The Church of the Ascension
Galatians 1:11-24
June 10, 2007

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  AMEN.          

I have been without a car all week.  In the big picture this is absolutely no big deal, a minor inconvenience that will pass at least by Wednesday – or so I am promised by the very evil people at the VW place!  Perhaps my description of them as “evil” bespeaks the fact that this minor inconvenience may not have seemed so minor to me and has in fact irritated the daylights out of me!  I was amazed at how many times I needed to run somewhere for one thing or another – only to remember that my garage was empty, which is NOT an invitation to fill it up with spring fling items for next year!  One evening I desperately needed to run to Target in the middle of the night.  Though I was critically disappointed and inconvenienced at the time by being “stranded,” oddly now I don’t remember what I needed.

In addition to having to face the fact of my very “non-green” automobile addition this week, another issue has arisen for me: I have had to deal with my discomfort in allowing others to help me.  Being in the helping profession, it would seem that I would be adept at receiving help from others; but the truth is it is difficult for me.  I have a hard time asking for and receiving assistance.  Obviously I did not have enough trouble with it to do the sensible thing and rent a car – which is to say in the end I am cheaper than I am reluctant to ask for help from kind friends.  But the whole experience did set me to thinking about how interrelated and interdependent we all really are – particularly those of us living in a community of faith.  There are things we can count on from one another in our faith community – whether talking about this parish church of THE church universal.  At least there are things we should be able to count on, things that are much more basic but never more appreciated than a ride.

The problem, of course, is that the church, particularly our denomination, is living through an extremely contentious period.  I don’t talk about it much because the truth is most of the arguing among the world wide Anglican Church doesn’t have much direct impact upon us.  I don’t know if any of you heard Bill Moyers interview Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori on Friday evening.  He asked her all the questions one would expect – about her extraordinary journey from earning a Stanford PhD in oceanography to becoming the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, a heretofore all boys club.

Not surprisingly, though, the lion’s share of the interview was directed to the topic of sexuality – because everyone knows that sexuality  is the most important issue in the world and if not that certainly the one we seem to spend more time in our denomination talking about than anything else.  The tragic fact that issues of sexuality stand in the way of our truly being the body of Christ to the world is too big for me to tackle this morning except in the broadest way as it affects what we can and cannot expect from other Christians in the Communion.  Moyers asked Bishop Katharine to talk particularly about the dispute between a number of African bishops, led by Bishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, and our church.  As many of you have read, at a conference last year in Tanzania Bishop Akinola refused to receive Communion – not from Bishop Katharine – but refused to receive it all because she was attending the meeting.  Lord have mercy – what have we come to?

If there is comfort in precedence, we can take some.  In the epistle lesson today, we read of a growing conflict between Paul, the apostle who came late but loudly to the Jesus moment, and Peter, the disciple famous for his clay feet and his remarkable devotion.  Though the specifics of their argument ranged from the necessity of following dietary laws to imposing circumcision, neither a great marketing ploy, the real issue was determining how wide the mercy of God really was.  The question put before them came down to this: did the throngs of people who were finding relief and joy in the good news of Jesus have to become Jews, as Peter claimed, in order for them to be acceptable as Christians.  Paul said no; Peter said you are destroying our church by being too liberal.  With the benefit of our 2000 years of perspective, by and large we acknowledge that Peter was just wrong in his narrow interpretation – a good man but wrong.  Further we assume that Peter and Paul somewhere along the way kissed and made up and lived happily ever after.  Nice assumption but there is no scriptural narrative to support it.  In fact, each man argued that the issue was so important that it cut to the heart of the gospel.  Religious debaters always go for the jugular!  We do that in arguing about religion because it matters so much to us.

My point though is that even if they never fully reconciled (and I would bet more money than it would cost to rent a car that they never did), even with that fact, they continued to share life as the body of Christ.  And in the process, each one of them in his own way and through the particularity of his gifts and insights brought many, many people to a transformative, life changing knowledge of Jesus Christ.  Contrast that to the alarming developments in our own church.  Now when two sides of the argument about an issue – this decade it is sexuality; next it may be redistribution of wealth, each side is so entrenched and so emphatically correct that the other side is condemned as being outside the communion – as though such decisions belong to any but God.   There is no better – nor any sadder – way to demonstrate that outside-ness than to refuse to share God’s holy meal with one another.   Peter and Paul, who never became chummy as far as we know, taught us a powerful lesson in their willingness to stay in communion with one another.  The expanding circularity of our table – the spaciousness of that circle – is now, was in the past, and always will be the locus of our oneness in Christ – not our theological agreement about even very important issues.

So…are we ruined?  Are we going down the tubes?  No, of course, we are going to live through this – just as the early church lived through the conflicts between Paul and Peter.  Bishop Katharine will remain our bishop; Bishop Robinson will remain the bishop of New Hampshire.  For a little perspective, it might be interesting for you to know that only three US bishops have asked not to have Bishop Katharine in their dioceses.  Only seven parishes – not dioceses - in the US have asked to leave the Episcopal Church.  The sky is not falling. 

BUT….the church is damaged; it is damaged because a fearful underside to the church is so clearly shown in this strident debate.  When issues – even important ones – divide us to the point that we do not remain at the table together, we are damaged – no question about it.  We are damaged because when we operate from a place of such hurt and meanness – and there are plenty of both to go around on both sides, the focus gets shifted from the mercy and goodness of God to declarations about who is right or wrong or about who is in or out.  In that divide what gets lost is the amazing truth that not one single one of us is there – at this font of grace – on our own merit but by the gift and invitation of God.  To believe that we can or should regulate who gets to avail him or herself from that table is less arrogant than it is simply and deeply sad.

The Good News of Christ is that today at Ascension and all around the world people more or less like us are invited to make this trek from our pews to the table.  It is not magic; it does not erase our pain or solve all our problems; but it opens a place for us to experience God’s grace in a way unlike any other.  It is not ours to monitor but ours to share.  I can’t begin to tell you what it does for us any more than I can explain what it does for me, but I know I can’t live without and by God’s grace I don’t have to.  And neither do you.
In the name of God: AMEN.