Being Specific
When I was received into the Episcopal Church, I was afraid to tell my older sister about it. As some of you know, I was formerly a Roman Catholic, and my older sister has been a Roman Catholic nun for decades.
When I did tell her, she thought for what seemed to be an eternity, and then replied,
Katie, I’ve been praying for you to come back to the Church for a LONG time….
I should have been more specific.
My efforts to live out my faith in discipleship with Christ, as I have been called to do, brought a mere powder-puff of tension into my family. Apparently, Jesus anticipated a far greater struggle for his disciples:
Jesus said, "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!....Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three, they will be divided."
Christianity is a choice. In Jesus' time, family members were not debating different expressions of discipleship in Christ. Families were destroyed as some maintained their Judaism or Roman paganism and others rejected the state religion and Roman social norms to choose Christ. Their choice could and did lead to rejection from the family, loss of livelihoods, to betrayal, and even to death.
Christianity remains a choice today, in our advantaged and safe society. Christianity remains a difficult choice to make – not because we are threatened with physical death, but for more subtle but equally deadly reasons.
There was a rector in a diocese far away – you know this couldn’t happen in our diocese – and he experienced a big challenge.
After the Vestry meeting, the Senior Warden told the rector that she had decided to get into the business of breeding Jack Russell Terriers.
“That sounds like a great venture for you, Evelyn. I wish you the best with it.”
“Ah, and rector, I think you can do more than wish me the best. You can assure my success.”
“Assure your success? How?” asked the rector.
“You can perform a marriage for my dogs; that will get them off to the right start, with God’s blessing on their …. efforts.”
“But Evelyn”, the rector replied. “We don’t do marriages for dogs in this church. Maybe one of the churches in the Diocese of California or Los Angeles will, but surely not here.”
“That’s too bad,” Evelyn said. “I planned to leave two million dollars to the church as a thanksgiving.”
“Ahh, Evelyn," replied the rector, "Why didn’t you TELL me the dogs are Episcopalians?”
Our threat is not death, but putting our values out of our minds when it's convenient or when it gets to be too much pressure. Christianity is countercultural and asks us first to choose the values of the kingdom of God and then to live them as our priorities, even when the cost is great. We strive to maintain those values in a faithless world. This might result in ridicule – "Come on, man. Why do you care?" Or a rector saying, "$2 million for fifteen minutes of turning a blind eye about dogs? Sounds good to me! Hey, it's for the church, right?"
What priorities are we setting for ourselves? Where do we put our time, energy, and careful attention? How do our priorities reflect our choice of Christ?
Are our priorities
On the other hand, where are we turning a blind eye? Are we…
What or who is suffering from our choices? Who is enriched?
Our challenge in not facing death for our choice of Christ, but wiping out our
Christian values by sinking into indifference, by shutting out the still, small
voice of God's will and failing to pattern our lives to it.
As we read in the Gospel of Luke some weeks ago, "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." If our treasure is enriching the kingdom our God, so too will our hearts be. If our choices, no matter how difficult, fill our spirits rather than deplete them, we will attain the peace and serenity Christ promises us. In the here and now.
Christ came to replace our old ways with a new one, simply loving God and our neighbors as ourselves, without our rewriting the rules to suit ourselves in the process. He saw a violent struggle ensuing when his revolutionary message threatened the status quo. He saw that he would be the first sacrificed to that struggle.
Jesus said, "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!....Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!"
Let us kindle the fire of Christ's revolution in our hearts and actions. Let us decide where we stand in our divided world. My sister said, "I should have been more specific." Let's adopt the specifics of Jesus' life and work as our own priorities and values for the kingdom, and strengthen one another to live them.