Living The Kingdom Life: A Sermon For The Third Sunday After Epiphany

It's been a long time since this blog was a regular thing.   I feel like I am slowly getting back to some kind of normal after the death of my wife Kay in November.  I miss her enormously, but I felt her keen intellect and critical eye on my work as I prepared this sermon.  It's a wonderful parish and I'm so grateful to be their honourary priest.  Hopefully you'll see more activity from me here in the days and weeks to come.  MP+








Preached at St. Margaret of Scotland Anglican Church, Diocese of Toronto, Barrie, Ontario, on Sunday, 21 January 2018, The Third Sunday After Epiphany.


Readings for this Sunday: Jonah 3:1-5,10; Psalm 62:5-12; 1 Corinthians 7:9-31; Mark 1: 14-20.

14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, 15 and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news." 16 As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. 17 And Jesus said to them, "Follow me and I will make you fish for people." (Mark 1:14-17)

Cartoon courtesy of www.agnusday.org 

A good adventure story begins with an invitation.   Sometimes that invitation is hard to refuse.   A wizard and might descend on a hapless hobbit and drag him off to a dangerous and lonely mountain.  A mysterious wardrobe may tempt some children to a magic realm called Narnia.   A wandering rabbi might appear on the lakeshore and turn some fisherman’s world upside down.  

Today’s gospel reading, like last Sunday, is about that moment of invitation.   Jesus’ call to Simon and Andrew is just two simple words, “Follow me”.  Jesus doesn’t say anything about where they will go, how they will get there, or what they will do when they get there, but then again, you want suspense at the start of an adventure.   However, like any good adventure, there is a special destination -- the kingdom of God -- and unlike the magical realms of J.R.R. Tolkien, or the land of Narnia, it’s not imaginary.   The kingdom of God is real.  It’s now.  It’s close.

Today I want to talk about what it means when we say yes to those words of invitation:  “Follow me”.   I want to look at what it means to be a follower of Jesus, and at how Jesus invites us to follow him to a place called the kingdom of God.   Finally I want to talk about what the kingdom of God means, not just for us as individuals, and not even just as a church called St. Margaret’s and St. Giles, but in fact for us as The Church everywhere and always, as the means by which God shows himself to the world and by which he asks us to join him in his plan to save the world.

First, let’s think about what it means to follow someone.  “Follow” is an important word in the Gospels.  We heard Jesus use it last Sunday, in John’s gospel, to call Philip and then Nathaniel.            Now sometimes we use “follow” very casually, as when a business invites us to follow them on social media, but its significance is much more than that.   This past Thursday, those of us who were at Faith on Tap did some brainstorming around this question.   We talked about how to follow can be a very deliberate act.  To follow someone is to go where that person goes, to do what they do, to learn what they know.   To follow someone means to emulate them, to strive to be like them in a meaningful and transformative way. 

So when Jesus says “follow me” to the fishermen, or to you and me, for that matter, he isn’t just saying “hey, guys, let’s go somewhere”.   He’s inviting them to spend time with him, to learn from him, and to grow and change as people.  Jesus speaks as a rabbi or teacher here, inviting the fishermen to become his students, or to use the Greek word, his disciples.   A disciple in the ancient world was someone who learned by sitting at the feet of a wise and learned teacher.   St. Paul frequently gets at this when he talks about putting on the mind of Christ (Phil 2.5, 1 Cor 2.16).   To follow Jesus is to know him well enough that we become, well, Christlike in what we do and think and say.  After all, as much as we might use the slogan “What would Jesus do?” when confronted with a difficult life choice, we have no way of answering that question unless we know how Jesus thinks, and we can only learn how he thinks by spending time with him and attentively listening to him.

Following Jesus, therefore, is a decision to accept his invitation to follow, and to deliberately and carefully strive to become more like Jesus.  However, as soon as we use words like “decision”, we make it sound like this is all about our choice as individuals to respond to Jesus’ invitation, and that the ensuing relationship is all about this thing that happens between me and Jesus.   But it’s not, because there are other people in the relationship.

Being a follower of Jesus isn’t something that we do by ourselves.   We may think that the process begins with our decision to follow Jesus and to believe in him, but its more than that.  In our gospel reading, Jesus calls Simon and Andrew, James and John to join the twelve and the others, including women, who follow them.  To follow Jesus is to join together with other followers.   Think of it this way.  You made a personal decision to visit St. Margaret’s, and then you made another decision to stay, as my wife Kay and I did over a year ago.   However, despite that choice, St. Margaret’s is not you.  It’s all the people around you, all of us, trying as best we can to follow Jesus and to be more like him.

