Called to Serve
West Texas Diocesan Council
27 February 2015

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church

Why are you here? Did the bishops offer a free lunch? Was this an opportunity to play hooky from work or school and spend your Friday at a church meeting?

My sense is that most of us are here because we heard an invitation, a challenge, a request to follow Jesus wherever he might lead. Like the guys who were fishing in the Galilean lake, we’ve been invited to set aside old ways and set off on an adventure – the one called holy living, that keeps us moving toward abundant life and the reign of God.

When we walked through that open door and first said yes to that invitation, we agreed to try to live in ways that reflect love of God and love of our neighbors as ourselves. That shift, or metanoia, sometimes called repentance, is about turning in a new direction, from a pretty exclusive focus on ourselves to a far more equal focus on our neighbors. That re-orientation also invites us into more intentionally grateful living. More than anything else, following Jesus is about getting out of our own way to give thanks for what God is doing and to notice where we are being invited to join in what God is already up to.

Human beings evolved with deep-seated instincts for self-preservation. Sometimes those instincts blind us to the larger communities of which we’re a part, and to the wondrous miracle of God’s creation – the diverse and generative garden where God planted us. That focus on self is what got Adam and Eve in trouble – they thought they ought to be able to use anything in the garden for their own desires, even though a tree or two had been set aside NOT to be used. Their offspring had the same kinds of challenges. Cain and Abel get in a snit because each thinks his offering is better than his brother’s. Like most kinds of sin, the original one is about taking what was originally a gift and trying to hoard it or using it to excess. Self-preservation is a very useful trait when the predators are after you, but it becomes sinful or even evil when it is the entirety of your focus. The great commandment is to remember who gave us that gift and that it was given to every other creature as well. It’s not all about us! The gift of self-preservation is meant to be balanced with the desire of others to preserve themselves. Loving our neighbors means doing what we can, not just to preserve our own life, but to foster abundant life for all. When Irenaeus said that the glory of God was a human being fully alive, he meant every human being – and all creation.

The continuing, daily conversion of Christian living is about turning away from our own navels, turning outward to give thanks for all that is, to discover the gift of the neighbors we’ve been given, and to do something creative about the brokenness in the world around us. That’s what service, ministry, and discipleship are all about. That is the road to abundant life.

We’re called to serve God’s intention for all creation – that it be healed, made whole, so that it might more perfectly reflect the social nature of three persons in community called Trinity. This may be even harder for Americans, for we tend to lionize self-reliance as the goal of existence. Being called to serve, and understanding it as being called, begins with recognizing that we aren’t the ones doing the calling. We didn’t call ourselves or decide to live this way on our own hook – someone or several someones helped to form the desire in us to say “yes” to this invitation. We have admitted and affirmed that we’re not on this journey by ourselves. We’re part of a community of human beings who bear the image of the divine and are also clearly imperfect. We find our humanity increased and our lives glorified by answering the invitation to serve that dream of abundant life for all.

That community, like the Trinity it images, is bigger, more effective and expansive, and more abundant than the parts that make it up – for simply by living together as interconnected parts of a whole, we become more than we could have imagined. The work of living together in community – the struggle for harmony and coherence (and it will always be a struggle this side of the grave!) both prepares us for reconciling work in the world and begins to effect that healing.

The catechism in our nearly 40 year old prayer book says the mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.[1] If we look deeply at what that means, we might phrase it differently today – healing what is broken, making whole what is divided, breaking down the dividing walls between us, peacemaking – and we would be explicit about the work of reconciling human beings with the rest of God’s creation. It’s the sort of work that Jesus claims for himself at the beginning of his public ministry, when he reads from Isaiah in his hometown synagogue, “the spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”[2] He spends the next three years of his life doing that in very concrete ways. He teaches people about the nearness of God, encourages people to see God present and at work in their lives, in the midst of both suffering and feasting. He feeds people who are hungry, and releases people from the bondage of disease, infirmity, mental illness, and social stigma. He heals the blind, revives the dead and near-dead, and builds new kinds of families – like giving his mother and John to one another while he hangs on the cross. And he challenges the powers around him who want to limit access to God or to deny the healing possibility of right relationship with God in community – what we more commonly call justice. Those are the same kinds of things the long tradition of prophets rail about. That’s what all his conflict is with both the religious and the political leaders around him – and that challenge to the status quo is what gets him executed.

