The Wild Ride of Repentance

Sermon notes for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany.
Audio of the sermon delivered at Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, California


Someone remarked to me this week that I had chosen – in this particular vocation of serving the Church – what he called the “wild ride.” I hesitated for just a moment, tempted as clergy are all too often to see our calling as elevated or separate from most other Christians. On the one hand, it’s true: being subject to the uncertain future of a relatively modest not-for-profit budget that relies almost wholly on others’ generosity; social forces well beyond my control that might make churchy business popular, unpopular, or indifferent tomorrow; being on call when people are facing life-altering events that few witness with any regularity. . .well, it is a “wild ride” at times, indeed!

But then I recognized that few, if any of us, can say with any validity that we are not subject to the uncertainties of the present state of the world, or that we are secure enough to weather social forces no matter which way they trend, or that our particular line of work will sustain us in two or five years, let alone ten. Truth is, all of us are confronted with a “wild ride” of one sort or another. And so I say again, paraphrasing Wesley in The Princess Bride: Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something!

On Facebook this week, I came across the perennial article remarking on how the institutional church is faltering: How it has failed and hurt many over the centuries, and whether or not it deserves to survive. The curious thing was that I read one article like this and then another popped up on my Facebook news feed, and then another, and then another! I wondered for a moment if everybody was starting to write again about the demise of institutional Christianity (a familiar and depressing thought for a guy like me). Maybe we really were going to at last go under. But then I realized Facebook was only doing what it was supposed to do – posting articles on my news feed similar to ones I’d already read. It’s the same kind of consumer-driven content selection that all our media and social outlets now employ at every turn, every mouse click.

What struck me about that is the rapidly distorting effect this has on our perception of reality. We can quickly find ourselves in an echo chamber hearing only voices that think about the same things we do, and think that therefore the whole world is discussing what we are; or worse, that a majority of the world thinks the same way we do! What makes this doubly troubling is the modern myth that with all our access to information these days, we are getting a more “unbiased” view of reality than did our ancestors.

The first piece of good news, then, in today’s gospel, is that we are in this way, at least, similar to Peter, Andrew, James, and John living on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. They didn’t have mass media or access to mobile devices to distort their view of reality with consumer-driven content. But it was still probably hard for them to imagine much reality beyond that which they already knew and talked about all day. Fishing was and remains another all-consuming “wild ride” subject to forces well beyond human control: weather and the almost complete mystery of the biology beneath the waves. Whether their catch would be big or small must have been a combination of seasonal guess-work, intuition, and fate into which a faithful fisherman might have injected a good dose of prayer. But no matter the size of the catch, there would always be the endless work of disentangling and mending the nets, countless hours of dropping them here or there in the waters and hauling nothing, and the gnawing uncertainty of whether even a good catch would sustain their livelihoods for another cycle of moons.

These first disciples, doubtless, talked, breathed, and dreamed fishing. It was what they knew best to their very bones. And so, when this itinerant teacher, filled with the Spirit of God from his venture in the wilderness, shows up and commands them to follow, I can only imagine their perplexity when he told them they would now “fish for people.” They will spend the next few years on this “wild ride” with Jesus, learning better what he means by that from the greatest teacher of them all: experience. They might even come to learn that this is no ordinary mystic, prophet, or teacher they are following. This might just be Someone who reveals God’s presence with us in the flesh.

For Jesus, his time has come, and none of the signs are good. John has been imprisoned, and no sensible person would believe anything other than Jesus was next on the hit list. It will take time for Peter, Andrew, James, and John – even a lifetime – to learn what Jesus has just learned in the wilderness through his confrontation with temptation: by rejecting the offer of the powers this world recognizes – the power to satisfy ourselves and lord it over others – Jesus has planted the flag of a new kind of community that will involve radical self-offering, radical non-violence, and, therefore, radical vulnerability.

