I pledge allegiance...

This week, I became an American citizen. To become a citizen - after living here for five years as a permanent resident, being fingerprinted, and paying a hefty fee - I had to prove that I could read and write English and that I know basic facts about U.S. history and government. What is the Constitution? Name one of the two longest rivers in the US. What are the rights and the responsibilities of being a citizen? Who wrote the Federalist Papers? (In case you’re wondering, the answer is Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, writing under the pseudonym of Publius). Finally, I had to give up my allegiance to my birth country and take the Oath of Allegiance.


It’s a big deal, and something that I didn’t take lightly. But as I went through the process, I wondered, what if we treated baptism more like citizenship?


It wasn’t an original thought. In Ephesians 2, Paul writes, “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God;” in Philippians 3, he argues “ Our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” When we become followers of Christ, when we are baptized, we become citizens of the kingdom of heaven, with all the privileges, the rights, and the responsibilities entailed in that.


As citizens of the United States, we pledge allegiance. We will participate in our nation's life. We will obey the law. We will serve our country - without qualification or limitation - except if our religious belief limits us in some way. There are no excuses; we don’t need excuses, because we are proud to be part of something so much greater than ourselves, and we trust that when we are in need, our nation will in turn provide for us.


It’s the same for us as citizens of heaven. There is no residency requirement, no fingerprinting, and no application fee to become a citizen of heaven. There’s not even an exam - though it does help if you know something about this kingdom you are joining. But when we are asked, “Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Savior? Do you put your whole trust in his grace and love? Do you promise to follow and obey him as your Lord?” we are, in effect, taking an oath of allegiance to Christ. We will follow him. We will obey him. We will serve him. No matter what. We become part of something so much greater than ourselves, the work of Christ in this world. And we trust that Christ will provide for us when we are in need.


That’s the theory. But the reality is often different. We try to juggle our obligations - to work, to family, to ourselves, and to God. How do you choose between worship and much needed family time? What do you do when your employer expects you to work late on the night you have committed to lead a church activity?


There are no easy answers: the only answer that scripture gives us is Jesus’ answer: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” No matter what.

Feet that ache and a heart that breaks

It was a somewhat ragged looking procession, Joseph, in his homespun robe, and Mary, struggling to keep her scarf on, hesitantly moving toward the manger and the coming of the baby. It was not the first Christmas Eve, of course, but Christmas Eve last year, when the children of our parish reenacted that story that is so familiar to us, and that we gather to remember each year.

Mary and Joseph were soon joined by the baby, a bouncing nine month old, smiling and waving. Then the shepherds straggled up the aisle, clothed in bathrobes and dishcloths, followed by the angels in their Christmas best, adorned with fairy wings and haloes of dubious provenance. Finally they all reached the front of the church

and paused in a glorious tableau of worship, angels adoring, shepherds kneeling, as we sang,

“Come to Bethlehem and see

him whose birth the angels sing:

come, adore on bended knee

the infant Christ, the new-born king.”

There was a lot less carpet and a lot more dirt, but I suspect the original Christmas

would have been just as chaotic and just as glorious when finally the baby was born and the shepherds arrived and the star shone brightly overhead.

But sometimes I wonder if, wrapped in the the beauty of the familiar story, we forget its astounding significance. Because the story of Christmas isn’t just confined to that scene in the stable. After all, the birth itself was like any other one, and the appearance of the shepherds a passing curiosity.  What makes it different is that we understand it to be the time when the Incarnation became tangible: God came among us as one of us, or, as the letter to Titus puts it, grace appeared.

In Jesus Christ, grace appeared.

What Titus means, as far as we can tell, is not that some abstract thing wafted over humanity.  Rather, in the Incarnation, the grace that the people had always known as a characteristic of God materialized. It became real.  Grace with flesh and blood.

And that grace that is embodied in Jesus Christ makes a difference.  It makes a difference because now we know that God knows exactly what it is to be human, the best and the worst of it.  God knows the joy and the pain, the ordinary and the extraordinary.  God knows about feet that ache and a heart that breaks.

Because grace was embodied, we know that the physical part of our existence, our bodies, are no less holy than our spirits, our souls.  God became incarnate in Jesus Christ, and in so doing entered the created world in a way that left no room for lingering doubt.  We, as created, embodied beings, are part of the good creation of God.

And grace that was embodied in Jesus Christ lived like us and died like us. And grace turned the cross from a thing of torture to a hallowed place of forgiveness. And then grace rose again, with the promise that we too will rise again.

