Go on, Go back, or Sit still?

God, like Moses and Abraham, may we follow you, even not knowing the way. Amen.

You’ve heard it said... you shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not swear falsely

But I say... don’t even stay angry with your brother or sister. If you don’t reconcile with each other, the part of your heart that harbors resentment and animosity will start to abscess and become necrotic, and it will poison you from inside. Cut it out.

Jesus is making a distinction between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.

The letter of the law tries to define the spirit of the law, which can be helpful up to a point, but after that point, the more specific the letter of the law gets, the more it sucks the life out of the spirit. Living your life strictly in accordance with rules (even the Ten Commandments) with no reference to what the law is for is like teaching to the TAKS – it makes the whole system a farce.

Not that basic skills are unnecessary or irrelevant. They’re absolutely foundational. For your spiritual development, keeping the Ten Commandments is like learning plus, minus, times and "guzinta," or like learning nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and prepositions – its good to learn them, but knowing those things is not an end in itself. The goal is that we take those materials and start to create new things no one’s ever seen before. You teach kids grammar so the ones who are poets will be able to somewhat translate for us the songs they hear the angels singing. You teach them multiplication so they can chase infinity.

If the letter of the law hands you a paint-by-number kit,

 

 then the spirit of the law walks you into a sunlit studio and simply says....
Create something beautiful.

Yesterday at Council, Bishop Doyle told us that, not only in individual parishes like St. John’s, but all across the Diocese, we’re going to have to rethink our direction and our way of being Church, because we’re realizing that the map we’ve been looking at doesn’t match the terrain we’re moving toward anymore.

We may as well unplug the turn-by-turn GPS. We maybe should even stop the car and open the door and start walking through the grass. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in the Book of Hours, “Now you must go out into your heart, as onto a vast plain.”

The Bishop has invited us to start a process of inventing and imagining new things, but his invitation yesterday did not to me sound like a theoretical pathway-- more like a life and death kind of turning point.

He said:

Continuing this church economy, doing the things we have been doing for the last three decades leads only to greater conflict and loss. Continuing to be church, simply tinkering with efficiency and symptoms leads unequivocally to closure. However, at this very same moment we stand on the pass with a second thought not yet fully formed but forming. That thought is that you and I stand on the edge of a new missionary age – a new geography of hope.

His words sound like what Moses told the people of Israel as they were standing just outside the Promised Land, ready to cross over. After wandering in the desert 40 years, circling around and around in the same tracks, they were about to walk into a place they’d never seen, trusting God. Moses knew there was still hesitation, so he laid out for them what was at stake.

“See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity... Choose life that you and your descendents may live.”

The Egyptian people today are standing at a similar kind of gate. They’ve got the door down and a path open in front of them. Will they walk through it toward a different kind of future? Or will they get cold feet and revert back to the way things were before? It’s up to them.

It seems to me St. John’s is on that kind of a course right now; we’ve got some choices to make about our future and how we’re going to shape it. When the Bishop was here two weeks ago, he set some hopeful, life-giving options in front of us. Some of them are new things that we’ve not previously imagined – that even the diocese has only recently begun imagining. He told us we’ll have the freedom to choose how we’d like to do ministry in this place, even to create new ways of doing it.

We’re at a point where we can walk into a new territory or go back the way we came – or we can stand still and try not to move, waiting for someone who knows more, someone who has more authority, to come and tell us what to do. That would be ridiculous - and also not necessary. The Bishop is the head of this diocese and of this congregation as part of it; Fr. John, as the rector, is acting as the Bishop by extension, filling his shoes in this place when he’s not here. But when the Bishop is here, wearing his own shoes, that’s the most authoritative voice you’re going to get – nobody knows more about where he wants the Church in the Diocese of Texas to be headed than him. And he’s already told us... and given us a project to work on. The scary thing is, it’s not a paint-by-number; it’s a blank canvas. From what I’m coming to learn, this is a different kind of relationship than you’re accustomed to having with your bishop. It’s new for everybody – him too – start enjoying it.

If we choose, we can stop walking around in circles and set off toward a new land that God will show us. It’s not going to be easy to discern this; we have no map for where we may be going. But think of it this way: if we’re willing, we’ll get to help make the map of this new territory the Church is being called to inhabit.




Map of America - 1730 by Guillaume Delisle

 Amen.