But there is another reason we gather and perhaps it is the most important one: We gather as the people of God, and in high dramatic fashion, we act out what God’s reign in earth looks like…just as poems and plays are maps of the world captured by the imagination. That is why liturgy, not dogma, is the first priority of Episcopalians. What we believe is borne bodily in the way we worship: We gather as friends of God, in majestic procession befitting the entrance into God’s presence; we sing and play beautiful music because we know that our souls are fed and formed, and our imaginations quickened by beauty; I like to believe that God’s own imagination is set afire by things beautiful; We hear from the sacred texts of our tradition to remind us where we’ve been, who we are, and perhaps in so doing we gain a sense of where we are going; through preaching we hear studied interpretation of the texts we have read; we offer our life and labor symbolized by the elements of bread and wine, and we ask God’s blessing upon them, that they may be for us the risen Christ shared among us, empowering us with the Spirit of life; and then we are sent as Christ’s raised body into the world as nurture ourselves to a world hungry and thirsty for this abundant life. It is a “passion play”, as it were. It causes us, as all art does, to remember something profoundly important about who we are.

The reign of God looks like a community who have travelled far together and who love each other for it. It is not some other-worldly place within which the streets are paved with gold. God’s reign is among us. It is an open, all inclusive, egalitarian commonweal in which neighbor takes care of neighbor; a radically mutual community in which justice, kindness, peace, and mercy prevail….and it is for our world now…not exiled into the hereafter. We act  liturgically that we might remember who we are and to whom we belong; and that as the people of God’s Way, we remember that we are called as Jesus was called into the world to make this reign so.

I think this past Sunday in our liturgy we got a glimpse of such a world as we sent our high school seniors out into the world to serve it, love it, change it. What we enacted liturgically this past Sunday, though symbolic, was no less real….as real as the many tears shared on this day…tears of love and joy and hope…and the inevitable tears that come when we depart from one another…but as the community of faith, we never say goodbye for long…we always meet again along the way…for such is life in God’s kingdom…that comes ever so close….as close as the love that lives among us, and as real.

Let me say again that faith is not an adherence to a set of Dogmatics or an assent to a particular belief system….faith is a sense of connection to a larger whole, a sense of relevancy and purpose, that moves us into the practice of God-likeness, the practice of the good…The writer of the Gospel of John calls it, “laying down ones’ life…faith is not static but on the move. Faith is “acting as if”, as one responder put it….acting as if this way of the Christ, this way of compassion and mercy and justice…this way of raising up those who are beset by the indignities of our world….this way of nonviolence….this way of raising the dead of our world to life….Faith is acting as if this gospel vision, this promise of God’s imminent egalitarian kingdom is true. Belief evolves, as it ever has, and as it ever will. There is no such thing as an in stone doctrine other than to practice the way of Christ which is in a very intimate and mystical way to “know” Christ. When one “accepts” Jesus as our evangelical culture likes to put it, they best be prepared to know what they are getting into. Jesus is not a personal genie who capriciously grants wishes to some and not to others…but Jesus is the archetype of a way of life…not only the lens through whom we see God…but also the lens through whom God sees us…the true humanity…humanity that recognizes ourselves as one organism. (indeed we evolved from the same source…we are in fact all related on this planet, chemically, genetically) And if one organism…it follows that until all are saved then the whole of us are not saved.

Therefore God’s project of salvation has to do with the whole of humanity, and I don’t mean our going out into the world as the faithful to huckster a belief system….the saved are the ones in this world who live in “well being” (in freedom and with food and water and shelter and amid nonviolence and in a relatively just community, and empowered with agency, that is, empowered to make change happen) As I mentioned before the word salvation in scripture is a socio-economic and political term….so under that rubric, in today’s world at least two thirds of our world are the unsaved…those are the ones who live without a sense of well being, who live in abasement and fear, and ill health, lacking basic necessities to which all are entitled…Those are the ones to whom we are sent…we the raised body of Christ, the people of the Way….the people who “act as if.” We go into the world as agents of change…changing the structures of our society that would disadvantage or disenfranchise the least of us. Therefore, for example, the work of salvation has everything to do with our engaging the health-care debate….the efficacy of our schools….the intractable troubles in our prison system… the immigration debate….not to mention the structures of power that belie the dignity of the human community around the planet.

