By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

John 13:35

Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.

I John 4:20

Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

I John 4:11

It makes no sense to take the name of Christian and not cling to Christ. Jesus is not some magic charm to wear like a piece of jewelry we think will give us good luck. He is the Lord. His name is to be written on our hearts in such a powerful way that it creates within us a profound experience of His peace and a heart that is filled with His praise.

William Wilberforce

Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.

Billy Sunday

Real Christians

I keep seeing a billboard that reads: Real Christians Follow Jesus’ Teaching. I’m taken with the phrase and wonder who sponsored the ad. I also wonder whether the sponsors would think I was a real Christian.

I’ve had a couple opportunities to think about this lately. The candidacy of Mayor Pete Buttigieg has raised the issue of what makes a real Christian. One commentator (Erick Erickson) who I’m guessing won’t vote for the mayor, has questioned the mayor’s faith, especially his reading of the Bible. The commentator notes that because Mayor Pete is an Episcopalian, he might not actually “understand Christianity more than superficially. Episcopalians are shallow Christians.”

Mr. Erickson may be right as I look at my own heart, and am struck by the depth of my own shallowness. But it’s been my privilege to know so many Episcopalians who know God and follow Jesus and are filled with the Spirit. I wish Mr. Erickson could know them.

Looking at the question from another angle, I recall conversations with one woman who responded to the RenewalWorks inventory. She bristled at some of the questions and said she preferred to “self-identify” as Episcopalian, not Christian. A part of me gets her point because the association with Christians in our culture is pretty grim. When people outside the church looked at the church in the first days, they said “See how they love one another.” Now, surveys indicate that people might say “See what hypocrites they are. See how judgmental they are. See how they fight with each other. See how they are captive of a particular political agenda.” Anyone who has hung around church for a while, and especially anyone who has gotten involved in sausage-making governance can probably provide examples. 

At the same time, my own experience of the Episcopal Church is that it offers me an authentic way to be a follower of Jesus, for which I believe I will be eternally grateful. My journey to the Episcopal Church was personally salvific.

So what’s a follower of Jesus to do? For starters, remember that Jesus nowhere uses the term “Christian.” His first followers who met in small communities described themselves as people of the way. I suspect we’d all be better off if we’d stuck with that name. Jesus said to his disciples “By this shall people know that you are my disciples if you have love one for another.” Not by your doctrine or your stand on social issues or the name of your group or how you do liturgy or the way your interpret scripture.

Jesus’ own ministry was marked by harsh judgment primarily directed at religious people. He said “Not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven.” He told the parable of sheep and goats (Matthew 25) and said that those who welcomed the poor, the hungry, the imprisoned would inherit the kingdom. Those who ignored those in need would be excluded.

Finally, Jesus seemed pretty expansive in his understanding of who lies within the range of God’s grace. A Syro-phoenician woman, who apparently expanded Jesus’ vision of his own ministry. The Samaritan woman at the well, who engaged Jesus on the subject of worship. A Roman Centurion who Jesus described as having more faith than anyone he’d met in Israel. A child who understood what the kingdom of heaven is all about when adults were dense. You get the point.

In current discourse about who is a real Christian, columnist Cal Thomas (see column on April 8) denied that Christianity was inclusive. He said Christianity is about exclusion for those who refuse its central message of repentance and conversion. I think he’s doing what we all do, reading scripture selectively, reading it in a way that serves our own purpose and, in this case, is anything but good news. 

Which leads to this insight which Jesus gives: Why get all worked up about the speck in somebody else’s eye when you’ve got a honking timber going through your own? When as a kid I was scrapping with my siblings, my grandmother would say: “Take heed to yourself,” which is somewhere in the Bible. Not a bad word for all of us who wonder who is a real Christian. Maybe we don’t need to worry about that. Maybe we should let God worry about that. While God is sorting that out, maybe we can direct our energy elsewhere, like figuring out what we should do to live into Jesus’ call: “By this shall all people know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.” We all have some growth edges there.

Our church would be in much better shape if that became our singular focus.

-Jay Sidebotham

Contact:
Rev. Jay Sidebotham
jsidebotham@renewalworks.org
RenewalWorks is a ministry of Forward Movement.
www.renewalworks.org

SAVE THE DATE

Leading for Discipleship:
A conference especially for those
who have worked with RenewalWorks
Sept. 30-Oct. 2
Wilmington, NC
Registration and more info coming soon!

The following prayer requests appear in the Good Friday Liturgy (page 279 in the Book of Common Prayer) On this Monday in Easter Week, these requests offer a roadmap for the work of Easter:

Let us pray for all who have not received the Gospel of Christ;

For those who have never heard the word of salvation

For those who have lost their faith

For those hardened by sin or indifference

For the contemptuous and the scornful

For those who are enemies of the cross of Christ and persecutors of his disciples

For those who in the name of Christ have persecuted others

That God will open their hearts to the truth and lead them to faith and obedience.

