August 8 (Proper 14) Sermon

Be prepared. It’s the Boy Scout motto.

"Be prepared for what?" someone once asked Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting, "Why, for any old thing." He said.

The training in scouting prepares the scouts for what is to come in their lives, not just emergencies and such. As the BSA website puts it,

“Be prepared for life - to live happily and without regret, knowing that you have done your best. That's what the Scout motto means.”

Getting ready for life is also true for anyone expecting a child, there are always the preparations for the arrival of that new life, the child: getting the room ready, clothes, toys. I think of all the books Ellen and I read on parenting to be ready. We live in a society that wants to be always ready. Right? We have our cell phones, ready for that important call, or to use when we need it. We feel like we always need to be connected, or maybe its out of fear that we want to be ready.

And yet, when we stand alert for too long, what happens? We lose that attentiveness. Think of the color code system set up for our country by Homeland Security. What’s the color? (Yellow – elevated threat level) Its been on that color for a while, are we really standing vigilant? Have we really prepared?

“Be dressed for action,” Jesus said. “Have your lamps lit, be like those waiting for their master to return.”

So is Jesus asking us to be on the lookout, always ready? Is the heavenly code system on yellow alert or should it be red, he’s coming any day now (reminds me of a t-shirt a friend had, it said, “Jesus is coming. Look busy.”) Or is Jesus’ emphasis on discipleship that we hear about in today’s gospel helping us see that attentiveness in a different light from our culture today?

Think of the beginning of our reading today, when Jesus said,

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms… For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

It is God, who in pleasure gives us the Kingdom. But to understand that, to know it in our bones and soul, Jesus tells us to let go of our possessions, to give alms, to focus on that treasure that God gives us. And with that in mind, then we see Jesus not asking us to be hyper-vigilante like our society with our cell phones always on. But to be aware and ready for this abundant kingdom has been given to us, and its up to us to share it and live it in our daily lives.

11 year old Olivia Bouler knows every species of bird near her grandparents’ cottage on the Alabama coast. The fifth-grader, appreciates their beauty and elegance and has developed a real talent for illustrating them. So when she saw the pictures of the birds drenched with oil, Olivia was devastated. “I couldn’t stand it… It wasn’t fair for them. They didn’t do anything.”

Olivia was determined to do something. She wrote a letter to the National Audubon Society: “I’m a decent drawer and I was wondering if I could sell some bird paintings and give the profits to your organization.” Olivia’s sketch of a cardinal accompanied the letter. The Audubon Society was so moved by the young girl’s talent and determination that they began offering her watercolors and prints on their website. To date, Olivia’s drawings have raised over $130,000.

The Audubon Society is using the money for animal rescue and to establish a new bird habitat in the Gulf. This summer, Olivia is working to turn out some 500 illustrations for sale. A fifth-grader with a paintbrush and a big heart is one of the few signs of hope amid the toxic sludge destroying the wildlife and beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. [People Magazine, July 5, 2010; CBSNews.com.]

Olivia in her own way was ready and alert, because she understood the abundance she had been given and to see the need of those birds, she wanted to sell her drawings and give alms so they would benefit. Is this not what Jesus asks of each of us? To respond to the Gospel in an attentive way to what’s happening around us and to give?

Several years ago a young man in his early 20s was dying of AIDS in a hospital in Atlanta. He had no connection with any church, but friends called a local church and asked the minister to come. The minister came, but would not go into the room; he stood out in the hall, shouted a prayer and blessing into the room of the dying young man, and quickly left.

But another young minister, just out of seminary, heard what had happened and rushed to the hospital, hoping the man was still alive. She got to the hospital, went into the room, and pulled up a chair by the bed. The man was gasping. The minister lifted his head and cradled it in her arm. She sang. She quoted Scripture. She prayed. And he died.

Later, a friend said to the young minister, “Weren’t you scared? He had AIDS!” “Of course I was scared,” she said. “Well then, why did you do it?” And the young minister said, “I just imagined if Jesus had gotten the call, what would he do. I had to go.” [From Craddock Stories by Fred Craddock.]

The compassion of that young minister is the mark of the faithful disciple. We all are called to prepare for the Master’s return by creating his kingdom of mercy and peace through our acts of kindness, generosity and mercy in our world today.

Today, Cheryl & Patrick have brought Sarah into our midst, to be named before God and be baptized. Today, she will begin her journey of faith. A faith that will rest in the abundance of God’s kingdom, a kingdom that God wants us to have and to share.

So let us begin as her parish family to show Sarah what discipleship is all about, by faith filled action in our lives and in our community. For its not about being on the lookout, looking busy, but instead being attentive to the ways that can we share the abundance that God has given to each of us. Amen.

