Delicious Heresies or Junk Food for the Soul.

NOTE:  In 2003 I gave a talk at Saint Johns Memphis, Tennessee about the DaVinci Code the page turner by Dan Brown.  The piece below explains the adventure.  I came across this on the internet recently and thought it might be worth sharing.

I wrote this in 2006

Dear Friends

Below is an article I wrote for ExploreFaith.org. It remains topical two and a half years later.  Three years ago this November a quote from an interview I gave about the Da Vinci Code published in the Commercial Appeal was subsequently quoted by Dan Brown on his website, DanBrown.com. This citation opened a “minor career” on matters Da Vinci. Calls have come from La Monde Magazine, Paris, France, The Guardian, Sidney, Australia and even talk radio in Sacramento, California.  Now the movie is about to be released and I have agreed to respond to questions from the Commercial Appeal readers.  All this says a great deal less about my “authority” than about the ubiquitous nature of the Internet. Below you will find an article I wrote for the web page, Exploring Faith.  It continues to reflect my sense of the Da Vinci Code phenomena.

In November (2003) I led three conversations about issues raised in The Da Vinci Code. Months earlier, while browsing in a bookstore, the cover of the novel caught my eye, and because I have a long fascination with Leonardo (he is never called Da Vinci), I bought the book to read as a diversion. I found nothing new there, but it was a good page-turner.

Then something interesting happened. People old and young, male and female, began to ask me could it be true, as the Code contends, that Jesus and Mary of Magdala were married and perhaps even had a child. This and other questions continued through the summer with such frequency that I realized that this book provided a teachable moment.

I prepared to have a conversation about the book with interested members of the congregation I serve. A press release was sent to the local newspaper and I was asked for an interview. The resulting lead article once again indicated a high level of interest, but the turnout the night of our first gathering was completely unexpected: Six hundred people packed the pews.

What is it about Dan Brown’s novel that enticed hundreds of people into church for a conversation? When questioned by a reporter about why I thought so many people were reading this book, I replied, “It is filled with delicious Christian heresies.” Did Jesus marry Mary from Magdala and have genetic descendants? However intriguing the notion there seems to be no compelling evidence that Jesus married at all.

The idea has prompted people to ask, “What am I to believe and why?” That is a very valid and enduring question. Toward the end of that first meeting a woman stood up and said, “We are here tonight because we are searching.” One of the challenges for the searcher is the interpretation of discovery. What does a new idea or experience I have encountered mean? Is it true? If it is true how is it true? If it is true how does it apply to my life?

In an age of anxiety it is tempting to reach for certainty. If we can be certain then we can be safe. If we are safe then we are in control. However, certainty is illusionary. There is no certainty. In fact certainty is contradictory to faith. As Allen Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, puts it, “The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty.”

For me at least, notions that promise certainty are suspect. For Christians faith is the posture in the face of mystery. What God has revealed in Christ Jesus is a mystery. How could the birth of one man in one moment of history make a difference for all people at all times within history? Many have found this preposterous. And yet that is the core belief of classical Christianity.

What is there to find that is unique about the classical Christian understanding of Jesus? Over centuries Christians came to believe that Jesus is fully human and fully god. I believe that he is. That is an act of faith for me but increasingly I suspect that it is true because it is not the easy way out.

Humanity likes the quick fix, the black or white option—clear cut and simple. Heresy, from the word, “to choose,” is the tendency to choose a part of a notion and carry it to a logical conclusion, thereby ignoring the complexity and richness of the fuller reality.

Northrop Frye

As Northrop Frye writes in his book Anatomy of Criticism, “… the full metaphorical statement ‘Christ is God and Man’ is orthodox, and the Arian (the belief that Jesus was not god but the highest creation of God) and Docetic (Jesus only appeared to be god but was in fact only a virtual god) statements in terms of simile or likeness (are) condemned as heretical.” The heresy is to not be willing to live with the tension of the paradox, but rather to want reality easily understandable.

The Da Vinci Code introduces many people to the fact that there were many exotic flowers in the early garden of Christianity. There are many reasons that they didn’t become the dominant form of Christianity. In some cases they couldn’t compete in the marketplace of ideas and in others they were eradicated by the political power of the state allied with the church. The church has not always covered itself in glory by mercy and justice.