And perhaps the children walking up the aisle to create that tableau have it right.

Because it’s the way of grace that we don’t always know where we are going; we’re not always sure what we are supposed to do. But we trust that we will be led to see our Savior - and the grace of it is that we will. God is waiting for us in the manger in Bethlehem, in the cross of Calvary, in the empty tomb and resurrected Christ, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Grace has appeared.

Living and breathing Word

Itʼs not often in Scripture that we hear about someone who has grown up in the church. 

Thatʼs not surprising, given that the books of the New Testament were mostly written in 

the first fifty or so years of the churchʼs life, and so many of the people whose stories 

are recorded were adults when Jesus came on the scene, and so were adult converts. 

Most of the disciples and the leaders of the early church appear to spring fully grown out 

of nowhere, confident and full of faith, ready to go out preaching from day one. All it 

takes is a word from Jesus and they are ready to go, with none of the struggles and 

fears that most of us have experienced as weʼve tried to work out what it means to be a 

Christian. 

Recently our lectionary has had us read the Epistles to Timothy.  And they are written to 

someone just like us.  

Timothy didnʼt ever get to meet Jesus.  He learned his faith not directly from Jesus, but 

in much the same way as many of us learn ours, from his family.  And when he needed 

help, he was advised to turn to the Scriptures, the sacred writings that would remind him 

about the God he worshipped and recall him to his faith in Christ. 

Scripture is still the touchstone of faith, the place we can go to receive encouragement 

and wisdom, as 2 Timothy reminds us, 

“All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, 

and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be 

proficient, equipped for every good work.” 

“Scripture” in 2 Timothy probably meant the Old Testament.  Later the Church realized 

that the first writings of the early Church, the letters that were passed around from 

community to community, the stories of Jesus that had begun to be written down, were 

somehow distinctively authoritative.  In them, God spoke.  They are what we now know 

as the New Testament.  Old Testament and New Testament together form our Bible. 

The Bible is inspired by God, God-breathed.  From the time of creation, we know that 

when God breathes on something, God brings that thing to life.  Not just once, but 

continually. 

And so when we read the BIble, we know that God inspires these words.  God breathes 

life into them, even now, so that they are not just dead letters but alive, the living and 

active word of God. 

And as the living and active word, when we read Scripture, we are invited into a 

conversation with God, a conversation where the Spirit of God is active and alive in us, 

inviting us into truth. We may discover that we need to disagree with the Scriptures, to 

argue with God just as Abraham did in the book of Genesis, or to shout at God just as 

the psalms so often shout lament and scream.

We may find contradictions in Scripture, because God needed to have different 

conversations with the people at different times; we may find principles that we then 

need to apply in different ways today. We may find commands that Jesus ignored, and 

new ways of living that he commanded. We may find things that turn our stomachs, and 

things that fill us with joy. 

But when we read these living, breathing, scriptures, we are able to join a conversation 

with our living and breathing God, and be encouraged and equipped for the life of faith.

Sent to bring Christ

A small church sits on an isolated salt marsh in eastern England.  It was built in the year 654 by St Cedd, on the remains of the wall of a Roman fort.  The chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, Bradwell-on-Sea is a visible symbol of the Christian faith, and the faithfulness which moved St Cedd to travel from Lindisfarne in northern England down to the heathen wilds of Essex on a mission to convert the East Saxons to Christ.

As Christians, we often talk about the mission of the church. But it’s not always clear what we mean by ‘mission’.  The word itself only appears once in the New Testament (at least in the NRSV version of the bible), in Acts 12:25: “Then after completing their mission Barnabas and Saul returned to Jerusalem and brought with them John, whose other name was Mark.”  But the word for mission here is the same word that is translated everywhere else in the New Testament as “ministry” or “service.” So it doesn’t really help us to understand what ‘mission’ means.

The dictionary tells us that ‘mission’ has a number of meanings.  It might be a religious ministry of evangelism or humanitarian work.  It might be a small church that depends on the larger church for its survival.  It might be a series of evangelistic rallies. It might be a vocation or calling.  Or, outside of religion, a group sent to a foreign country for diplomatic or political purposes, or a military task, or a space operation. Or, in the business world, an objective or purpose. I suspect that in the church, when we use the word ‘mission,’ we mean a kind of muddle of aspects of all those definitions.  

