For several decades the Episcopal Church has been in a tailspin nationally. Average Sunday attendance nationwide has declined to around 60 per church, which is below the level to support one full-time rector. The majority of mainline Protestant churches have serious financial difficulties. Very few church leaders seem to be getting serious about growth. Grace Episcopal Church in Muskogee is surrounded by big growing churches, yet our growth seems to just plod along. If we choose to let things get us down, it would be easy to be pessimistic.

But just before Christmas I noticed one of the most hopeful things I have heard in a long while. The report came from a Harvard Business School professor’s studies about a hotel on a different continent owned and run by a deeply religious family from a non-Christian religion. In spite what seems to be huge cultural and religious differences between the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai and Grace Episcopal Church in Muskogee, I found the report incredibly positive, hopeful, and reason enough to be optimistic about our future. The optimism in this story, however, blooms from the ashes of a tragedy.

On November 26, 2008, terrorists attacked several locations in Mumbai, India. One of the attack sites was the Taj Mahal Hotel, where gunmen walked into the lobby and started shooting. In the midst of chaos, panic, and terror, ALL of the employees of the hotel risked their lives to save the hotel guests. Kitchen employees formed a human shield to help guests evacuate. They lost their lives as a result. The telephone operators were evacuated to safety, but chose to return to the hotel so they could call guests and tell them what to do. Waiters, room cleaners, and busboys, who knew all the back exits for the hotel, chose to stay in the building during the siege until their guests were safe. The general manager of the hotel lost his wife and two sons in a fire set by the terrorists. In spite of his terrible loss, he stayed at the hotel, helping guests get to safety.

Often, during a crisis, one or two heroes will emerge who risk their lives to help others. But in the case of the Taj Hotel, something much deeper was going on. These employees risked and some of them lost their lives in selfless acts of kindness and mercy to help people they did not even know. They did not think of themselves as heroes. In fact they were selected for and trained for their self-giving character.

A Harvard Business School professor happened to be working on a project at the Taj Hotel about nine months after the attack. He kept hearing stories and references to these incredible acts of mercy and kindness, so he decided to study the hotel to see where this extraordinary behavior came from.

A main thing was recruitment. When the hotel looks for low level employees such as maids and bellhops, they avoid big cities and turn to small towns where they develop relationships with local schools. They ask school officials to hand select people with qualifications the Taj Hotel is looking for. They do NOT look for students with the highest grades. They are recruiting for personal characteristics such as respect and empathy. They recruit for respect and empathy because those human values are very difficult to teach. In the same way, they do not hire hotel managers from the top business schools because those graduates are primarily motivated by money. Instead they look for managers from second tier business schools, again screening for personal integrity and empathy.

This is a highly unusual strategy in modern day India, where earning top grades and attending top schools is a national obsession. The Taj Hotel does the opposite of the rest of India. Instead of recruiting for top grades, they recruit for positive character traits.

The Taj Hotel is owned by an enormous conglomerate company which is run by an extremely religious family. They plow two thirds of their profits into a charitable trust for use in social justice projects. The hotel and all of the operating companies run by this family have a fine reputation for customer service. For example, when a hotel guest compliments and employee for any action, the hotel management rewards the employee behavior within 48 hours with a gift, cash, or even a promotion.

In a very real sense, the hotel employees on that terrible day in 2008 were performing the behaviors they were selected for and trained to perform. In other words, there was a system in place that selected for and formed people to behave in positive ethical ways. The hotel was a community that enabled and sustained positive ethical behavior.

In a very real sense, isn’t that what we strive to do at Grace Episcopal Church in our Sunday school and all of our Christian formation activities? We form children and adults around the Golden Rule. What we strive to produce at Grace is positive ethical behavior.

Many of you have been attending Grace Church much longer than me. You can look back at the generations and count all the kids you have seen grow up here. You know that most of those young adults have turned out very well with healthy productive families of their own. You know that many of them are active in giving back to their communities. They are the living fruits of our labor and God’s labor here at Grace Episcopal Church.

It took a Harvard Business School professor to demonstrate that positive ethical behavior can be instilled in an entire organization. If you have attended Grace for any length of time you have observed that already. We have been doing that for more than a century.

Nathanael asked Jesus how he knew him. Jesus replied that he saw Nathanael under the fig tree. After his confession of Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus said, “You believe in me because I saw you under the fig tree? … You will see greater things than these.”

