Sermon for: Pent V B_RCL _ July 5, 2009
St. Benedict’s, Los Osos (The Rev) Brian McHugh +
[Ezekiel 2:1-5; 
Psalm 123; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; 
Mark 6:1-13]


I love the way Annie Dillard writes. I think I have read every book she has written, including Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm– though I will tell you that I have always been someone who can never remember the titles of books or what was in them! The same is true of movies, of where I have traveled and when, of the events of my Life, places I have been, etc. Things I read, see, experience, become part of the woven fabric of my Life, and in their own mysterious way they shape and form me, my thinking, my ideas, my identity. If there is anything I think I am going to want later, I have to make a note of it, and file it somewhere I can find it. Hence the rather large file on my computer called “Resources” – which, lest I lose my identity, I have backed up on three different places!

Being prompted by the readings for today, I did recall and did find these startling lines, which I suspect many of you have heard, from Annie Dillard’s book of 1988, Teaching a Stone to Talk”. She says:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, making up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offence, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

“The waking God may draw us out to where we can never return”. For me, this “never returning” is a given of the life of the Gospel. It is what is so terrifying about Baptism – and why I think that the sacrament of Baptism, in our era, should only be administered to adults - adults who have stared the Way of the Cross in the face. Taking the Baptismal vows, which we have degraded into a cute naming ceremony, is meant to stand us on the edge of the precipice called “Never Return”. Baptism reminds me of the poetic words of Peter McWilliams, who died at age 51 when the federal government took away the medical marijuana that would have prolonged his life, and who helped fund the Wisconsin Journey for Justice:

Come to the edge, he said.
They said, We are afraid.
Come to the edge, he said.
They came.
He pushed them…
And they flew.

Like birds, we can’t fly until we have been prepared for fledging. But we are meant to fly! This is what worship and sacrament and prayer and Christian fellowship is for. Worship and sacrament nurture the Inner Christ. It should start very early, as our present Prayer Book encourages. Never will I forget a little boy in one of my congregations who had been receiving the Eucharist since age two, when he came to the rail, looked up at me, and said loudy, “Me too!”. When he was about four, I said the invitation to Communion. He lept up from his pew, raced ahead of everyone down the aisle and up the steps to the altar, came round to me, and held out his open palms. I laughed and said to him, “You seem excited!” “Yes”, he said, “because Jesus is coming to be with me!” It is when we discover that Inner Christ living within us that we will heed the call of the Spirit and, like those fearless birds, leap. As Harriet Beecher Stowe said: “All serious daring starts from within.”

“Never Returning”, nor looking back, is what discipleship - being a student of the Gospel and of Jesus - is about. It is what “dying to self” is about. It is what “dying with Jesus that we may be raised with Him” is about. Being “encouraged out” to a place from which we can never return – nor would want to return– is exactly what we have prayed for today in our gathering Collect. We have asked God to help us keep all of God’s commandments by doing only one thing: loving God with our whole heart and each other with pure affection. If we leap from that precipice, there is nothing else to do but soar.

Learning Love. This is what is at the heart of Life, and, I am convinced, at the heart of God, of Jesus, of His Gospel, and of the Scriptures He so challengingly interpreted to His neighbours in the synagogue. Jesus could not have made it plainer than by giving the New Commandment to “love one another as I have loved you”. In my over 40 years of ministry, it is that question that has been writ large in front of me: What does it mean, to love? We Christians believe that we can find the heart of the answer in Jesus, whom we have invited to reign in our Inner Country. I still believe that Learning Love, day by day, over and over again, is the core enterprise of Life, certainly of being a Christian.

It is not my intention this morning to chide us all for our failures in Love. I assume that all of us are doing the best we can. Life is a real challenge! We are - at times more, at times less - deeply aware of the daily failures and successes. We know we need the understanding and compassion of God, of friends, of our fellow journeyers in the Faith. We know our need of that Mystery we call “Grace”, and of Forgiveness. At age 63, forty-four years on from my Confirmation at age nineteen, I am embarrassed at my failures to love my friends, and at my selfishnesses. I am dismayed at the anger that can rise in my heart for those I identify as “enemies”, at those with whom I disagree, especially in the areas of sexuality, Biblical interpretation, and militarism. I am grateful that my grappling with the Gospel, and my priestly vocation, and some loving fellow journeyers, have kept me from “acting out” - most of the time, anyway! - in unloving ways.

The season of Pentecost (now rather boringly called “Ordinary Time”) is a long season of asking the question, “What does it mean, To Love?”, in the context of the Mysteries we have contemplated since the Feast of the Incarnation through the Gift of the Spirit. It is my desire today to encourage us in this enterprise of Love. Think of those disciples that Jesus, in the passage from Mark today, sends out to confront evil and to heal, rookies though they are. He tells them, "Don't think you need a lot of extra equipment for this. You are the equipment ….. Keep it simple.” Off they go. And we are told, “They preached with joyful urgency that life can be radically different; right and left they sent the demons packing; they brought wellness to the sick, anointing their bodies, healing their spirits ….. They [had] nothing but themselves and the message of God’s Love.”

Simply to love is all we are asked to do, and we are assured that it will make all the difference in the World. Paul, talking about his limitations – handicaps, weaknesses, abuse, accidents, opposition, bad breaks –urges us just to “let Christ take over” – by which he means, do our best to love God, our selves, and each other as God loves us.

I still believe that we are made to love – made in the image of the God of Love. All of us here will have had a sense of or seen the power and the possibilities of Love. Of those possibilities Soren Kierkegaard once wrote: “It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it….. If God does not wish it then let him prevent it, but one must not hinder oneself. Trusting to God I have dared, but I was not successful; in that is to be found peace, calm and confidence in God. [If] I have not dared: that is a woeful thought …...”

In our own small circles of families and friends, in our own country celebrating the great ideals of equality and Justice set forth in the Declaration of Independence, in our deeply troubled, anxious, fearful World, God has asked us to live the power of Divine Love. Today’s theme is the courage to set forth on the unknown path. Christ says that Love will “send the demons packing”. What is our answer to Annie Dillard’s suspicion? Do we indeed believe a word of what we say about the power of Love?

Come to the edge, he said.
They said, We are afraid.
Come to the edge, he said.
They came.
He pushed them…
And they flew.

We have been gently pushed to the precipice of a radical Love that will define our lives. Shall we fly?