Christ the King -- Christ in Majesty

 

November 26, 2023

 

Ezekiel 34.11-16, 20-24; Matthew 25.31-46

 

+ Today is of course Christ the King Sunday.

 

Now, as most of you know, I have issues with authority.

 

I bristle at talk of rulers and kinds (and Presidents).

 

But for some reason, I don’t have much of an issue with the idea of Christ as King, despite my deep-seated issues with authority.

 

I love this idea of God as Ruler.

 

And, as you know, I love preaching about the Kingdom or Reign of God.

 

Jesus did it all the time.

 

The Reign of God is a good thing to preach about.  

 

But, it’s an important Sunday for another reason.

 

It is the last Sunday in that very long, green season of Pentecost.

 

Today, for the Church, it is New Year’s Eve.

 

The old church year of Sundays—Church Year A—ends today.

 

The new church year—Church Year B—begins next Sunday, on the First Sunday of Advent.

 

So, what seems like an ending today is renewed next week, with the coming of Advent, in that revived sense of longing and expectation that we experience in Advent.

 

Today, we get a great reading from the Prophet Ezekiel.

 

We hear God saying things through Ezekiel  like,

 

“I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.” 

 

And (I love this one)

 

“I feed them with justice.”

 

We also get to hear Jesus tell us that story of the sheep and the goats, echoing in many ways our reading from Ezekiel.

 

Now, I actually love this parable—not because of its threat of punishment (which everyone gets hung up on), not because of its judgment.

 

I love this story because there is something beautiful and subtle going on just beneath the surface, if you take the moment to notice.

 

And that subtle aspect of this story is this:

 

If you notice, the reward is given not to people who work for the reward.

 

The reward is not given to people who help the least of their brethren because they know they will gain the reward.

 

The reward is granted to those who help the least of their brethren simply because the least need help.

 

The reward is for those who have no regard or idea that a reward even awaits them for doing such a thing.

 

Now I don’t think I need to tell anyone here who the least of our brethren are.

 

The least of our brethren are the ones who are hungry, who are thirsty, who are naked, who are sick and who are in prison.

 

I think this ties in beautifully to our own ideas of why we do what we do as followers of Jesus.

 

I preach this a lot!!

 

Why do we do what we do, we must ask ourselves?

 

Do we do these things because we think we’re going to get a reward for doing them?

 

Or do we do these things because by doing them we know it goes for a greater reward than anything we ourselves could get?

 

In our Gospel reading today, we find that the Kingdom of God is prepared for those who have been good stewards, who do good for the sake of doing good.

 

It is prepared for those who have been mindful of what has been given to them and have been mindful of those around them in need.

 

It is a great message during this stewardship time

 

For us, we need to realize that the Kingdom is prepared for us as well.

 

It is prepared for us who have sought to be good stewards without any thought of eternal reward.

 

For us who strive to do good for the sake doing good.

 

It is prepared for us who have simply done what we are called to do as followers of Jesus.

 

To love God, and to love others.

 

That is why we do good.

 

For us, in our own society, we find that these same terms found in Jesus’ parable have a wider definition.

 

Hungry for us doesn’t just mean hungry for food.

 

It means hungry for love, for healing, for wholeness.

 

Hungry to be included, and treated as equals.

 

It means hungry, also, for God.

 

Thirsty doesn’t just mean for water.

 

Thirsty for us means thirsty for fairness or justice or peace.

 

And thirsty for God.

 

Naked doesn’t just mean without clothing.

 

It means, for us, to be stripped to our core, to be laid bare spiritually and emotionally and materially, which many of us have known in our lives.

 

We have known what it means to be spiritually and emotionally naked.

 

To be sick, doesn’t necessarily mean to be sick with a disease in our bodies.

 

It is means to be sick in our hearts and in our relationships with others.

 

It means to be sick with despair or depression or anxiety or spiritually barrenness.

 

And we all know that the prisons of our lives sometimes don’t necessarily have walls or bars on the doors.

 

The prisons of our lives are sometimes our fears, our prejudices, our anxieties, our addictions, our very selves.

 

To not go out and help those who need help is to be arrogant, to be selfish, to be headstrong.

