Without a Vision
Proper 21 Matthew 21: 23-32
25 September 2011
I recently attended a stewardship conference in which the leader often used the phrase, “without a vision the people perish.” I remembered having heard that as a youth and was sure it was from the Bible but when I tried to locate it, I couldn’t. I finally discovered that it is the wording of the old King James version. The NRSV puts it: “Where there is no prophecy, the people cast off restraint.” I like even better the NJB: “Where there is no vision [that is, from the prophets] the people get out of hand.” [Prov. 28: 18] The Scriptural quotation doesn’t really hold up, then, to the use to which it was put, but it still indicates something important. A vision embodies what you hope for if you are successful in doing your mission. Now St Thomas has one of the most beautiful mission statements I have ever seen. I hope I am not being too partisan when I say that, having been part of the committee which developed it. It is printed in your bulletin: “To share the Wisdom of God in all its rich variety, through our common life in the Body of Christ (Ephesians 3:10), so that the place where we live may be renewed and transfigured in God.”
This could just sound like a lot of pious, biblical words piled on top of each other, but in fact it is tremendously practical and serious. The Wisdom of God which we share is nothing less than Jesus Himself—the Word and Wisdom of God. Wisdom is another way of thinking about the Holy Spirit, as well, and taps into the long scriptural emphasis on being a student of the Wisdom of God, personified as Sophia, Lady Wisdom. So, in order to share the wisdom of God, we must first find it. That means following Jesus in the power of the Spirit and learning to live according to the will of God. This is a task, a discipline, which we cannot pursue alone, but only within the body of Christ. It is here at Mass that we learn to pray, where we learn to listen to the Spirit, where we participate in the Body of Christ in Holy Communion. As we learn to live in Jesus by the power of the Spirit, in all of the manifold ways we as individual persons do that in the Body of Christ, then we have something to share with others. Not only do we have something to share, sharing with others what we have found in Jesus is nothing less that our purpose for existence.
We do this sharing in many ways. Perhaps the greatest is the integrity with which we live as Christians in the world—in all the places we find ourselves—at work, at home, in the neighborhood, at Church, as we pursue our individual vocations. But sharing Jesus will sometimes lead us actually to say something about him to others as the Spirit gives us the occasion. Of course, we must be looking for the occasions or we will never see them. Those occasions can be as simple as inviting someone to Church or as complex as sharing our experience of Christ with someone else, or helping someone to a deeper spiritual insight from the vantage point of our own discipleship. The aim of all our living and discipleship and sharing Christ’s wisdom with others is transformation. We want the place we live to become more of what God wants it to be: our lives, our homes, our Church, our neighborhoods, the places we work.
Now what would happen if we really engaged our mission? What vision do we have of what the outcome would likely be or the outcome we want to see in our parish? About ten years ago, we developed a statement for that as well: “A genuine Christian community, a fellowship of disciples, through which God is glorified, in which worship is vital and nurturing, to which new people are routinely invited and welcomed, in which all people are sincerely accepted, in which the needs of our own members are truly met, out of which compassion flows to the needs of our community and, when possible, to the wider world.” This vision is fairly idealistic, but it is not unrealistic. That is, such an outcome is possible, attainable. There are elements of it already in place. But imagine what we could be as a parish community if the mission were fully engaged and the vision embraced! In order to do these things, however, we would need to embrace our relationship with St Thomas as the kind of spiritual discipline I wrote about on the web site this week. [I have some copies on the back table for those without internet.] If you find pictures helpful as you try to imagine things, I remind you of a diagram we have used before and which is reprinted in your bulletin: The Benedictine Promise. This is a model of the kind of spiritual discipline which we embrace in order to engage the kind of mission and in order to achieve the kind of vision I have mentioned.
Let me work through these three points with you again this morning. I have changed my thinking about their meaning in the years in which I have been at St Thomas—which is most of my adult life. I don’t think my job is quite what I supposed it to be when I arrived here. Then, I thought of myself as an Anglo-Catholic priest coming to an Anglo-Catholic parish in an Anglo-Catholic diocese, where I would function as the authority who represented that particular tradition of thinking and praying within the Episcopal Church. [If those terms don’t mean much to you, that is only an indication of the changes that have occurred.] So I thought at first that I was to try to secure a consensus around certain elements of faith and practice. I discovered that I was far more conservative in many of my ideas than some, or perhaps most, of the members of the parish. So I began to aim for something more complex—in terms of our mission statement, something “more rich in variety.” I desired—if I didn’t always manage—to find a common ground with anyone who loved our Lord Jesus and wanted to follow him. It took me a long while to learn that someone could very well follow Jesus and come out in quite a different place than myself with regard to some issues. And what we have had for all the 30 years I have been here is a succession of issues which have tried to divide us. First it was prayer book revision, then women clergy, then homosexual relationships and clergy. These have not all been resolved yet, and added to them are issues that very much effect our embodiment in the culture in which we live: our attitude towards the poor and immigrants, towards wars in the Middle East and the security state that has developed since 9/11, and towards the environment, to name only a few. It is very difficult to accept that someone else is a deep or true Christian when they disagree about an issue that you take to be very close to your heart. I have been moving in that direction—not perfectly, to be sure—but trying. And now I find myself to be, in some ways, more liberal than some of you, which is perfectly astonishing to me.