Grace Episcopal Church has contributed so much value to the lives of children and adults for generations in this community. What we are called to do now is to grow and share that love. Jesus calls us too. And we will see even greater things.

At our annual meeting later this morning we will elect several new vestry members. One of my long-term goals here at Grace is to change the image of vestry service from an obligation of drudgery to a formative opportunity for Christians who enjoy having fun. As you know, however, vestries often get a bad reputation for focusing on the wrong things, often small stuff. At another church, I had a vestry member with a wry sense of humor. One time, when the vestry got wrapped around the axle on some $39 item, he chimed in with the observation, “That’s about as important as pimples on prom night.”

A long-standing problem in the Episcopal Church from top to bottom has been the tendency to focus on small stuff and ignore the big stuff. I won’t depress you with statistics because they are about the past and we need to be about the future. But just look at the opportunities around you. Look at all the space in here for new friends, old friends, guests, visitors, newcomers, and all kinds of new people.

You don’t need a Ph.D. in theology to understand the big stuff of the Bible. It is right there in the Gospel you just heard. What does Jesus tell us to do? A) Baptize people, and B) teach THEM what Jesus has taught US.

What if we took everything we did at Grace Episcopal Church and held it up to the Great Commission? What if we asked the question about every issue, “How does such and such help us either baptize new people or teach people what Jesus taught us?”

If we used the Great Commission as our yardstick, how would that make us different than we are now?

We would value the outsider, the stranger, the guest, the newcomer, more than we value our members. I am convinced that God sends messengers (angels) to us all the time. Many times we turn them away because they are different. At the peace we would seek out people we do not know and we would work to develop new relationships, new friendships.

We would value non-Christians more than Christians. We would do this, not because we want to add X new members to our rolls this year, but because we are excited about showing them about what God is doing in our life and in the life of this community.

I know, I know. Episcopalians are about as eager to talk about what God is doing in their life as they are to volunteer for a root canal. Most of us do not have the vocabulary or skills to talk about God, so we leave people with the impression that God must not be doing much here and they go somewhere else where they can find that excitement.

I ask you. Do you think God is at work in positive ways directly in Grace Episcopal Church in Muskogee? If we cannot convey to new people our own sense of excitement, then I guarantee you people will go somewhere else where there is much less to be excited about. What if we spent this year intentionally building the skills and vocabulary to work with newcomers and guests? What would happen if new people came to this church a year from now and after a while simply said, “Oh wow”?

There is no silver bullet, no magic elixir to grow a church. All I can do is be your cheerleader and point out to you all the good things that are happening here. You get to decide if God is behind this or not. As you think about this question and as you pray about this question, you get to discern if maybe you have experienced “Oh wow.”

And if you have, I invite you to learn how to pass it on.

For some reason we have not had any door to door evangelists visit us since we have lived in Oklahoma, while in pagan Maryland we had visitors “witnessing” to us as often as dandelions pop up on a spring lawn. I enjoyed having a little fun with them sometimes, so I would generally tell them that I was a priest at a nearby church. In Maryland if that is all you tell someone, they are going to assume you are Roman Catholic. Then I would let them start their spiel and I would interrupt saying “Let me get my girlfriend up here so she can hear what you have to say too.” This would invariably be met with an exchange of uncomfortable glances by the two black suited evangelists who would then beat a hasty retreat to my neighbors’ house.

Our gospel starts out telling us that John was sent as a witness to the Light. So it got me thinking about all the different kinds of ways in which we witness to the Light. There is the random approach: If you knock on enough doors, someone out there will invite you in. Some missionaries go door to door wearing starched white shirts and black suits like my visitors in Maryland. Then there is the “spray and pray” approach: If you spew enough militant Bible verses at perfect strangers and pray for success, someone might convert. And finally we have the “big brother knows best” approach, where typically a group of experts goes to a foreign country to dig a well, build a school or treat illnesses. Sadly, the vast majority of missionary attempts fail soon after the missionaries leave.

John was a witness to the light, the very first sign of God’s action in creation – “Let there be light.” John’s life and ministry served as a sign pointing to or revealing God. Even Jesus in John’s gospel reveals the nature of God. And we are also signs and witnesses pointing to God. After the resurrection, Jesus meets the disciples in the upper room and says, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” The word mission simply means to be sent. Those on a mission are sent somewhere by someone. If the majority of Christian attempts at mission fail, how are we to serve as witnesses to the light?