God’s gracious commonweal….God’s gracious favor is for all….and the work of salvation is to share that favor with our neighbor….Salvation is nothing short of a socio-economic reordering of our common life on this planet in which power, well being and agency at the top of the socio-economic, and political pyramid is shared with the whole of humanity….Read the Magnificat in Luke, and you will hear the vital, the radical song of Salvation .

Then the questioner followed up thanking me for answering her first question and then posed a few others. Chief among them was the question, “What does the Episcopal Church believe about salvation,” and “what is required to be saved,” and “when does that happen.” My mind raced towards my memories of my days in high school, a time in which there were a number of teenage evangelical groups whose sole purpose was to make sure their classmates got “saved” (as if it were something one got) and therefore their/our souls would be destined for heaven in the next life; I used to get asked from time to time growing up, “are you saved?” My mother’s snide answer for me was to say to them…. “of course I am, I’m an Episcopalian!”…. and even today we still speak in many denominational and nondenominational churches about salvation being an intimate and intensely personal enterprise. Living in the South we still see such theologies of salvation in the revival culture. Indeed our culture as a whole still prizes above all things self-interest. 

So here is my reply to the questioner who only identified herself as Ms. M (perhaps she is reading this): First and foremost we must look and see what scripture has to say about salvation. For the Gospel writers and for Paul the word salvation is synonymous with the state of “well being”. Salvation then is principally about living in the present; how we live together justly, sharing the abundance that God provides. The word salvation in scripture rarely speaks of an afterlife. So the term salvation, particularly in the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, has decided social, economic, and political implications (not partisan political, but political meaning how we live together as the human family) Implications for the present day, for a people oppressed by a totalitarian regime. Salvation then is not a possession but a way of  life for the good of the whole up and against the tragedy and injustices of our world…It is a communal term and not a personal term in scripture. Through Jesus’ preaching and teaching we learn that salvation means loving our neighbor as we love ourselves, that we are our brother’s and sister’s keeper. Salvation is something we don’t hold on to, or claim as our own, but something we give away, something we bear to our world, a way of life.

And at least according to Paul, the gospel of John and in Hebrew scripture salvation is intended by God for all, it is universal, not just for a chosen few. We still suffer in our culture from the theologies of Augustine and Calvin which hold that only an elite few will receive salvation…how this doctrine has survived and the damage it has done is beyond me….perhaps it evolved and survived due to a collective self loathing that centuries of violence have brought upon us…that’s my amateur psychologist’s guess. So salvation is intended by God for all of us since before time….Baptism a symbol of a reality that already is…. Salvation is for all, and all means all…. the human community entire around the planet. I don’t believe “religious” affiliation as a thing to do with it, because salvation is not principally about belief, but it is about the practice of the faith, the practice of the good….the principal goal, the principal tenet being the well being of the people God loves and the creation in which they live…well being meaning living in freedom, and non-violence, and in good health , fed and clothed …cloaked with dignity, living justly with one’s neighbor….and the means of salvation, what is required of us quite simply has been expressed by the prophet Micah (6:8): “He has told you O mortal what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.” What more than that can there be?

But in her analysis she found that people are no longer attracted to a church of rigid dogma and belief, churches run by varying degrees of hierarchy, of rules and regulations…churches in which order is paramount. This is the church that was filled to the brim just after World War II perhaps because people needed a rigid order in the face of the most chaotic and violent century in human history. In the fifties 90% of the membership of the Episcopal Church were born into the Episcopal Church; now, that figure has reversed, only 10% of Episcopalians are cradle Episcopalians. So over the past fifty years we have become much more diverse; we ordain women as priests and bishops. The church has participated in the civil rights movement; lived through the Vietnam debacle; revised the way we worship; much has changed in the latter part of this century that has shaped the church towards a new paradigm.

That is because the believer has changed, the ones who say they are spiritual and religious, the ones who say that so-called organized religion just doesn’t speak to them any more, and by organized, I’m speaking of the aforementioned paradigm, the one in which dogma and ‘right belief’ comes first, bolstered by a hierarchical ordered structure in which one comes to church to have church performed for them… structure being more important than our participation in it… Dr. Bass is not so much making a value judgement as to this paradigm, but is noting that this paradigm is dying and dying fast. The Episcopal Church she notes, and believes passionately, is poised to embrace the spirituality of the post modern believer.

