It doesn’t matter how you love, it matters that you love.
The only thing that matters is that whatever you do and however you do it must honor God, creation, your neighbor and yourself. That’s what matters. How you get there? Jesus isn’t that concerned.
But how we get there, how we do this worshipping God thing does matter to us, just as it mattered to the temple authorities of Jesus’ day.
Traditions, rules and regulations are good things…they provide a certain comfort that allows us to get lost within the worship experience. Yes, traditions, rules and regulations are good things….until they’re not….when we begin to worship the rules and the traditions instead of the thing these rules and traditions were designed to protect, we get into trouble.
Most radical fundamentalism stems from the worshipping of how things are done instead of the why and the who.
You know, when we first began this Ascension style Eucharist at 4:30 pm on Sundays we upset a lot of temple authorities.
There were members of Ascension who just couldn’t stand the idea of a late afternoon Sunday service .
There were (and still are) people across the diocese who thought our efforts to make our prayers and readings radically inclusive by, with the exception of Jesus’ words ,refer to God with gender neutral language, were tacky at best and heretical at worst.
There were others, within the congregation and outside who thought a liturgy with primarily uplifting and unique piano music, without EVER using the 1982 Hymnal was simply WRONG.
Then there was one famous case where a former member screamed at me because he couldn’t believe I thought that having a liturgy that maintained a deliberate and passionate focus on the sacrament of Holy Communion could possibly attract people. (That one really ticked me off…)
There were others who thought inviting dogs into our service, hosting a pet food pantry and pet memorial services was beyond wrong. Truly, I think some thought/think it evil.
And there were those, maybe even some people sitting here who thought two parishes sharing one priest and deacon wouldn’t work.
And, finally, those who couldn’t even fathom how two independent parishes could share not only one priest and one deacon but one building.
And yet. Here we are.
The Church of the Ascension at Good Shepherd and the Church of the Good Shepherd: making people uncomfortable, infuriated and annoyed, since 2011!
Jesus must be proud!
Actually, I’m serious. Jesus liked nothing more than upsetting the status quo, challenging the expectations of his time and pushing people right out of their comfort zones. He accomplishes all of that in this afternoon’s Gospel.
Oh yeah, the temple authorities are annoyed and infuriated. And you know why they are so annoyed and infuriated? Because what Jesus was teaching, what Jesus was proclaiming and most offensive of all what Jesus was LIVING, made them mighty uncomfortable.
We’re all uncomfortable when the familiar appears to be usurped by the unfamiliar, when the usual is overturned for the unusual, when the way things have always been done, doesn’t get done that way anymore. It’s difficult to adjust to the different, but that’s no reason not to try.
Jesus knew something that so many people in his day, and so many people TODAY, forget:
Some times our rules, our regulations, our laws, our traditions get in the way of the very thing they were designed to protect.
When the second amendment was written by our forebears, it’s fair to say none of them could envision how the NRA has manipulated a constitutional right into the arming of lunatics leading to such horrors as Sandy Hook and Mother Emmanuel AME Church.
When the founders of Good Shepherd and Ascension built their buildings without providing wheel chair access, they didn’t do this because they hated people who use wheelchairs, they did it because any idea of universal access was foreign to them.
When our Holy Scripture talks about men raping boys (which is where the verses from Leviticus so often used to say that God condemns same-sex attraction comes from) they had no idea their words would be used to disenfranchise an entire group of God loving people.
What I, and hope many of you, have learned since embarking on this covenant journey between the two parishes is this---offering three distinct ways of praising God, three distinct ways of being nourished to do Christ’s work in the world, is life giving (and sometimes frustrating, annoying and difficult)….and it all makes Jesus smile…because the one thing Jesus clearly detested was failing to see the forest for the trees, for getting so caught up in the letter of the law that people forgot the spirit.
Pushing the limits----testing the boundaries, trying to access the holy in new, hopefully interesting and inspiring ways is telling the temple authorities of our day that doing something in a different way isn’t bad, that changing, evolving and growing isn’t demeaning where we’ve been, it’s honoring it, learning from it, and moving on to the next thing God has in store for us.
What the temple authorities couldn’t (wouldn’t do) is clear: they wouldn’t lift their heads and look around and see that the world about them had changed and that maybe, just maybe, their traditions needed to as well.
I guess what I’m trying to say to you, this collection of newcomers and old-timers, of 8:30 am’ers, 10:30 am’ers and 4:30 pm’ers is this: The only way we’re going to succeed in being the instruments of God’s love in this world, the only way we’re going to truly be disciples of Jesus is to remember that God’s not finished with us yet. We have new boundaries to push, old traditions to challenge and honor, new ways to make ourselves and all those whom we encounter uncomfortable. Why? Because if not us…who?
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