All that notwithstanding I think the principle reason that classical Christianity endures to the present is the fact that the easy way was not the way chosen. The fact that the church chose the way of paradox and ambiguity as the most authentic way to live in the mystery of God revealed in Christ is the most telling reason for the enduring power of its life and message. Even in the church there is a desire for certainty. That is the human condition. The courage to face paradox is the most authentic expression of the Christian life. I believe that this is the life for which people unconsciously search. That is why I suspect that six hundred people showed up on a Wednesday night to talk about a novel.

Now the movie opens and questions abound.  I don’t think that this novel threatens anything. It’s existence provides a teachable moment and as Christians we should be in words of the Apostle Peter be prepared to give an accounting for the hope that is in us (I Peter 3:15). We must be about the business of our Lord and the culture is prepared to talk. That’s a good thing.

In hope, in spite of the facts.

John Sewell

MAUNDY THURSDAY

April 18, 2019

JOHN 13 Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. 2 The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper 3 Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, 4 got up from the table,  took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. 5 Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. 6 He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” 7 Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” 8 Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” 9 Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” 10 Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” 11 For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.” 12 After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? 13 You call me Teacher and Lord— and you are right, for that is what I am. 14 So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one anothers feet. 15 For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. 16 Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. 17 If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them. 31 When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. 32 If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. 33 Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ 34 I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

When Jesus got to Peter with basin and water Peter balked.  It’s not that his feet were ticklish, it’s not that someone wanted to wash his feet, it’s because it was Jesus, who he loved and revered, came at him as servant.

In our own day it is all about us.  We are self-conscious about our feet.  By a certain age feet are pretty beat up.  It is not, I have observed, washing feet that is so unacceptable even, no, it’s having our feet washed.  That may seem backwards, but the ego inside voice says,   “So, if this is going on at least I will be in control.”  Sitting in chair when someone not of ego’s choice, touching, handling and, at least symbolically, is beyond a self-absorbed ego’s tolerance.

Soul, on the other hand, while perhaps timid the first time, discovers a peculiar intimacy in the process.  Suddenly, one is in a genuine religious experience, and such has an almost irresistible attraction.

Ego, sighs relief, retreating to the pew, having survived an unpleasant experience.  Soul is almost unaware of self upon reentering the pew. They are both moved, but consider the dichotomy. Attendance on Maundy Thursday is lower than other Holy Week services and I suspect the push pull of ego versa soul is the reason.  Pedicures are not required.  So relax, and pardon the expression, but meeting sole to soul is holy.

In hope, in spite of the facts.

John

The Sunday After All Saints Day

All Saints – All Souls & The Communion of the Saints
November 6, 2016

All Saints on November 1 is the day of remembrance of all the saints, those whose lives display pronounced activity of the Holy Spirit, but who did not have a particular day set aside for them, there being only so many days after all. The next day is All Souls Day. What is the difference? On All Souls, we honor all the faithful dead of the Christian faith.

On Wednesday, November 2, 2016, at ten minutes after noon a congregation gathered at the Saint John’s Cemetery to celebrate Eucharist. As traffic raced by on Central Avenue and planes roared overhead in the clear fall air folk joined saying their prayers and remembering the faithful departed.

The ancient Romans buried their dead outside their cities in necropolis (Greek) for cities of the dead. It was in such a place that Saint Peter was buried by the side of the road across the street from the Circus of Nero. This site lies beneath the Basilica of Saint Peter in Vatican City. We do not call our place of the dead a necropolis rather we use the word cemetery a word also coming from the Greek that means a place of sleep. The early Christians were making a theological distinction between those believed to be dead as a “doornail” and those who fell asleep in Christ in the hope of the resurrection and those who have no such belief.

Also, the Romans had a custom called a refrigerium, a memorial meal eaten at the graveside of the person that was replaced by the Eucharist over time in Christian practice. We gathered at Saint John’s Cemetery as heirs of hundreds of generations of Christians who had gone before us, who in their generation prayed for the dead who die in the Lord and who have in their time joined those who sleep awaiting the Lord’s return.