The fundamental problem with traditional witnessing, mission, or evangelism is that the missionary does all the talking and none of the listening. If we go out in the world thinking we have the answer for them, whether it is Jesus Christ or a GED diploma, what good do we do if we do not meet people’s needs? If someone is drowning, do we throw them a sandwich?

To be effective witnesses or evangelists, we need to listen to people, discover their needs, and start there. If you recall the big miracle stories in the Gospel, you will quickly realize that Jesus did NOT say “OK, I’m going to give all 5,000 of you people some food, but you must believe in me first.” He did not say that to the people he healed or raised from the dead either. He met their needs without condition or qualification. And, as in the case of the ten lepers where he healed and only one turned around to say thank you, not everyone will thank us or even recognize what we do.

Let me summarize how mission typically fails, and then we will talk about how it succeeds. Witness and mission most often fails because we get in the way. We think we have all the answers and we do not listen to the real needs of the other person. Secondly, most Christian mission efforts come with strings attached such as “we will only help you if you will attend our church.” For example, the pastor of a local church went to an elementary school and performed magic tricks for the children. I have no problem with that. Next he invited them to his church that night to see more magic. When 80 kids showed up that night, instead of magic tricks and entertainment, they got 2.5 hours of hard core guilt-inducing altar call preaching.

Jesus never attached any strings to his invitations and neither should we. Finally, the very way we evaluate mission and evangelism is inappropriate at best. We use worldly measures to gauge our success such as: How many people attend your church? How many people did you preach to in Guatemala? How many meals did you serve? How many people did your physicians heal? How many teeth were fixed, eyes examined, and so on and so on. Staff salaries for people who work at churches are based on these models and they are all wrong. They are not God’s ways.

Then what are Biblical models of testifying to the light? You can break down every action of Jesus in three steps: Listen, Give, Love. We have certainly listened to the needs of those in the community who are hungry. We feed people through Meals on Wheels and our own Servings of Grace programs. We give people food with no strings attached. We do not preach at them while they eat nor do we make them feel guilty if they don’t attend our church. We just feed them. These are healthy examples of testifying to the light.

We had a wonderful GED program running for 29 years. There are some conversations now about providing educational assistance. Should we start by providing after school tutoring? Should we consider starting a school? Whatever we do in new mission areas, we must listen to the needs of the community first.

We are beginning to get the idea of witnessing through our connections to the wider community. We have had very positive outcomes at the Chili Cookoff, Cardboard Boat Race, and most recently the Christmas Parade. We tell the community who we are by being present, by participating, by smiling, by engaging children in positive ways. Now we are handing out bookmarks that tell a little more about who we are. These serve as low key invitations. No guilt, no pressure. Try us out some Sunday; we are different than the others.

The physical appearance of our buildings and property is another aspect of how Grace Episcopal Church testifies to the light. If you haven’t seen our chapel at night, I encourage you to drive by and check it out after dark. If you go to the corner of Broadway and Sixth and view our property across the parking lots you will get an entirely different message. One that says, “We are run down and dilapidated. You cannot even know our name unless you can find the two tiny little rusted metal signs. You are welcome here but don’t trip on the broken up sidewalks. You will have to guess how to get into the church from here.”

An architect from the state of Oklahoma visited us last week. He is involved with the city on a long term plan to improve the appearance downtown. As he toured our property, he was astonished to learn that the parking lots to the south of the church actually belong to us. He thought they belonged to the car dealer. Although his office cannot do our design work, he did provide encouragement (and references) for our integration of our south parking lots and signage into the overall renovation plan.

How do we testify to the light? We are doing a terrific job of renovating how Grace Episcopal Church relates to and connects to our local community. We will be renovating these buildings very soon. If we can change our thinking and understand that our front door to the public is the south parking lots, then perhaps we can renovate our front door before Easter rolls around.

We do not renovate these buildings primarily for ourselves. We do it for others as part of our mission. We do not grow as individual Christians primarily for ourselves. We do it because at the end of our days we will be judged based upon what we have done for other people. So I ask you, can we renovate our front door for others too?

