over the water

It is the second to last week of Sundays after Epiphany, and in the sermon series that we’ve been following, it is time for the fourth promise of our Baptismal Covenant:

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself. (I will, with God’s help.)

Last week, we imagined ourselves as not only Christ’s hands and feet in the world, but his beating heart, a tangible sign of God’s love to another. This week, turn and turn about, we seek the heart of Christ in those before us, those around us, those behind us. We who are sealed at baptism as Christ’s own forever, indelibly marked, seek out the signs of Christ in those around us, knowing that no one is made in the image of God unless all are; no one bears Christ’s cross unless it is the one bowed down by the burden, cast out by the crowd, the one raised to glory by the grace of God.

Paul spoke of being all things to all people, not because he was manipulative, or had no sense of himself; Paul seems, most of the time, to have a rather strong self-confidence, in fact, and an almost foolish tendency towards politically incorrect and unpopular statements.

He speaks of becoming all things to all people for the sake of the gospel, for the love of Christ and the love of those he seeks to reach with the good news that the kingdom of God has been brought near, declared to be at hand by Jesus, whose word is true.

In order to love his neighbour as himself, he tries to become his neighbour, to put himself in a different skin, let his heart beat to a different rhythm, in order to reach out with compassion, understanding, love.

Paul wasn’t always so understanding. At the beginning, he was the worst kind of extremist, colluding and condoning the killing of Christians for their religion, for what he understood to be their blasphemy, their apostasy.

When Stephen was stoned to death, Paul cynically stood by, guarding the belongings of the lynch mob, consenting to their murderous rampage. A zealot for the Law, he watched as the fifth commandment was broken, buried, and he consented to the madness. He was the worst kind of extremist.

And even Paul was capable of redemption. In fact, a man named Ananias, a disciple in Damascus, was sent to seek Paul out at the house where he was staying, since his strange encounter with the light of Christ on the road, which had left him sightless.

Ananias was sent to seek out Paul and to serve him with the gospel. Ananias laid hands on the man (who at that time was still named Saul, not yet Saint Paul), saying,

“Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came, has sent me that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.”

Perhaps it was the example of Ananias, and the few others who trusted in his conversion, that taught Paul how to see beyond the past and into the soul of another, becoming as one under the law to the in-laws, and as one without the law to the outlaws.

Most of us, God willing, will not have need to seek out the worst kind of extremists and serve them as Christ’s own anointed, although it’s worth considering.

But we are called to seek and serve strangers, however shy we may feel of them, who are our neighbours, deserving of our love, and of the gospel.

Even Jesus, rather than staying in the family home in which he had plenty of healing work still to do, what with the whole town crowding around the door, set out to seek and serve others in the region, others who might need the gospel, others who needed Christ.

Christianity is in some ways a restless religion. St Augustine, who although not an extremist like Paul, was in his youth and well into adulthood rather profligate; Augustine recognized that restlessness as that which draws us closer to God, compelling us to seek God out in the working out of the gospel, of grace, of love. In the very beginning of his Confessions, he writes,

“you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they can find peace in you.”

Our hearts are restless, ever seeking God; what better use to put that restless energy to than to seek and serve Christ in those around us, our neighbours whom we are called to love as ourselves, the great commandment second only to the call to love God with mind, strength, and heart.

This morning we commission our new Vestry and Officers for the year’s work ahead, and one of the things that we will be discussing as the year goes on is how we can become to others what they need us to be for them; not to manipulate them into church attendance or propping up our numbers, nor out of any lack of certainty about who we are, as Christians, as Episcopalians, as members of Epiphany. We can keep our identity and our integrity strong, and out of that strength, founded in the gospel, built on the solid foundation of Christ, we can reach out to others, enter their skin, hear their heartbeats, dance to their rhythm.

Do you remember who first sought out and served you with the gospel? Maybe it wasn’t as explicit as, “Little girl, do you have a moment to talk about Jesus?” Maybe it was more like a gentle touch, a word of encouragement, the knowledge that you were valued, and loved, and over time, the realization that this was absolutely consistent with all of those stories about God seeking and saving the little lost sheep, seeking and serving rough fishermen and their mothers-in-law, feeding with broken bread and wine the multitudes and the select few friends, indiscriminately.

Someone once asked me the question, “What difference would it have made in your life if you had never heard the gospel, never known the love of Christ?” It hit me like a rock; I could see the answer and it moved me to tears. For a moment I was as sick and unsteady as Simon Peter’s mother-in-law before Jesus grasped her by the hand and lifted her up.

Do you remember how it happened to you? Can you become the person who does the same for another child of God, another lost sheep, another lonely soul?

Jesus went out from the house where he was staying while it was still dark, and watched the sunrise in prayer: “From the rising of the sun to its setting, the Lord’s name be praised.”

And they came to him and said, “Everyone is looking for you.” And he answered, “But where is the one I am seeking, the one who most needs me today?” And they went out, seeking to serve the others.

He came seeking us, serving us; Christ the Lord, all things to all people, and always good news to see him coming. And he bids us follow.

Amen.

When I was a child, I was one of those daydreamers who could get lost in a world of my own. If I were reading a book, I might surface from it to find my mother standing in front of me with her hands on her hips, lips pursed, “If I’ve called you once, I’ve called you ten times,” she might say, and it was probably true. Lost in a world of imagination, I wouldn’t hear her, until I came back to this dimension, this reality, with a bump.