We’ve got Easter work to do

For me, the celebration of Easter was (and remains) awesome. I don’t mean to be Debby Downer, but I’m still thinking about the Good Friday Liturgy. I was struck by a few prayers in that service, included above. In fact, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them, as I consider the state of our church, as I think about how people come to faith, or not. In my heart, I think Easter has something to say about those prayers. They provide some Easter work to do. Let’s look at those petitions one by one:

We pray for those who have never heard the word of salvation: I remember going to see the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. I sat behind a family, two young teenage children with parents explaining, “That’s Jesus. That’s Judas. That’s Mary.” The kids apparently had no idea about the story. I taught a confirmation class to a bunch of teenagers and on the first day, to gauge level, asked them to name the two parts of the Bible. Crickets. Too often I hear people associate faith with rules, with judgment. How might people associate faith with grace, with inclusion? We have Easter work, teaching in a culture that is increasingly unfamiliar with the old, old story of Jesus and his love.

We pray for those who have lost their faith: A report came out last week that said that the fastest growing group in terms of religious affiliation in our nation are those people with no religious affiliation (atheists, agnostics, those self-describing as spiritual not religious). The percentage of population in this category now equals number of Roman Catholics and Evangelicals, all three groups at 23%. Mainline protestant affiliation continues to plummet, now at 11%. Many of the non-affiliated folks were raised in Catholic churches, in evangelical churches, in mainline congregations. I call them the spiritually wounded. Religious refugees. Often, I totally see why they left. We have Easter work, healing work to do.

We pray for those hardened by sin and indifference: In our research into the spiritual vitality of Episcopal churches (sometimes called the frozen chosen), about a quarter of Episcopal congregations can be described as complacent. One such church, with a wink and a nod, said they were changing their tagline. They would now be called, “St. Swithin’s: Spiritually shallow and fine with that.” We have Easter work to do, work of engagement of the heart.

We pray for the contemptuous and the scornful: I think of how social media has affected our discourse about everything, including religion and politics. People who communicate this way (including yours truly) often write things online with contempt and scorn, things they would never say in person. We have Easter work to do, in how we speak the truth in love to each other, while respecting the dignity of every human being, a thing we pledge to do in baptism.

We pray for those who are enemies of the cross of Christ and persecutors of his disciples: So we pray this morning for all Christians suffering for the sake of the gospel, especially for all those who on Easter Day 2019 lost their lives or lost their loved ones in Sri Lanka, as we have prayed for those shot at a bible study in a Charleston church, or the young girl who lost her life in Charlottesville standing against hatred, or those churches which were recent targets of arson. We have Easter work to do, supporting those who face persecution.

For those who in the name of Christ have persecuted others: The brilliant preacher, author, priest Barbara Brown Taylor was recently interviewed by CNN. She talked about how some Christians depict her as an outcast pastor. She calls them the true believers. “True believers are among the meanest people I’ve ever met.” In my own experience, some of the folks who give the most lip service to grace are the most judgmental people I’ve ever met. We have Easter work to do, letting compassion be our highest value.

The Good Friday prayers conclude with this request:
That God will open their hearts to the truth, and lead them to faith and obedience:  God opening hearts. That is Easter work, God’s work. As the stone was rolled away, the grave opened, so the message of resurrection says that hearts can be changed. We get to participate in that work, which begins with asking how our own hearts need to change before we go to work on anybody else’s.

-Jay Sidebotham

Contact:
Rev. Jay Sidebotham
jsidebotham@renewalworks.org
RenewalWorks is a ministry of Forward Movement.
www.renewalworks.org

A prayer for Monday in Holy Week (a.k.a., today)

Almighty God, whose dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other that the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Philippians 2:5-11 (read in many churches yesterday)

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself  and became obedient to the point of death–  even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name  that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Which way?

The first Christians were not called Christians. They were called people of the way. I wonder if we might not be better off if that name had stuck. No prospect of the frozen chosen with a name like that.

What do I like about the name? It presumes movement, growth and transformation. We hear about it as our Presiding Bishop talks about our church as the Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement. We’re part of a movement, folks. We don’t stay put. Pope Francis preached a sermon in which he said that there was no such thing as a stationary Christian, that a Christian is meant to walk or move. That movement is actually part of our healthy identity. We see it in our liturgy as the gospel, the story of Jesus is moved to the center of the people, and as we are moved to come forward to say yes to the bread and wine.

Jesus himself said: “I am the way.”