We spent the summer of our second year in seminary traveling in England and Wales. While touring the Tower of London, the tour guide, who was dressed in one of those Beefeater outfits looking like he had stepped off the label of a bottle of gin, detailed the famous wives of Henry VIII who were beheaded there. He worked his way around the crowd talking about Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves. When he was right behind our oldest daughter who was about 14 at the time (going on 20) he put his arms on her shoulders in front of this large group of tourists and said, “Now Kathryn Howard would have been about 19, just your age, when Henry found favor with her.” I will never forget how much my young adolescent daughter blushed just to be singled out like that in a crowd.

Isn’t it wonderful to be noticed sometimes? Of course when you are an adolescent like Mary the mother of Jesus, or our daughter at the Tower of London, being noticed or being favored can be embarrassing, perplexing and downright uncomfortable. I think my daughter’s reaction to being favored by the tour guide must have been similar to Mary’s reaction of embarrassment and bewilderment.

“How can this be?” she must have asked. “Me, a teenage girl, a virgin, engaged to an older man, from a nobody family, in a nowhere little town! How can I be favored? How can this be? Why would the Most High God want to pick me out of all the girls in Israel? If this is really true, I could get in big trouble with the village. Me, pregnant with the son of the Most High! They will stone me for sure. What can I do? This is truly scary.”

Isn’t that the way we all are? When something about us breaks us out of our comfort zone, we become afraid and wonder what will happen to us. Perhaps you won the lottery. Maybe you fell in love with your soul mate. Your first child was born. Or maybe, you got a nudge about really changing your life, kicking an addiction, starting a program to help the needy, or going back to school. I talk to lots of people who question whether God actively works in our lives. I tell them that all you have to do is pay attention to the extra-ordinary events of your life. God is there, changing you, forming you, helping you, saving you, and at the end, helping you walk through that turnstile into the next life.

If you are completely clueless, you may not notice God at work in your life. If you are a completely self absorbed egotistical narcissist you will not notice God at work in your life. But if you have managed to escape these two sand traps of life, you should be able to notice that God is there – nudging, pointing, saving, healing, and yes, even making you embarrassed and uncomfortable.

God was certainly at work in Mary’s life. We have no idea how many other young girls Gabriel visited before one of them said yes to this outrageous proposition. In the same way we never know when we feel nudged, pushed, or transformed. How many other people were given the same opportunity before we said yes?

The angel Gabriel visited Mary and began this remarkable announcement with “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” We continue to say this to one another, sometimes in greetings, and formally we say it in the Eucharist. There is an old joke about how do you know a bunch of Episcopalians are watching an old Star Wars movie? Because every time Obie Wan Kenobi says, “The force be with you”, the audience says, “And also with you.” You too are favored.

But there is more to “Greetings favored one! The Lord is with you.” That more is our response. We have baptized four children today. As a congregation we have affirmed that we will support these young people in their life of faith. The Lord is with you, and also with the newly baptized.

Part of our job as a community of faithful people, as parents, sponsors, and grandparents is raise up these children in the knowledge and love of God so that they truly know deep down that the Lord is with them and the Lord favors them. When we are able to live into this knowledge of the Lord’s favor, we will know that we are truly blessed – not necessarily with material goods, but with the spiritual power necessary to deal with everything that life and death can do to us.

When God calls our name – whether that call is to get married, become a parent, become a doctor, serve as a priest, or to come to the end of our days – we will know that God favors us and God is with us. And we will respond just like Mary did so long ago, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

Just ten years ago in a small town halfway between Baltimore and Washington, I celebrated Christmas Eve services with my new parish of four months. As you know too well, maintaining these quaint old church buildings can have its own charm and headaches. In the fall of 2001, a plague visited on that little church in Laurel Maryland was a plague of squirrels. In a quaint mill town with lots of century old hardwood trees, a squirrel could find a lot to love. But when the weather turns cold, the little critters first try to find someplace warm to spend the winter. And the Episcopal Church on Main Street with a little hole in one of the ventilators welcomed them. Dozens of them.

A few weeks before Christmas I learned how someone years earlier had tried to save on heating costs by installing a small piece of steel flashing to cover the inside hole from the ventilators at the peak of the roof. It was a high ceiling church like this one. In the middle of the early service Eucharist, the sight of little bits of insulation falling to the center aisle near the back of the church caught my eye. An octogenarian usher thought such stuff should not be left in the aisle so he bent over to pick up the bits of pink insulation. Somewhere around “Do this in memory of me” came the horrible sound and sight of a two foot square piece of steel crashing on its side about a foot from the poor man’s head. The sound was like a marching band cymbal clanging. I really thought we would have several candidates for CPR at that moment.