But when we dig deeper in the bible, there are hints of what the church’s mission might look like.  The word ‘mission’ comes from the Latin, mittere, which means ‘to send.’  And there’s a whole lot in the New Testament about sending.

First of all, God sent Jesus, as we are reminded time and time again, particularly in the gospel of John, in order to save the world.  During his earthly life, Jesus sent his disciples, often in pairs, to preach and teach and heal.  And the risen Christ sent the apostles to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching them.

If we read on in the New Testament, we discover that the early Christians saw their mission, saw their ministry, as being to build up the body of Christ, to testify to the good news of God’s grace, of freedom, justification and transformation, to share, and to praise God.

As Christians today we too are sent, like the early church, to build, to testify, to share and to praise.  We’re sent, like the apostles, to make disciples, to baptize and to teach.  We’re sent to preach and teach and heal.  We can’t save the world - at least not on our own - but we can become God’s partners in that work.  And at the heart of it all is Christ.  We are sent to bring Christ to the world, to embody Christ in the world.

It’s not always easy.  Sometimes we look around us and wonder if anyone is listening.  “Why bother?”

But that little church in the salt marshes of Essex reminds us that this mission of the church is the mission of God, and God is faithful.  Fourteen centuries later, people continue to meet Christ in that place, and the mission of Cedd, and the mission of the church, our church, continues to be fulfilled.  By God’s grace.

I decided to take a chance

Last week, I spent a day on retreat.  It began with Morning Prayer, and ended with a visit to my spiritual director, but in between was a blank slate.  And I have to admit that I was anxious about that blank slate.  What would I do?  How would I spend the time?  What if I got bored?

I packed my car with lunch, coffee, knitting, a picnic blanket, bug spray, a prayer book and bible, a journal and pen, a couple of other theological books, and a novel, just in case. I wasn’t leaving anything to chance.

But when I reached the retreat center, I decided to take a chance.  I sprayed myself with bug spray, put on a hat, and left everything else behind.  Then I wandered down to the river, and sat on a rock a couple of feet out from the shore.  And said, “God, I’m here.”

About twenty minutes in, it began to dawn on me.  I didn’t need to fill the time; God would be there - just as God is there every instant of my life. I just don’t stop still often enough to realize it.  I’m spend more time worrying about how I will measure up to God, and trying to orchestrate some sort of God-event than I do simply waiting on God.

Scripture is full of stories of people who come to God just as they are, and God comes to them.  They don’t have to do anything to earn it; they don’t really deserve it.  It’s simply by the grace that they get to meet God. 

Our hymns echo that truth.  

Just as I am, without one plea,
But that Thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bidst me come to Thee,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

Charlotte Elliot, 1835

I know that in my head, but there’s a part of me that just can’t quite believe it.  

But as I sat on the rock, I thought of my my eighteen-month-old goddaughter.  Much as I’m looking forward to her learning to call me Godmama, and drawing me pictures, and sharing my love of the bible, the very best times are when she puts up her arms to be held and snuggles against me.  What if God enjoys having me around as much as I enjoy having my godbaby around? 

And God does.  God created humanity, and looked upon us, and saw that this creation was very good (Genesis 1). God doesn’t delight in strength or speed but takes pleasure in those who hope in his steadfast love.” (Psalm 147)  That’s us.  God delights in us.

At the end of my retreat, I was slightly sunburned, had written three pages in my journal,  and didn’t need the knitting or the novel or books.  If anything, the time went too quickly.   Because God was there waiting, and is, and will be, any time I stop long enough to notice.

"See the world in green and blue"

For the last few months, the news has been dominated by the story of the oil leak in the Gulf.  Pictures of pelicans covered in oil and tar balls washing up on beaches crowd our eyes; we hear stories of people whose livelihoods are gone, possibly for good.  It makes us want to cry at the damage to creation, andFor the last few months, the news has been dominated by the story of the oil leak in the Gulf.  Pictures of pelicans covered in oil and tar balls washing up on beaches crowd our eyes; we hear stories of people whose livelihoods are gone, possibly for good.  It makes us want to cry at the damage to creation, and the waste of the resources of this wonderful world which we inhabit.

Over recent years, the main impetus to talk about the environment has been global warming.  But whether or not you believe that global warming is occurring, it is clear that humans are having an impact on the environment, and that impact is not always good.