So, the first point in the Benedictine Promise is “Stability.” Stability is not just hanging around the same people or the same place for a long time, it is hanging around with the serious intent to love both people and place. This is the embodiment in Christ that our mission statement talks about: our common life. It means learning to love and care for others you disagree with—even on important things. It means not writing people off as long as you can sense they have some desire to follow Jesus—and even then. This means that we are attempting to discover a true community—where people truly belong, no matter what they are like and what they think. Real families don’t discard their members when they act strange or develop new ideas. My Mother, God rest her soul, and I disagreed about many things. She listened to a certain radio talk celebrity and would throw up his latest opinion as if it were a revelation of Moses from Mt Sinai—and we would argue about it. Then we would put it aside and be mother and son. Mom had a really loving side to her. She had some rigid categories about right and wrong, good and bad, acceptable and not acceptable. But when actual persons were involved, she also had a compassion and love for people that was surprising to me in its intensity and flexibility.
The next element is “Obedience.” This is a tougher thing than sticking with each other. It means that we engage each other in order to learn what it is that God might want to teach us as we live together. This has been a hard thing to do—particularly for me as a priest. I once thought that my job was to secure agreement over a set of issues and beliefs. Now I don’t think that is true. I still think there is such a thing as the truth and I like to argue things out. But my job is to secure, I have come to believe, the centrality of Jesus at the heart of our life and vision, and to encourage people to follow him. There is a subtle—sometimes not so subtle—difference between these two things. There are some things about which many of you will never agree with me. Some of them are really important. But they are not as important as following Jesus. Our agreement in the Episcopal Church is that we follow Jesus within the context of the prayer book, which outlines the nature of our prayer and worship. If you are following Jesus and living out of the prayer book tradition, then we are stuck with each other, because so am I. So what we have to do is listen to each other and talk even about the hard things about which we disagree. But if we are really committed to loving each other as fellow-disciples of our Lord, then there is something stronger than our disagreement. A Bishop I once heard said that we need to understand that there is a distinction between a problem and a dilemma. A problem is something that can be solved; a dilemma is a complex issue that has to be lived with. We have treated many of the dilemmas of the church’s engagement with the cultural changes of the last generation as if they were problems and have formed coalitions and voted and gotten angry with each other. Maybe it is time to realize that some of these issues are dilemmas and we will have to live with them and with each other for a long time yet. We might as well learn how to love each other and listen for the voice of God as we talk to each other.
The final element of the Benedictine Promise is “Conversion.” This is the toughest part of all. It corresponds to the transformation element of our mission statement. This is our promise to let ourselves be transformed, renewed, converted, changed ourselves as the process of obedience and stability run their course. If we don’t run away from each other and if we listen to God and to each other, loving God and our neighbor in this place, then it is likely we shall be changed in the process. At the end, none of us will be as we now are. None of us has already—as far as I can see—achieved perfection or attained to the life of the age to come. That being the case, it ought not to be so difficult to change our minds or our hearts—as long as we are serious about our devotion to Jesus. There is no merit in changing our minds if it takes us farther away from him: being close to him is our life and salvation!
And that finally brings me to the Gospel for today. Jesus could not connect with the Pharisees. They always wanted something different than Jesus had to offer. They were so caught up in being right and separating themselves from those they thought were wrong—in fact, as Merton reminded us last week: they were ever more convinced of their righteousness as they were able to find others who were wrong. They demanded a sign from Jesus to authenticate his teaching. But Jesus knew that nothing he did would reach them, because they were blind to the signs that had already been given them—they were even afraid to give an opinion on John the Baptist. They wouldn’t listen, they wouldn’t see, what was in front of them, because they had determined already what they believed and thought independent of the reality of conditions around them. Jesus brought a new reality, a new phase in the dealing of God with humankind. All the indications were there if one only had the eyes to see. And many did—but they were the wrong kind of people, from the point of view of the Pharisees. Yet, in the end, it was the unworthy who entered the Kingdom while the Pharisees were left out. The sinners found acceptance and the righteous were excluded.
We have spent so much time in our beloved Church over the last generation pharisäically determining from both sides who were the righteous and who were the sinners, that we have often missed what Jesus was doing. We have not learned how to talk to each other either, since we have been more interested in choosing sides. The times are too late for that now. Our mission demands more of us; our vision shows us what is possible.