Getting the Story Grounded in Reality
By The Rev. Mark Stanger
The Sixth Sunday of Easter (B)
May 21, 2006
Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; I John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17
When the book first came out three years ago, the buzz about The Da Vinci Code was quite something. Now the movie is here, the buzz is like the Blue Angels overhead, loud and inescapable. After the publication of the Nikos Kazantzakis novel The Last Temptation of Christ, fifty years ago, the buzz turned into a shout of outrage and protest when it hit the movie theatres a quarter century later. Sometimes a story on a page just doesn't cause the controversy seeing it on the screen does. The same thing happened nine years ago with The New Yorker magazine's publication of a short story by a well-known 62-year-old writer, Annie Proulx. When her stark but tender story, "Brokeback Mountain" appeared, a few people took notice; not until Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee made it into a film just last year did the fireworks begin.
These three examples are works of fiction. But every good story or novel or film, even if completely made-up, is always, to borrow a term from television, "reality-based." Good fiction illuminates truths about our real lives. Reality-based TV shows seem to have real people working out real problems. But the hundreds of writers, producers, directors, and camera crew are out of sight, and the "real" personal drama has been prodded and edited and expanded to last a network season. Good writing or drama may not be reality but can still provoke some questions about or shed some light on our real lives. The ancient Greeks knew the cathartic power of a dramatized story which has left the page and is thrust into the faces and hearts and lives of real people.
The readings we have during the Sundays of Easter, coming from the Acts of the Apostles, don't seem to say much to us. I wonder what would happen if they were produced for the movies or TV. Though the author of Acts (who is the same person who wrote Luke's Gospel) has turned real events into a kind of adventure novel or screenplay. Luke has played fast and free with the facts but has used good dramatic writing to show how inclusive and amazing the spread of the tiny Jesus movement really was, both in terms of its life-giving vision as well as the beginnings of its tremendous global expansion. The human and social dramas on the pages of the Acts of the Apostles are not simply reality-based; they are real and reality-grounded. The challenges were, for the people involved, not unlike some of the challenges we face today: who belongs? What are the criteria for membership in a believing community? How do we share our resources? What does God want from us? Where will we find ultimate surrender, mercy, love and forgiveness? How will God's purposes be known in the world or in our life together? How can we recognize what's real what's just human obstruction to the divine purpose?
Last week's episode had an outsider to Judaism, the court official from the African continent who was a eunuch, wanting to embrace the full love and acceptance promised by the covenant God gave to the chosen People of Israel. The circumstances of his life, a good job and good pay but a broken personal history and its consequences, prevented that full and complete belonging. In Acts of the Apostles, we see a breakthrough moment when Philip unlocks the power of the scriptural text the eunuch is struggling with and then, by the spirit, the author says, this outsider is welcomed and baptized and heads back to Ethiopia, bringing home the good news of God's personal yet universal inclusive invitation.
Today's story announces an even larger breakthrough. Peter and Barnabas are in Syria, in Antioch. We see the arguments and fights among the first groups of followers of Jesus and among the apostles themselves about the criteria for membership -- what the necessary behaviors and expressions would be in order to assure God's love and purposes would be theirs. We see showdowns between Peter and Paul, between traditionalist hard-liners and new thinking enthusiasts, and a bunch of via media hybrid types in between. After all of that, here at Antioch, Peter (one of the traditional hardliners) gets a huge dose of just what Christianity might be and of the mysterious purposes of God. Peter is preaching, speaking to eager listeners of the household of Cornelius. Peter knew how things were supposed to work from his experience earlier in Acts, back in Jerusalem, at the first Pentecost: Peter preaches the good news to a good religious Jewish group on pilgrimage who keep the whole Jewish way of life faithfully, and the crowd is moved and says, "what should we do?" and Peter pulls out his punchline, "Repent, be baptized into Jesus for the healing of your lives and the forgiveness of your sins and then you will receive the Holy Spirit."
But here in sophisticated worldly Antioch, talking with people who seemed to have no recognizable religion, Peter suddenly sees that the Spirit is already present in them, "that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, the outsiders." Peter, once the hardliner for rules of membership, gives into God's bigger plans and the Holy Spirit's determination to blow wherever it will. Peter relents: "Let's stop fighting about who's in and who's out, who's acceptable and who's not... 'can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have somehow already received the Holy Spirit just as we have?" It must have been a shock to his system and his deeply-held religious sensibilities. He showed up with all the right teachings, all the right behaviors and all the right steps to salvation and he found that God had shown up first. If you want drama and intrigue in Christian origins, enjoy The Da Vinci Code or The Last Temptation of Christ, but don't miss the startling truths which our all too human way of doing business in the church over the centuries may have smoothed over.