After church that Sunday the crew came in to green the church in time honored tradition. Laurel was named for the indigenous mountain laurel plants that grow around the area. They are also evergreen, and the plants were woven into sixty foot long strands of green to be hung from each major roof truss. Everything was green and lovely. During the week before Christmas, in my custom to pray in the quiet of the church, I could occasionally hear the sound of the squirrels in the attic. I brought binoculars one day to confirm my worst fears. There was a direct opening through the ventilator shaft from the attic space into the ceiling of the church.

There was not time to bring in the pest exterminators before Christmas. They were all tied up with holiday cheer and much bigger clients. I prayed, I fretted, and I dreaded the possibilities. Imagine a full church on your first Christmas service with them and the cousins of Alvin and the chipmunks poking their heads into the ceiling and saying, “Hey guys, look at the forest in here.” The scene rolled around in my head like a low budget version of Chevy Chase’s Christmas Vacation.

The blessed hour came with the midnight mass and holiday spirits in fine shape. No visitation of the blessed church rodents. I went home and collapsed, thanking God for the gift of Jesus and for the separation of church and squirrels.

Isn’t that what everybody does around the holidays? We always manage to find something that grabs our attention and we obsess about it. The perfect party. Getting all the right gifts for people. Making sure the cards go out. Getting lights on the tree and around the house. In my case I obsessed over squirrels in the attic.

But take a minute to step back from the holiday trivia and look at the big picture. The unimaginable being who created the universe, set the planets in motion, and who gives life and breath to every living creature. That being chose to become human in the form of a baby. Completely dependent and vulnerable in every way just like any of us. It is scandalous. It is crazy. And it is true.

This unimaginable being whose name we don’t even know wants us to love creation and other people with the same love as we are loved. We are to forgive as we are forgiven. We are given a beautiful life. Every day of our life is a gift from this creator. We honor what we have been given by sharing the love with others. Traditions, religions, creeds, and doctrines will ultimately all fall away before the big picture.

We were known and loved before we were knit in our mother’s womb.

Take a moment to ponder the immense size of the universe and the even greater love that is there for each one of us. Then in another breath consider this all came into focus in the form of a tiny baby long ago in a remote back country village.

It kind of puts squirrels and holiday madness in perspective, doesn’t it?

2002 started off with a bonus for the local critter control company. Before Epiphany they came out and over three days trapped sixty eight squirrels. At $25 apiece, their year was off to a good start.

The parable of the talents is probably the most abused and misused piece of scripture in the entire Bible. It is probably on the top ten list for many preachers because they will first of all allow you to hear the word “talent” as is commonly understood; one’s special abilities. In fact the word talent here is a quantity of silver equal to a vast amount of wealth. Some scholars have said a talent would be close to 6 million dollars today. Other sources determined that one talent was equivalent to twenty years of pay for an average worker at that time.

Secondly, this parable is abused by many preachers because they put God in the role of the wealthy landowner and exhort the congregation to invest the things God has given you and you will not only see your investments grow, God will reward you for it. This corruption is often referred to as the “prosperity Gospel.” Let’s take a closer look to see why this is such a corruption.

If we put God in the role of the landowner, then you have God telling the third slave he should have invested the money with the bankers. This practice of investing money with interest is actually forbidden in the Bible, so here you would have Jesus telling a parable where God in the story is telling people to violate Jewish law. Not likely.

Finally, when the landowner berates the third slave, he says “You know I reap where I did not sow and I gather where I did not scatter.” Part of the promise of the “promised land” was that every tribe of Israel received an allotment of land forever. This reference of reaping and gathering implies taking profit on land that does not belong to the landowner. In other words, on land that was stolen.

Why would Jesus tell a story that put God in the role of violating Jewish law AND one of the Ten Commandments? Notice that Jesus does NOT introduce this parable with “The kingdom of heaven is like …” He begins this story with “It is as if a man going on a journey…”

What if the “it” in this story simply refers to the way the world works? The landowner would be a Donald Trump kind of figure. His two top lieutenants would stop at nothing to deliver a good profit, including taking more land from the peasants. The practice of burying money may seem odd to modern people but it was quite common in Jesus’ day.

