We had an amazing day here at St. Mark’s.  The entire community gathered for a single service to mark our desire to commit a portion of our treasure for next year.  In addition, we had a celebration lunch to mark the occassion.

It was a day of joy, of laughter and of thinking on how we can live a better story both individually and corporately.

Here’s the text of my sermon.  I hope you join us—whether a member here at St. Mark’s or not—in living a better story.

Matthew 25:31-46

Jesus paints quite a picture in the parable of the sheep and the goats that we read today.  The Son of Man has returned and is sitting on his throne, and the nations come before him.  He begins separating them, some on his left and some on his right.  He invites those on his right into the kingdom he has prepared since the beginning of time, because they fed him and gave him clothing and something to drink and visited him and welcomed him.

“When?” they ask.  “When were you naked or hungry or thirsty or lonely or a stranger or sick or in prison?”  And he tells them quite simply, “Whenever you did it to someone who was being overlooked or ignored—the least among you—you did it to me.”

He runs the same list with those on his left, the goats, except they never did these things.  They ask the same question, “When was it that you were shivering or thirsty or destitute and we didn’t do anything?”  “Whenever you didn’t do it for someone who was being overlooked or ignored—the least among you—you did not do it for me.”

In this image of the Last Day when we come before Christ the King, it comes down simply to what we did or didn’t do.

I read Donald Miller’s book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years a couple of years ago while I was laid up with a tibial plateau fracture, and it changed my life.  Don subtitles the book, “What I learned while editing my life,” and he talks about living a better story.  In one of the vignettes in his book, he talks about the frustration of writing fiction, because often the characters don’t do what he, as the writer, wants them to do.  As he would walk to his office in the morning after his coffee, he would dream up the plot of his novel.  But there was a problem.  “Stories,” he explains, “are only partly told by writers.  They are also told by the characters themselves.  Any writer will tell you characters do what they want.”[1]  Those of us with kids certainly know the irritation of not having them do what we might want them to do—especially when we know it’s for their own good—but characters in a book you’re writing?  How annoying would that be?

Don writes, “As I worked on the novel, as my character did what he wanted and ruined my story, it reminded me of life in certain ways.  I mean as I sat there in my office feeling like God making my worlds, and as my characters fought to have their way, their senseless, selfish way of nonstory, I could identify with them.  I fought with my [character] who wanted the boring life of self-indulgence, and yet I was also that character, fighting with God and I could see God sitting at his computer, staring blankly at his screen as I asked him to write in some money and some sex and some comfort.”[2]

As this idea percolates, Miller questions his desire to take over his own story, to not listen to God as the writer of his life.  He talks about wresting control, of hijacking the story for his own means.  But then he reconsiders.  “At first, even though I could feel God writing something different, I’d play the scene the way I wanted.  This never worked.  It would have always been better to obey the Writer, the one who knows the better story. … So I started obeying a little.  I’d feel God wanting me to hold my tongue, and I would.  It didn’t feel natural at first; it felt fake, like I was being a character somebody else wanted me to be and not who I was; but if I held my tongue, the scene would play better, and I always felt better when it was done.  I started feeling like a better character, and when you are a better character, your story gets better too.”[3]

And then he writes this, “At first the feeling was only about holding my tongue.  And when I learned to hold my tongue a bit, the Voice guided me from the defensive to the intentional.  God wanted me to do things, to help people, to volunteer or write a letter or talk to my neighbors.  Sometimes I’d do the thing God wanted, and the story always went well, of course; and sometimes I’d ignore it and watch television.  But by this time I really came to believe the Voice was God, and God was trying to write a better story.”[4]

“Be the master of your domain, the king of your castle,” we’re told by our society, but God wants to write a better story for us.  We want more for ourselves—whatever that more is—but God longs for us to have more joy and fullness of life.  God wants us to have deeper relationships with those we love.  God asks us to hold our tongues, and take a little time to talk to our neighbors.  God calls us to feed the hungry and hand out cups of water and visit the ones we know who are sick and in prison.

There have been times in my own life when I wanted create a story of my own choosing.  Times when I ignored those who are the least among us.  Times when I said something I shouldn’t have said.  Moments when I asked God to write in more of what I wanted into my story.  Things meant merely to bring entertainment, or personal gain, or to stroke my ego or to make me feel better about myself at the expense of others.

