O God, help us all to be
a pure vehicle for your love,
and light,
and wisdom.

Good morning. I’d like to reflect a little bit on faith as found in this mornings readings, so you will perhaps forgive me if I digress a bit from time to time.

In Genesis, the Lord tells Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

So Abram goes and does just as the Lord has commanded him. He packs up everything, takes his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, and all the people he’s converted in Haran, and at 75 years of age, in an act of absolute faith, sets out for the promised land. For us as Christians, as well as for the Jews and the Muslims, to believe in God is to believe in the reality of this man Abram, and to be witnesses to his faith. He is a fundamental figure, a patriarch found at the heart of all three faith traditions.

In Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, the most precise statement of his theology, he says that, “The promise to Abraham and his descendants, that they would inherit the world, did not come about through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. If it’s the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, then faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham. Early on in the first chapter of this Epistle is the verse where Paul reminds us that, “the righteous shall live by faith” the thought that brought such relief to Martin Luther, founder of the Protestant Reformation, who’d almost driven himself to madness, trying to live out the letter of the law.

I love these readings, with their succession of both action and thought based in faith, because they remind us not only of the basis of our faith, and how it’s articulated, but also how others have acted in it. And whenever I’m having a discussion with one of my fellow Christians, say my fundamentalist sister, or maybe one of my Catholic friends, or any of a number of friends who’ve broken with the Episcopal Church because they don’t like the direction it’s taken, I make every effort to remember this.

Twice a year I go on retreat up at El Retiro, the Jesuit Retreat House up in Los Altos. It’s a 15-year tradition that began the year after I arrived at St. Thomas. On my most recent retreat I was talking with a gentleman who, upon discovering my faith background, said with a twinkle in his eye “Episcopalian, eh? We’ve been getting a lot of your folks coming through our door lately.” To which I replied, “I know, we’ve been getting a fair share of yours as well.” Touché.

What is it about faith? We live in difficult, yet interesting times, and for many of us I know it takes a lot to keep our faith alive in such an environment. It takes a daily effort, a discipline, to reconcile what we read in scripture, what we think, what we feel, and understand, and how we live with what is happening in the world today. I know a significant number of people who are keepers of the law, but this doesn’t necessarily make them good Christians, or even human beings for that matter. I note this with more than a trace of sadness. They are in love with the letter, but often I am afraid it is the spirit escapes them.

In my family, there are 4 children. We were all raised to be good Christians. Our parents would have nothing less. We were all raised in the Episcopal Church. But the faith of one of my sisters, as I noted earlier has taken on a decidedly more conservative, fundamentalist tenor as her life has progressed. She’s been a nurse all of her adult life, has survived 2 failed marriages, and has 4 kids, two from each. I have to admit, she’s been through some really tough times, and I believe that her faith has served her well. But as good as that faith is, as powerful as it is, she can’t seem to find it in her heart to forgive our brother, or for that matter, our mother, and I often find myself wondering why that is, because it is not in line with what she professes to believe.

It’s funny, because my brother’s faith has taken on this same tone as he’s gone through life. He’s a diesel mechanic over in the Central Valley. He served in the military, and has also survived two failed marriages, although he has no children, only a stepson from his second marriage whom he loves dearly. He’s also survived a methamphetamine addiction, which for a time most of us were convinced would claim him. And he constantly struggles with depression. He has his own demons, of which there seem to be many. I was reminded of this two weeks ago, when he failed to attend my graduation after promising the folks and myself that he would be there. He hung up on my mom on Saturday morning as she badgered him to “be ready” when they came by to pick him up. Then called me that evening to say that he wouldn’t be making it over at that point, just “because that’s the way it is”. At that point, I have to admit that I was pretty angry with him, as I was when he failed to arrive for graduation the following evening. But as the evening progressed, I realized that I had to call him and find out how he was doing. This concern was lost in the hubbub surrounding the sudden demise of a friend’s car on her way out of Berkeley that evening, as my wife and I wound up dropping her mom off at her car in Mountain View and then returning to Berkeley to retrieve my friend at about 11pm.

I probably shouldn’t have worried too much about my brother, because he phoned as we were on our way down to Campbell about midnight, to say that he was stopping in Gilroy for some food, and would be up? So, we went home and fixed up the guest bed, and waited. 1am came and went, as did 2am. We were starting to worry as it became later and later, but had no way to contact him, so we went to bed. About 3am he called to say he was in Coyote, and that was the last we heard, until I found him asleep in the car with his dog at 6am. I tried to get him to get up and come in the house but he wasn’t having any of that. So, I went back to bed, and at 8:15, I got up, showered, and made him come to breakfast with me. I mention my brother because as pleased as I was that my folks and my other sister had attended my graduation, I was probably even more pleased that he of all people had managed to make his way over here in the wee hours on the Monday following my graduation to share a breakfast and conversation with me for what proved to be all of an hour. He is a man with a strong sense of faith. He’s been through a lot, and I’m certain he was in no mood to come over and celebrate his brother’s great accomplishment. But at that table, at that place in time, we were just two people giving thanks, and professing the same faith in the face of what has often proved to be a strange and difficult path. We love each other, as well as Christ and were most grateful for the fellowship of that one fleeting moment. It seems to me that these days that can be an easy thing to forget. We share the same faith, and yet we often act on it in radically different ways.