Jesus was simply saying that the way the world works is that people will break the law and even break the Ten Commandments in order to get ahead. And if you don’t play along with them in their pursuit of wealth, you will be punished. Jesus was telling this to his disciples to let them know that while they are waiting for Jesus’ return, the world out there is nasty and brutish.

Where is the Good News in all this? This story is not about a God that throws us into outer darkness; it’s about living fully and faith-fully. You can choose a life of taking from others, following the siren call of this world. Or you can choose a life of faithful giving to others. It’s not always the easy way, but it’s the best way.

Somehow it doesn’t seem like Advent to me. We haven’t even finished our turkey sandwiches. I cannot deal with the bell ringers at the stores, the Christmas music on the radio, and the relentless march of Christmas lights on every house in town (including ours). I’m not ready for Advent. let alone Christmas. I just want to shout, “Enough already”, but then nobody wants a Grinch to steal Advent.

I had prepared a sermon focusing on our Gospel, Mark 13:24-37. But the words of the earlier verses kept running through my head all weekend: the words about the “desolating sacrilege.” One of the problems with our lectionary and sermons based on the lectionary is that it is way too timid. For example we pick up today’s reading in the middle of the action. Jesus says. “… but in those days, after that suffering …” Doesn’t that make you want to know what days, what suffering?

If you base your sermon on today’s text alone, you will either get a nice Advent sermon about God’s love and waiting expectantly OR you will get a sermon that sounds a lot like those awful “Left Behind” books. In either case we completely miss what Jesus is trying to tell us. If you were hearing this entire chapter from verse 1 to 37, you would note the parenthetical command “let the reader understand” right after Jesus talks about the desolating sacrilege.

Mark is telling us in giant red letters, “This is significant. It is in code. Have you figured it out?” The exact phrase “desolating sacrilege” that Jesus uses is also found in the book of Daniel and in 1 Maccabees. referring to a time when the Roman Emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes set up an altar to Zeus in the Jerusalem Temple and sacrificed pigs on that altar. Not only were Jews at that time outraged by the action of the occupying Romans, two hundred years later in Jesus’ day they were still outraged by it. And the hated Romans were still there two centuries later. Now do you understand? These words of Jesus are radical, subversive words.

If the explicit connection between the words of Jesus and the events described in Daniel were not enough, you also have to understand that Mark’s gospel was written about thirty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection during a time of Jewish revolt and Roman destruction of the temple. This passage in Mark occurs right before the crucifixion and resurrection, so we could look at another layer of meaning where Jesus effectively says, “Don’t look for God in the Temple anymore. Don’t look for God in the big cities or centers of power. Look to the cross.”

The cross, an instrument of Roman execution, becomes a subversive statement about the power of God over the powerful government. For another three centuries, you could be executed for making a sign of the cross. Early Christians disguised it using an anchor as a kind of cross.

As with so many symbols, over time they become used and worn and lose the power of their original meaning. They say there is no Easter without Good Friday, but I say there is no Advent without the cross. Have we bit by bit undermined the real power of the cross? Have we diluted it so much that we print it on Tee shirts, tattoo it on our bodies, make it into jewelry, and use it to ward off vampires? Talk about a desolating sacrilege!

Many of us go to church but we hedge our bets. We pin our hopes on a variety of things that we think or we believe will save us. I’ve got news for you. The power of the government will not save you. Doctors and hospitals will not save you. Changes in tax policy and paying down the debt will not save us. The military will not save us either. The only thing that will save us is the real power of the real cross in your life.

God who set the planets in motion and fashioned you in your mother’s womb chose to become human like any of us. That same God willingly submitted to a painful, brutal execution on trumped up charges because there was a greater plan. That same God would defeat the powers of death itself and live among us again. That same God has plans for you. Plans to give you hope and a future. A future that goes beyond death itself.

Where are you going to look for god this Advent?

What kind of salvation do you really hope to find?

Bill and John were co-pastors of a mega-church in downtown Baltimore. Years earlier the building had been part of venerable Episcopal congregation, but a succession of rectors there lived off the endowment until it ran dry and the bishop was forced to close the church and sell the property. Bill and John had just graduated from seminary, and they saw an opportunity.

They purchased a beautiful 200 year old sanctuary that seated 800 people, along with classrooms and just about everything they needed except for parking. The purchase price was pennies on the dollar of the real value of the property. The bishop could not see any kind of proper church growing in that crime-infested corner of the city, so the new church bought the entire property for $20,000.