This brings us to the destination of our journey as followers of Jesus.   Mark tells us that before Jesus met the fishermen, he was preaching a message “that the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near” (1:15).   What is this kingdom?  Where is it?   Jesus says that it is real (“it has come near” – it’s already happened) and that it is near.   Almost in the same breath, Jesus says “repent and believe in the good news” (1:15), as if these things, repent and believe, are the ways we get to the kingdom.   Repent to us often has a moralistic quality, as in “to feel sorry for something”, but the Greek word “metanoia” can mean “a change of mind or a new way of thinking”. 

One commentary about this verse suggests that Jesus is saying something like this.  “The kingdom of heaven is so close – wrap your minds around this new reality”.   Or maybe “Try to understand this amazing thing, that the kingdom of God is just next store”.   So, to go back to our idea of the journey, Jesus’ words to the disciples, “follow me”, assumes a destination, “the kingdom of God”.  Jesus is saying, in effect, follow me and we can get to this amazing place, the kingdom of God, if you dare to believe it.

It’s natural for us to think that the kingdom of God means heaven, the place we go to at our live’s end.  I know that as my wife Kay was dying, she firmly believed that she was going to God, and that she would be safe when she got there.   However, I think that Jesus also links the kingdom of God to our decision to follow him on earth.  If we want to be followers of Jesus, if we want to learn from him and to become more like him, then we not only come closer to the kingdom of God, but we make that kingdom more visible for others, which is perhaps the most important role of the church.  Here are three examples of how that can work.

Take money and wealth.  We live in an age of growing inequality, where crazy amounts of wealth are gathered into the hands of fewer and fewer people, and where it becomes increasingly acceptable to blame the poor for being somehow lazy and corrupt.   Jesus has a lot to say about how we should use our money, and tells us that the way we treat the least among us is how we treat him (Matthew 25:40).   As I write this sermon, I know that our treasurer and corporation are carefully reviewing our year end numbers, and say that St. Margaret’s is doing pretty well.   So at our vestry, or around our family dinner tables, how can we talk about how we as followers of Jesus should use our money and our wealth to make the kingdom of God visible?


Take gender.  We live in an age of the Me Too movement, where women in the entertainment industry and in business are telling us that the sexism and abuse of powerful men has to stop.  Almost every day we here about domestic violence and murder directed against ordinary women and children in our communities.   What should we as followers of Jesus learn from how he treated the women around him?  The scholar and novelist Dorothy Sayers once famously said that “it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross”, because Jesus never once in all his teaching suggested that women were in no way inferior or in any way deficient to men.   How can we, in our lives as a congregation, in our homes and workplaces, show that all people, regardless of gender or orientation, are fully loved and equal citizens of the kingdom of God?

Or take power.   Some people say that we live in an age where freedom is more and more the exception, where tyranny and repression are more and more common around the earth.  Governments have huge powers of electronic and digital surveillance, journalists are threatened, and minorities like the Rohingya in Maynmar/Burma can be terrorized and driven from their lands.   In fact, at the very start of Mark’s gospel, Jesus comes preaching “after John was arrested” (1:14), so oppressive regimes are nothing new.  If we truly want to be his followers, then Jesus can teach us much about how God’s power has nothing to do the supposed strength of kings and emperors.   In our Faith on Tap discussion this week, we asked Jesus’ politics and asked if he was in fact a socialist, but maybe that’s the wrong question to ask.  We use political labels to build up our side and tear down those we disagree with.    How can we, as a congregation, set aside these labels so that we can really listen to Jesus and try to model our lives and actions on the justice of the kingdom of heaven, where all are created by God and loved and valued by God?

Let me close by returning to the idea of the invitation to adventure.   In the best stories, any good adventure is difficult.  The hobbits suffer to get the ring to Mount Doom.  The children who find Narnia must fight to defend it from the White Witch.   Jesus asks more of us.  Later in Mark’s gospel, he explains that anyone who wants to be his disciple must take up their cross and follow me (Mk 8:34).   To be a follower of Jesus is not an easy thing.  To be a follower of Jesus is to sacrifice our self-importance once we realize that every other follower has equal value.  To be a follower is to have demands made on our time, our money, to be willing to sacrifice friendships if needs be because we have to say things and live out values that might not be popular.   To be a follower is to be willing to have our comfortable values and assumptions challenged and turned upside down.  But that’s what we agree to when we follow Jesus.   “The kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe in the good news”.   Or, if you like, “The kingdom of heaven is so close – wrap your minds around this new reality”. 


