7 PENTECOST, PROPER 11, YEAR B

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE

THE REV. ANNE STANLEY

19 JULY 2009

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2 Samuel 7:1-14a; psalm 89:20-37; Ephesi8ans 2:11-22; mark 6:30-34, 53-56

“Many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.”

                                                                                                Mark 6:3

How well this little observation of people in Jesus’ day describes some of us in our day.  And for those of us who have just returned from our church’s General Convention, how well it describes how we lived while in Anaheim. Or at least, for much of the time.

Scurrying here and there, we were, busy, busy, with no leisure even to eat. Committee meetings, daily Eucharist, legislative sessions, special events, grab a bite, sit and eat if you’re lucky, munch on the run if you’re not.

How can we hear God if we don’t pause once in awhile? How can Jesus’ voice stir us if we over-fill our days?

The chaplain of the House of Deputies these past two weeks asked us to ponder that thought.

But he also reminded us that Jesus speaks to us not only in the silence of our hearts but also through the voices and hearts of others, if we will but listen to them. Silence AND listening, both. Some people need a lot of silence; others need people. But both are important ways of hearing the Word of God.

At General Convention we did both. In spades. Intentionally and carefully. In spite of salads in plastic boxes on the run. I heard more than one person tell me that as they listened, to testimony at microphones, to stories told in our small-group narrative sessions, in other conversations, these people told me they actually were changed by what they heard. Transformation happened.

Here’s a refresher on how things work at General Convention: Committees are given resolutions to hash over and perfect before sending them off to either the House of Bishops or the House of Deputies for deliberation and decisions. Both Houses must agree to legislation in order for it to be adopted. Like most committees, mine on Ministry was organized  into subcommittees. Early on, the first week, we got our stack of resolutions. “Well, here’s a no-brainer,” said our facilitator, a priest from Alaska. “That’s right, a no-brainer, a  good one to start with,’ we all said. “We’ll pass this one on untouched, for sure.”

But as we talked some more, and as we listened to each other, as we sat in some silence, we came to hear new things. And lo and behold, some days later, guess what? We all decided to reject the resolution. Transformation happened through taking time and silence AND listening to each other. Who’d have thought!

I need to tell you that this General Convention has been unlike any of the three I have been to, and senior Deputies who have been to many more than three have said the same thing. As the Bishop of Los Angeles put it, there has been less rancor at this Convention than any he’s known. If you haven’t heard much in the mainstream media about this Convention, I suspect that’s precisely because the rancor level has been ratcheted way down.

Not that all 100-plus bishops and 447 deputies agree on everything. We don’t, of course. But we were able to talk and hear each other when we needed to, and to be silent when we needed to be quiet, and above all to be focused on God’s mission.

God’s mission is our mission and the reason for our being. The mission of Jesus is the mission of the church. A mission of reconciliation and community.

That’s UBUNTU—when people respect one another, when people accept where we are just now, when we care for each other because we know that we are part of each other, that we can’t ignore one another, that we need each other, that we are all part of the Body of Christ.

It’s not about winning and losing, about taking sides. The truth is bigger than one end or the other of a polarity, says our Presiding Bishop, the President of the House of Bishops.

I am here to tell you that our General Convention Bishops and Deputies managed to craft graceful words that tried to draw people in rather than keep them out. Because that’s what Jesus does.

Dr. Bonnie Anderson, the President of the House of Deputies, reminded us that by healing the sick and other outcasts, Jesus was at the same time drawing them into the center, into the group, where everybody else was, where they belonged. So that they were no longer outcasts. “In this church, there are no outcasts,” said former Presiding Bishop Edmund Browning in 1985. That became his signature statement, and in spite of painful budget trimming, which involved letting some programs and Church Center employees go, this Convention made “no outcasts here” real in new ways.

Although the writer of the Letter to the Ephesians was talking about Gentiles, non Jews, who had been kept out of the early church as outcasts, he might as well have been speaking to us at General Convention. Or rather, that writer’s voice could easily have been OUR voice speaking. “You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are members of the household of God…”

The poorest among us, those needing affordable health care, victims of domestic violence, gay and lesbian Episcopalians seeking ordination and other ministries within the church,  all parts of the Anglican Communion---our church is committed to reaching out to them all, drawing them in because that’s the only way we can live in UBUNTU.

Every creature and plant and thing in creation is a part of us, too, of course. UBUNTU is about all of creation, not just its human members. We humans rely for our very survival on the planet we have been given to live on. The merest speck of an insect to the largest of animals, the earth and its waters and the air we share, are all part of us. We bring them in, too. We dare not treat them as outcasts. We need them all.

Even if we forget the minutiae of each resolution, or the resolutions themselves, still, we who were there have absorbed it all somehow; what was said and done in Anaheim has gotten under our skin and into our hearts and will influence our lives and the lives of those we encounter in ways we can’t now even imagine.

As I sat on the redeye from Los Angeles, it dawned on me somewhere over Lake Ontario that General Convention has been for me like a giant retreat, giving me new energy and hope. I’m counting on you now, that together, in a spirit of UBUNTU, we can surge ahead in Jesus’ name with the mission God trusts us to perpetuate.