It took a few years and they had to buy buses to bring people in from the parking lots outside the center city. Now the old sanctuary was packed for several services every Sunday. A large video display was tastefully inserted in front of a statue of Mary. Another video display dropped down in front of the chapel entrance on the opposite side of the nave. The chancel was rearranged so the choir and praise music band faced the congregation behind the pastors.

Sunday after Sunday the message beamed out of those displays. “God loves you and will bless you with all kinds of riches if you will just turn your life over to Jesus.” Powerful, emotional testimonies from talking heads on the video displays reinforced the message. People streamed down the aisles for altar calls. The scripture used was a select cut from the Bible, all designed to emphasize individual salvation by grace alone. Yes, grace is an unmerited gift, but somehow Bill and John taught their flock that they had earned their seat on the last train to heaven.

Money poured into this church and it became a powerful political machine in the city. Bill and John wrote books about church growth and attended prayer breakfasts with the rich and powerful.

One day they read from Matthew 21. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.” Bill and John launched into a discussion about the former owners of the building, and how some churches have strayed from the “true mission” of God. They implied that the Episcopal diocese deserved to fail in that location because it was God’s plan. They portrayed themselves proudly as the new tenants who would give God a tremendous produce of all these people at harvest time.

Down the street in an area the police called “the shooting gallery”, named after all the heroin users there, Joe gathered his flock into an abandoned shoe store. There was no sign on the windows except for the neatly lettered sign of its former days as a shoe store. The front door hung wide open. People shuffled into Joe’s church stooped over at the shoulders as if they were carrying heavy bags. Some of the baggage they carried was physical, from a life on the streets. Some of it was mental, from a life of alcohol and drugs. Some of it was spiritual, in the form of cut off from God – no hope, no human connections, no future.

Joe didn’t have a lot of training, but he loved his people. He didn’t try to change them. He told them about God’s love for the poor. He didn’t paint rosy pictures of how God would bless them because he knew better, and the Bible didn’t really say that if you read the whole thing. Joe just tried to live like Jesus: simply, with gratitude, and a hopeful outlook for all God’s creation.

That same Sunday Joe’s church also read from Matthew 21. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures: `The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’?

Joe talked about his own experiences of rejection. Members of his congregation talked about how the rich were buying up buildings and converting them at great profit much like the greedy tenants in the story. At the same time the only grocery store for miles around and the health clinic were both closing. Joe listened while each member told their story of loss and rejection. A woman in the group looked up and said, “This gathering is all I have. We’re family. I love our meals together. We take care of each other.” Everyone nodded in agreement.

They say that every preacher preaches the same sermon every Sunday. Joe’s sermon was always about God’s love. He entered the discussion and said “God sent his only son to be tortured and die. It was God’s way of telling us, ‘No matter what you do, God will forgive you and love you.’ God’s love for us is crazy. It makes no sense. But when you are at the end of the line no matter whether you are rich or poor, that crazy love is all you’ve got.” People responded with “yea” and “amen.”

A shiny new bus rumbled down the street headed for the mega-church. An old man straightened up and asked if anyone knew how to take a city bus to the suburban clinic. His arthritis had become unbearable.

[pause]

Now I must tell you that some people have asked me to talk more about what these scriptures will do for each one of us in our everyday life. I tend to shy away from this kind of preaching for several reasons: Ever since I responded to a call to ordained ministry, life has actually been more difficult in many ways. It would be a complete lie for me to tell you that once you decide to follow Jesus, everything will be rosy. That has not been my experience. But at the same time I would not trade these years for all the money in the world. They have been the most difficult years AND they have been the best years. Our time so far in Muskogee has been very positive.

Secondly most of the teachings of Jesus are addressed to the plural form of you, not to the individual. Even today’s lesson where he says, “Have you never read in the scripture …?” his question is posed to a crowd. So the idea of focusing sermons on the notion of personal benefits or individual salvation is quite a stretch.

When we try to follow Jesus as a community, when we try to spread the love of Jesus to others, and when we make a difference in the lives of other people – then we are producing the fruits of the kingdom. That’s all Jesus wants us to do

While in seminary in 1997 I attended the General Convention of the Episcopal Church which was held in Philadelphia that summer. I have never been big on conventions and huge gatherings, partly because my hearing makes it such a challenge, but this event was nearby and worth attending. The governing body of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America (that’s our official name) is the second largest governing body in the world, even among world governments. We are second only to India.