The thing that strikes me as terribly sad is that our sister, in spite of her faith, cannot seem to forgive him his history of drug use, or our mother her history of alcoholism. She is one of those folks who seem to have conveniently forgotten her own past. For her, the letter is strong, and yet the spirit is wanting. Hold tight, I expect you will get a chance to meet all these folks in 2 weeks.

So, are you still with me? I’m sorry, I do tend to digress periodically, but now we’re back to Matthew, who tells us that, “as Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he says to him, "Follow me." And Matthew gets up and follows him. (Another act of faith) And as Jesus sits at dinner in the house, all these tax collectors and sinners come and are sitting there with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees see this, they say to his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" Jesus reply to this is, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, `I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners." I desire mercy, not sacrifice…

Unfortunately, at this point in our history we seem to be suffering an abundance of the righteous, and I’m not talking about the folks Paul was referring to, the ones who live by faith, but people for whom the world seems to exist only in terms of black and white. One of the most serious problems for us as Christians, and one of which we’re all probably guilty at some time or other, is a tendency towards selective literalism, and while you may not have heard this term, I know I’ve been guilty of it, as has my sister, although she’s an extreme case. We choose the passages that we want to apply literally, and we become terribly righteous about those while ignoring all the others that we don’t like, failing to consider scripture as a whole. A friend I was having this discussion with, who is not a Christian, said, “if that’s so bad, why not just apply all of them literally?” Well, probably because that would be almost impossible. You don’t have to read far into Leviticus to appreciate that. And you have to believe we’ve learned more than a few lessons in the past 2 or 3 millenniums, and that everything in that book doesn’t necessarily apply in this day and age. Heresy? No, not exactly. No one in their right mind advocates slavery any longer, even if it still exists in the world, any more than they do stoning of adulterers or any number of quaint, yet barbaric practices that were common in the past.

No, for us as Episcopalians, faith is about the three common threads, or the three cords, or the footstool if you will, but I like the two former images, because it is that which binds us; scripture (the primary), tradition (as Anglicans), and reason, always a biggie. There is a fourth, although we often fail to realize it, and that is experience, our shared experience of life, of faith, and the realities of our modern world. These are the things which bind us, and which help to shape our faith on a daily basis. But the trick is, we still have to come to terms with others who profess the same faith, although they interpret and act on that faith in radically different ways, as certain members of my family remind me, they are not going to go away.

And in the meantime, the world is still full of tax collectors, and God knows more sinners than Matthew or Paul ever would’ve imagined. You don’t have far to look. Have you visited any of our prisons lately, say the Santa Clara County lockup, or maybe Elmwood? All full. They reflect a larger circumstance in this country. I’ve had ample opportunity to walk through St. James Park, San Jose, over the course of the last 9 months. People LIVE there. Redevelopment in San Jose has driven them up from the banks of the Guadalupe River, and onto the city streets. I’m certain you’ve seen any number of them on our streets. We do an admirable job of feeding a good number of these souls here during the week. And there are others who merit our concern and compassion, and I’m not just talking about the poor and the disenfranchised. I have a friend whose employer switched medical coverage on its employees in order to save some money. After going in for emergency gall bladder surgery recently, she now finds herself owing $19,000, a bill she is ill equipped to handle. Can you imagine how you would feel if you worked the same job faithfully for a couple of years, had to go in for emergency surgery, and found yourself owing for the bulk of the stay? The sad thing is that she has health care. Imagine all the folks who don’t. Or how about if you’d worked faithfully at a job for 25-30 years and retired, and then found out your pension plan had been cut, while the CEO has a compensation package in excess of a million dollars, and your company spent more than a million dollars on incentive bonuses for it’s top 5 employees, while at the same time asking employees to accept wage and benefit cuts? In moments like this, you have to believe that something is fundamentally wrong in our society, and that maybe there are larger issues that merit our attention, that perhaps we as a nation have lost track of that most basic message in the gospel, which is simply to love one another as Christ loves us, and to show the same kind of respect for every other human being as we would expect to receive.

Let’s be honest. I’ve been gone from here for a long time, and now that I’m coming back, there is no way I can stand up here and tell any of you here how to think or what to believe. That’s not my job; it is not what I am called to do. These are simply my thoughts, this is another point of view, so please feel free to approach me at any time, at coffee hour, via e-mail or on the phone if you like with your own perspective. Nothing here is cast in stone. I do believe that this book (The Bible), unless it speaks to something in you is nothing more than a book. But we keep coming back to it, because it is a history of others experience of God, it is a witness, and it is not the word of God unless it possesses you, as opposed to you possessing it. I’ve spent the last 50 years trying to come to terms with my faith, and to make that faith a lively thing, something I can carry out into the world. But I’m not through by any stretch. I am not the expert here; I am no different from any one of you. I simply want to understand, and so I work on it every day, and it is a never-ending job. I will not be done until I depart this life, and I’m not certain it’s accurate to say I’ll be done then, as I expect there will be a whole new life, and a whole new understanding when that time comes. Each of us has to come to terms with what we believe and how we live out that faith in the world. That is what makes us all ministers in Christ’s church. That is what we’re called to do. That is our great commission. Amen.