Sermon preached by Rev. Jerry Drino at St.Philip's
September 12, 2004 Celebration of the Land & Her People

[An Adobe Acrobat version is available]

Exodus 32: 1, 7-14; Luke 15:1-10

The celebration of the Land and Her People is ultimately a celebration of the story of community. It is about our community, it is about any community that is gathered together because God intends us to be together. Living in community is not easy. The most basic community is the family and there is no one here who can say that family life is easy. It is messy and hard work. Neighborhoods are even more difficult to be called communities today because hardly anyone knows who lives near them any more. The lack of community in the world is perhaps the single most dangerous health hazard that we face as a human race. The problem will not be settled by wars and might, laws and containment, but by the touch and intimacy of the human heart.

As I have said many times before the word "celebrate" comes from the Latin word "to observe." Therefore, what we celebrate today is not something superficial; it is something essential to the wellbeing of ourselves and the rest of humankind. Let us observe what is in this sanctuary this morning. We are a laboratory of the potential of what might save the world.

In both Exodus and in the Gospel of Luke we have a glimpse of the challenges to nurture and develop communities. In Exodus the community falls apart and reverts to a more primitive existence when the leader, Moses, the carrier of the vision has been absent for a while. Here, the God of the whole creation, the Creator of all that has and is and will be has called them out of slavery to be a nation of priests...the highest calling that a community can have.

And what do they do? They let go of the vision and fall back into wanting to be just conventional, traditional practitioners of the old time religion. They want a sterile, lifeless community of manmade gods. It is like bunches of Episcopalians worshipping the old Prayer Book, wanting no women priests, only straight male clergy and certainly not to have anything change. There is no vision of the high calling God has sent before them.

The same is true in the Gospel of Luke. The leaders of the community, those with high control needs, the Pharisees and scribes, are critical of what kind of community might be formed if you took seriously the teachings of this young rabbi they have been drawn to listen to. You see, they've been interested in Jesus of Nazareth, but they want to separate out the teachings from the behavior, the implication of the way of the Kingdom. Their conservative values of living by rules and laws seems to have been blow out the window.

"My God, is everyone to be included in this Kingdom that he is pointing to?" They are deeply disturbed over the potential of such a diverse community. "This is not decency and order!" It would look more like chaos, would be terribly messy and probably not controllable by the "right kind of people."

What is Jesus' response? He uses examples so that none of his hearers can wiggle out of the judgment. For the men: which of them would not go searching for a lost sheep; and for the women: which of them would not go searching for one of the coins of her wedding attire?" This coin eventually became the wedding ring. This lost coin was one of the ten coins a bride wore across her forehead on her wedding day to symbolize the wealth that she brought to the marriage and that she retained control over throughout her marriage. It would have been unheard of for either the men to say "One sheep is no big thing to loose" or for women to say "Loosing my wedding ring means nothing."

In these two challenges that Jesus tells his hearers, which today includes ourselves...he reveals how central community is for God...how essential a full community of diversity is for God. No one is to be lost! All communities that are life giving are created by God. Our freedom is not is choosing to be in community, but what we do once we are there. In Exodus the Israelites didn't like "the vision stuff," as a former president of the US once said. A millennium after the Exodus the Pharisees and scribes were alarm: the community that was being formed by the action of the Kingdom included the wrong type of people. And where was Jesus in this new community? Right in the middle of those that the "good" people deemed "sinners."

But let us remember that it is God who originates and places us in community. We celebrate, observe, today the great diversity of God's people called into the community of San José. At times we may ask the question, "How did these people get here?" The answer is simple, "God!" Diversity was and is created by God. But behind our question might be the dark side of the Pharisees and scribes that is saying "those people don't belong here!"

When the Laotians first came to St. Philip's in 1980 we placed a statue of the reclining Buddha on the Asian altar. Saturday by Saturday the directress of the Altar Guild, at that time, would hide the Buddha because she felt it was too sensual and inappropriate for the church. Sunday morning I would have to go find the Buddha. It was only after Bishop Mallory preached a whole sermon on Buddhism and the gifts that he saw the Laotians bringing to St. Philip's that she finally got the message. His concluding statement was, "The day the statue of the Buddha moves to the high altar will be the day we will know that the gifts Buddhism has to offer will have been truly integrated into this parish."

Community is not about making others into our own image. It is celebrating, observing what God has gathered together in one place and acknowledging with thanksgiving its origin. Diversity is the clearest way in which we can see the face of God. Remember in the creation stories of Genesis where God says that humanity will be created in their own image - a reminder that God is not just masculine, but has multiple personas. Look at the diversity that is around you this morning. Take minute to look at your neighbors, especially those who do not look like you. There is the face of God. The image of God.

Among those whom God has called into the Eucharistic community this morning are people from the Sudan. What we have recently heard and seen about the genocide and atrocities in the Dafur region of their country. For these people this has been their experience over the past twenty one years (if not forty-eight years since the British left in 1956). The reason they are here is because all that was their home has been destroyed, most of their family members killed or lost and they were sent into lands that were not of their own choosing to suffer even more. Last year when I was in the Sudan I had the privilege of preaching in one of their villages. I raise the questions "In all your suffering where was God? When you were ready to give up and die what kept you going?" Then I reminded them of the say of Jesus when someone asked him how would they recognize him. He answered, "I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me to drink. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and in prison and you visited me." But the people didn't get the point about communities that God calls together with radically different kinds of people. So they ask him again, "But how did we know you?" He said to them "In as much as you have cared for the least of one of my brothers and sisters you have done it unto me." I then asked the five or six hundred people in the thatched roofed church to turn and look in the faces of those around them. I said, "There is God." Great laughter and applauding burst out. They knew exactly what I meant. None of them would have survived if God had not placed them in community. Talk to the people of the Sudan this morning and they will tell you that it was because God traveled with them and in them, in community that they were able to choose life and to move forward when everything in them wanted to give up.

Now what do we hear about the challenge to being in community, especially one that we feel has been called together by God? Perhaps we can summon up all of this with a set of beatitudes:

Blessed are you who are willing to see the stranger as the carrier of the image of God, for you are close to the kingdom

Blessed are you who wrestle with your own prejudice and recognized you are in a prison of control of your own making, for you are near to finding the freedom to love and accept.

Blessed are you who recognize your own cultural bias, your hierarchies of class, color, gender, sexual orientation; if you acknowledge that these things prevent you from seeing your own humanity and that of others then you are on the road to true liberation and seeing God for who he/she really is.

Blessed are you who give up the wasteful pastime of trying to control who are the right people to be a part of your world, for you will have a new family and will discover your true brothers and sisters who come from many language, tribes and nations. You will be born again into the global village, God's village.

But woe to you who fear the stranger and harden your heart towards those who are different, for you will never find God.

Woe to you who try to control the way your community should be run, for you will miss all the surprises God has in store for you.

Woe to you who are unwilling to die to the way things use to be because you will always be yearning for yesterday, which is only a memory, and you will miss today, and possibly the future, which is where the living God wills to be found.

And woe to you who want to keep things simple, because you will miss the birth of many wondrous event. Birth and family life and communities are messy places, but they are worth the effort, they are worth nothing less than all that you can give. For the community God has brought together is where there is life and that is where we will find God.