This will not be a wild-ride in a chariot or alongside a marching legion or the grit of a violent insurgency. It will be a wild ride of profound vulnerability to people’s love or painful rejection; it will be a wild ride in the midst of a confrontation between the ways of a God who lovingly made all that is with a world that is too often hell-bent on distortion, dissension, division, domination, and destruction.

No doubt, Jesus saw this likely ending with a cross. Had Peter and Andrew really understood the reality they were stepping into, would they have dropped their familiar nets and followed? Would you? Would I?

Repentance for them was not simply getting it right with God so things could go back to the old and familiar. Paul must confront this very human temptation bearing bad fruit in the little clutch of Corinthian Christians today, and while his message is at times amusing (just how many people did you baptize there, Paul?) it is steel-edged with worry that the faith he gave them is being quickly sandblasted by the dry winds of familiar factionalism and quests for domination and control. They haven’t gotten repentance yet, and so they are at the same risk every formalized Christian community and every half-converted heart has been since: just going the way of thousands of other spiritualities and religious institutions across the millennia. And that is nowhere at all really, except back into the familiar teeth of a power-hungry and hell-bent world.

So when Christ calls us to repent, he is not merely telling us to be good Christians working on our own righteousness, finding the right cause and standing up for it, and then hoping to end our short lives having done good things. If that were the case, we could see Sundays as only a time to gather, utter faithful words, mend our nets, collect our rations at the altar, organize a bit, and then go out and simply do “it” better.

No, repentance is more like Jesus coming to the shore of our familiar lives and calling us out of our familiar but distorted, insular view of reality, and us daring to follow him into a wild ride that is truly unfathomable — a ride with God that, inevitably, will overturn everything we thought we knew about ourselves, the world, and even our most cherished values and beliefs.

Didn’t you learn that somewhere along the way? Maybe in Sunday School? No? Then the institutional Church, you see, is still trying to get its job right, and two thousand years later is still falling far short. Paul is addressing us as much as he is that quarreling little sect in Corinth all those centuries ago!

But not to worry. Our little community is rooted in grace, not institutional righteousness. And the school of repentance for Jesus was not confined to the synagogue. It was ever engaging its students at the side of the sea, at the booth of a tax collector, in the kitchen, seated at table with friends and enemies, under a tree, or even up a tree! For us, the school of repentance is found, too, out there in the world at least six other days of the week, when we each must grapple with our own “wild ride” and perhaps find ourselves called yet again out of the familiar, the predictable, and the ever budding arrogance of our own narrow judgments about reality. Here we gather in the hopes of being reminded of this humility and re-fueled for our journey by the life-blood and strength of our Savior, exhorted by word and sacrament not merely to do better, but be affirmed again that we are on this wild ride together with one another and our God.

And so we can truly repent by pursuing that journey that Jesus’ first disciples were on: where the flag of a new kind of community, a new kind of people, a new kind of world is carried...

A world built not on the foundations of power, but of radical self-offering and self-emptying...

So that we each may be filled with the love that God made us to have, a love that even promises to bring life beyond all death.

Brother Rock, of his own Violation

Sermon for the Confession of St. Peter
January 18th, 2014
delivered at the Winter Convocation of The Brotherhood of Saint Gregory
The Chapel of the Stigmata
Mt. Alvernia Retreat Center, Wappingers Falls, New York

Among the great blessings of my childhood and youth were trips to rural Gloucestershire to visit my English grandparents. Even now, simply reflecting on it brings back the scent of freshly cut sweet pea blossoms on the kitchen table, the yeasty smell of the pantry where my grandfather fermented homemade wine, and his aftershave scenting the little office beyond, cluttered as it was with papers, books, and the typewriter where he tried his hand at writing for many years.

Above his desk was a little wooden plaque that read:

“Engage brain before opening mouth.”

You might think for a moment I will be relating St. Peter today to my grandfather — a self-made and largely self-educated man, a man of simple trade, and yet amongst the wisest people I knew growing up.