 

To not do so is to turn our backs on following where Jesus leads us.

 

Because Jesus leads us into that place wherein we must love and love fully and give and give freely—of ourselves and of what we have been given.

 

It means to “feed with justice,” as God tells us in Ezekiel.

 

I like that because that is definitely what we have all been striving to do here at St. Stephen’s.

 

We practice our radical hospitality to everyone who comes to us in any way.

 

And, I think, we accept everyone who comes to us fully.

 

Here, we not only welcome people, but I think we allow people to be the people God created them to be—without judgment, without prejudice, just as the Kingdom no doubt will be.

 

And is. 

 

Again, that brings us back to Jesus’ parable.

 

The meaning of this story is this: If you do these things—if you feed the hungry, if you give drink to the thirsty, if you welcome the stranger, if you clothe the naked, if you visit the sick and imprisoned—if you simply respond to one another as loving human beings—if you do these things without thought of reward, but do them simply because you, as a Christian, are called to do them, the reward is yours.

 

The Reign of God is not only awaiting us in the next world, on the other side of the veil.

 

The Reign of God, when we do these things, is here.

 

Right now.

 

Right in our midst.

 

As Christians, we shouldn’t have to think about doing any of those things.

 

They should be like second nature to us.

 

We should be doing them naturally, instinctively.

 

For those of us who are hungry or thirsty, who feel like strangers, who are naked, sick and imprisoned—and at times, we have been in those situations—we find Christ in those rays of hope that break through into our lives.

 

It is very similar to the hope we are clinging to in this moment as we enter Advent—that time in which the Light is seen breaking into the encroaching darkness of our existence.

 

And we—in those moments when we feed the hungry, when we give drink to the thirsty, when we welcome the stranger, when we clothe the naked, when we visit the sick and imprisoned—in those moments, we become that light in the darkness, that hope in someone else’s life.

 

We embody Christ and Christ’s Reign when we become the conduits of hope.

 

So, as we celebrate the end of this liturgical year and set our expectant eyes on the season of Advent, let us not just be filled with hope.

 

Let us be a true reflection of Christ’s hope to this world.

 

Let us be the living embodiment of that hope to those who need hope.

 

And in doing so, we too will hear those words of assurance to us:

 

“Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for….”

 

I am going to close today with the prayer they pray at All Saints, Pasadena on this Christ the King Sunday.

 

It’s a beautiful prayer.

 

So, let us pray,

 

Most Gracious God, who in Jesus of Nazareth showed us an alternative to the kings, queens and emperors of history, help us to revere and emulate Jesus’ leadership: To love, and to seek justice for all people. Help us to recognize the true grandeur and life-changing power based in loving you and all of our neighbors. In Christ Jesus with you and the Holy Spirit, may we co-create a world ruled not through domination, but in that radical and all-powerful compassion and love. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

25 Pentecost

November 18, 2023

 

Matthew 25.14-30

 

+ As a a priest, and especially as a Rector of a congregation, people say things about me.

 

Sometimes those things are complimentary.

 

Sometimes they definitely are not.

 

Once, many years ago, at another congregation, I heard that a parishioner there told someone else that I was full of hubris.

 

That person later became a very dear friend of mine and has since passed on to the nearer Presence of God.

 

But, at the time I have to say I offended by that statement.

 

I will say, there have been much worse things said about me behind my back (and to my face)  than being accused of hubris.

 

And one of the curses of my life is that when people say things behind my back, I usually end up hearing about it.

 

Somehow inevitable it always comes back to me.

 

But, the reality is this: as you may or may not know, the priest is often the catch-all of a congregation.

 

If something doesn’t work well in a congregation, the priest often is the one who gets the blame, whether or not she or he really is the problem (usually the priest is NOT the problem).

 

If people want to complain about things in a congregation, it is often much easier to complain about a priest.

 

Now, I knew this fact long before I ever went into the priesthood.

 

I tell anyone who is heeding a call to ordained ministry that the first thing they need to develop is a very thick skin.

 

Luckily, here at St. Stephen’s, I have not had that issue much.

 

People here seem pretty content with me for the most part.

 

And I’m grateful for that.

 

And if there are criticisms, which trust me, usually get back to me (they just do), I usually can go with it.

