A Bishop's Blog Updated: 4/21/08 |
Bishop Sloan's Page
May 2008
Sometimes it seems like we're preaching to the choir about 87 percent of the time (actually I just made up that number, but it looks good, and I expect it's pretty close). Most of the time the people in the pews have heard everything the preacher has to say several times over, for years.
The sermon illustrations will change with different stories and different dramatic concluding rhetorical questions, but the message, the essential message remains the same: we are invited more and more fully into the love and grace of God through the life, ministry, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
But every once in a while, on Easter and Christmas, for weddings and funerals, we have a chance to share the Gospel of Christ with people we don't see very often. And very often, from my observations facing the congregation as everybody else is facing the altar, it seems to me that some of those folks who are not often among us really need to hear what we have to say. They need to hear about love, about hope, about mercy.
But many times our visitors are not comfortable among us. It's not usually because this parish is inhospitable or that congregation is unfriendly so much as it is because the visitors have been roughed up in their experience of church before they came to visit ours. Maybe they've learned a guilt they think they can't release, a shame they've been told will haunt them forever, or a distance between them and "church people" that can't be bridged, and they have the idea that there's an abyss that they are convinced will always keep them from God. They might have rejected much of the teaching of their church, but that part of it they've held on to: it's too late for them-they are beyond redemption.
And the preacher stands in the pulpit and talks about "God and Jesus and love, stuff like that," knowing that it is the most precious gift we are able to give and not able to understand how someone wouldn't accept it. The visitors, suspicious of our welcome because it doesn't match their previous experience, let the sermons wash over them, secure in the knowledge that all that sort of talk is for "good people," for "church people"-it doesn't apply to them. They've heard the message that they've been judged unworthy, and they know it to be true because they know they're broken and selfish. Sometimes they're angry at the "good church people" for not being as good as they assume we claim to be, and they think of us as hypocrites because we're just as broken and selfish as they are.
And it's true, of course: we are broken and selfish, sinful through and through. But we've accepted the great gift of redemption given in the Cross and empty tomb-the wonderful gift we are called to share.
The story that makes us who we are tells us that Jesus was killed, executed by Roman soldiers. He was put away in a tomb, and that, they thought, was that-it was the end. Until he died there must have been hope that he would do something to save himself. But when he died it must have seemed like that hope died with him. It was too late. But then, on the first day of the week, when some of his friends went to tend his body . . ..
Part of the story of Jesus Christ is that it is never too late. Part of the story we're given to share is that no circumstance is beyond the power of God and that nobody is beyond the redemption we are invited to accept. The Gospel is not just for "church people" and not just for "good people," but for all of God's children. Our mistakes do not define us, and we are not trapped forever in the messes we make. By the power of God, hope does not die, and in Christ it is never, never too late.
Alleluia, Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.
The Rt. Rev. John McKee Sloan
Archive:
- Apostle Column 05/08
- Convention Festival Eucharist Sermon 2/21/08 (Read) (Listen)
- Apostle Column 02/08 (Read)
