An Eschatological Compass 

November 4, 2015

This isn't a sermon, but a reflection on a conversation, one that led me, as most conversations do these days, toward the idea of journey.  

I found myself in another of those interesting, Wednesday morning conversations today as I ate breakfast with fellow clergy from churches in the Route One area.  We’ve been meeting for grits and oatmeal and such on Wednesday mornings for ten or fifteen years now, and you’d think we would have settled all the questions of faith in that time but that, of course, is not the case-another indication that this faith of ours must indeed be an ongoing, ever unfolding business.  Maybe that is why I keep coming back to the theme of journey.  

Usually, the best I can say is that we are making our way toward something better in the company of that great host we remembered this past Sunday when we celebrated All Saints Day.  I used to be more aware of the dogma in which the Church operates, sometimes arguing for and sometimes against ideas and beliefs long held in our tradition.  These days I am coming to prefer silence and meditation to theological argument, so I was not sure how to respond when one of our group this morning brought up the subject of eschatology.  Eschatology has to do with the end times, as in the books of Daniel and Revelation, and it has to do with when, whether, and how Jesus might be returning some day.  Eschatology is a subject that many clergy, including yours truly, don’t spend much time with because the subject has inspired a lot of, Oh, what can I call it?……well, craziness over the years.  

The cartoons with the bearded guy on the street corner bearing a sign saying “the end is near” are a product of eschatology.  People wondering if Jesus would show up at midnight on December 31st, 1999, those who gathered on mountain tops to pray and welcome him back.  They too were responding to eschatology.  Every so often, people are sure they have come up with some kind of mathematical code hidden in scripture that explains the exact day when Jesus will return.  Those are some of the ideas that come to mind when I hear people talking about eschatology, or the end times so I mostly ignore the subject.  I am glad though that my friend brought up what is still an important part of the Church’s life, giving us all a chance to look beyond some of that old baggage.  I am glad because I need to be reminded sometimes about the parts of the tradition I conveniently shuffle to the edges of my mind’s desk.  I am glad too because eschatology has an important place in the theme of journey that we are currently using to explore this faith of ours at St. Aidan’s.  

Part of journeying involves having a sense of where we might be headed and eschatology might help with that.  Yes, I know we have talked about being called into the unknown by God who doesn’t reveal what lies ahead.  We have said we have to set out seeing only what we are leaving behind, trusting God to lead us to a new and better place.  We don’t get the details, only the promise that God will accompany us and lead us well.  It is that intentional lack of details provided by God that makes me think trying to wrap our minds around what happens at the end of history is not particularly helpful.  But the part about being called to a place that God will show us, and journeying there in the company of God will, if we let it, move us toward awe, and maybe silent reflection, and great hope.  Eschatology has a lot to do with what we think the whole point of this faith endeavor might be.  

Just try to imagine.  What kind of a place would God show us?  What must lie in that direction?  If the way involves trusting again and again, sometimes against all our instincts, which is what all the scriptural stories of call and journey suggest, how might we and our world be changed along that way?   Imagine.  I have to believe that’s where all this eschatology stuff started, with imagination.  I don’t claim to know anything about the end times, and I sure won’t try to tell you that the biblical images of the fulfillment of all things have anything to do with what will be.  I will tell you that we have received our tradition from humans like ourselves, people who intuitively dreamed of something better, people who for thousands of years have associated the desire for life more deeply rooted in justice and love with what Verna Dozier calls the “dream of God.”  I’m thinking of people like St. Paul and St. Peter and great King David whose journeys were sometimes one step forward and two back, people whose lives were often changed through struggle and having to face hard truths about themselves, people who in the end are remembered for taking steps in the company of their divine companion toward a future described by that divine companion as “the land that I will show you.” I find that part of our story compelling. 

Every day, we all set out on journeys of some kind, little journeys, big journeys, journeys set within journeys.  Every day we rise and begin to make our way.  I can think of no better compass for our journeying than trying to imagine the dream of God for this day, for our lifetime and for the grand scheme of the cosmos.  Imagine.  