 

But there is one accusation that cuts through the thick skin of my “Priest armor.”

 

Actually, maybe I shouldn’t even share my personal Kryptonite with you, but, most of you know it anyway…

 

The one accusation I don’t handle well is actually one that has never been leveled at me here at St. Stephen’s (at least I haven’t heard it).

 

It’s an ugly word.

 

It even sounds ugly.

 

And it cuts deeply.

 

Words with the letter “z” often seem to have a razor-edge to them.

 

The word is…

 

lazy.

 

I despise that word.

 

Now, you can say I’m full of  “hubris” all you want.

 

But, I think we can all agree: I am NOT a lazy priest.

 

All this talk of laziness ties in well with this strange, difficult parable for this morning.

 

We get this parable of the talents, of money lent and the reward awaiting those who were entrusted with the money, complete with its not-so-subtle wag of the finger at us.

 

Trust me, I did not purposely pick this scripture for this Stewardship Season; it just happened to come up in the lectionary today.

 

But, man, is this parable is a very good story for us today!

 

Most of us can relate to it.

 

We understand how good it is to have people invest money for us and to receive more in return.

 

But, this parable isn’t really about money at all, as we probably have guessed, just as Stewardship I just about money either.

 

The parable is about taking what we have—and in the case of today’s reading Jesus is talking about the Gospel—and working to expand it and return it back to God with interest.

 

We, as Christians, are called to just this: we are called to work.

 

We are called to do something with what we’ve been given.

 

And the worse thing we can imagine as Christians is being called by that ugly word I mentioned earlier:

 

“lazy.”

 

Lazy.

 

See. The word cuts like a razor.

 

I hate that word!

 

None of us want to hear that word directed at us, especially regarding our faith.

 

It is that shaming admonition we hear in this parable: “You wicked and lazy slave!”

 

It’s not what we want to hear.

 

Rather, we want to hear:

 

“Well done, good and trustworthy servant; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.”

 

Over and over again in Scripture, we find this one truth: God is not really ever concerned with what we have; but God is always concerned with what we do with what we have.

 

And we should always remind ourselves that it is not always an issue of money that we’re dealing with when we talk about what we have. 

 

The rewards of this life include many other things other than money—an issue we sometimes forget about in our western capitalist society.

 

The fact is, God is not always concerned about who we are or what we do.

 

God does not care about our ego.

 

God does not care about your ego!

 

But, God is always concerned with what we do with who we are and what we have.

 

And when we’re lazy, we purposely forget this fact.

 

When we’re lazy, we think we can just coast.

 

We think we can just “get by.”

 

We think we can just give lip service to our gratitude and that is enough.

 

We expect others to do the hard work while we sit back.

 

But it isn’t enough.

 

To be "good and trustworthy”  is to take what we have and do something meaningful with it.

 

By doing something good, we are showing our gratitude for it.

 

In this week leading up to Thanksgiving, we might find ourselves thinking about all the things in our lives we are thankful for.

 

And we should be expressing our thanks to God for those things.

 

And I hope St. Stephen’s is one of those things for which we are thankful.

 

And lest we forget, we are also now well into the short but very meaningful time of Stewardship season.

 

It is a time in which we look hard at ourselves and ask ourselves the important questions of what St. Stephen’s means to us, and how we contribute of ourselves and our resources to St. Stephen’s.

 

For some churches, stewardship time is a difficult time.

 

It is a time of uncertainty.

 

It is a time when people kind of groan and inwardly complain.

 

“The priest is going to talk about money!”

 

But for us at St. Stephen’s, it’s never really like that.

 

For us, here, people LIKE to be members here.

 

And people here LIKE to help our congregation out.

 

People here like to step up to the plate.

 

Why?

 

Because people can see what we do.

 

People can see that although we are not a mega-church, we are not a giant church, we do make a big difference.

 

We are a place where we don’t just “talk the talk,” we very much “walk the walk.”

 

We don’t just pay lip service to our commitment to making a difference in this world.

 

We actually work hard to make a difference.

 

Let me tell you, no one can call St. Stephen’s a lazy congregation.

 

We are not some idle parish.

 

We do things.

