St. John’s Episcopal Church
Hamlin, Pennsylvania
The Rev. Ronald Royce Miller, Ph.D.
The Third Sunday After the Epiphany
25 January 2015

Scripture readings:
	Jonah 3:1-5, 10	Psalm 62:6-14		I Corinthians 7:29-31		Mark 1:14-20

	Last week we paid attention to the fact that the commemoration for the Confession of St. Peter was bumped over to Monday from a Sunday commemoration. Well, guess what? Today we have the same difficulty. The 25th of January in the Church Calendar is set aside as the .... You mean you just don’t walk around thinking about these things? [laughter] In the Gregorian Calendar the 25th of January is reserved as the celebration and commemoration of the Conversion of St. Paul. So that’s technically moved to tomorrow, but I want to think about it today. We’re still in the Epiphany cycle and if anybody had an epiphany, I suppose St. Paul did.

	Paul, as you know, was a very highly educated Pharisee, a very dedicated member of the synagogue, a very motivated Jew who was interested in keeping the synagogue clean. So he wasn’t very happy with these other members of the synagogue who had ideas about Jesus that were newfangled and possibly subversive and otherwise destructive to his religion which he knew inside and out. He was serious about his religion, and his religion taught him what was right and wrong. He worked long and hard at being right, and he wasn’t going to tolerate those who were going to mess with that. He was pious. He was a good, good, good, faithful man. He spent a lot of time early on persecuting the people who would have upset his religious organization and his religious ideas.

	It’s believed that St. Paul may have witnessed the stoning of the first Christian martyr, Stephen. St. Paul, in the iconography of the Church, is the one standing there with pom poms. That was a joke! [laughter] At that point he was probably supporting the assassination of Stephen. You know the rest of the story. He’s on the road to Damascus on his high horse and gets knocked off of his very high horse by a very bright light and is blinded and is eventually healed of his blindness by Ananias, a faithful man, - brought to the faith, and then becomes this extraordinary missionary of the Church.

	Do you want to talk about something we called in the seventies “a credibility gap”? You can be sure the early Church wasn’t entirely enthusiastic about Paul at the beginning. And Paul and Peter - interesting that their commemorations come a week apart - had their differences as well. And one of the differences was whether or not the church in Jerusalem was right in insisting upon Gentiles being circumcised before they could become Christians. Thank you for the eyebrow raised, Joanne! [laughter] The point being, could you become a Christian without becoming a Jew? And how could you become a Jew without being circumcised? You’ll find this in the scriptural record. This was a major concern for the early Church. Paul won that argument anyway.

	And so we have this extraordinary moment in the history of the Church, early on in the history of the Church, of seeing a person who knew he was right finding out that he may not have been. Now that’s not a problem that’s foreign to us, is it? I have a long way to go with you in terms of Lutheranism, but we’ll get there. Joke!

	It wasn’t long ago that I heard proclaimed vigorously and piously the knowledge that someone was going to heaven because that person had received Jesus into her heart. Not a bad idea. The part that drove me around the bend is that that person knew who hadn’t received Jesus into her or his heart and was just as sure that those persons were outside the pale of the forgiving, salvific love of God. That makes me nuts! [Voice from the congregation: “We noticed.”] [laughter] Thank you, John. Because it is such an invitation for religious communities to exercise a very pious and happily swallowed hypocrisy. We look at our religiosity. We claim moral high ground. Then we exclude others whom it is easy to exclude and forget that at every Mass we say, “He died for the sins of the world.”  And my question is, particularly of Christians of that certain bent, “Did your God really do such a bad job that two-thirds of the world which is not Christian is going to hell? Is your God so small that even where your God’s name is not known, your God’s love is known? And are we going to willy nilly buy into that kind of construct because it wears, and I think very falsely, the name of Christian? I hope not!

	And this is the elemental radical idea of Jesus that was so profoundly disturbing to religious people they strung him up for it. This idea cost Jesus his life because he talked to whores, because he sat down with tax collectors who were thieves, because he called cussing fishermen to communicate this love, because he walked through the crowds and saw there God’s children, every last God-blessed one of them!

	“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” he wept. “How I would have gathered you under my wings as a mother hen gathers her chicks.”

	My buddy Frank this morning: Una cosa brutta cristiani divisi. Una cosa brutta - a very bad thing. Christiani divisi - divided Christians. Today in St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, which is a huge and ancient church, is a prayer service for Christian unity. Thank God we have a person in that position who sees value in this in a way that often is missed, I believe. And he’s not the first or the only one that’s been there. Certainly John XXIII had a pretty clear idea of what that might mean and others, I’m sure, whom I didn’t pay as much attention to.