Jesus is calling.  Are you ready for an adventure?

 MP+

The Nativity Pageant: A Sermon For The Third Sunday of Avent

A shorter sermon for this Sunday. MP

Preached at St. Margaret of Scotland Anglican Church, Diocese of Toronto, Barrie, ON, Sunday, 17 December, 2017

Truly there is nothing quite so wonderful and so real in the life of the church as a Christmas pageant.   Those children shuffling about in bathrobes and towels, pretending to be shepherds and angels and Joseph and Mary - we know them, they are our children, our grandchildren, and we watch them with pride and, perhaps, a little suspense as we hope nothing goes wrong.  (And goodness, so much can go wrong!  Some time I’ll tell you about my disastrous idea of giving the wise men a bag of chocolate coins to be the gold).  

 We are warmed by the innocence of this children, and some of us, perhaps, feel saddened at memories of children we know, now grown, who once played shepherd and Mary and angel and who are now missing from the life of the church.  Or maybe we are saddened by the passage of time, by our own lost innocence, or uncertainty about whether the message of this little play can compete with what Christmas has become out there in the world.  

So for me, at least, this mix of innocence and lost innocence is why I feel a mix of emotions when watching a children’s Christmas pageant.   its the same jumble of feelings I get from listening (and I do, many times each Christmas) to the famous jazz soundtrack to the Charlie Brown Christmas, composed way back in 1965 by Vince Guaraldi.  The untrained children’s voices singing “Christmas Time is Here”, or“Hark the Herald Angels Sing” are full of simplicity and innocence, while the slow minor chords of the jazz piano add a layer of sadness and speak of lost innocence.

This year I got to wondering, why do we as church ask our children to act out the Christmas story for us?  What is it about this particular story that makes us turn it into a children’s event.  Perhaps it is the raw bones of the story, wondrous and simple, which seem to come out of children’s literature - a barn, animals, a magical star, a family with mommy, daddy and baby, mysterious visitors and kings no less!   You couldn’t do better than that for a bedtime story, really.  

But at the same time there is real substance and power in this story.  Gabriel setting aside the fear and shame of Mary at her pregnancy, the angels telling the shepherds not to be afraid of God, the startling and awe-inspiring fact of just who it is lying in that manger - all this is the essence of our theology, the heart of our church’s message.   St John in his gospel puts this message into abstract terms - “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14), but the nativity stories of Matthew and Luke put it in real, concrete terms that any of us can understand.  Somehow, that’s the living God in that manger, Emmanuel, God with us, the Word made Flesh with little fingers and toes and we aren’t alone and we don’t have to be afraid of anything.   

That’s a story so simple that children can tell it.  It’s a story with God at its very centre, a story with so much power that perhaps only children can really tell it.   Perhaps this is true of all the church’s proclamation.   The American writer Annie Dillard once wrote that the liturgy of the church is like children playing with a chemistry set, trying to make TNT.  Her point was that we scarcely imagine the power of the one whose name we invoke in our worship.  Every Sunday we are like children, trying in our eucharist to imagine the heavenly feast, playing in our fellowship at the communion of the saints who are before the heavenly throne.  These children who have just told the Christmas story are us, Sunday by Sunday, and how true and honest our worship would our worship be if we approached it with the wonder and innocence of children?

These stories that we tell, Sunday by Sunday, Christmas after Christmas, are not make believe or children’s stories, though same out there might think so.   Like children trying on their parents clothes and makeup, we know that we are imitating something real, that we are on the edge of a reality that we aspire to grow into.   In the meantime, the church’s role in this dark and preoccupied world is like Linus at the end of a Charlie Brown Christmas, stepping into the spotlight, and in his lisping, child’s voice telling the nativity story in the words of St. Luke’s gospel, a story that begins with shepherds abiding in the field, and the angel of the Lord telling them to fear not, for a saviour is born to them.  Those shepherds are us, our friends and neighbours, preoccupied, afraid, and called to salvation by a story so wonderful that perhaps only a child can truly tell it.

MP+

A Eulogy For My Wife

 

 

 

Kay Leslie Brown

6 July, 1952 - 25 November, 2017

Funeral Eulogy

St. Margaret of Scotland Anglican Church, Barrie, ON, 3 December, 2017

Bishop Shaw, dear colleagues, friends, fellow parishioners, on behalf of my family and Kay’s family, I thank you all for joining us today to pray for and to remember an extraordinary person and faithful Christian, Kay Leslie Brown.   Kay received so many acts of kindness and compassion from so many of you during her long illness that any words of gratitude I could offer would be wholly inadequate.