But if I keep doing that, if I keep pursuing that storyline, I may end up at the end saying to Jesus, “What a sec.  When were you hungry or sick or destitute or alone?  I don’t remember seeing you, Jesus, ’cause if I did, I would’ve stopped.  I would’ve done something.  I would have gotten you some warm clothes or tried to offer you some comfort.  Are you sure it was you, because I’m pretty sure I would have recognized you.”

The vestry, staff and I believe the purpose of St. Mark’s is to be a community that lives fully into Christ’s mission for our world.  To be those wanting to live a better story.  To be disciples who notice the least among us and who reach out to them and create a place for them to be with us.  We desire to teach our young people—and our adults too­—about the faith, and we want to have our buildings used to deepen community both among ourselves and our neighbors.  We know that there are many hurting people in this world—both in our parish and beyond our walls—and we want to be those who do something about that, who offer support and care and the chance for life-change through Jesus Christ.

And that’s why Melissa and I will be giving 10% of my salary to St. Mark’s.   Because we want to be a part of congregation that longs to make a difference in this world.   We’ve decided that there is a greater meaning to be found in life, and we want to help create a more just and humane world.  And we believe that we can fully participate in God’s dynamic mission at St. Mark’s by committing our financial resources and offering our time and talents for a common goal.

We’ve seen that when people hold out with open hands the finances and treasure that God has entrusted them with, God’s work gets done.  I know personally that when I give generously and joyfully, I live fully into the story that God is writing for me.  And I want to invite you to join with me in creating that story.  I encourage those who have found a church home here to strive toward giving 5-10% of your income to God’s work in this place.  If that is out of reach for you, or if you have never pledged before, I’d suggest that you make a commitment of 3% of your income this year—3 pennies on each dollar you make—with the hope of moving toward a larger percentage next year.  If we all made these types of commitment, we would have resources both to meet our financial obligations for the work we are already doing here, and we could expand our ministries at St. Mark’s to reach out to the ones often overlooked.

In 1968, just after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the rector at Saint Luke’s Parish in Darien, CT, together with lay people there, decided to respond in a faithful way by working for those who were poor in their area and to help educate others about poverty and injustice.  They began a ministry called Person-to-Person, and began collecting food and clothing for the working poor who lived and worked among them.  P2P started in a cleared out closet in the church admin building to hold the donations they received.  This past year P2P, going strong over 40 years, helped more than 22,000 people, had 2,900 volunteers, sent 600 low income kids to summer camp, and has taken over the entire administration building on the church grounds, including the apartment Melissa and I and our kids lived in when we served there.  It was a small idea that grew into a significant blessing.

What would happen if we at St. Mark’s took action on some small ideas that we shared together?  Maybe expanding our connection with Straight Ahead ministries and providing start up capital and business advice for young men like we did for a man named Kon.  He’s turned his life around and began a small t-shirt business called “Creating Hope Apparel” in Lowell this year.  Or maybe we could offer annual mission trips for our youth and adults. We could strengthen connections we already have with Our Father’s Table or Cradles to Crayons or build on the success of our own Bargain Box.  The beauty of being a part of a faith community is that we can see a seed of an idea grow into a life-changing endeavor.  And I’d love for this sort of dialogue to be a part of our work together this next year as we prepare to celebrate our parish’s 150^th anniversary.

I am so very hopeful for the future of St. Mark’s and I am so proud and humbled to serve as your rector.  As we enter into 2012, I know that we can make a significant impact in our world.  It begins with a strong commitment to Christ and to the call he has given us to serve him and see his presence in all of our sisters and brothers and especially those who are least among us.  As we make our commitments this morning for the work of this parish, may we do so trusting that God will use whatever we can give for the continued growth of Christ’s kingdom.  Amen.

I think those of us who participate in the life of the Church often promote an unhealthy attitude about what God can accomplish.  We underestimate God’s ability to work in our lives, in the work of the kingdom, in transformation.  And so we set the bar accordingly.  In other words, low.

We have a tendency, I believe, to think that we know how all this works.  That people don’t change, or that our lives—collectively and individually—will not get better.

And that anemic view of God’s kingdom holds us back.  It limits what we hope for.  It makes us hamstrung.