Sermon: August 12

[The Scripture readings for Sunday can be found here.]

Just a week ago I was Gazing at the Green Mountains of Vermont
-enjoying a nice cold beverage
-leisurely, without a care in the world…
-kids playing in the pond, catching frogs
-it is what vacation is all about…

Some R&R, we all need it, even Jesus went away from his ministry to rejuvenate, to get some R&R with friends or up on a mountain…

But as I read this week’s Gospel, I was reminded that Jesus often couches his calls of discipleship in terms that will not gently bring us in, he calls us into action, right now. Jesus said, “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet… You must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” We must always be aware that our call to discipleship, to follow Jesus, is never meant to be brushed aside until we have time, forgotten about, wait until fall but engaged each and every day of our lives. For sometimes, the Holy Spirit moves us to engage our world right now.

In March 1965, Jonathan Myrick Daniels sat in the chapel at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, MA trying to decide whether or not to heed the call of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, who asked clergy, students and others to join him in Selma, Alabama for a march to the state capital in support of his civil rights program. The Magnificat, the Song of Mary, is one of the canticles that is sung or said at the Evening Prayer service.

Jonathan Daniels wrote: “I had come to Evening Prayer as usual that evening, and as usual I was singing the Magnificat with the special love and reverence I have always felt for Mary's glad song… Then it came. "He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things." I knew then that I must go to Selma. The Virgin's song was to grow more and more dear in the weeks ahead.”

Jonathan Daniels and others would travel from Cambridge to Selma. They participated in the march. After returning to the seminary for final exams, Jonathan and some others continued working in Alabama for several months helping with the civil rights movement. They stayed with local families, registered African Americans to vote, protested and marched, and tried to visit local Episcopal Churches. Most saw them as outside agitators and Jonathan and the families with him were often rudely treated at church. Arrested on August 14 during a march in Fort Deposit, Alabama, the group was released on August 20, as he and three others approached a local grocery store, Jonathan was shot and killed by a deputy sheriff in Hayneville, Alabama. His last act was to thrust Ruby Sales, a young African American woman, out of the path of the gunfire that took his life and seriously wounded another civil rights worker.

Martin Luther King Jr. said, "One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry and career for civil rights was performed by Jonathan Daniels." And Jonathan Daniels was led to the South by the Holy Spirit as he sang the Magnificat early in 1965. I first became acquainted with Jonathan Daniels in an article in a magazine I was reading in college. His life and his faithful witness have always struck me as what God calls all of us to do as disciples of Jesus.

Not that we all should be martyrs in the sense that we need to die to show our faith. But the word martyr, from the Greek means witness and in one sense we are all called to be martyrs. Jonathan understood this and put his life on the line to witness to his faith by helping with the civil rights movement. In the words of T.S. Eliot… “A Christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident. Still less is a Christian martyrdom the effect of man's will to become a Saint, as a man by willing and contriving may become a ruler of men. A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men [and women], to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. It is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God.” (T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral)

August 14 is the day we remember Jonathan Daniels’s witness in the Episcopal Church. Jonathan shares August 14 with another martyr of the 20th Century, Maximilian Kolbe, a RC priest imprisoned in WW II in Auschwitz. After a man escaped from the death camp, the SS condemned 10 men from the same barrack to be starved. Kolbe took the place of one of those men when he heard the man’s anguish cries about his family. Kolbe died on August 14, 1941.

The man, Franciszek Gajowniczek, and his wife, Helena, survived the war. In 1993, he said, “so long as he had breath in his lungs, he would consider it his duty to tell people about the heroic act of love by Maximilian Kolbe.” In the Chapel of Saints and Martyrs of Our Own Time at Canterbury Cathedral in England, Maximilian Kolbe name appears alongside Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jonathan Daniels. Jonathan and Maximilian were both instruments of God, who helped us see the horrors of oppression and evil that existed in our society. They each saved a life, Ruby & Franciszek, by their actions.

And that is what discipleship is all about, giving life to ourselves and our world by our faithful action. For we are called by Jesus to be ready, to be witnesses to our faith, for as the letter to the Hebrews reminds us, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” And our witness to our faith is to be people who share heroic acts of love, just like Jesus and Jonathan and Maximilian by living out our Christian faith in our everyday lives.

Let us end, by saying together the prayer for August 14 commemorating the witness of Jonathan Myrick Daniels:

O God of justice and compassion, who put down the proud and the mighty from their place, and lift up the poor and afflicted: We give you thanks for your faithful witness Jonathan Myrick Daniels, who, in the midst of injustice and violence, risked and gave his life for another; and we pray that we, following his example, may make no peace with oppression; through Jesus Christ the just one: who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.