But, no, I would better relate my grandmother to Peter. For our beloved Rona, to say it was to think it. She was the positive antithesis of that delightful little sign in my grandfather’s office, which is probably why it remained in his office and nowhere else in the house, and you can only imagine the fascinating relationship they cultivated for over fifty years of marriage!

My grandmother had married well below her station. To employ a bit of British understatement, her family that included a captain in the Royal Navy was not at all amused when their daughter found herself backed by love to marry into trade — namely, the floristry trade. But that she did, and so without the roadmap of family sanction, she and Stanley built a life and started a family together around his floristry business in London. They in turn found themselves backed by geopolitical forces far beyond their control into lessons of survival and perseverance through the war years.

They narrowly escaped death on at least one occasion when a German shell leveled their little shop. Gathering stubborn resolve for survival from that experience, Rona learned how to deal effectively with annoyed customers, difficult characters, and guide anxious brides and grieving families to the right floral design. All the while, she and her husband worked grueling hours, rising in the dark to gather fresh flowers for the day from the market, working late into the night to prepare for weddings, funerals, holidays, and every need for a bit of beauty that came in the door, and raising two children. Years later, as Stanley watched his professional colleagues drop dead of exhaustion in their early fifties, he and Rona decided to sell their business and purchase an old hunting lodge in the West Midlands. There, Stanley was determined to slow their pace of life, pick up gardening, and become a published writer.

But Rona, with no roadmap yet again, found herself backed onto a new, unexpected path, and so she began to teach. And she started writing about flower arranging, too, and was quickly published. By the time her first American grandson was born, she had become the primary breadwinner of the household, having built her little floristry school into an internationally recognized training ground for aspiring and experienced florists alike, all based in the studio she had designed and built.

In the seasons I would visit, we would sit together for tea and fine cheese, and Rona would still always speak her mind. Didn’t matter if it was politics, the beautiful garden she and Stanley cultivated, religion, church gossip, music, neighbors, or the weather. She articulated a strongly held thought about almost everything. And so Stanley would sometimes say in exasperation, if for no other reason than to end the volley of unsolicited opinion:

“Yes, dear, you could be right.”

Following his death, she told me on at least one occasion with a laugh that she learned early on not to be bashful about having the last word. And hers was a one-liner worthy of the Dowager Countess of Grantham:

“Not only could I be right,” she would sometimes respond to her husband, “I bloody well am!”

Rona lasted into her nineties, impetuous and opinionated as ever, and in many respects more successful business-wise than her more careful and studied husband had been. She was never the charmer that the self-made gentleman Stanley was, but at least you always knew where you stood with her. Her mottos included an honest wage for an honest day’s work and making a commitment to “keep the tide coming in.” A cousin even noticed that one of Rona’s books made a cameo appearance in the opening credits of the BBC comedy, Keeping Up Appearances. Her floristry school was taken over by a colleague and continued to flourish after she moved to the States to live with my parents.

Rona’s other favorite expression, which to this day I find myself using on occasion, was always about so-and-so undertaking something “of his own violation.”

Now that’s Peter in a nutshell, isn’t it? Always impetuous, always undertaking actions “of his own violation.”

Peter finds himself backed into dropping his nets at the seashore, abandons the familiar life of fishing for an uncertain future following this strange yet alluring, itinerant teacher. Peter jumps out of the boat to walk on the water. Peter is ready to enshrine Jesus, Moses, and Elijah on the mountaintop and is answered by more than awkward silence. And Peter, today we remember, boldly calls Jesus Messiah and Son of the living God, and suddenly in a truly inspired moment for once, finds himself in the right. Then, before the sound of his confession fades in his own ears, he is handed the keys to the kingdom and is named in an instant of affectionate word play, “Brother Rock” if you will, a first stone for the foundation of the Church.