The Eucharist for the entire convention of 12,000 people was a grand spectacle to observe and participate in. It was held in the basketball stadium for the Philadelphia Eagles. It was a Eucharist in the round with the altar and presiding bishop in the center of the court. I sat on the second row very close to the front near the aisle. When the elements were brought forward, I estimated that nearly fifty gallons of wine were brought to the altar. But the most interesting and amusing part was the offertory.

Each row (and there were at least 250 rows) seated about 50 people. At the offertory an usher appeared at the first row in front of us and sent a basket down to the other end. An usher at the far end simply turned the basket around by handing it to the row behind. By the time the basket made one trip down and back traversing a hundred people, it was brimming with cash. No, it was overflowing with bills falling out of the pile in a rather undignified way.

The usher with the overflowing basket of cash was within reach of me. I handed him the basket and smiled knowing that what followed would likely be amusing. Panicked he looked back up the aisle at the head usher for the section standing about 50 yards away. They made frantic sign language at each other. Finally, the usher near me squished all the cash he could into the basket with one hand and walked briskly up the aisle while trying to contain the bills from falling out. I turned my head to look up the aisle and see what happened next.

The section head usher ran away and came back shortly with a very large dark green garbage bag in his hands. They dumped the cash from the basket into the garbage bag and my usher walked briskly back down 50 yards to start the basket down the next row. At this point things got even more amusing. Each pair of rows generated the same amount of cash and the same brimming basket was walked briskly up the aisle to be dumped unceremoniously into the garbage bag. I imagined that later in the day the janitors would find piles of garbage out in the halls of the stadium and wonder where their garbage bags went.

But isn’t that just classic Episcopal Church planning? We are so focused on making our liturgies “decent and in good order” that we fail to account for the bounty of God’s Grace. We fail to imagine that 100 people would over-fill the kind of wicker basket that any of us might have at home. We fail to think about the next step that given all this cash, what do we do with it? Our problem in the national church AND here at Grace Church is not whether we have enough cash for this or that project or for next year’s budget. Our challenge is now and always has been a lack of faith just like that day in 1997. Our baskets and our expectations are simply too small for God’s gracious bounty.

I began to look at today’s Gospel in the same way. The king is about to throw a wedding banquet. Now that word, “banquet” just doesn’t begin to describe what Jesus means here. If you imagine the recent royal wedding between Kate Middleton and what’s his name? It was a wedding feast of epic proportions. God, the king in this story, has thrown out the rich and powerful. Into this feast we are all invited, the middle class, the students, the poor, the retired, those with health problems, those with financial worries, ALL of us are brought into the grand wedding hall. Most of us feel honored and even humbled to be in such a grand place.

Now instead of focusing on the jerk wearing baggy cargo shorts that fail to cover parts of his backside, I want to stop us right here at the wedding feast. Our Eucharist every Sunday and our community gatherings are supposed to be JUST LIKE THAT. Do you feel awed to be here today? Do you feel a bit humbled in the presence of the Almighty? Do you feel honored to be invited? After the service are you eager to tell your friends about the incredible party you attended on Sunday? These should be our goals for every Sunday celebration.

Yes, it is my responsibility to structure Sunday worship so it meets these goals. But I now think these goals have been so watered down by church tradition and “the way we always did it”, that we have lost the sense of the epic banquet thrown by the king.

These are open questions for us. What would happen if we could really throw an awesome party every week in honor of what God has done for us? What would happen if people were caught up in our party like folks on the streets of New Orleans at Mardi Gras? Would your faith grow stronger if you saw all kinds of people streaming forward to receive the precious body and blood of our Lord? Would a tear form in the corner of your eye when you realized you just caught a glimpse of heaven?

I only have a few conclusions to share: Our baskets and our expectations of each other are WAY TOO SMALL. In the same way, our parties on Sunday are WAY TOO LAME. Thirdly, we must do something radically different. We must throw parties on Sunday that become the talk of the town in a positive way. People will come to our parties at Grace because Jesus is truly present.

I invite you to help us throw parties on Sunday fit for a king because it is the king and his son that we celebrate. I welcome new ideas, volunteers, iconoclasts, and rule breakers. I welcome those who cherish tradition too. If we make our celebrations fit for the king and raise our expectations of one another, I guarantee you your faith will grow. The church will grow. All because your hearts will be open to what God is doing with us right now.