So which way do we go? That is in many ways the question of Holy Week. The prayer crafted for the Monday in Holy Week (see above), asks that we may find that the way of the cross is the way of life and peace. Paradox alert. Think with me as we begin this Holy Week about what the way of the cross looks like, and how it could possibly also be the way of life and peace.

The way of the cross includes the journey that went from that raucous Palm Sunday procession, with Jesus’ high approval ratings helping him make his way through Jerusalem streets. As we read yesterday, that festive parade soon becomes a crowd pressing for prosecution and execution. On Maundy Thursday, Jesus makes his way from the head of the table to kneel at the feet of disciples. Jesus washes those feet. A big move. Jesus makes his way to the garden where he prays for deliverance from what is to come. In a lesson for me about my prayers, Jesus finds that his prayer is not answered in the way he might have wanted. He makes his way to the hard wood of the cross, where he hangs between heaven and earth, stretching out arms of love to draw us all into his saving embrace. Do you see how the whole week involves movement, from life to death to life?

So what do we make of the way of the cross? How do we walk in that way? Is it a way of humility? Is it a way of service? Is it a way that moves toward confrontation with religious and political power of the day? Is it a way that knows grief and loss, that does not hide from the pain of the world? Is it a way of compassion and sacrifice? Is it a way that extends forgiveness, even and especially to those who don’t deserve it or even ask for it? Is it a way of life and peace?

However you observe Holy Week (and I urge you to dive into as many liturgies as you can. It’ll just deepen the joy of Easter), think about the way of the cross as a way of life. You do have other choices, the gospels tell us. You can choose the way of Pilate, entitled indifference. You can choose the way of Peter, bluster giving way to cowardly denial. You can choose the way of Judas, grasping at your own agenda. You can choose the way of most of the disciples, and just check out, hopping on the first Greyhound out of Jerusalem.

Or we can ask: What does the way of the cross mean for us in this Holy Week? What does that mean in the weeks that follow? May God’s grace allow us to see it as a way of life and peace. 

Apparently our world stands in need of that kind of way. 

-Jay Sidebotham

Contact:
Rev. Jay Sidebotham
jsidebotham@renewalworks.org
RenewalWorks is a ministry of Forward Movement.
www.renewalworks.org

Pray these prayers as you prepare for Holy Week

A preface for the Eucharistic prayer in Lent: You bid your faithful people cleanse their hearts, and prepare with joy for the Paschal feast (i.e., Easter); that, fervent in prayer and in works of mercy, and renewed by your Word and Sacraments, they may come to the fullness of grace which you have prepared for those who love you.

A Prayer for Monday in Holy Week: Almighty God, whose dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other that the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

A Prayer for Tuesday in Holy Week: O God, by the passion of your blessed Son you made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

A Prayer for Wednesday in Holy Week: Lord God, whose blessed Son our Savior gave his body to be whipped and his face to be spit upon: Give us grace to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time, confident of the glory that shall be revealed; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

What makes holy week holy? 

In just a few days, we’ll begin our journey through the week at the heart of the Christian faith. We call this week holy, and the question I want to pose this morning: What makes it so?

We talk about holy places, thin spaces where the distance between heaven and earth diminishes. That can often be churches, or particular corners of churches. A yoga mat can prove to be sacred, set apart. A walk in the woods or on the beach can be holy. A certain chair in a home may be holy.

There are public places that convey holiness. For me, the Lincoln Memorial is one of those, as the gracious, wise, healing words of Lincoln’s second inaugural address are carved into stone. My recent visit to the motel/museum where Martin Luther King lost his life filled me with a sense of holiness. As visitors filed by the small motel room, conversation stopped. We were on holy ground.

We talk about holy times. Next week, for instance. In my experience, that sense of holiness only comes as I pay attention to it, which includes preparing for it. I grew up in a tradition that made a big deal about Easter, but didn’t do a whole lot to observe the days leading up to Easter. My migration to the Episcopal Church taught me that the Easter experience, the power of the message of resurrection, is deepened by observance of the week that precedes. I get glimmers of why that week gets set apart, why it’s holy.

During that week, it’s not like everything else stops (thought that’s a tempting approach). It means that on some level, varying from year to year, I attend to the reason for the season, attend to the message of the various liturgies that unfold during this rich week, in ways great and small.

There’s Palm Sunday, with the spiritual whiplash that begins with the grand Jerusalem parade echoing with hosannas. That grand procession turns quickly to Jesus’ arrest and trial, torture and execution, a reminder that public opinion can shift pretty quickly. We are nothing if not fickle.

There are the first three days of the week, each with their thematic contribution to the story. Check out those stories we read each year. Why do you think we read them?