That’s not to say that I am promoting a “health and wealth” understanding of the faith.  I don’t think that God’s desire for Jesus’ disciples is to be wealthy.  Jesus himself was homeless, so I just can’t buy into that belief that some Christians hold on to dearly (and more often than not they are getting that idea from charismatic leaders who have created a lifestyle that others desire—yes, I’m looking at you, Joel Osteen).

This past Sunday those of us reading from the Revised Common Lectionary heard two parables about the kingdom of heaven starting small—with a mustard seed or some yeast—and getting to be huge.  Jesus was saying that the kingdom is like the energizer bunny, it just keeps growing.  It may look like it’s insignificant or too small, but it doesn’t stop.  And then it becomes a place where the birds can come and nest.

If he were living in the US today, Jesus might say the kingdom is like kudzu—that ivy like plant that has grown over tress, signs, even houses, in the southeast.  It doesn’t stop once it grows.  In fact, even though it lies dormant in the winter, in the spring it picks up where it left off.  The kingdom is like that.

People in my denomination sometimes dole out statistics about the church’s impending doom.  That somehow we can see the end of the church.  Nope, Jesus says.  While we like to sometimes latch on to scarcity and the frailty of God’s work, God pays no attention to what we think and keeps on working.  God wants to use us in that work to be sure, but even if we don’t God’s work continues.  The kingdom just keeps on growing.

So what view do you take of the kingdom of God?  Do you think of it as a dying vine or a flourishing tree?  Is your view of how God can work in our world—in your life—limited or is it hopeful that God will bring life?

We’re on Day 22 of our Great 50 Days of Easter, and our lessons turn from Resurrection Appearances to how we are to follow Jesus.  We got the great lesson from Acts 2 where we hear that tons of people began to follow the Way of Jesus and devoted themselves to this endeavor.

It’s enough to make any clergy person giddy.

So that’s what I talk about in my sermon.  Here you go.

Easter 4A—Acts 2:42-47 

            If you talk to clergy about the reading we heard from the Acts of the Apostles this morning, you will probably encounter some good old- fashioned envy.  What we clergy know as well is that in the previous verse we hear the results of Peter’s first sermon on the Day of Pentecost.  Luke, the author of Acts, writes, “So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.  They devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”  It’s a pastor’s utopia, with the people spending much time at the temple, with their generous hearts sharing their possessions with one another and the Lord adding to their number each day.  A priest could sit and daydream about such a place for hours.

But then something in our heads pops up and says, “Wake up and smell the coffee.  Such a place doesn’t exist, at least not today.”  It’s easy to give in to this “nostalgia for those biblical days,” as one pastor put it.[1]  But, he warns, “from there it is a short step to nostalgia for our own church’s better days, when pews were full, programs were exciting and we had an impact on the large community.”  We don’t live in those times anymore, for better or for worse.  We live in the here and now, and longing for the past will leave us blind to the present.  It will so shade our understanding of things that we will lose our focus and mission in the present day.

So I want to assure you that this is not a sermon in which I ask why you all can’t be more like those first converts a couple of millennia ago, which would lead to me pointing a stern finger and having you all feel guilty and also questioning your desire to ever come back here again.  I want to live in the present day, and see it for the blessing and challenge that it is.  “Holding all things in common,” and pooling all of our money won’t work today, and in fact, it wasn’t even something that happened in other churches throughout Acts.

Yet I don’t want to go on as if there is nothing to learn from this text either.  This is a challenging piece of scripture if we allow ourselves to hear it.  Rather than imagining clergy nirvana, what might these verses be saying to us in 2011—this post-modern, fragmented, overly-busy world that we live in?

Personally I am not really struck by the sharing of money here, but by the deep building of community that happened.  We’re told that these new converts “devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”  Those words may sound familiar, since it is the first of five questions asked of us when we renew our baptismal covenant or baptize someone for the first time.  “Will you continue in the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread and in the prayers?” we are asked.  “I will with God’s help,” we respond whole heartedly.

They did this, these first followers of Christ.  They devoted themselves to this.  They spent much time, day by day, together.  In worship, in sharing meals.  In living their lives in community.

