Retiring for the Fourth Time

            I have loved being here at Atonement for the past couple of years.  My preaching in this place has become a part of my life.  You have nourished me with your wonderful Christian activity.  This is a powerful parish and I want you to continue in the same way to do the good that you continue to do.  You are the ministers of this parish. 

            We had a fabulous experience last week.  We were celebrating Rosie’s 80^th birthday and we went down to Station Square to take a ride on the Ducky Tour, the boat/trucks that go around Pittsburgh and sometimes get on the rivers.  The rivers were too high, so it was only a land journey.  Before we got on the boat, we were all standing around waiting.  Our granddaughter Lindy was watching her phone with a Facetime call from our youngest daughter Heather, her mom.  We thought it was wonderful to include her in this way since she lives in San Diego.  Rosie noticed that Heather seemed to be bobbing up and down while she was talking. We thought maybe she was in a car or something.  All of a sudden, Heather came upon us and we discovered that she had flown back east to help us celebrate Rosie’s birthday. 

            On Wednesday, Rosie and I will fly out to San Diego to spend a week with Heather.  We have been looking forward to this for some time and it will mean a lot to us to be able to do it.  We will come back home after a week out there and we will continue to live in our home and get into a summer routine.  I thank God that I have had the opportunity to be with you all of this time.  You have helped me in so many ways.  We are fortunate people to have been here at Atonement.

            In our Gospel this morning, Jesus continues to tell his apostles about what is to come; how he is going to be with the Father. They don’t really have any understanding of this at all. He tells them again that he will not leave them without company; that the Holy Spirit will be a part of their lives from that moment on.  He says that those who love him will keep his commandments and that they will be loved by the Father and will not be alone because the Spirit of Truth will be a constant part of their lives.  This is true for us also.  We have celebrated Easter, have once again celebrated the feast that helps us to remember our resurrected Lord.  As he told his disciples, Jesus did not leave us orphaned and alone either.  When we keep Jesus’ commandments, we also have the presence of the Spirit with us.  And those commandments can become an excellent foundation to our way of life.  Jesus outlined them in his Sermon on the Mount, but gave us the ultimate key when he told us to Love the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls and minds, and to love our neighbors as a person like ourselves.  That sums up the commandments that our Lord gave us.  This is what creates peace and hope in the world.

             It isn’t always easy to do.  Loving difficult people is always a problem.  We all have had that experience.  I had a man in one of my parishes who frequently yelled at me.  It was sometimes about something in a sermon, sometimes, just something that was bothering him.  It was always difficult talking to him.  Years later, I got a long letter from him explaining to me that he had been fighting alcoholism and that he wanted to apologize for his behavior.  It was gratifying to me to read that letter.  The simple fact about loving one another that we can’t always do it ourselves is just another indication that what God wants for us all is community; the joining together of all of us to create loving relationships in this world.

            This is something that Atonement has learned to do very well.  You take care of each other when you have problems.  The coffee hour downstairs after church is a wonderful place to share our lives and to listen to each other.  It isn’t only a place to taste the latest goodies, it is a place to continue the community that we celebrate around this altar.

            The most important part is that we take this expression of community with us into our lives and work to care for the people whom we meet.  That is why the outreach efforts of this place mean so much.  There is an old saying that it doesn’t matter so much what we say, but what is important is what we do.  Our religion is what we say.  Our outreach is what we do because of it.

            Religion can be a very complicated activity.  That is why there are so many denominations in this world.  That is what prompted the split in the Diocese a few years ago.  It was a time when some people tried to make rules for everyone else.  Our liturgy is helpful to our faith, but it is not the essence of it.  Love is the essence of our faith. When Paul was in Athens, he told the people that they had a monument with an inscription that read “to the unknown God”.  Paul told them that he came to tell them about that God, who made Heaven and earth.  He quoted the Greek poets who said about God that in him we all live and move and have our being.  He then told them about Jesus who came and gave his life for all of us and then rose from the dead to assure us of eternal life.