I return again and gain to the eloquent words of John Polkinghorne in his book, Faith of a Physicist, “The resurrection of Jesus is the vindication of the hopes of humanity. We shall all die with our lives to a greater or lesser extent incomplete, unfulfilled, unhealed. Yet there is a profound and widespread human intuition that in the end, all will be will. … The resurrection of Jesus is the sign that such human hope is not delusory. …This is so because it is part of Christian understanding that what happened to Jesus within history is a foretaste and guarantee of what will await all of us beyond history, ‘For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be make alive,’ (I Cor. 15.22).

The proper preface for the dead at the Eucharist sums up the hope of all who believe, “Through Jesus Christ our Lord; who rose victorious from the dead and comforts us with the blessed hope of everlasting life. For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended; and when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling place eternal in the heavens.”

Peace,
John W. Sewell+

The Second Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 4c –  Saint John’s Episcopal Church – Memphis, Tennessee – John W. Sewell

Almost every time Jesus appears in the Gospels he is healing or has healed or is on his way to heal.  In Luke 7:1-11 a foreigner, a gentile, sends Jewish elders to Jesus asking for help for a sick slave. The man was a Centurion.  A bit of explanation is in order: Roman Military structure: what we call an army they called a Legion

Tatum Channing – The Eagle

Basic unit – Century made up of 80 men commanded by a Centurion

6 Centuries = Cohort

10 Cohorts = 1 Legion – The first Cohort had double Centuries of 160 and thus was an elite unit –

The Centurion over this Cohort was the Primus Pilus (first javelin)   highest ranking Centurion – Aside: Some believe that Pontius Pilate, Governor of Judea, who condemned Jesus, had been Primus Pilus thus the nickname Pilus or Pilate. 

Vegetius, a historian from the 5th century, the period of the late Western half of the Roman Empire,  wrote a book called The Epitome of Military Science. In it, he described the qualities of a centurion in rather glowing terms. Centurions should be

• literate,
• ideally at least 30 years old,
• With some years of military service behind them.

A centurion is chosen for great strength and tall stature, as a man who hurls spears and javelins skillfully and strongly, has expert knowledge how to fight with the sword and rotate the shield, and has learned the whole art of armature. He is alert, sober, and agile, and more ready to do the things ordered of him than speak, keeps his soldiers in training, makes them practice their arms, and sees that they are well clothed and shod, and that the arms are burnished and bright. (Vegetius, Epitome of Military Science, quoted on Cotter, p. 114)

This Centurion was an impressive man.  He likely worked his way up through the ranks, he may well have been the Primus Pilis as he has control of consideration money. After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum.

Excursus: First-century Roman baths excavated on this site point to Roman presence in the 1st Century.  Legions were often stationed in a place for a long time, even centuries. 

2 A Centurion there had a slave whom he valued – this choice of words is utilitarian, sort of like saying, “he had this machine he valued for what it could do for him” a better translation would be a slave whom he highly honored, slavery is always bad, and people shouldn’t be “owned.” Unlike US history Roman slavery was not racial but economic.  It was assumed that at some point the slave will be freed and likely go into business sponsored by his former master.  We do not know any more of the relationship than the fact that this Centurion thought highly of this slave who was ill and close to death. 3 When he heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave. 4 When they came to Jesus, they appealed to him earnestly, saying, “He is worthy of having you do this for him, 5 for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us.”

Thoughtful Romans rather liked a lot about Judaism and particularly appreciated its high morals and ethics. What they did not find attractive at all was the rite of circumcision and the dietary kosher laws.  The most common meat in Rome was pork and Roman folk, as do we, like a big pork chop from time to time and as you know Pork was high on the list of kosher no no’s.

We encounter these Gentiles in the Gospels, The Acts and in Paul’s letters.  Since Paul’s understanding of the Gospel was that the resurrection spelled an end to all the very rules that turned off the Gentiles attracted to the high ethical standards and practice of the Jews so they could become Christian rather easily and they did just that.  This very man may well be a brother of ours in heaven.

This military man asked the Elders of the Synagogue he attended to approach Jesus. The Elders were glad to do it because apparently he was a really good guy, and he had paid for the Synagogue building.   They came to Jesus with the request and Jesus agreed and went with them to the Centurion’s house.

6 And Jesus went with them, but when he was not far from the house, the centurion sent friends to say to him, “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; 7  therefore I did not presume to come to you. But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed. 8 For I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and the slave does it.”