In the distracted times in which we live now, I sometimes wish I could reclaim that single-mindedness, that total immersion in other worlds, or even in the tasks of this one. But there was a time that detachment almost killed me.

We used to travel, every year, to St David’s, a jewel on the coast of west Wales, a city by designation but a fishing village by design. We were walking on the coastal path, a national heritage trail that wound around the cliffsides overlooking the sandy bays with their seals and seagulls. I was skipping ahead, off in my own world again, some story running through my head, when from a great distance I heard not one but both of my parents, and my brother, call my name, and then, “STOP!”

Thus rudely awakened from my daydream, I paused, looked up, saw nothing but seagulls and sky; looked down, and discovered that my foot was on the edge of the cliff, hundreds of feet above the rockfall at the top of the beach. The path behind me made a ninety-degree turn. I, lost again, had failed to turn with it.

We hear the word, “repent,” in two out of three readings today. You have probably heard before that the word means to turn, to change direction, although Frederick Buechner, in his ABC of religious words, writes that,

“To repent is to come to your senses.”*

To come to your senses: to return to reality, to see things as they really are, rather than continuing blindly, or blunderingly, in a dangerous direction.

When Jonah went to Nineveh, to tell them to repent and return to the Lord, the instruction was pretty straightforward. Nineveh had a reputation for sinful living. It was the city that never slept, the city of a thousand idols, the capital city of the Assyrian Empire, the subject of oodles of oracles of doom; the sin of the city was straightforward and well known and their need for repentance obvious in Israel.

Nineveh was so sunk in its own sin that it took the voice of an outsider, an individual prophet with a strange accent and a sulky demeanour, to attract the attention of the citizens and bring them to their senses. Perhaps it was the smell of fish guts that cut through the perfume of their parties and got them to pay attention to the word of God spoken among them. Whatever it was, they responded, they repented, as a community, as a city, as an empire, of their wickedness, their ungodliness, their vanity and their vaingloriousness; they repented before God, and God relented, and restored them to God’s good favours.

On the other end of the spectrum we find a handful of fishermen, going about their daily business, nothing much to see here, no great evil, no great shakes. Still, Jesus spoke to them, and it was the ones who were paying attention to the words of God, the wind of God, which way the Holy Spirit was blowing today, the ones with a weather-eye, who kept their senses alert and to hand, who were able to recognize the call, and change direction, change their lives on a dime, and follow Jesus.

“True repentance,” says Buechner, “spends less time looking at the past and saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ than to the future and saying, ‘Wow!’”*

Wow, because when we come to our senses, when we really begin to see things clearly: not through the fog of sin or disgrace, shame or discouragement, but through the sixth sense of grace, encouragement, forgiveness, acceptance, love; then we begin to see all that God has done for us, all that God has created for us to live into, all that God is to us, and wants for us, and offers us.

Paul, to the Corinthians, writes that the present form of this world is passing away; he encourages them to see through the distractions of daily living, to give up the drugs of distraction with which we dull our senses; to come to our sense of grace, of God’s power, of glory.

That is what repentance can do: restore our souls to grace, free our hearts from shame, open our minds to wonder.

The second promise of our Baptismal covenant reads,

“Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord? I will, with God’s help.” (BCP)

The avoidance of evil is not passive but an active and persistent job of work. We know that too well in these days of media coverage and interconnectedness. But the spiritual work of repentance and returning, that is an undercurrent of daily life, a rhythm of fall and return, suspense and resolution, lost and found we come to our senses with one foot in the air, and God and our community calling us to turn, return, come back to reality.

The spiritual work of repentance and return is continual, and it is about living in the real world; not the world of illusions and disillusions, but the world created by God, redeemed and sustained by the God in whom we live and move and have our being. It is about seeing ourselves and one another through the lens of a loving God, the only reality. William Temple once wrote,

“To repent is to adopt God’s viewpoint in place of your own. There need not be any sorrow about it. In itself, far from being sorrowful, it is the most joyful thing in the world, because when you have done it you have adopted the viewpoint of truth itself, and you are in fellowship with God.”**

We don’t do it alone. We can’t do it alone.

To Nineveh, the city so loud that it could be heard across the sea, God sent Jonah, one grumpy and recalcitrant little prophet with a chip on his shoulder and horrible stench of fish guts. To the Corinthians he sent Paul. To the fishermen he sent Jesus.

We get to hear them all. Left to ourselves, lost in our own little worlds of individuality, illusion, self-delusion we might be lost, we might even fall. But we are not left alone.

We have one another. We have the voices, perhaps, of our parents, or our godparents, calling us back from the edge of the cliff, calling us back to our senses. We have our faith community, to help us work out together where the path should go, when we are lost. We have one another, to help each other along the way, when someone needs help to turn around, or move forward, or go back.

When repentance happens – and it can, it should happen every day that our senses are alive – when repentance happens, it should stop us in our tracks. It should bring us to our knees. It should lift us to the skies. It should restore our souls to grace and to glory, offering us a God’s-eye view of our lives and the lives of those we are called to love, with God’s help.

Amen.

*Frederick Buechner, Wishful thinking: a seeker’s ABC, revised and expanded edition (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 96

**William Temple, Christian Faith and Life, 67, quoted in L. William Countryman, Forgiven and Forgiving (Morehouse Publishing, 1998), 2