Yet we have good reason to doubt Peter knew precisely what he had really said or what any of this really meant. A scant few verses later, he will attempt to block Jesus from turning towards Jerusalem, and his Lord and Master will be vexed enough to call his first disciple Satan. Clearly, divine inspiration or no, “Brother Rock” had yet again opened his mouth without engaging his brain.

And it will go on. After promising not to, he will betray Jesus three times during the Passion. He will be skeptical when reports of the Resurrection are brought to him. Even after witnessing the Resurrection himself, he will clothe himself with embarrassment and jump impetuously into the water yet again, and yet still be befuddled when the arisen Christ commands him to feed his sheep. On the way to fulfilling this charge, he will argue vociferously with Paul, struggle with intractable disputes of his little community, and learn through mis-steps and unexpected visions that God still has yet even more to reveal. Nevertheless, he will still successfully lead the first Christian community in spreading the Gospel in word and deed: healing the sick, sharing the Spirit, organizing and exhorting, testifying boldly before powers and principalities, and even bursting the shackles of prison.

This week, in our own way, we Gregorians have recounted the uncertain footsteps and impetuosity of Peter as he discovered his walk with Christ. We have spent time with minds and hearts buried together in our Rule and governing documents, recounting how our Founder began this community “of his own violation” as Rona would say, and how he and subsequent companions on the way jumped impetuously and dangerously into the water, went off on tangents, said and started things they didn’t quite understand at the time. . . or simply didn’t understand at all, and yet found God inspiring, leading, and revealing things they had never imagined.

But then, that’s true of all of us, isn’t it? It’s one reason why we gathered here again to talk about humility, being broken open again and again for Jesus to plant seeds in us, and about the virtues of traveling light and allowing Christ to open our eyes. It’s why we spent time this week endeavoring to understand ourselves better, both as a community and as individual brothers.

Yet we are like many ancient tribes and like Peter himself, in that we are really walking backwards – not forwards – into the future. The ancients understood that hindsight is truly the only way we see, and so it is the future, not the past, that is behind us. Now, we might be tempted to see our evolving governing documents in particular as some kind of roadmap, some pathway forward, but they are really only lessons from experiences of the past, helping us —at best — to keep our footing while we walk backwards – or, perhaps a bit more accurately – to gather a bit of confidence and hope that we will more than survive when we, like Rona and like Peter, find ourselves backed by love and life into a future that we can only best describe as unexpected and unplanned.

The philosopher and prophet of our modern media age, Marshall McLuhan, coined the familiar phrase  “the medium is the message” and the term “global village.” He also said, gathering up this ancient wisdom, “We look at the present through a rear view mirror; we walk backwards into the future.”

And, yes, it is always dangerous to walk backwards: no constitution or customary or amount of self-awareness will make religious life safe. My brothers, we are called to remain unsafe and impetuous at times, just as Peter was; to proclaim Jesus Messiah and Son of God, and not know what the hell we are talking about some of the time or even much of the time; to undertake ministries and tasks “of our own violation”; and, indeed, to open our mouth sometimes or often without engaging our brains; to risk offering the gift of the Spirit working in us despite ourselves.

And it is this risk that continues to allow the kingdom to unfold among us and through us for the sake of those we serve, so that perhaps in the final analysis, we can with Peter learn finally to become the media and the message for Christ in this global village of ours. We might in the process show in word and deed that not only could Peter be right, he (bloody well!) is right that Jesus is indeed Messiah, the Son of of the living God:

Christ at work for the redemption of a whole fragile, tender, beloved world.

Jesus and Company

Sermon delivered at Church of Our Saviour,

Mill Valley, California
on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

July 1st, 2007

audio available

Readings for Proper 8

With so much action this morning focused on Elijah and Elisha as they approach the Jordan, the eastern boundary of Israel, I’m fascinated by this curious verse from our reading from Second Kings: “Fifty men of the company of prophets also went, and stood at some distance from them, as they both were standing by the Jordan.”