 9 When Jesus heard this he was amazed [amazed: Astonished, his jaw dropped, the language is beyond surprised it is intensified to “he just stood there dumbfounded.”]  at him, and turning to the crowd that followed him, he said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.”

 Now, just go with me for a minute.   If we are mentally lazy,  the fully human & fully God nature of the Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity quickly goes out of balance and becomes a bizarre melange.  I was reared with a heresy, common in American Christianity, that unwittingly elevated Jesus’ divinity at the expense of his full humanity.  This is my thought. 

Could it be that this was the first time Jesus realized that he could heal at a distance with a word? How cool is that?  Jesus is brought up short not by his fellows but by a Gentile of all things, who would have thought it?   Maybe that’s why he turned those with him and said, “Well, don’t that beat all, a Gentile has just taught the Son of God something about faith!”

10 When those who had been sent returned to the house, they found the slave in good health [in Greek the word means robust, like nothing had ever happened].

• If you notice, the Centurion never met Jesus in person.
• He knew that Jews didn’t enter the houses of Gentiles.
• He in an elegantly graceful move kept Jesus from controversy while at the same time believed that Jesus could/would heal his friend.
• He was powerless to help this man who he held in high regard
• He was not without power.
• He used his power: net-worked
• He was humble – put aside his station and power – and asked for help.

That was them then and there.  What about us here and now?

  Bronson Bryant, “JOHN, WE ARE ALWAYS PREPARED FOR GOD TO DO NOTHING.”  

   ACTS 12:13 As soon as he realized this, he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John whose other name was Mark, where many had gathered and were praying. 13 When he knocked at the outer gate, a maid named Rhoda came to answer. 14 On recognizing Peter’s voice, she was so overjoyed that, instead of opening the gate, she ran in and announced that Peter was standing at the gate. 15 They said to her, “You are out of your mind!” But she insisted that it was so. They said, “It is his angel.” 16

Meanwhile, Peter continued knocking; and when they opened the gate, they saw him and were amazed. 17 He motioned to them with his hand to be silent, and described for them how the Lord had brought him out of the prison. And he added, “Tell this to James and to the believers.” Then he left and went to another place.

• Where is the need in your life?
• Where are you powerless?
• How are you using the power you do have?
• When was the last time you really asked God for help?
• And expected something to happen?

Faith is found in the strangest places.  Unfortunately, Church is often not one of them. I pray that Saint John’s will be a place where people meet the Living God with visible consequences.    Amen.

JWS

 

LENT II

March 1, 2015

God called Abraham to follow him to the land of Canaan where God will make Abraham the father of a great nation. He went.

“God promised him a covenant – a contract – God will, according to the contract, make Abraham, as he will be known, the ancestor of a multitude, not of people, but a multitude of nations. God will make Sarah, as she will be known, the mother of nations.
Abraham was almost a hundred & Sarah almost 90.
Paul writes to the Christians in Rome:

Romans 4:13 [page 118 NRSV] 13 For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.
16 For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on GRACE

[Grace is the constant availability of abundance with the question always being am I open to it or not. Parker Palmer]

…and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham [not genetics but faith] (for he is the father of all of us, 17as it is written, ‘I have made you the father of many nations’)—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. 18Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become ‘the father of many nations’, according to what was said, ‘So numerous shall your descendants be.’

19He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. 20No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21being fully convinced [persuaded] that God was able to do what he had promised. Not wishful thinking – happy place self-created magical wishful thinking but the trustworthiness of the one in whom we have placed our faith 22Therefore his faith ‘was reckoned to him as righteousness.’ [Accounted, marked on his account – accounting term]

23Now the words, ‘it was reckoned to him’, were written not for his sake alone, 24but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, 25who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.

Mark 8:27

JESUS; “Who, do you say that I am?”
PETER: Messiah – Son of God

Jesus began to say to his disciples what he would undergo in Jerusalem that he would go there and suffer, be rejected, killed and rise. Mark records that,”he said this plainly”. Peter could not bear hearing this so he took Jesus aside and said, “Now don’t you go talking like that. It’s morbid.”

Peter is horrified on at least two levels.

1. On a thinking level, the idea of a “suffering” messiah was not part of the Jewish vision. Messiah was going to be like David, who would come and sweep the Romans into the sea, reestablishing the Jewish political state. Messiah was to be a King, a man’s man. The possibility of suffering was not at all what Peter had counted on.
2. On a feeling level the notion that Jesus might suffer and die is emotionally painful. We say, “Don’t say that when someone voices a bad possibility as if by the mere saying it would make it happen.