The post modern person of faith doesn’t care for a rigid belief system; the post modern generations (X and Y and Millenneals) want first and foremost invitation, welcome, and connection….and they want relevancy and purpose; they want to question the doctrines of the old paradigm; they want mystery, beauty, and discovery; they want to make a difference in the world around them…belief then becomes in its own time, and belief must be believable…I tell newcomers all the time that though we say the ancient creeds and Eucharistic formulas, there is always room for speculation and discovery….If we at All Saints had a conversation about what we believed, I think we would see a church with a vast diversity of theology…That is a healthy thing. The Roman Church is fighting tooth and nail this inevitable shift. Pope Benedict himself has said that the Roman Church must become smaller, with a more precise and authoritative theology…He is succeeding.

Dr. Bass argues as an historian that we, our culture, which includes the church, is in the midst of a new awakening which actually began in the early sixties, slowed by the religious and political influence of the so-called Christian right, they too arguing for a narrow and rigid dogmatic faith…but faith now is finding its life more in orthopraxis than in orthodoxy….that is,  finding life in “right practice” more-so than in “right belief.” Don’t get me wrong, believing is essential, but we must recognize that belief is formed and re-formed by the practice and experience of the faith community…belief (also in the Greek translated as “trust”) comes as we mature in the faith…as we participate in God’s very “changefulness”….the created order forever in transformation…forever awakening to the new…the exciting thing that is next….May we embrace such a life with integrity and grace, so that we may experience this life in Christ more deeply than ever before.

The story was beguiling and the illustrations wonderful, but as to the title, The Glorious Impossible, I beg to differ with the venerable Ms. L’Engle.  Her point is that this Incarnation is a singular supernatural event, that of God descending to earth to take on human form, changing the world, redeeming the world forever, but I want to argue that there is nothing supernatural about God or this event, nor about the life and ministry and death and resurrection of the Christ….all of these icons of our faith are the means to tell us, teach us the way life in truth really is…in other words, the Incarnation, Jesus’ life of healing and feeding and dignifying…living the God-life is the archetype, the model of what it means to be truly human, which is to be truly Godlike, and as people of faith when we live into our true humanity then all things become gloriously possible.

In this season of Easter we acknowledge that the life that Jesus gave so freely for the good of the whole is raised among us, bearing us up to engender endless possibility and potential to our world….the possibility of healing where there is disease….the possibility of peace where there is seemingly intractable conflict….the possibility of freedom where there is rigid oppression and intolerance….the possibility of dignity where there is abasement. God’s life among us does not lead us to hope for some glorious impossibility (which I think modern fundamentalism teaches, and therefore allows us to abdicate our own responsibilities)….God’s risen life among us invites us to hope for glorious possibilities….the possibility that God’s life does and will continue to transform our world for the better, even when hope seems distant….these possibilities are the fruits of our vocation.

Our God is the God of nature, inhabiting the created order, amid the ebb and flow of life itself, amid our joys and our sufferings, inhabiting our imaginations,  forever making all things possible, all things new….Let us live lives expecting, imagining, and enacting the possibilities of God’s raised life in earth….Let us be courageous bearers of the Glorious Possible.

Rabbi Wise goes on to speak of the traditional Seder meal Celebrated by Jews at the feast of the Passover which approaches as our high feast of Easter approaches. During this meal it is the responsibility of an elder to tell the story of the Exodus from slavery in Egypt to their children lest they never forget that God is first and foremost a God who values freedom, liberation from that which oppresses….a God who frees us from the indignities of the world. One would think the Israeli government would be at least familiar with such a mandate since it, liberation, is at the heart of Hebrew Scripture.

Over the last several presidential administrations there has been a lot of bluster concerning the establishment of two sovereign states for Israel and Palestine. There have even been documents accepted by both sides by some leaders favoring such a solution. Sadly, however the Israeli government still permits and encourages Jewish settlements on Palestinian land….and the Israeli government is providing military protection for these settlements that are rapidly proliferating. The government has built highways in this occupied territory meant for Jewish travel only. The map of the West Bank, the heart of a potential Palestinian state, now resembles Swiss cheese as pockets of military installations and Jewish settlements pepper the landscape….and the Palestinians in Gaza (which would also be a part of the so-called Palestinian state) are basically being starved by a horrific embargo of goods and services and utilities so that they might just throw up their hands and leave.

And yet we watch and keep silent other than superficial soundbites. The possibility of a two state solution is fading, perhaps beyond the tipping point as the Israeli government continues to ignore international law. If this situation is not resolved justly, there will never be peace in the Middle East, as this situation has far reaching ramifications beyond Israel/Palestine…and that means, since we the U.S. have so many interests in the Middle East…It means that we will in the future be continually at war. Where are the statesmen and women…where are the ones with passion on the wings of imagination who can bring such a seemingly intractable situation to resolution. President Carter some thirty five years ago brokered a peace accord between Egypt and Israel, a peace accord many felt would be impossible. I still remember Carter, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat shaking hands almost in tears. What is the difference between then and now.