 

We are kept active.

 

It is never boring here.

 

And we should be thankful for all of that.

 

But being thankful for this active, vital parish that we are is more than just the priets standing up at the pulpit and saying it.

 

What God seems to want from us more than anything else is to let that thankfulness be lived out in our lives.

 

Yes, we should give thanks to God with our mouths.

 

But we must give also thanks to God with our actions.

 

We should also give thanks to God with our time and with our talents—with our resources and with our hands and labors.

 

Our thankfulness should not simply be the words coming from our mouths, but also the actions we do as Christians.

 

As Christians truly thankful to God for all we have been given, we are to live a life of integrity and purpose and meaning.

 

Integrity.

 

Purpose.

 

Meaning.

 

And standing up again and again to what is wrong.

 

We show our thankfulness to God in our stewardship—in the fact that we are thankful by sharing what we have been given.

 

By sharing the goodness we have been given.

 

And in that sharing, we find the true meaning of what it means to be gracious.

 

In that sharing, we find purpose and meaning in our lives.

 

In that sharing, we find true contentment.

 

We all have our treasures in this life.

 

We all have these special things God has given us.

 

It might be our talents, it might be our know-how, it might be a blessing of financial abundance.

 

It might just be our very selves.

 

We have a choice with these treasures.

 

We can take them and we can sit on them.

 

We can store them away and not let them gain interest.

 

And in the end, all we have is a moldering treasure—which really isn’t a treasure at all.

 

Or we can take a chance, we can invest them and, in investing them, we can spread them and share them.

 

During this stewardship season, the message is not “Give”

 

The message of this stewardship time is “be grateful.”

 

Be grateful to God for the treasures of this life. 

 

These are the things we have—our talents, our God-given abilities, the material blessings of our lives—and to be truly thankful for those things, we need to be grateful for them and to share them.

 

We can’t hoard them, we can’t hug them close and be afraid they will be taken from us.

 

And we can’t go through life with a complacent attitude—expecting that others are going to take of these things for us.

 

We must share what we have.

 

And we must share what we have with dignity and self-assurance and with a graceful and grateful attitude.

 

We must be gracious

 

We must not be the lazy slave who hoards what is given him, afraid to invest what he has.

 

We must instead be like the wise servant, the one is alert and prepared, the one who is truly gracious.

 

That is what Stewardship is really about.

 

It is about giving of ourselves, even when the times are tough.

 

And it is about making sure that we at St. Stephen’s can continue to do that and be that place in the future.

 

So, let us be the wise servants this Stewardship season.

 

Let us continue to step up to the plate and do what we must do.

 

Let us make sure that we as a congregation can continue to be a place of safety, of integrity, of holiness and love, when times are good and when times are bad.

 

Let us give thanks to God for all that St. Stephen’s does and is and continues to be.

 

And let us make sure that we can continue to be this radical place we are, this unique and eclectic and Holy Spirit-filled place we are.

 

And let us all do what we are called to do in our service of God and one another.

 

And if we are, we too will hear those words spoken to us—those words we all truly long to hear—“Well done, good and faithful one…enter into the joy of your master.”

 

Let us pray.

Abundant God, you provided us always with just what we need; we ask you during this Stewardship time to continue to provide this congregation of St. Stephen’s with the resources we need, with the time and talent needed, to do the work you have called us to do, to be a place of love and acceptance to those who need shelter, to embody those principals in this often dark and uncertain world, and to make a difference among those who need us; we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.  

 

All Saints Sunday

 

November 6, 2023

 

1 John 3.1-3; Matthew 5.1-12

 

 + In case you might have noticed it, today is a very, very special Sunday.

 All Sundays, of course, are special.

 But today is even a bit more special, if you haven’t noticed.

 Out in the Narthex, we do have the All Saints altar.

 We have the Book of Remembrance, with the names written in it of all our departed loved ones.

 Last Wednesday we had a very full All Souls Annual Requiem Mass at which we remembered the names of our departed loved and processed out to the memorial garden where candles burned on the graves of the 21 people whose ashes buried there.

 Wednesday night’s Mass, I have to say, was moving on so many levels.

 Especially for those of us who read those names aloud.