I perceive that you & I are very much like Peter.

In America & the West we are at the end of an amazing ride, a ride that has gone on for over a century. Never in human history has so much been available to so many, continued and sustained for such a long time. As Immersed as I was in the 20th century, I thought that the word “Modern” simply meant new, improved, progressive, innovative, and inexorable even. Imagine my vertigo when I was introduced to the post-modern era. All that looked shiny and inevitable, you know modern, is now rusty, creaky, longer holding the promise upon which our culture relied. The greatest modern notion, the myth of inevitable progress, has failed us.

As Richard Rohr says, “Our age has come to expect satisfaction. We have grown up in an absolutely unique period when having and possessing and accomplishing have been real options. They have given us an illusion of fulfillment and an even more dangerous illusion that we have a right to expect fulfillment – fulfillment now – as long as we are clever enough, quick enough, and pray or work hard enough for our goals.”

We don’t want to hear that. It can’t be true.
And Jesus tells us like he told Peter, “Get behind me Satan!”
Why, because this is not how one follows Jesus!

Rohr continues, “We believe that we are energized by the bird in the hand; but believe it or not, the word of God and the history of those who have struggled with that word would seem to tell us that we are, in fact, energized much more by the bird in the bush. God’s people are led forward by promises. It is promises, with all their daring and risk, at empower the people of God.”

Beloved satisfaction is no longer immediate.
Beloved we are not entitled to satisfaction.
Beloved we have lived in illusion that we are entitled to immediate satisfaction.
Jesus promised his followers only three things that they would be absurdly happy, entirely free and always in trouble.

ISIS announced the execution of 21 Copts but only 20 names were confirmed, most of them were from the province of Minya (Upper Egypt). There was an inaccuracy in the number of Egyptian hostages; there were only 20 Egyptians (Copts). Then who was this remaining one non-Coptic victim?

Ahram-Canadian News was able to gather information about this man. He was a Chadian citizen (darker skin shown in picture) [I believe his name is Samuel Alham Wilson] Who accepted Christianity after seeing the immense faith of his fellow Coptic Christians to die for Christ. When the terrorist forced him to reject Jesus Christ as God, looking at his Christian friends he replied,

“Their God is my God”

so the terrorist beheaded him also.

What if Samuel Wilson was imprisoned with 20 of us?
Would he have wanted what we have been given in Christ Jesus?
Do we even know what we have in Christ Jesus?

When Jesus said the way of the cross is the way of life, he wasn’t kidding. He meant it literally.

To him, be glory and may the souls of the martyrs of Libya and of all the faithful, rest in peace.

RECTOR’S ADDRESS

Christ of the Homeless – Fritz Eichenberg

 Saint John’s Episcopal Church – Memphis, Tennessee

I want to tell you a story I heard this week.  It happened in one of the Episcopal parishes in Memphis last Sunday.  The clergy and staff were busy preparing for the service when a man came in from the cold.  A staff person saw him and introduced himself. The man’s hands were rigid, clammy cold.  He was welcomed in given coffee and a place to warm himself.

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Later the Rector learned the back story.  The man had tried to get the Union Mission but they were dangerously full.  He could find no place to be so he walked through that night because to stop, rest, perchance to sleep, was deadly in 22 degree weather. By morning he had walked a long way and happened upon that parish.

Everyone gathered themselves for church and one of the clergy invited the man to church and he came, sitting near the front behind a parish family.  They invited him to communion and he went.  The service ended as Episcopal Eucharist does with the congregation dispatched to do ministry in the name of the Lord. As everyone in Church busied themselves preparing to go off to lunch as folk in Memphis have done for generations, the man from the pew in front of the guest asked if he had a coat. “No.”  He took off his own overcoat and put it on him.

And the Kingdom came near that parish that morning.  And that parish, beloved was this parish, your parish, Saint John’s.

N T Wright, Bishop of Durham (retired)

I was listening to Bishop NT Wright a few days ago as I walked in my neighborhood.  He spoke directly to me about these men when he spoke of the empowering nature of the Eucharist, giving those that receive it the energy to become the occasion where Jesus’ incarnation breaks out again.”  The moment that coat left its owners back and was slipped on the man Jesus was in-fleshed again – We know what Jesus would have done if he had been there because he WAS there!