Just who were these guys? These fifty nameless prophets lost to history except to the possible collective name of “Elijah and Company?” I wonder, too, what they might have said to one another as a series of extraordinary sights met their eyes: the parting of the waters, the whirlwind, and the chariot of fire. This text, so emblazoned into our psyches that it affects our language – from the words to Swing Low, Sweet Chariot to the almost cliché expression of “taking up the mantle”. . . this text about Elijah and Elisha is filled with the encounters of a wandering life without family, where the other followers become our family, even without a home, at the edges of the tradition and culture.

In its own way, the Jordan River serves the story as the boundary between heaven and earth.

These fifty are like the rest of us, men and women, children and elders, followers of famous figures, part of the crowd pursuing truth and witnessing to what we have seen on the edge. Sometimes we are wayward. Sometimes we are uncertain. Sometimes we are confused by what our leaders are telling us. But we are here, with Elijah and Elisha, at the Jordan River, seeking something great and awesome, watching the passing of the mantle to a new generation of prophecy.

In the gospel we encounter a Jesus this week that few of us want: a Jesus who has, in the words of Luke, “set his face” towards Jerusalem for a final showdown with the religious and political authorities. He is going to confront the powers that be for the ways they have brought misery to the masses, the way they have arrogantly claimed God for themselves but no one else, the way they have maligned the ancient traditions and substituted coldness for compassion, cowardice for courage, and self-righteousness for humility.

It takes no amount of genius to realize how such a confrontation will likely end. The Romans aren’t fools, after all. They’ve shown the world in general, and Israel in particular how rebels and criminals are dealt with. And anything that even remotely threatens the peace or the free flow of tribute to support the sprawling Empire is harshly swept away.

Nor are Jesus' followers and fans fools either, although, like us, they can be foolish in many ways. The Samaritans, outcasts from the greater culture of Israel, take on a special place in Jesus’ ministry. We know the beloved parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke’s gospel. We remember the Samaritan woman at the well who has a profound theological discussion with Christ in the Gospel According to John.

While the Samaritans are friendly to him in most cases, today we hear that they refuse him hospitality. Opposed to the primacy of Jerusalem as the heart of the Temple cult and the seat of Jewish religious authority, the Samaritans are offended by Jesus’ single-minded determination to go there.

His closest disciples reveal their own stress over the direction the movement is taking, wanting to summon wrath on the Samaritans for not allowing Jesus and his followers a respite.

Strain is starting to show in all kinds of ways. We no longer have a kind, soft-spoken Jesus (now did we ever, really?) but one who confronts those who wish to follow him with an edgy, cutting set of pithy teachings. God and the Gospel must come first. First before family. First before kin and country. First before the home.

In the Eastern Christian tradition, as my spiritual director is fond of noting, "water runs thicker than blood." Do you remember your baptism? Many of us don’t. Have you yet fathomed its consequences? We pledged to put God in Christ first. Or, for many of us, our parents and godparents dared to pledge it on our behalf.

This is a bold claim Jesus places on his followers, on all of us. Like Elijah and the company of prophets, Jesus and his companions across the ages are not beholden to deep roots. Baptism leaves us all rootless and even, in a profound sense – especially for those of us. . . all of us. . .who are wealthy in the grand scheme of things – in a profound sense, we are all left homeless.

“The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

And we must be prepared, when necessary, to “let the dead bury their own dead.” We are not subject to the past any longer, but to the future with God.

Nor do we spend all our time and energy on saying goodbye, looking back to what we might or could have been.

We put God first, in front, ahead, before all else. And in doing so, any family that might travel with us will see us slowly but surely transformed. Any friends we make or have begin to recognize that we belong to no one, but ever to Someone else.