The witness of the Church through history is not to some point on a calendar out in the future, but to the hope revealed in its members.  Our hope is that we and all creation are being created ever more fully and drawn ever more deeply into the dream of God which we intuit to include love, justice, peace, mercy, fulfillment, the list goes on.  And when our movement toward the vision seems glacial, maybe it is only because God will not leave behind recalcitrant wanderers and distracted stragglers. That too is a part of the vision….at least as I imagine it.  You see how this works?   

Before you head out on your next journey, I invite you to sit with or take a walk with or somehow spend time pondering the “dream of God.”  What comes to mind for you around that timeless image and where will it lead you? 

JB

And here is the link to the Essay:  Grandpa and the Gun Boys

Sermon for the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

St. Aidan's, Alexandria
October 4, 2015

I had my preaching plans all set when the world lurched yet again and the subject needed to change.  I will try to post a link along with this week's sermon to the essay I posted on Facebook today.  It's way past time to be talking about guns, but here goes.

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Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

September 20, 2015
St. Aidan's, Alexandria

It's ok to leave your Garmin at home

Mark 9:30-37

A couple of our great, 8:30 service, wandering, dancing, freedom loving kids helped me out with this one on Sunday.  Pretty much right on target with the theme of the sermon.  JB

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Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 30, 2015
St. Aidan's Episcopal Church

In my first Sunday back from the beach, I was caught by the readings for this Sunday which all speak about the changing, growing nature of faith.  

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Sermon for the Eighth Sunday in Pentecost

July 19, 2015
St. Aidan's Episcopal Church

Ephesians 2:11-22

Remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called "the uncircumcision" by those who are called "the circumcision" -- a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands-- remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

The writer of the letter to the Ephesians caught me this week with the line about Jesus "creating in himself a new humanity" that includes us all.  

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Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

July 12th, 2015

St. Aidan's Episcopal Church

Amos 7:7-15

This Sunday, after finding that my great idea for a sermon had left the room I ended up saying what I really wanted to say without worrying too much about the readings.   
"Call" is for everyone, not just prophets and preachers.  

Thanks for stopping by.  John Baker

Link to This Week's Sermon

Sermon for The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

July 5, 2015
St. Aidan's Episcopal Church

Mark 6:1-13

.........Then Jesus said to them, "Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house." And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief.
Then he went about among the villages teaching. He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. He said to them, "Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them." So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.

For a couple of years now I have not been using a manuscript for sermons so I haven't posted here very often.  I have been looking for a way to post recordings of sermons and think I've figured it out.  The link below will take you to my site at Soundcloud.  Once you are there, just click the arrow on the left to listen to this week's message.  

In addition to the gospel lesson above, we heard Ezekiel being sent to the exiles in Babylon.  God tells Ezekiel he is to go and speak the truth to the people who will "know that there has been a prophet among them." 

The "prophet" theme caught my attention this week.  JB

Link to This Week's Sermon

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 21, 2015
St. Aidan's Episcopal Church
Job 38:1-11

I have a dream.

I have a dream today.

I don’t know if I could ever have uttered those words from a pulpit until today.  Until today, I would have thought those words coming from a white, privileged preacher in a mostly white, privileged church to be at least disrespectful, if not outright arrogant, words certainly that didn’t belong to the likes of me.  But then I caught a glimpse of this thing and I now have to tell you that I have a dream.  Here it is……

I have this imagining that somewhere, out in the future, a distant future maybe, an old man, a white man, walks into an auditorium filled with people of all colors and all ages and people come to their feet to welcome him to the stage.  He very humbly acknowledges their applause with a gentle bow of his head and brushes his hand across his eye as this now-familiar connection between audience and speaker opens up his insides yet again.  Over the course of the next hour, the audience listens spell bound to his story, a story that has somehow, miraculously captured the hearts of so many across the country, a story that has fallen on parched souls like rain from an at last friendly sky.  It is a story parents have brought their children to hear.  