If I had to speculate about what keeps many of us from this kind of life—that is a life centered on our faith, building community, saying the prayers—I would say quite certainly that for many it is one thing.  Time.  We are so mind-numbingly busy in our day and age that we hardly have time to rest, let alone fully putting our faith into practice.  We are overly scheduled.  Both us and our kids.  Even those who are retired will often say that they have never been busier in their lives.  Often in social settings this topic comes up, and we talk about our over-loaded schedules almost with a sense of pride, each trying to outdo the other.  We think it makes us important.  Or we don’t know how to say no.  Or we are scared to face the demons of our inner life so we keep ourselves busy so that we never have to.

I promised not to head down the road of nostalgia to a time when 24 hours was magically longer than it is today, nor would I stand up here and point a finger saying that you must add more things to your overly-extended calendars.  So how do we do this?  How do we devote ourselves to the life Jesus wants for us as his followers?

If there were easy answers, I could write the book and make a bundle.  Many have tried, of course, and the results are all somewhat unsatisfying.  There aren’t magic bullets in the spiritual life, no pill we can take that will somehow make everything better.  It is, I think, as Eugene Peterson puts it, a long obedience in the same direction.  I think it takes intentionality and perseverance.  Without either of those two, our faith life will take a back seat to the other distractions in our lives.  And for many of us—a great deal in fact—it’s because we don’t know how to live into this life.  We haven’t been taught how, or given a reason to see its importance.  And that, if I am honest, is because we who are clergy have failed you.  We have for too long felt as if we needed to hold the information to ourselves and give it out in palatable doses, or we think that you aren’t mature enough or intelligent enough to handle such a life, or we think that you won’t listen to us anyway so why should we bother.  Or, if I am even more honest, it’s because many of us haven’t been really taught how to live this type of life ourselves.  And for that, on behalf of all the clergy you have known and let you down, I am truly sorry.

You see, I think Jesus invites us into a better life.  The way life is meant to be.  Peace in our homes, deep and lasting friendships, time set aside for prayer, caring for one another, enjoyment of God’s many blessings, compassion for those who face injustice, having generous hearts, finding fulfillment in the work we do in this world.  But this life often gets lost in the busyness of our days.

I’ve recently discovered a blog written by Michael Hyatt, the chairman of the board for Thomas Nelson Publishing.  He writes a great deal about productivity and the things that steal our time, and about intentionality.  He says that many of us spend more time planning our vacations than we spend on planning our lives.  We live from moment to moment, crisis to crisis, experience to experience.  And so we may, like I have been doing this weekend, give hours of our time to watching the Red Sox and Yankees, while also feeling as if we have no time to devote to the life we desire.  If you desire a certain type of life—and I hope you’re like me and desire the life that Jesus wants for us—you have to make a plan.

That sounds so much like a First World problem, but in my understanding of things, I cannot think of any other way to put it.  If we start with the reality of our overly-busy lives (also a First World problem), then most of us cannot address our desire for a new life without intentionality.  If we desire authenticity in faith and devotion to Jesus, we must begin somewhere.  And we begin best of all by making a covenant to look at our lives honestly to see where we spend our time, and then finding a way—even if it’s small—to begin living the life Christ calls us to.

Imagine if each person at St. Mark’s covenanted to spend 10 minutes each morning and each evening in prayer and reading of scripture.  20 minutes a day.  The average adult watches somewhere between 3.5 to 5 hours of television a day.[2]  You may not be the average adult, but I suspect you could find that pocket of time for prayer if you wanted to.

And I want to covenant with you that I will be a priest that provides you with the tools you need to live this life.  I will spend my days by giving you ideas and tips for living this way, in deepening relationships with you, in providing opportunities for you to devote yourselves to the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.  And I will invite you to walk alongside me, and share in this leadership.  I cannot do this work alone–that is a damaging fallacy that has run its course much too long in our churches.  All of the disciples, and apostles were lay people.  They were folks like you who had families and day jobs and had to pay their taxes and all the rest.  The Way Jesus invites us into is not only for those who are seminary trained.  We are all called to walk in this way, to grow and deepen in our faith and to share that faith with others.

If as a community St. Mark’s lived in this fashion, I bet we would see the same sorts of things happening here that they saw in the Early Church.  That we would worship together, sharing meals with one another with a spirit of generous hospitality, praising God for our many blessings and caring deeply about the goodwill of all people.  This is the life Jesus holds out before us.  I pray that we intentionally desire this life for us and for others in this community, and that we devote ourselves to authentically following Christ.  Amen.