The Holy Spirit moves and acts and transforms lives and we can be part of the celebration or just bystanders. The Holy Spirit of God intends to be poured out on all flesh not to round up the peoples of the globe into a tidy Christendom but as life and power to every person, to give back dreams to those who have grown old and tired and to enliven and direct the youngest among us with purpose and vitality. The church, the People of God, those of us here, you and me, can be part of this reality or just sit back, fan ourselves with our service leaflets and enjoy the show.
Now let's get further grounded in reality -- I want to speak about something in your service leaflet inserts last week and this week and bring it to life from the page. The Grace Cathedral community has been a part of this spiritual healing and renewal of the human family for a hundred years. Our story has been marked by courage, generosity and joy. We are now, with God's help and if God wills it, about to embark on another one hundred years of witness to the power of the Spirit in people's lives and in our world, in all that is human and in all that is mysteriously present and powerful just beyond the limits even of our most deeply-held truths and ways of being. We are a generous group of disciples, generous in our outlook, and generous in giving our time and energy and in support of our common mission. We have been generous in maintaining and growing this vision by supporting it lovingly with our resources -- our money -- as have those whose vision and generosity came before us and to whom we owe great gratitude.
Right now, not based in panic or fear but based in simple reality, we realize we cannot go one step further without a fuller participation by all of us in pledging annual financial support to Grace Cathedral's work in the community. Our dedicated leadership, our hard-working clergy and staff, and our very sharp board of trustees comprised of real-life professionals have honed and refined our already-disciplined patterns of spending and saving. We have a history and a present that we love and can feel good about and be proud of, and we have financial management that we can be proud of. The prudent use of the generous gifts to Grace Cathedral, large and small, is something we can definitely feel good and proud of.
We now know we need to be honest and real about our income and means of support. As you know, each local church must be self-supporting. Grace Cathedral's finances are not a code or a mystery novel. We are healthy but not wealthy and we are still not fully supporting the work we are presently doing. Our expenses are lean, almost to the bone. Our income is still not fully meeting those expenses. The outside community believes in Grace Cathedral and actually provides most of our financial support. We regular or occasional worshipers here could, and really have to, strengthen our support in many cases. A yearly pledge which reflects an ongoing commitment to the life and work here is one of the realities of being in this place and time, being a living part of conserving, strengthening and prospering our ministries, our beautiful building and of our message of inclusion. Coming on board or reevaluating the realism of each of our contributions as sustaining participants in our common life has the power to move each of us from a kind of partial enjoyment of an inspiring and beautiful reality-based story on the big screen to a more satisfying reality-grounded fuller participation in the goodness of the rich and wonderful ife we share here and wish to share with others.
A firm pledge of ongoing support allows the best possible stewardship of all our gifts and resources, in careful budgeting and planning. If we love Grace Cathedral and all that it is and provides and stands for, our love has to find an expression in real, tangible support. This is not a matter of guilt or shame but of pride and of love. We're all in this together and we all struggle --clergy, too, as we each make and pay our annual pledge -- we all struggle to find the best expression of our love for this place and all it stands for by real, meaningful acts of support and participation. This grounds us in the reality, with all its wonder and mystery and all its humanity, of our life and work together, our relationship to each other by the power of the Holy Spirit. And dealing with these issues honestly and openly prepares us for the future God is calling us into, wherever the Spirit wills to blow.
Jesus says to his disciples today, you are not servants or slaves but friends. But it's a gutsy kind of participation in friendship, like the relationship of Jesus with the heavenly Father and his loving relationship with us. Jesus doesn't ask us to keep the golden rule, doing unto others as we would like done to us, loving others as we want to be loved. Jesus asks us to love as HE loves, laying down our lives, our energies, our generosity, our welcome, our mysterious unique wonderful selves where the Holy Spirit has come to dwell, in real, tangible, fruit-bearing lives and practices in order that the world may see and know what God wants for everyone.
Our next hundred years might outshine all the accomplishments we've shared in thus far, and our service to human beings and to the community might demonstrate again the abundance of God's spirit in a world that desires fuller meaning and celebration. We are again being invited to participate with all that we are and all that we have in that mysterious, life-giving, ongoing true story that began in Jerusalem, and spread to Judea and Samaria, south to the African continent, north to Antioch, across to the Empire's capital at Rome, to the ends of the earth, right to this place and time, to real people and real lives here and now. This truth is stranger -- and more wonderful -- than any fiction, no matter how well-written or acted: "You are my friends…you did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last." At the very least -- we hope and pray and vow -- fruit that will last for another hundred years.
The Rev. Mark E. Stanger Canon Precentor and Associate Pastor