The divided city of Jerusalem is a symbol of the persistent injustice of the region…but Jerusalem in the lore of Islam, and Judaism, and Christianity is also a symbol of hope and new life…This Holy Week let us pray that the Holy Land truly becomes holy…Pray for the peace of Jerusalem…may those who love her prosper in security.

I read also yesterday morning that Mike Hubbard, speaker of the Alabama House announced that the new draconian immigration law of our state will be amended in the upcoming legislative session so that it will be more readily understood and “enforceable.” The possibility of  repeal is now off the table…a bad law about to be made worse…and then how is it possible that the issue of contraception is now a topic for discussion in the media…Have we forgotten the incredible liberation and empowerment “the pill” brought to women? Do we not realize that the world without it would be dangerously overpopulated, much more so than it already is? Can’t the Roman Church’s hierarchy consider the invention of safe contraception to be a very gift from God? (which of course would be admitting they are wrong…slim odds) Is it me who’s crazy?

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, with whom I often disagree, wrote an insightful Op/Ed piece just yesterday in which he noted that what the Middle East needs, instead of protracted warfare costing untold billions, is education (literacy), empowerment of women, access to health-care, and an equitable means to share wealth. This includes and demands, perhaps at the heart of the matter, a just peace between Israel and Palestinian Arabs. These are our issues at home for us as well; but somehow the art of statesmanship, the art of diplomatic conversation has been rendered impotent within the nihilism of post modernity….an acute stenosis of fear perhaps…..What of Roosevelt’s New Deal, a coming together of common interests for the good of the whole; Johnson’s “Great Society” a consummate bipartisan effort to provide economic stability for retiring Americans, and health-care (universal care, and this was in the sixties!) for our elderly; The voting rights act…bipartisanship at its best…Nixon’s triumph of foreign policy befriending the Chinese backed by a rallied international American conscience; Reagan’s artful diplomatic efforts and awareness during the collapse of the Soviet Union, which could have brought terror and violence, but was brokered in peace. Are we falling back into former old ways…or worse, are we falling forward into a renewed and dangerous form of militaristic self interest, the likes of which we have not seen…I fear the latter.

I shan’t go on….and I don’t really have any answer to the insidious intractability we face at home and around the world. We went to sleep here in Alabama while the immigration law sailed through. I would say that we must keep awake, let our legislators know that we are paying attention….Let corporations know that we are aware of their profit motives that thwart the good of the whole….like Caterpillar, for instance, building special machinery designed to destroy dwellings of Palestinians in the West Bank….Keep awake…pay attention…and act…those are in my opinion the three critical rudiments of  prayer, not the pious folding of hands, but intentional and enlightened action….so let’s get real…pray….even if in the streets.

Throughout Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament we are asked to live a life towards maturity, and that maturity has everything to do with the pursuit of knowledge. We hear the figure of Wisdom in Proverbs tell the aspiring faithful “to come and learn from me…eat the bread I have made, drink the wine of knowledge I have mixed…lay aside immaturity and live.” Jesus refers to his disciples(learners) as children…immature persons on a quest for wisdom and therefore the means to live dignified lives and lives that enrich the world around them. The pursuit of knowledge, this maturing, was held sacred by the Greeks which has been handed down generation to generation in the West for millenia. The same is true for other cultures…that knowledge informs faith, and faith matures the soul.

So whence this proliferation of this modern willful ignorance. I have an acquaintance in Dothan who thinks Global warming is a myth; that people of other religions are going to hell; we don’t discuss religion or politics needless to say. Certainly before modernity there was illiteracy…but this phenomenon of ignorance seems relatively new…these aren’t illiterate people…these people choose to not know….maybe one aspect of extremism that infects our world is this insidious willful ignorance….perhaps the demise of the liberal arts in our education system is complicit….In response to the demands of a hyper consuming culture, colleges and universities offer specialized vocational training, at the expense of a well rounded liberal arts regimen…I am told at some universities one can major in insurance, even hotel management…that’s information, vocational training, not knowledge….knowledge comes on the wings of the imagination, in the arts, in the humanities, in math and science taught with inspiration and integrity.

