Of a Glimpse

This past Sunday I mentioned in my sermon that we gather on Sunday for three reasons: First to celebrate the fullness of life God gives to us; second to thank God for our being loved unconditionally; and third to join together at God’s table for nurture and renewal so that we may go into the world empowered to change it for the better. Those are just three reasons among many. I have had people tell me that they can just as well be a person of faith alone, but I don’t think that is true. We are meant for community. We are stronger together; we learn from each other; sometimes we have to believe for one another; sometimes we must carry our sister, our brother; community engenders creativity; love is present among the proverbial “two or three.”

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.