 For us, we just randomly read a column of names, not knowing which ones we will get.

 But sometimes we get the names of our own loved ones.

 And we found ourselves choking up because no matter how long it has been since they’ve been gone, we realize how real what we are doing when we commemorate those people really is.

 Today, here in the Nave, we have the paraments on the altar, and of course I’m all decked out in as well (as you can see).

 The first class relics of the saints have been brought out from where they usually lie inside our altar.

 A first class relic, by the ways, means that it is an actual part of the saints—in this case we have actual pieces of bone from St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, St. John Neumann (not the Anglican priest who became a Roman Catholic cardinal, but rather the Bohemian Bishop of Philadelphia), and St. Francis Cabrini, better known as Mother Cabrini. Inside the altar are still the relics of our unknown saint, whom we just affectionately call, St. Incognito.

 And we are celebrating even a bit more than we usually do.

 In just a few moments, we’ll renew our Baptismal vows.

 You’ll get sprinkled with water.

 We’ll take joy in our baptism.

And in all the company of the saints.

 See, it’s a Sunday to celebrate.

 Which, as you all know, I LOVE to do.

 I love to celebrate.

 I will look for any little opportunity to celebrate.

 And, today we have plenty to celebrate.

 First, we are celebrating the saints.

 We are celebrating all those saints that we know of, like the Blessed Virgin Mary and our own St. Stephen.

 We are celebrating the saints we have remembered in our beautiful windows. 

 We celebrate the saints whose relics rest inside our altar and which are exposed today for veneration.

 We celebrate those saints because they are held up to us as examples of how to live this sometimes difficult life we live as Christians.

 And, as those saints would no doubt tell us,  it is hard to be a Christian sometimes.

 It is hard, as we all know, to follow Jesus, and to do what Jesus tells us to do—to love God and love others.

 It is hard to be, as John says in our epistle for today, the children of God, as Jesus himself is the divine Child of God.

 The saints have shown this fact to us.

 They have shown us how to be these very children of God.

 We celebrate that today.

 We celebrate, by our baptismal vows, that we are loved children of a loving and accepting God.

 We are also celebrating the saints we have personally known.

 We are celebrating the saints we have known who have come into our own lives—those people who have taught us about God and shown us that love does win out, again and again.

 The saints in our own lives are those who have done it, who have shown us that we

can be successful in following Jesus, even if they weren’t always successful at times in their own lives.

 But, before we go any further, we do need to ask ourselves: what is a saint?

 Well, a few years ago I came across this great story.

 It is about the great Dorothy Day, who is also being considered for canonization in the Roman Catholic Church.

 This story is one we can relate to here.

During the 1970s, in those days after Vatican II and the liturgical reform that Churches like the Catholic Church and the Episcopal Church were going though, some priests were becoming rather casual with the liturgy. One afternoon, a priest came into the soup kitchen in which Dorothy Day was working. He wanted to offer a Mass for the homeless. He went into the kitchen and grabbed a coffee mug to use for the chalice.

Dorothy, although frustrated at the irreverent use of houseware for the liturgy, prayed throughout the mass with the priest. After the liturgy ended, she quietly got up and started to cleanse the vessels. Then, she walked outside with the mug and a shovel.

A man followed her and asked her what she was doing. It is said she kissed the mug and then buried it. She told him that it was no longer a mug, but a chalice. It was no longer suited for coffee- it had held the Blood of Christ. She didn’t want anyone to mistake it for a mug again. Once something holds the Body of Christ, it is no longer what it was. When the mug held the Blood of Christ, it changed its vocation forever. It could no longer hold anything less than Christ again.

The story goes on to say this:

“We are common mugs. Simple, functional, practical, and good people. We have a capacity to hold good things. But when Christ entered our lives, we became more. We became Chalices. We started to hold Christ—who is fully divine--within our hearts. Now that we have held the Body of Christ within our bodies, we are no longer common, but rather extraordinary.”

That is what a saint is.

  A saint is a common mug that has holds within it the very Presence of God, and by doing so is transformed into something different and wonderful—a chalice.

 That is why we celebrate the saints.

 That is what we celebrate today.

 And when we start pondering who a saint is, we then can start looking at ourselves.

