ACTS 11:19-30
PSALM 33:1-8,18-22
1 JOHN 4:7-21
JOHN 15:9-17
Sermon – May 21, 2006
“Here in Christ we
gather, love of Christ our calling.
Christ, our love, is
with us, gladness be his greeting.
Let us fear and love
him, holy God eternal.
Loving him, let each
love Christ in one another.”
“This is my
commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” These were the simple, pithy and powerful
words of our Lord Jesus Christ to his closest followers at the Last Supper on
the night before he died. The kind of
“love” Jesus was talking about was not frail sentimental love or the chummy
camaraderie of buddies, but self-sacrificing, through-thick-and-thin love, the
kind of love he would demonstrate on the cross the very next day.
Those gathered
in the Upper Room that night did not realize the extent to which he would go to
show his love for them – and for the whole world. But, with the help of the Holy Spirit, they remembered his words
very well.
Jesus spoke
to a group of followers that night which was entirely Palestinian Jews – not
much diversity there, by some measures.
But his little band had considerable diversity in terms of life experience
and previous ideologies.
Matthew had
been a tax collector for the Roman Empire.
As such he was considered to be a traitor by patriotic Jews much as any
Palestinian working for the government of Israel on the West Bank would be
considered a traitor today. Matthew was
also part of a system of taxation which winked at or even encouraged personal
enrichment by tax collectors in a way that would be unacceptable even in
certain parts of New Jersey. For two
reasons, therefore, he was a “marked man” in the eyes of, say, the Zealots,
Jewish revolutionaries some of whom were the “Hamas” of the First Century.
And one of whose former members was sitting
across the table from Matthew at the Last Supper: “Simon who was called the Zealot.”
You think the
Episcopal Church has “ideological diversity”? Think of the original band of
apostles!
Had Matthew
and Simon the Zealot been nervous in each other’s presence before – Matthew,
that Simon or one of his former comrades-in-arms might knife him while Jesus
wasn’t looking, Simon the Zealot, that Matthew might inform on him and have the
Roman soldiers come for him long before they ultimately came for Jesus? We don’t know, but we do know that
religion-and-politics was played for very high stakes in First Century Judea
and Galilee, and both of them would have had to overcome deeply ingrained
habits, patterns of behavior and survival-linked “sixth senses” to be able to
truly be on the same team.
They did. This is, I think one of
Jesus’ miracles, one not usually included with the list of his miracles.
And after
Jesus died, rose again and ascended into heaven, did they try to settle old
scores? No. Jesus’ love had indeed worked a miracle which endured.
Jesus could
have taken fewer risks in picking an inner circle, but Jesus was not all about
living a low-risk life! After all,
there also were supposedly “apolitical” disciples like Peter, James and
John, who legitimately could have borne grudges against both Matthew and
his kind and Simon the Zealot and his kind, the one for oppressing them
and ripping them off and the other for endangering their lives and those of
their loved ones with his crazy revolutionary schemes. I’ll bet there were some lively discussions
around the campfire when this crowd was wandering through the countryside on
one of Jesus’ constant road trips!
Yet, as Jesus
also said to his followers at the Last Supper, as quoted in today’s Gospel,
“You did not choose me but I chose you.”
Jesus chose us,
too, all of us here in this parish, in our Diocese, in our Episcopal Church, in
our world-wide Anglican Communion, and in the entire Christian Church. And he called us his “friends” – if
we do what he commands us. And he
commands us “To love one another,” and “To go and bear fruit.”
Starting with
that core group with such ideological diversity, the followers of Jesus became
dramatically more diverse in many ways in the years following Jesus’
death, resurrection and ascension, as chronicled in the New Testament books
which follow the Gospels. In fact, in
today’s reading from Acts we heard how our church’s patron saint,
Barnabas, was commissioned by the original disciples to be, you could say, the
first “missionary bishop” in Christian history.
Barnabas was
sent to Antioch (then a major city near today’s borders between Syria and
Turkey) which became the site of the first major congregation of Jesus’
followers outside of the Holy Land. In
fact, as Luke tells us, “It was in Antioch that the disciples were first called
‘Christians’.” Luke later tells us that
the church in Antioch was the first multinational, multi-racial Christian
church.
Barnabas was
smart enough to know that he needed help in leading this new congregation, and
he was secure enough in himself to hire as his “curate” someone who was a lot
smarter than he was and who would ultimately go farther: a promising “rookie”
named Paul! Barnabas (who was not
named “son of encouragement” for nothing!) rejoiced in all the good he saw
going on in Antioch. He taught the
Christians of Antioch, encouraged them, strengthened them, guided them,
supported a relationship of mutuality between them and Church Headquarters
in Jerusalem, stayed for a year, left good, indigenous leaders in charge,
received their blessing and then left.
Too bad that
model wasn’t followed by more missionaries!