He speaks in a gentle tone of what it is like to be transformed by forgiveness.  His message is that simple, but it takes the whole hour to tell the story. He speaks of redemption and being unmade and then reassembled inside by nothing short of love.  He speaks of an intractable hatred that seemed to be his whole life and he speaks of that hatred eroding over time under the unrelenting pressure of what he came to recognize as love.  It came at first in the stinging voice of forgiveness speaking from the center of unimaginable pain, pain he had inflicted.  His story goes on to tell of those who not only spoke their forgiveness, but of those who wrote to him and a few who eventually visited him over a lifetime in prison.  In this dream, the speaker tells his hushed audience the story of how the people of Emanuel AME church took him on as a project, about how they came to understand very early in their grief that the best way to pull themselves out of the hell of anger and bitterness was to take up the work of leading—of inviting—him out of his hell.  That’s how it started, and fifty years after that terrible day the letters were still coming, these days, mostly written by those who were not even born when he did what he did.  

His story fills halls with people captured by the hope of a world transformed.  Yes, at times someone in the audience still stands up and hurls old pain in bitter words, and when that happens he simply puts his head down and gets quiet and apologizes yet again for the pain he has caused the speaker.  In those moments the rest of the audience recognizes that he responds not out of what he has learned about handling hecklers, but out of who he has become as a person.  His salvation has been deep and thorough, his is a story only he can tell, it is a story that fills a deep hunger in those who flock to hear it.  

I have a dream.  

And I know that dreamers are easily dismissed.  

But here’s the thing.  We would be lost without our dreamers.

And here’s another thing.  Following Jesus means casting your lot with dreamers and taking up the dream. Even when the dream seems too impossible for the kind of right thinking, pragmatic realists we think we are supposed to be.  Dreaming is for dreamers we say.  We live in the real world.  Dreamers live in their heads, in pleasant visions of heaven where a little love and a few angels make everything ok.  Let the dreamers dream, and while they dream, the rest of us will have to get the real work done.  That kind of thinking is familiar, but it is not what we have been seeing in the news this past week.  What we have been watching, what has become apparent in the middle of the tragedy in South Carolina, is the promising fruit of dreams taken up long ago, dreams preserved and advanced through what is sometimes, like in the declarations of forgiveness we heard from the victims families, gut wrenchingly hard work. I marvel at the voices that were able to speak forgiveness in that courtroom.  I am humbled and convicted by their faith and their ability to hold tight in such times to the dream of God.  And yes, I can imagine that kind of faith and commitment, and love, working its way over time even into the tangled heart of someone as twisted as Dylann Roof.  We’ve been given signs of transformative dreaming all week.  

Forty seven years ago when Martin Luther King was killed, Memphis, my home town was split apart.   Last week when nine people were killed in Charleston, the city came together in ways that have inspired the world.  One of the bright lights in this past week has been the story of Joseph Riley, the white mayor of Charleston.  The story of his commitment to the dream of racial harmony and equality in Charleston over the last four decades, often in the face of ridicule and resistance from some white citizens, is a story of triumph.  Part of the reason the killings were so painful for all of us is that they remind us of a time we thought we had outgrown, moved beyond, and they make us wonder if the progress we thought we had made is real.  Well I’m here to tell you the progress is real. It is progress.  

The work isn’t finished, not by a long shot, but we have come a long way, thanks to the hard work of dreamers, dreamers who have slogged through the hard times protecting and nurturing a vision of what might yet be.  They have been laughed at, hated, even killed, but we see this week that their work has changed the world, not by ending evil, I don’t know when that will happen, but by changing our response to evil.  What stands out this week in words of forgiveness, in a mayor’s tears, in the black and white arms entwined in prayer and support of each other is the living promise that under the storms of this life, beneath the trials that threaten us, the dream of God, a dream of living, transforming, creating love runs strong.  Our call….our work..like the work of all these good people we have heard of this week, is to share in that dream, to embrace it, to hold it and live it in the world in such a way that others come to believe in its power.  The hard work to be done in our time is the work of dreamers.  We all have a voice in what is going on here.  Every one of us can say,  must be able to say, 
I have a dream.    

JB