 We can find the saints are not only in church, in stained glass, or on ikons, or their relics we put out.

 No, rather we find saints looking back at us from our very mirrors.

 We are the future saints.

 We celebrate ourselves today—we, the future saints gathered here to worship God, to hold within us the very Presence of God.

 Together, we strive to follow Jesus, to love God and each other and to serve those we encounter.

 That is what it means to be future saints.

 Often, as we have known, saints are hidden from us.

 Saints often are the ones we least expect to be saints.

 But we have all known saints in our lives.

 This morning, on this All Saints Sunday, and on a fairly regular basis, I think about the saints who have worshipped with us here at St. Stephen’s.

 Today, we are reminded that they are still with us.

 I occasionally look out and I can see still them with us at times.

 I can still see Harriet Blow’s wheelchair.

 I can see Betty Spur in that back pew.

 I can still see Greg Craychee as an acolyte up front.

 I can still see Angel Brekke and Betty De La Garza and her mother Georgia Patneaude, and Jim Coffey and Jonathan Gilbert and Tom and Ruth Stickney and Marlys Lundberg,  here with us, smiles on their faces.

 And many of you might not know who those people are because you have become members here since they passed.

 For those who might not know who these people were, it’s just a reminder that ordinary people worshipped in these pews and in this building over the years and are now gone, but are still, in some amazing holy way, with us.

 I have shared with you many times that despite all the loss of several close people to me in my life over the last decade, the times when I often feel them closest is when I am standing at this altar, right after I break the Bread and am looking down into that chalice of Christ’s Blood.

When Jesus says in our Gospel reading for today that “blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” we can be assured of that comfort in whatever way it comes to us.

 It is then the veil between this world and the next is lifted for one moment.

 This is why we celebrate the saints.

 That is why we celebrate the saints with the different commemorations we have of them at our Wednesday night Masses throughout the year.

 That is why they are in our windows.

 That is why their bones are in our altar.

 And that is why we celebrate them especially on Sundays like today.

 We celebrate the saints because they lead the way for us.

 They show us how to live this sometimes difficult life as Christians.

 They show us in their successes and they show us in their failures.

 They remind that we are all chalices, holding within our common, sometimes worn-out and broken bodies, the very Presence of God in our midst.

 And we celebrate the saints as well because we too are the saints.

 We are the future saints, who will one day be gathered around the altar of the Lamb, where we will partake of that glory without end.

 I just mentioned that “veil” that separates us from those who have gone on before us.

 I mentioned that that veil is actually a very thin one, even though it often seems like a very thick curtain. 

 But there are moments, like the Holy Eucharist,  when that veil is sort of lifted and we can see that very little actually separates us from those saints who have gone on before us who now dwell in the nearer Presence of God.

 This morning, we are actually able to see that veil lifted.

 Of course, we see it lifted every time when we gather at the altar to celebrate the Eucharist, and God draws close to us.

 At the Eucharist, those saints who are now worshipping God in heaven and those who are worship God here on earth—we are, in that one holy moment, together.

 The distance between us, in that moment, is brought close.

 And we catch a clear glimpse of what awaits.

 This is not some isolated act we do, here in St. Stephen’s Church in north Fargo on this morning in November of 2023.

 Every time we celebrate the Eucharist, we do it with every Christian on this earth who also celebrates it.

 And when we celebrate the Eucharist, all we are doing is joining, for this limited time, the worship that is going on in heaven for all eternity.

 We are reminded this morning that our true vocation as Christians is to be chalices, to carry within us the very Presence of Christ.

 Our inheritance is to be children of our loving God.

 We are all called to be saints.

 It is a wonderful vocation we are called to.

 So, let us—the future saints of God—truly celebrate today.

 Let us celebrate the saints who have gone on and who are still with us in various ways.

 Let us celebrate the saints who are here with us, right now, on this joyful morning.

 And let us celebrate ourselves, as we look into our future with God with delight and true joy.

 Let us pray.

 

God of all ages, you are truly glorious in your saints; fill us with the Presence of your Christ, so that we, mere houseware that we are, may be chalices of your Presence to those around us who need your Presence; we ask this in the name of Jesus our Lord. Amen.