There is Maundy Thursday, with takes its name from the commandment (mandatum) to show love, to be of service, reflected in the institution of the eucharist and the washing of the disciples’ feet. What does that holy night teach us about putting faith to work in the world? There is Good Friday, which always poses the question of why we call this Friday good. There is Holy Saturday, a day to note that grief often calls simply for silence. All of that gets us ready for Easter beginning with the Great Vigil of Easter, arguably the most awesome liturgy in our Prayer Book (IMHO). All of it can be holy, set apart.

And all of it offers a window into the wholly holy mystery of God’s love at work in the world, God’s love overcoming the worst that the world can dish out. All of it points to the mystery that in the face of human denial, betrayal, violence, abuse, duplicity, cowardice, callousness, in the face of all of that (a gracious plenty), love wins.

That’s what we celebrate in Holy Week. So how might you and I prepare for this week? I can’t say what that will be for you. I’m not sure this year what it will be for me. But God knows. So maybe we can use this last week of Lent to ask God to help us each to experience this holy week as holy.

-Jay Sidebotham

Contact:
Rev. Jay Sidebotham
jsidebotham@renewalworks.org
RenewalWorks is a ministry of Forward Movement.
www.renewalworks.org

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John 1:14
(New Revised Standard Version)

The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, generous inside and out, true from start to finish.

John 1:14 
(The Message) 

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Philippians 2:5-11
(New Revised Standard Version)

Other Worlds

My Lenten journey this year took me to Hawaii. Tough assignment but I was willing to answer the call. That’s the kind of guy I am. On a cloudless day we flew for hours over the Pacific to get to the islands, tiny specks of land in a vast expanse. As I looked out the window of the plane, I wondered what was going on below all that blue surface. It was a mystery, another world, and it led me to think of other other-worlds.

I’m a news hound, with my own political perspective, reinforced by 24/7 news sources that ratify my opinions. I recognize in our partisan culture that there are other news sources supporting other points of view marked by equal intensity. There is another world out there, one that views the world from a wholly different point of view than mine. 

I grew up in a tight church community, part of a denomination that represented about .0001% of Christians in the world. It was all consuming, in some respects inspiring, in some respects toxic. (I suspect that’s true of many religious traditions.) In that culture, we believed we had the answers. Nobody else really did, bless their hearts. My own faith journey has been a matter of discovering other worlds found in other expressions of Christianity and other faith traditions. As I reflect on the intensity of the religious culture of my youth, I wonder about other intense religious cultures. I may never know what it is like to swim in those streams. They may never know what it is like to swim in mine.

As I reflect on my privileged life, I know there are billions of people who live in communities that have been denied the kind of privilege I take for granted. I can’t pretend to know what that is like. I think of the older woman we saw several times in Hawaii, pushing a stroller with all her earthly possessions held in garbage bags, moving along the shoulder of the highway in the hot sun. Appearances indicated she had no home except maybe the woods. I wondered about her story, as daughter, as sibling, perhaps as parent, perhaps as spouse, not to mention, as beloved child of God. I wondered what it was like to live in her world. It was hard to imagine.

Did I mention Hawaii? I was honored to offer a presentation at the annual diocesan convention. Honored with just one hitch. I gave a talk at 11am on a Saturday morning. I looked at the schedule and realized that at 10am, a certain Michael Curry was speaking. I wondered if I was having an anxiety dream, like taking a test for a course I never attended. I felt like changing the title of my talk to this: “And now for something completely different.”

But it was a grand gift to hear him. A part of his gift: he always speaks of love. I’ve heard him talk a few times, but this question was new for me. He asked: Do you know what the opposite of love is? I’ve heard that the opposite of love is hate. That the opposite is fear. He said that the opposite of love was self-centeredness. It’s exemplified, when someone shows me a group photo, one in which I am included. Guess who I look for first?

As I pondered that big blue ocean, its surface hinting at another world, I thought of Jesus as one who entered another world. I thought of Jesus as one who listened to the Samaritan woman at the well, who invited himself to lunch with scoundrel Zacchaeus, who called Matthew, the hated tax collector to be one of his followers, who ate with Pharisees and prostitutes. I thought of Jesus who calls us to go into the world, not to make everyone just like us, but to serve, to share, to show grace, which may well begin with wondering, listening and learning.

The sin of self-centeredness refuses that adventure. (After all, ego is an acronym. It stands for edging God out.) It’s the pride that claims a corner on the truth, that claims with complacency that there is nothing more to learn. It’s the hubris of refusing conversation. It fails to admit we don’t know what we don’t know.

Jesus points to another way, and in the end, to another world. The entry point? Love, compassion, listening, learning. Step into that other world this week. It may be a small step, just putting your toe in. Or you might want to jump right in, taking the plunge.

-Jay Sidebotham

Contact:
Rev. Jay Sidebotham
jsidebotham@renewalworks.org
RenewalWorks is a ministry of Forward Movement.
www.renewalworks.org