	But then I thought, “What would he think if he were here this morning?” Lutherans, Methodists, Roman Catholics. Is there a Presbyterian in the house? But here we are. There were times - and we all know this in our own experience - there were times when what it meant to be one or the other of those things meant ...  I went through three years of confirmation classes. Is it any wonder I know what a Lutheran might be! Three years! I’m not sure it worked. [laughter] We’re good about our structures in knowing who’s in and who’s out.

	What was the question I was asked about the flowers this morning? What was the question? [Voice from the congregation: The question was, “Do you allow flowers in the church during Lent?”] Well, first of all, who am I to allow or not to allow flowers? Secondly, there’s an old tradition that during Lent, which is a penitential season, you don’t have flowers. But thirdly, what came to my mind was if it’s important for somebody to give flowers to the church, who cares if it’s Lent? Who cares? And if it creates a talking point for us, something for us to think about and it creates a vehicle for someone to remember somebody because somebody else had flowers on another Sunday or who knows what happened. Are we not a living Church and do we not believe in a God who loves us in the middle of things we do not understand and asks us to believe that we are fully, entirely, sufficiently and completely loved and saved by God who is the only one we confess who can save us. Then aren’t we in a living situation where who cares what the rule is? How do we as faithful people work out our life together? And how is it we more effectively and more frequently can share the love that God gives to us in completeness which we believe and accept, not because we are good, not because we deserve it, but because we need it and God gives it. That’s the truth of Jesus that we believe. That truth for two thousand years has been understood to be a scandal. And you know what a scandalone is in Greek. It’s a stumbling block. Now I have a trick where I put my one foot behind my other ankle as I’m moving forward and stumble, and it makes people think I’m falling. My knee is too bad to do that today. So I don’t need a block. I have a stumbling knee. The point is that the truth that Jesus brings to the world and that Paul woke up to after being knocked off of his high horse is that as human beings we live inside the limitations of time and space and imperfection, but our hope is based on the perfect love of a Creator God.

	Cathy came this morning with the news that her mother had died a month after her husband - double punch in the gut. What is our faith? At the graveside service for your mom, Sandy, I walked to the grave site with Maryann and I said, “Here it is we laugh and here it is we shout Alleluia, all of the evidence to the contrary.” Our grief at death, I think, is our fear that God has died. And in some respects that’s not an irrational fear because if the decedent has in any way communicated love to us, we believe that’s divine, that’s God’s gift. And so when the person who shares that love with us intimately, personally and beautifully is dead, it’s not irrational for us to believe that in some sense God has died. But the Church knows better. The Church, taught by St. Paul, says that together we constitute the body of a living Christ who never dies and that although this one vehicle of communicating God’s love has now completed his or her course in this world, God’s love for that person and for us remains the same.

	Now that’s interesting in terms of the Jonah text this morning, isn’t it, because Jonah predicts the end of Nineveh and it doesn’t happen. So guess whose fault that is? God changed her mind! [laughter] Now if that’s not proof that God’s a woman...[laughter] Pardon me, feminists! [Voice from the congregation: “How about open to new information?”] Of course!

	Today is the 67th anniversary of my baptism. Somewhere in my attic - I couldn’t put my finger on it - is a photograph of me as an infant in the hands of my grandmother. My mother went out onto the porch to take a picture through the front window. As she took the picture, my mother is reflected in the glass. Someday I’ll find it and frame it. You know who my Aunt Gertrude is - Gertrude’s mother. I have no hesitation in saying in my life the faith and love of God was equally, fully and probably more so communicated by women than men. And shame on the Church for diddling around for so long in terms of the ordination of women. The Church was wrong.

	And St. Paul found out he was wrong. That doesn’t mean insincere. It doesn’t mean they didn’t get sucked into those ideas because of somebody else’s mistake. It doesn’t mean that things didn’t change. Of course they did. But it does mean that the invitation to us is to remain open to the possibility of growth that we never imagined in terms of our own concepts of the Almighty and the Almighty’s love for us.

	And so my challenge is to the person who knows all about who’s going to heaven and who’s going to hell and say faithfully - and this is heresy...well, maybe not - I believe God can take anybody to heaven God wants. And I don’t believe anybody is here who God did not want to be here.

	So do I know? I know nothing about after death. I know as much about after death as I know about before birth. But I believe that this is not an accident and I believe that we can imagine something more perfect than our own ideas, even than our own affections, and that we all float in the same ship together. And we are invited to believe that we are loved by a merciful God who invites us to share that love, not with those who deserve it, but with those who need it just as much as we do. And if we really get busy about that, do you really care who’s in heaven because you see when we start living like that, heaven starts to appear here.

	In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.