What’s today all about?
It isn’t every Sunday that two churches from different denominations come together for their primary Sunday service.
It’s been more than two hundred years of Sundays since people called Methodist and Episcopalian, people who started-out in the same church, who started out as the same church, openly broke bread together blessed by each other’s clergy.
For two hundred and some years, since just after the Revolutionary War, we’ve each adapted to what it means to be an American Christians in ways as different as our historic leaders, the likes of John Wesley or Richard Hooker, Bishops White and Asbury.
For two hundred and some years we’ve acted like distant cousins who see each other at family weddings and funerals. We are polite, nice and respectful. And then we go our separate ways until the next time special circumstances bring us together.
Now our bishops, recognizing our shared denominational histories, believing the whole church is stronger and better equipped for doing Jesus’ bidding in the world in unity (not uniformity or merger) more than in respective bailiwicks, are leading us to full communion, interchangeability of clergy and participation in each other’s ministries without the sense that one of us doesn’t quite measure up to the other’s orthodoxy.
What’s today all about?
There’s the historic, ecclesiastical, denominational, judicatory, more hoity-toity, up-there-where-the-air-is-rare angle to all this. And that’s fine. There is a place for such higher level administration, bureaucratic thought and understanding.
And there is the place, the wonderful place a dozen of us from St. George’s and Gloria Dei-Old Swedes shared through a winter and spring of the good Bishop’s study manual called “One in Christ” (while enjoying tasty snacks!). But as someone from St. George’s said to me this week said, one who wasn’t part of our deliberating dozen: “I’ll be at Gloria Dei on the 27th. I just wish I understood why we’re doing this. What’s all the fuss?” Or as Dave Sampieri similarly spoke for the Gloria Dei faithful: “All this is very nice, but why should ‘I’ care?
What’s today about to all the rest of us? Why should you care?
Here’s why. Because in our coming together, God is here, Jesus is present and the Holy Spirit is stirring in a new way that might never have been, except here we are. Here’s hoping today feels like a family reunion – welcoming a long lost relative.
We United Methodists are reunited, embraced by the church of our founders, John and Charles Wesley. We Methodists come together again with our very roots, the life force that bore us in Anglican/Episcopal tradition: a church of stately worship, with rich and wonderful buildings full of marvelous signs and symbols. A church with kneeling rails in the pews so a person can bow down to God. A church of the linguistic beauty of the Book of Common Prayer, the intellectual balance and tolerance of via media, seeking “the middle way,” a rich sacramental life centered in the Eucharist, the openness to seek the truth in tolerance, and the humble grandeur Anglican orderliness.
You Episcopalians are reunited, embraced by the progeny of some of your very own reformers and renewers , the Wesley, canonized and listed among the crowd of witnesses, who are your saints. The Wesleys, concerned that the ways of faith be available to masses drifting away from the church, seeking to offer an experience of God for the heart as well as the mind, espousing a theology of love, inclusion and striving toward disciplined, holy living, an enthusiasm about faith in life (not to be confused with empty emotionalism), a joy and exuberance expressed in preaching, worship and hymns, small support groups caring about “how is it with your soul?” the desire to put God’s grace and love to work in concrete action, awakening the faithful conscience to social responsibility.
Julie Daye spoke for all of us in the group when she said we’d have to patiently work through some of the misconceptions we have about each other. Like… To a Methodist, an Episcopalian is likely to be a stuffy, upper crust, head-in-the-prayer-book, smells and bells worshipping, cold, rational, faux catholic, whose favorite expression is “and also with you.” But hey, when all else fails, there’s free wine every Sunday! Unless of course you’ve been raised a Methodist grandmother and she taught you this little ditty: “We don’t drink, we don’t chew and we don’t go with girls that do.”
Our caricatures precede, even prejudice us. Like…To an Episcopalian a Methodist is likely a Bible-toting Baptist who can read and wears shoes come Sunday, an “Amen” shouting, four part harmony hymn singing, come to the altar rail crying, saw dust trail walking, pray out loud at the drop of a hat, liturgically loosely-goosey movement that still isn’t sure whether it wants to be a church or not. To a Methodist, a cocktail is ginger ale, red fruit pinch with a little sherbet floating on top.
These caricatures make us chuckle and even wince. Even with the little bits of truth in them they are still cartoons.
What’s really happened is that 12 of us have begun to learn more about God, experience the real presence Jesus and approach what’s holy in our lives and the world by hearing each others heritage and listening to each other’s path to God. Beyond the misconceptions, we’ve come to recognize each other as gifts. We’ve come to trust each other and each church.
We never see ourselves more clearly as when we see, not just though our own eyes, but through another’s. To quote Dave again: “We’ve left the comfort of the familiar, the cocoon of our own beliefs and experience to experience something new and different.”
What’s happening today, what today is all about is that you – the rest of Historic St. George’s and Gloria Dei -Old Swedes congregations are invited into the circle of new friendship and the mutual recognition that we’re better for God’s sake and each other’s – we’re better TOGETHER than alone.
What’s happening today, what today is all about is but another affirmation that the Lord’s Table is not our own but God’s gracious invitation to a feast set to welcome, feed and fill all of us with God’s love enough to heal our own brokenness and have at the worlds to.
I confess I may well have flunked preaching in an Episcopal liturgy because I haven’t yet referred to the lectionary texts even once. Here’s hoping all that I’ve said thus far is testimony of what each today’s scriptures have already said in their own way.
In Exodus, the grumbling, discontent, thirsty, complaining Israelites wandering the wilderness, about to fire Moses for incompetence, are amazed to find water gushing from a rock. Impatience and all, God was out ahead of them the whole time. And here’s the thing: God is the one out ahead of us in times of difficulty, doubt and division, not saving us from the dangers, toils and snares, but through them – like Episcopalians and United Methodists coming together, finding God rushing to us NOT keeping us from but flowing through all that’s kept us apart.
In the Gospel, there’s story of two sons. Both misled their father. One blew-off what Pop asked and later changed his mind. The other said, “Yea sure!” but never got around to what he said he’d do. Telling this story to religious leaders of his day, Jesus says we religious are usually long on words and short on follow through. God bless us, Episcopalians and Methodists, St. George’s and Gloria Dei-Old Swedes, today we’re getting it right, matching words and deeds. “That they all may be one,” Jesus prayed the night before his death. Let’s keep it up.
But the words that speak best to what’s happening today come from Epistle to the Philippians. It’s as if they were written just for us. Just for today. They speak for themselves. Listen to Eugene Peterson’s translation. “If you’ve gotten anything at all out of following Christ, if the love of Jesus has made any difference in your life, if being in a community of the Spirit means anything to you, if you have a heart, if you care, then do me a favor,” says Paul. “Agree with one another, be deep spirited friends.” (Philippians 2:1-3)
Deep spirited friends. I like that. That’s what today is about. That’s why the fuss. Making “deep spirited friends,” like Philippians says, growing “the same mind in [us] as was in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 2:5)
I wonder sometimes about how the world looks at the church – Jesus people – so divided, having trouble getting along through their differences. Even in our own denominations. (Something else Episcopalians and United Methodists have in common!) If they can’t come together, I think people who aren’t part of the church or who have left in frustration are thinking – if they can’t break bread together, then there must not be all that much to this God stuff.
C’mon St. George’s. C’mon Gloria Dei – Old Swedes, lets show the world another way.
Amen.
Rev. Alfred T. Day, III
Shared Eucharist - Historic St. George’s UMC, Gloria Dei-Old Swedes Episcopal Church
September 28, 2008