Throughout all of that servant ministry, he keeps reminding those who will listen that the reign of God is nearer than they knew or thought. When you see healing, there it is! When the widow gets justice, yes! When children are welcomed and foreigners made to feel at home, the kingdom of God has indeed come near. That’s what service is.

Now I’m going to move from preaching to meddling. What does that look like around here? How and where are the people of this diocese called to serve?

We might start with the original challenge – none of us is whole unto ourselves. We need each other, and we cannot be truly human or truly whole or truly holy without community and the struggles it entails. There are no extraneous people in God’s holy and healed community. If there’s room for that robber who was hung up next to Jesus, there is room for anyone in our prisons, anyone who comes across the border, and those who sit on the other side of the aisle in the Capitol. No one is expendable in God’s economy, and our salvation depends on making peace with the people we’d rather not have around. It is often those nearest to us who seem the most challenging, whether it’s noisy neighbors or excessively perfumed pewmates, or our Abrahamic brothers and sisters. Building connections and healed relationships with immigrants or our Jewish and Muslim neighbors here will ultimately have an effect on the brokenness and violence in other parts of the world. Breaking down dividing walls in this neighborhood will help to build bridges elsewhere.

That reality is central to the gospel. The loving service of one human being in Palestine some 2000 years ago changed the world and its interrelationships. Jesus’ sacramental self-offering exposed the underlying reality of God’s creation – that God has created us for more abundant life, and that God gets the last word, not death or division or evil. There is always hope for more abundant life, for that is ultimately what God is about. That reality continues to become outwardly evident in tiny acts of compassion as well as the repair of nations. Each instance of healing, bridge-building, and wall-breaching makes life more abundant.

For Jesus is our peace, in his flesh he has made two into one and broken down the dividing wall and hostility between us. He proclaims peace to those who are far away and to you who are near – all are beloved of God. You can’t be strangers and aliens any more, you’re members of the same household, with Christ Jesus in your midst. He joins all the parts together into a world where God is at home.[3]

We are called to serve that vision of a healed world. We’re called out into Galilee, into the neighborhood that is both familiar and strange, to meet the residents and hear their lament – and their joy. Who is crying out for healing? What injustice makes lives less than abundant? That’s where we will find Jesus already at work. Will you go? Will you answer that call? Will you serve that vision of holy wholeness, life abundant meant for each? And when there is joy, will you go and join its abundance?

The journey begins in gratitude – thank you, Lord, for giving me life and breath and people to love. Thank you for getting me through the travels of this week without getting stuck anywhere. Thank you for showing me the grace and humor of the strangers I met traveling – for they became companions. What are your thanksgivings this day?

The journey begins in gratitude and continues in confidence that God walks with us, even when it feels like the valley of the shadow of death. There is no abundance to be found in any kind of self-preservation that excludes neighbors. We find abundance when we’re willing to risk, when we are open enough to be vulnerable. That’s probably the center of what it means to take up our cross and follow Jesus. Take the risk to live abundantly – even recklessly, to love neighbors as much as we love ourselves. Let’s go out there and meet the neighbors. Are we willing to take the risk to listen deeply enough to discover what they’re hungry for? I keep hearing that one of the amazing gifts of this diocesan community is the network of relationships you have. How might that bless the Galilee around you, by loving as you love your own?

We discover abundant life by giving thanks for the One who gives it, and by offering and sharing the abundance we know so that others might also find it. Yes, there is a free lunch! It comes to those who give thanks and share what they have received. It’s called grace, and hope, and the love of God. We have seen it in human flesh, and we are called to serve it up in our own offering.

Baruch atah Adonai eloheinu – blessed be the Lord, God of the universe, who has given us life and all that is. Blessed be the God who sent Jesus among to break down all division. Blessed be the Lord who has made us all to share the abundance he has created. Thanks be to God who has created and called us to serve his people and his creation. Amen.

[1] Book of Common Prayer, p 855

[2] Luke 4:18-19

[3] cf Ephesians 2:14-22. Loose paraphrase