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While I was in York, I heard Dr. Anthony Campolo lecture in the choir of York Minster.

Anthony Campolo

Britain is in a national debate about these very concerns.  Dr. Campolo launched his lecture from Genesis 4: 9 Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?”

People rather love quoting Cain.  It distances them from any genuine connection.  Even in the Church we rather like to quote Cain, of all things?  That being as it may, the real answer Dr. Campolo announced is, “You are not your brother’s keeper.  You are your brother’s brother!”

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That is my very theological point about the encounters in the film and in Saint John’s nave.  It is one thing to give, even vast sums of money, from a safe distance and from a higher position.  A story from my years in Mississippi is illustrative.  The Stew Pot was inter-faith soup kitchen in Jackson.  People from lots of religious communities had volunteers who went to serve food at the daily noon meal.  That was all well and good until a new director was appointed.  He decreed that food would no longer be served at the counter but that the volunteers would serve the homeless at their table and then when they had waited their table sit and eat with the people they served.  I don’t need to report the sad fact that when people had to come from behind the safety of the counter, serve as waiters and then break bread with the same people  …. they were never seen again.

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Mahatma Gandhi

E. Stanley Jones, a Methodist Missionary to India, was a great friend of Mahatma Gandhi.  He once asked Gandhi what Christians should do? Jones then writes the following: “The greatest living non-Christian (Gandhi) asks us not to adulterate it or tone it down, not to meet them with an emasculated gospel, but to take it in its rugged simplicity and high demand. But what are we doing? As someone has suggested, we are inoculating the world with a mild form of Christianity, so that it is now practically immune against the real thing.” (E. Stanley Jones, The Christ of the Indian Road, “The Great Hindrance.)

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Which leads me to ask me and you the question: If we do not contract a lethal strain of Christianity, how can we die to self as The Holy Spirit penetrates our history and existence…

•     How can those who do not believe contract the full influenza of grace?
•     How can those with just enough Christianity to have an allergic reaction;
•     How can those who contracted a comfortable Christianity, whose martyrdom is mild embarrassment;
•     Or God forgive us, those who contacted certainty leaving them twisted and almost invincibly immune from the faith as we have   received it;

If we, you and I do not get up from breaking bread and be bread… If we have been fed and refuse to be bread, For God’s sake who will?

This city is starving to death for the very bread that only you and I can be…

That is why when I began to hear from a great distance the new life that was springing up among you as you read the scriptures, how Bible studies were organized not from the corner of Greer and Central but in offices and businesses and homes.  When I heard how new energy infused Sunday School as the daily feeding quickened the life force of faith within you, I gave thanks.

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Constantine the Great

As I wandered the streets of York, knelt in Churches where human knees have bent for a 1000 years I prayed for you.  I stood near the spot that Constantine was proclaimed Emperor and went from that spot to relieve the Church from persecution and there I prayed, I asked the Almighty to give us vision for the freeing of the souls of Memphians from poverty and despair.  As I sat in the Quire of the Great Cathedral of Saint Peter, the Prince of Apostles,  who failed Jesus yet followed him anyway, and  listened to the choir chant ancient Psalms there I asked God to give us strength for the living of  these days.

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Now that I am among you again, I see that the rumors of your quickening faith are not exaggerated and I give thanks.

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What is the way forward?  Please join with me in praying. The renewal team continues to meet,  your staff and vestry pray and will take counsel together in the days ahead.  What I ask of you is that you consider adding the ancient practices into the living of rhythm of your days. Some physicians among us will coach us as we take up fasting.  We will offer this before Lent.  There are valid ways of anyone to fast. Resources, companions and a map will be provided anyone who will.  That is all required.  The Renewal Works process will continue as a way of life here.

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Before I close, let me speak to you who signed a card in September and now find yourself wandering with the Children of Israel somewhere in the Wilderness of Numbers or Leviticus,  if you have read a sentence more scripture than you would have done otherwise that is good news.  My philosophy is that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. So take up you Bible and read.  This is not a sprint it is a long distance.  No one will be left behind. We are in this together.

To Him be glory, now and forever. Amen.