One of the most consistent reminders of the importance of creation is the work of musicians.Whether it’s Louis Armstrong extolling the wonder of trees of green, red roses, blue skies and white clouds in “What a Wonderful World” or U2’s invitation in “Beautiful Day” to respond to God’s recreation after the flood by not letting the world’s beauty “get away”, they call us to pay attention to creation, to celebrate it and to care for it.

This is, of course, not new to Christians.  Most of us are familiar with the words of Genesis 1:28: “God said to [humans], ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. ” (NRSV)  The way that chapter 2 of Genesis tells it, it is humanity who are created first; the plants and animals are then created for human benefit.  It’s an incredible blessing.

God has given us creation; we are its stewards.  But sometimes we misread that gift.  We read the words “subdue” and “dominion” -- and we tend to think the earth is ours to use however we want.  

But  when we look at how those words are used in the rest of the bible, we see something different.  “Subdue” is used most often of the enemies of the people of God: armies and kings and nations who want to do them ill.  But creation has no evil intent. It is not ours to attack at will. “Dominion” usually refers to the rule of a king.  That rule may be good or bad, but the rule we are called to imitate is that of God, in whose image we are made.  

And God’s rule is benevolent, even generous.  In Isaiah, God’s rule is described in terms of a new heavens and a new earth, that peaceable kingdom where wolves and lambs, and leopards and goats, and calves and lions and bears all play together, where there is feasting and wine, justice and mercy, and there are no more tears. This dominion is wholly good for all those who live within it; it is a rule of blessing.

That then, is what we as the people of God are called to.  We are called to bless this earth of ours.  And that means being wise stewards of its bounty, on both the macro and the micro level.  We need to work to influence the decisions of governments and multi-nationals, but there are also things we can do on a local level.  We can choose public transport over cars where it is available, and walk shorter distances. We can choose to drive more fuel efficient cars.  We can consider alternative forms of power such as solar and wind. We can eat food grown locally rather than imported.  We can vacation closer to home.  And there are benefits: fresher food, more relaxed travel, and so on.  And above all, the knowledge that we are acting as good stewards of God’s creation, becoming ourselves a source of blessing -- as God blesses us.

To be a pilgrim...

It’s a long way from Chester to Lichfield. Seventy-six miles, according to Google maps, and a little longer if you are walking.  Which is what I was doing, in May, the first pilgrim on a new English long distance trail, stretching from the shrine of St Werburgh to the shrine of St Chad.

I’d planned carefully, booking bed-and-breakfasts, making contacts with parishes, packing light, and hauling out my well-worn boots.  The first two days were wonderful:  morning prayer and a blessing for my journey at Chester Cathedral, a long morning following the canal, an afternoon crossing fields and visiting the church where my 6th-generation ancestors were baptized, married and buried, a cup of tea with a vicar and Eucharist in a market-town church where more of my ancestors had lived and worshiped. 

But on day three came the blisters.  Not just on my heels, predicable for a long-distance hiker, but on the soles of my feet.  Thirteen miles in, I could barely walk.  And I had a decision to make: hobble on my way to my night’s lodging, and risk having to abandon the rest of the pilgrimage, or find alternative transport and maybe be able to pick up the trail the next day.

I thought about the pilgrimage I had hoped and prayed to make.  I thought about my medieval forebears, and how grateful they would have been if the driver of a passing cart had offered them a ride.  And as I turned from the canal down into a housing estate, following the trail, I saw an elderly man getting into his car.  “Excuse me, would you mind giving me a ride to the church in Trentham?” (a mile or so, and I guessed the nearest bus stop).  

The man was gracious, and drove me to the church, and I caught a bus on to my night’s stopping place, all the while feeling as if I were somehow disappointing God if I didn’t walk every step of the way.

But then it dawned on me.  I don’t have to earn my way to salvation.  God probably doesn’t care whether I walk every step of that pilgrimage, or catch a bus the whole way,  What God cares about - and knows - is my heart.  

Ever since the time of Christ, the church has debated about the relative value of faith and works.  We are justified by faith alone, said Paul, through the grace of God. Faith without works is dead, said James. The grace of God on the one hand; our actions on the other.  Somehow, it is both that are essential.

Late afternoon of day five of my pilgrimage - walking again - I finally saw the triple spires of Lichfield Cathedral.  At evensong, I was welcomed alongside pilgrims from parishes across the UK, and our diocese was prayed for. And I knew the grace of God, in a long and sometimes painful walk; in an elderly man willing to give a hiker a ride, and a public bus; in a cup of tea, and bread and wine.