            The essence of our faith is how we live our lives; and living our lives with the love that we have been taught by our Lord is all that we need to do.  Accepting and caring for the people whom we meet in this life is what we are sent to do as our ministry.

            Yes, I’m retiring for the fourth time in my life, but I won’t be far away.  As I have told some of you, I will be here when you need me.  In the meantime, continue to be one of the best parishes in this diocese and do all that you can to make sure that this world is full of love.

            May God bless you all.  You are one of the best things that has ever happened to me. We will never forget our time at Atonement. 

                         

Fear and Grieving

             Fear can be a terrible thing.  It can interrupt our day, make anything that we are doing more difficult.  It needs to be confronted and put to rest, but often that is a very hard thing to do.

            Jesus disciples were haunted by fear after their Lord was arrested, condemned and crucified by the religious authorities and by Pontius Pilate. The gospel for today is an earlier conversation, but it describes all of this.  It is a clear statement by Jesus that we will follow him into eternity.  His disciples didn’t understand that.  Notice that he begins his conversation with them by saying do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me; words said to his disciples because of their obvious fear.  I can understand how they felt.  Their Lord was talking about leaving them and they were afraid of what would come next.  How would they be treated by the Sadducees and the Pharisees?  Would they be caught?  Would they then face death? 

            After the resurrection when they were all behind closed doors as the gospel said, for fear of the Jews.  It is then that the resurrected Jesus appears to them and showed them his wounds, but he was obviously present.  At that moment, their fear turned to joy and they knew that their work was not in vain and that they would continue the work that they had all started together.

           

             I love this morning’s gospel.  I want it to be read at my funeral.  It speaks eloquently of the truth of eternal life and the incredible mercy that Jesus offers to all of us after our death.  It has the obvious intent of confronting and allaying our fears.  It isn’t necessary to be afraid of dying.  It is a perfectly natural thing that we will all experience.  The difficulty that it presents is that of leaving our family and our friends and not being with them anymore.  That is why we grieve.  Grief is an important emotion.  It speaks clearly of the love that we have for each other and the loss that we feel at the time of death.  Our grief is why we come together at funerals to care for each other.  Our compassion and caring goes a long way to overcoming the worst of our grieving.  I have seen that happen countless times in my ministry.  When families gather to mourn a death with their friends and relatives, it makes a profound difference.  Surprisingly, the most frequent sound that you will hear in a funeral home is laughter.  It comes from people telling stories about the deceased and sharing their own personal moments.  That is a beautiful thing.

            What Jesus is telling his disciples is that his ministry won’t be over, even if he dies.  He tells them that they will go into the world and do greater things than he has done.  That he will be with them always and that they will never be alone.  The key to this is what Jesus calls belief.  Believe in God, he tells them, believe also in me! He goes on to tell them that even if they don’t believe in him, look at the works that he has done and to believe in them.  He tells them that they will go on to do greater works than these.  And so they did.  There are many stories of the disciples healing and bringing life to people who had no hope. 

            After Jesus’ resurrection, Peter begins to confront the Pharisees about the way that they are treating people.  He is no longer afraid of them.  This became true of all of Jesus’ followers.  Eventually, they all died, but before that, they formed and developed a wonderful Christian community that spread the word of God throughout the countryside. 

            In the Epistle today, we have the story of the stoning of the first martyr Stephen with Saul, later named Paul, holding the coats of the stoners.  With his last breath, the dying Stephen prays to God not to hold this sin against any of those who are killing him.  We all know what happened shortly after to Saul, how he was stopped on the road to Damascus, blinded and called out by the risen Christ when he says to Saul:  Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?  The blind Saul, then renamed Paul was sent into Damascus to see a man named Annanias who cured him of his blindness and set him on the course that we know so well through his letters.  Paul the apostle who had never met Jesus in the flesh became a powerful promoter of the Christian cause.

            That is how the church continued down the centuries.  We are the latest edition of the followers of Christ.  We are sent into the world to make life better for those whom we meet.  God loves all of us and all of them.  What we do for them is the nature of Christian ministry.  Making fear go away is a great part of our work.  Believe in God, believe also in Jesus.  That is the key both to this life and the next.