The Good News today we hear most from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. He reminds an early Christian community and us twenty centuries later that we have been blessed through our discipleship by the Spirit, and we will know its work in our midst by its good fruits. No longer with our identity ultimately found in bloodlines or lineages, we are part of the family of the Spirit now, prepared to seek and nurture all those good things that flow from the heart of God in Christ: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

The waters of baptism do indeed run thicker than blood for us as Christians, and the best works we have known here at Church of Our Saviour and in the greater church and amongst our sisters and brothers around the world witness to that fact.

But where Jesus calls, we must follow. Sometimes through suffering. Sometimes through joy. Often through both at once, and always through grace. That is our lot in life as Christians in community, seekers on a journey, the frequently unnamed but ever present body of disciples and Teacher, Lord, and Savior – perhaps best known collectively as “Jesus and Company,” that community with few roots as the world would recognize them. . .

That community that breaks bread and shares the cup.

That community that revels in water, in song, and claims no ultimate home here.

But only an ultimate home elsewhere. . . in what is not yet fully realized. . .

Home in the heart of God.

That We All May Be One

Sermon delivered at Church of Our Saviour,

Mill Valley, California
on the Seventh Sunday of Easter

May 27th, 2007

Readings for The Day of Pentecost

audio available

So the Anglican Communion was in the news again this week.

You probably heard, and I won’t belabor the details today. Suffice it to say there was a great deal made over who was invited and who wasn’t to the great conference of Anglican bishops at Lambeth for the every-ten-year gathering. Honestly, Monty Python couldn’t write it any better.

So continuing on the more flippant side, it reminded me of situations in high school where there was great consideration given to who was popular enough to invite to certain parties. Some of us never were invited, at least to those parties. Probably because we were considered too nerdy, too serious, or not properly dressed, not out for the right sports, or not associated with the right circles. But viewed from this angle, the Anglican Communion right now looks pretty silly, doesn’t it? There are more serious ramifications, as you can well imagine, but Lambeth is still 14 months away. So there will be much more to mull in the coming weeks, at least for our bishops, no doubt.

I also want to talk today about another sort of silly image that came to mind as I was both considering the story of Babel from Genesis today and considering the decisions getting made this week about who’s in and who’s out.

Both stories remind me a bit like one of those Hanna-Barbara cartoons I grew up with. You probably know the ones I mean – those made for television quick-off-the-easel cartoons before the advent of computer animation. Where a character’s body remained absolutely static – still as the background – and you could almost see the animator quickly scratching each frame for the eyes moving on the face. . .or the mouth opening and closing – maybe almost (but not quite) in time with the audio. Yes, one of those – I think the one I’m thinking of was He Man, which had a whole host of accompanying toys from Mattel, as I remember. In the almost every episode of this cartoon, there was a wonderful line in it that encapsulates just about everything going on both in Babel and in the greater Church this week:

“I HAVE THE POWER!”

Long before Genesis was written, Bedouins were sitting around fires under the night sky telling stories like the one about the tower of Babel. It might have almost the quality of a simple children’s tale to our educated Western ears, but it remains just as profound for us as for an ancient people living off the land and relying on oral tradition.

The story Tower of Babel at its root is about human hubris. The desire to be in control. To be powerful. Probably for the nomadic people who once told this story, Babel was a shining example of the cities that were known for controlling lands far beyond their borders, marginalizing the wandering stock-herders, and raising up armies dangerous to everybody.

We have our own towers of Babel today, of course. Some are more obvious than others. I was struck yesterday while driving over the Bay Bridge, coming from a diocesan meeting, by the new edifice in the South of Market part of San Francisco. A great condominium complex soaring as high as seismic considerations dare allow. A colleague riding with me asked rather wistfully, who would want to be at the top of it when then next earthquake hits? In all honesty, it was a question tinged slightly with bitterness that neither of us could dream of affording such a view!

But towers of Babel are also found in all the ways we lord it over each other. Whether it’s our constant insistence on having it our way militarily or economically, or doctrinally in the Church. Or, to be blunt, who gets invited and who doesn’t to the parties with the power-brokers.