Today the Christian
Church, including the Anglican Communion, is the fruit of 2,000 years of
evangelism which is and has always been inspired by the Holy Spirit and carried
out by fallible human beings, some of whom have been more fallible than others. The world-wide growth of Christianity in
general and the Anglican Communion in particular has lived though vast cultural
and technological changes and lives now in the early 21st Century as
a community of extraordinary and wonderful diversity in many ways which still has
the same Bible and the same commandments as did our spiritual ancestors nearly
2,000 years ago, including the one in today’s Epistle: “Those who love God must
love their brothers and sisters also.”
We’re pretty
good at this here at St. Barnabas. Our
love can grow deeper as we learn more about “our brothers and sisters,”
including our brother and sister Christians in the Anglican Communion, that
body of Christians who are part of 38 “sister churches” all over the world, all
of whom are in communion with the archbishop of Canterbury, England. The Episcopal Church is one of those 38
Provinces or national Churches.
We include
“the Anglican Cycle of Prayer” in the Prayers of the People in church each
Sunday here, and those who read Forward Day by Day may have noticed
prayers for specific dioceses across the world on each page of that daily
devotional book. Not everyone knows
that the Anglican Communion comprises 38 independent Provinces or national
Churches with more or less 70 million members in 160 countries around the
world. The list of Provinces is printed
in the insert to your bulletin.
Episcopalians
in the U.S.A. are a very small part of the Anglican Communion
numerically. Native-born Americans like
me are not really used to being a small part of anything, so it
probably helps to reinforce this point.
There are about 2 ¼ million active
members of the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A., which makes us the sixth largest
Anglican Church in the world, behind England, Nigeria, Uganda, Australia and
Kenya, and barely ahead (as of several years ago) of the Sudan, the Church of
South India, and the Province of Southern Africa. I suspect that when up-to-date figures become available, the
Episcopal Church in the U.S. will slip to eighth or ninth largest depending on
how many of our sisters and brothers in Sudan have so far survived the wars
there.
Put another
way, 48% of the members of the Anglican Communion now live in Africa,
and if one could take a census of who was actually in church on any
given Sunday all around the world the percentage of those who were Africans
would be much higher. Let’s think also
of our own Diocese of New Jersey, spread in 160 congregations from Elizabeth to
Cape May. We have about 53,000 active,
baptized members – about as many Anglicans as there are in Sri Lanka, or
in Myanmar, or in Scotland, and fewer than half as many as there are in
Papua, New Guinea!
There are
more Anglicans in the West Indies – 770,000 – than there are from Maine to
northern Virginia, more Anglicans in the six countries of the Province of West
Africa – one million – than in the entire American South plus Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Missouri.
And Nigeria
dwarfs everybody, with 17 ½ million members, almost eight times as many as
there are in the U.S.
Every ten
years, all of the Anglican bishops gather for a conference called the Lambeth
Conference, hosted by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The first Lambeth Conference, in 1867, had 76 bishops, all
British or American citizens, and all white.
At the second Lambeth Conference, the photograph shows the bishop of
Haiti and 99 white guys. By 1988, black
bishops were in a majority, and – hello! – in 1998 that majority grew at
a Conference which at the same time included women bishops for the first
time.
English
remains the dominant but not the exclusive language of
Anglicans. “At the 1998 Lambeth
Conference there was simultaneous translation provided for all plenary sessions
into Spanish, French, Swahili and Japanese.
Moreover, the parallel spouses’ conference functioned in these
languages, plus Arabic, in addition to English.” Also, Anglican prayer books have been printed in 170 different languages.
Suffice to
say, the Lambeth Conference no longer looks like a prep school reunion!
What do you
know; the Holy Spirit is still alive and working in the world! Pentecost happens! Evangelism works!
With this
great growth and vastly increased diversity, it becomes even more important for
all of us across the world and across the coffee cups in the Fellowship Room to
listen to each other with respect, openness, interest and excitement, expecting there to be different life
experiences and perspectives on various issues among us and asking for God’s
guidance as we seek to “love one another as Christ loves us.”
Over the next
few weeks as we approach the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, we
will hear in the media about the “ideological diversity” of the Episcopal
Church and the Anglican Communion. This
diversity is not a bad thing, and in any case it is inevitable. Let us all remember that none of us have
100% of the truth. Rather, we all work
for Jesus Christ, who himself is the Way, the Truth and the Life.
We all
seek to be Christ’s servants in a world still troubled deeply by war, racism
and poverty, by the mixed legacies of colonialism, and by temptations to pride
which endanger everyone. But
surely our challenge can’t be as great as that which faced Matthew the tax
collector and Simon the Zealot as they found themselves expected to be “on the
same team” for the first time in their lives. And surely we have the same Lord as they did watching over us and
coaching us, filling us with his love even as he bids us fill the world with
ours.
(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard
St. Barnabas Episcopal Church
Monmouth Junction, NJ