            

Our Good Shepherd

               I’ve always loved the Twenty-third psalm.  It is so deeply personal and talks about the Love of God in such a wonderful way.  I remember when I was a kid wondering what it meant by telling me that when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death that I would fear no evil because God is with me, his rod and his staff comfort me. That is good news, but to a kid, I wasn’t sure of what it all meant.  As I got older, the message got a little clearer. I came to understand that this means that God meets us in the world where we live, where terrible things sometimes happen and that we are not left only to hurt by what happens to us.   When I had surgery, and wasn’t sure how it was going to come out, I remember praying that psalm and finding comfort in it.  Eternal life didn’t mean much to me when I was a child, but it came to mean a lot to me as an adult.

            The Lord is my shepherd is a breathtaking statement.  Thinking of the whole human race as a flock of sheep is helpful.  Particularly when I think that Jesus is the shepherd.  I love the stories that we hear of our Lord’s ministry during his life; how he raised Lazarus, healed the man born blind, gave the Samaritan woman at the well back her life and her community.  If that is the shepherd that takes care of me, then I am satisfied beyond conversation.  Notice that the people whom Jesus met were not perfect people; they all had bad experiences.   

            There are other kinds of shepherding.  When Rosie and I were driving through the Native American tribal areas in the Southwest, we would occasionally see a herd of sheep being led by a dog.  No shepherd was present, only a dog.  The sheep obviously trusted the dog, but all of this worried me.  It just didn’t seem very safe.  You and me, as the sheep of the Lord are not led by a dog, but by the Son of God who came that we might have all that life can offer and who by his death and resurrection has given to you and me the forgiveness of our sins and the certainty of eternal life.  I can’t imagine a better gift for all of us.

            In the Acts of the Apostles, we hear how the followers of Jesus, after their grief at his death and their surprise at his resurrection were still able to continue his ministry in the life of the people who became the church.  They met together, pooled their resources and made life better for everyone. Some people have said that this sounds a lot like communism, but if it is communism it is created in the best way, to help people who have nothing to live their lives to the fullest.  This certainly worked because more and more people came to be baptized and to join them in their work.  This is the real story of the church; how it began and how it continued.  That it has had times of strife and trouble in its long life is not surprising, given the nature of humanity; but we have the continuing promise of our Lord that the things that we want the most: forgiveness, salvation and eternal life with God will be ours; and they are ours because of the relentless shepherding of our Lord Jesus who gave his whole life to insure the care of the people whom he met on this earth.

            Our mission as Christians is to continue this ministry.  To make available to people who have little or nothing the hope that Jesus brought to earth.  We need to show by the way that we live our lives that the promises that our Lord made to all of us mean something to us.  All of us have sinned and fallen short.  There is no argument about that.  We are not excluded from the love and the promises of God because of our sins.  Our sins are forgiven and our crooked road is made straight for us by the incomprehensible love of God.  I have watched as people in prison have come to understand that new life is possible for them even after committing horrible crimes.  The largest problem that we have with the people who are in prison is our prison system.  We call it the Department of Corrections, when it is not that at all, it is the Department of Incarceration. Or even better yet, the Criminal Justice system. The people who are incarcerated are constantly made to understand that they are criminals – that they have lost their claim to humanity by the crimes that they have committed.  I was appalled to see what Arkansas tried to do by executing eight prisoners before their supply of one of the drugs expired at the end of this month.  Humanity doesn’t leave when people enter prison.  Correction and forgiveness is the goal. When I have seen forgiveness work miracles in the prison system it is because somehow the inmate has come to understand that forgiveness means that the crimes are no more, the only thing left is the promise of living a life in the peace of God. 

            That is what we are asked to do by our Lord.  As his sheep to follow him into this chaotic world and to help those who are here and wounded by all that it is that happens that they are loved by their God and by all of us.  When we do that, we extend the sheepfold infinitely and help our neighbors to understand the incredible totality of God’s perfect love.