Ironically we have at our fingertips more information than ever in history…yet information is not the same as knowledge. We must never cease from the quest for knowledge…from “mental fight” as Blake puts it. We must persist in the ways of the imagination, and that requires willful openness… We must keep to the path of maturity for our own edification and for the world’s sake, and so must our children and their children’s children….Lest ignorance, willful ignorance rule.

I told him that I would be happy to meet them at the church and let them in. They arrived at about dark on Sunday evening. I was tired and intended to let them in and then come back in an hour or so and lock up. They looked like my children’s friends from Austin…It seems everyone in Austin looks alike, everyone somewhere in their twenties or thirties. We introduced ourselves and I let them into the church. Nice guys. They were of course awestruck by the church’s beauty. I gave them a little history of the place and its architecture while they unpacked their equipment. Just as I got to the door to leave, they began singing. I stopped cold in my tracks. There was no way I could leave….so with their permission I sat in the choir and listened and watched as they performed their artistry. Just one acoustic guitar and three voices…the drummer had a small camera with which besides shooting the video he recorded the sound as well. No microphones; just the rarefied acoustics of an empty church.

They played maybe four or five takes….each one better than the last….all I could do was just sit and marvel at the sheer beauty and power of their music…It was raw and perhaps naive, but it was so overwhelmingly honest…and these guys had real talent. I began to remember the words in Genesis that God spoke the creation into being in the very beginning; But I beg to differ…surely God brought the world into being through artful song. Dante knew this in the fourteenth century. He mused In his Divine Comedy that the spheres of heaven were moved by music. Indeed post modern physics has discovered that the most rudimentary element in the universe beyond quarks and strings is tonality. Music. Reverberations of the big bang, the very first note of the song of the universe. Shall we endeavor to sing along? Singing, I realized in listening to these young guys is a cardinal act of love. There was no denying that. Sing; Love….for the creation is still in its becoming…. “And when from death I’m free I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on, and when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on. And when from death I’m free I’ll sing and joyful be, and through eternity I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on, and through eternity I’ll sing on.”

Note: I have a copy of the video. e-mail me if you would like to see it. rector@allsaintsmobile.org

The doctrine of the separation of church and state is fairly unique and new among nations. The birth of our nation was a dramatic separation from England, a nation that had and has an “established church,” (with legislation however allowing other denominations and faiths to practice their form of religion), but still the queen/king appoints not only the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Church of England, but other diocesan bishops as well. Our doctrine of the separation of church and state disallows the government to establish any particular religion, and it prevents the government from exercising any control over any religious body. That is the first and foremost premise of this provision in the constitution; secondarily and conversely: organized religion may not have any institutional control in the affairs of government , lest there be the possibility of a theocracy. It is a good law.

But the separation of church and state does not mean that we don’t act out our faith in the public sphere. Nor do we remain silent on issues that affect the good of the whole. Archbishop William Temple of the Church of England in 1942 said it best, that the church exists only and solely for those outside its walls. The principal concern of the early first century church was quite simply to see to the well being of their neighbors’ immediate needs, and therefore seeing to their neighbors’ dignity.

By living out our faith in the public sphere I don’t mean to huckster  to and coerce people  to accept Jesus as a belief system (we’re still trying to figure that out) Living the faith in the public sphere to the contrary is to become agents, advocates for the ethics that Jesus represented in his life and ministry….we are to in short proclaim the egalitarian life, bring it to fruition…This way of life is stated in the sermon on the mount (my paraphrase): We will help you who are poor and at the end of your rope; we are community enough to stand with you who mourn; you who are humble and courageous of heart, stand firm, for you will lead us all in the end; thank God for you who are passionate for justice, for your work will bear great fruit; You who ardently seek the truth will see God’s actions in the world; those of you who proclaim and strive for non-violence, you are God’s very own children; even when people challenge you with malice, know always that you share and participate in God’s life.

The gospels as you have heard me say time and again are intensely political….not partisan political….but political, that is: How do we live together justly and with integrity? That is the political question since time immemorial. So when it comes time to cast your ballot in the electoral process that we thankfully have in this country vote for the candidate who best stands for the manner of life Jesus modeled in his life and ministry, Republican, Democrat or Independent…vote the beatitudes… vote for the ones who seek to bring a way of life in which all share in the abundance of our world…As Robert Berra (article last weeks Herald) wrote…. “we don’t need a roof to be the church”…we belong to the world, so that it may be continually changed, transformed, recreated for the better….that is our lives’ work…the reason we are here.