Beyond its etiological purpose – to explain, perhaps to small children long ago, why there are so many languages in the world as well as the name for the great city on the plain – the ending of the story of the Tower of Babel serves as a reminder to us of how God responds to human hubris. God confounds it. When we raise our arms and declare like our great simian ancestors and even our contemporary cousins in the animal world, “I have the power!” God responds, “Oh, yeah? We’ll see about that.”

* * *

Juxtaposed against the ancient story of confused languages at the Tower of Babel is the story of Pentecost, the arrival of the Holy Spirit, and the beginning of the Church. Not necessarily the imperial Church, or the Curia, or the building, or the self-styled guardians of doctrine. But the true Church. The Church that holds the Gospel at center, where God comes first and is at work amongst us, made in God’s image. Where the breath of new life blows and God’s people are moved to share great gifts for transforming hearts and healing Creation.

The divine irony is that the multiple languages that so confounded the people in the story of the Tower of Babel become the primary instrument through which the Gospel is first shared at Pentecost. The same divine intervention that upsets the applecart of human arrogance is the same intervention that brings healing, hope, and a new community.

Today we celebrate this new community of the Spirit still breaking into our lives 2,000 years later. It is not always found in the institutional church. In fact we should count ourselves fortunate when it is. In fact, the new community is everywhere, and knows few boundaries. It is wherever the Spirit is allowed to move. Wherever God’s creatures are freed from the bondage of lusting after power and control, wherever we have stopped playing God, and where we are freed from both being oppressor and oppressed. It is where the breathing is easier and suffering is relieved.

This is our primary vocation, our call as Christians – first and foremost – not to preserving the institutional church, but in creating space for the Spirit. Of looking foolhardy at times just like the first disciples at times because we don’t always play by the rules of power and control. And daring to confound, in league with God, the places where life is being crushed under the weight of the towers of human arrogance. To laugh at the silliness of the lust after power, and to be freed from the diabolical designs in which we too often indulge.

And we will know this new community of the Spirit when we see it by the fruit it produces. We are even offered a list by our spiritual ancestor, Paul, in his Letter to the Galatians. It’s one of my personal favorites: “The fruit of the Spirit,” he writes, “is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

It is with this fruit that the Spirit is conquering our indulgence in power and our self-made devices and designs. It is through this fruit that we engage with the Spirit in conquering the despair and fear that so dominates the world.

Love over hatred. Joy over despair. Peace over all forms of violence. Patience over our insatiable desire to have everything we want. Kindness over cold-heartedness. Faithfulness that insists on new life in relationship. Gentleness over our mean-spirited ways. And self-control. Well, I could quibble a bit with Paul here. After all, the first disciples who speak in tongues in today’s reading from Acts are accused of being drunk! But perhaps he means self-control of an unusual kind: self-control that gives us the freedom from having to control and dominate others.

Still working on these virtues? Good. Me, too. Better yet, God is still working on them inside each of us. That is where the Spirit has touched us and is transforming us. It is where the new community, what Jesus referred to as the “kingdom of God” begins in each of us. And beyond us it is where the true Church is taking root and burrowing deep down into the rich soil of life with God.

These fruits of the Spirit are our standards against all the darkness of our lives in the world. They are where God in Christ shines forth most brightly and where life is allowed to flourish. And, so, as we begin looking forward as a Church, regardless of what goes on in the Anglican Communion, or what new towers are built to edify human prowess, I urge you to always keep watch for, cultivate, and nurture the new community wherever you find it. Here at Church of Our Saviour. Out there in the workplace. At home with family and friends. And simply in your own heart, where the still, small, voice and true power of the Spirit wrestles to breathe free – that you may be freed to become utterly reliant on the One who created you, that we all may be free to be the gifted creatures of God that we were made to be, reflections of the Divine Wonder.