 

Kay was always tickled that when we were married, three priests and a postulant, so, for you non-Anglicans,  three and a half priests, officiated at our wedding.  I think we have that number beaten today, as there must be a small platoon of clergy and chaplains present.  Kay would enjoy that fact.

 

As I wrote this eulogy, I was mindful that Kay would probably not have had much interest in what I said about her, because she would never have wanted to be the focus of this event.   Kay designed this funeral, chose the readings and the hymns, so that it would be about her God.

 

For Kay, the words of the liturgy, the proclamation of the word, and the faithful preaching of the gospel were what mattered.  That was the exacting standard that she held my own sermons up to.  If I saw her frowning face in the congregation, I knew I wasn’t doing well.  Sometimes, in the car on the way home, she’d say “You did OK.” When it came to preaching, she was my fiercest and best critic.

 

In that respect, Kay always reminded me of the figure of John the Baptist, as painted in the Isenheim Altarpiece in the 1500s by Matthias Gunewald.  John is depicted off to the side, pointing to the figure of Christ on the cross.   The theologian Karl Barth loved this painting.  I know that Kay would be rolling her eyes at my working a theologian into her eulogy, but darling, you always knew that I was a geek.   

 

Barth said that the church must always be like John in that painting, not calling attention to itself, but rather directing attention to the cross and to Christ’s work there in defeating our enemy of sin and death.   That was Kay, like John the Baptist, always pointing to the cross.  Anytime she spoke up in the life of the church, you could be sure that would be asking, often impatiently, where was God in all our human activity.

 

However, darling, I am not here as a priest or a preacher.   I am here to talk about you and about what a privilege it was to be your husband.   So bear with me.  I’ll speak about you briefly, and then get out of the way of the church’s true business, as you would want.  

 

Kay fought a two front war with cancer and diabetes, and in the last year of that struggle she wrote a bible study on how our faith helps us to deal with pain and suffering.   She spoke on that subject with great authority.   People often told me how they were in awe of Kay’s calm, even serene, composure.  As she liked to say, God gave her “the peace which passes all understanding”.  

Despite four significant surgeries in three years, and long hospitalizations, Kay was gracious and kind with others.   As her body slowly failed her, she never gave in to self-pity or despair.   I saw her comfort other patients, nurses, and even embrace the young doctor who burst into tears as she told Kay that she had reached the end of what medicine could do for her and that she would soon die.  A priest friend of mine told me that he went to the hospital to bless Kay, and he came away blessed.  So while I regret that Kay never got to lead that bible study on living with pain and suffering, a friend pointed out to me the other day that, in a very real way, she did teach that lesson, just by the way she lived and died.

 

Kay would have been the first to tell you that her peacefulness and calm did not come from within, but rather were spiritual gifts.   Kay was not a saint, and she was not always a person of faith.   In her youth, she liked to say that she was, in her words, “a flaming atheist”.   In her passion for research and for the scientific method, Kay convinced herself that she had to jettison her faith, but God had other plans.  In the twenty years I was at her side, I saw Kay struggle with God’s call.  I think God had the upper hand in that struggle, because God simply reminded Kay of who she was and of who she had always been.

 

Kay was always a person attuned to God’s justice and grace.  Growing up in the southern United States in the 1950s and 60s, Kay saw things that would stay with her all her life.  She often told me how, as a girl, she didn’t understand why there were separate water fountains for coloured people.   At the same time she saw her father, a devoted civil servant, give the same care to black clients as he did to white ones.   Martin Luther King was one of her early and lifelong heroes.  Kay always believed that the moral arc of the universe bent towards the good, even if she stopped believing, for a while, that the moral arc came from and led back to God.  

 

Despite being a profound introvert at times, she attracted the misfits and the hurting, who sensed her compassion and patience.  Kay had deep reserves of empathy and kindness.   Even while she was still a self-proclaimed “flaming atheist”, she paid the tuition of a friend so she could go to seminary.    She gave freely because she had a big heart, an innate sense of decency, and an ability to see the other’s point of view.

 

What led Kay back to God is a long story.   I think partly it was circumstances, the people and places that God led us to, and I think it was also the frustration of her hopes to make a career in science and academia.   Kay had dreamed of winning a Nobel prize, and her academic career ended in frustration, partly due to bad luck and partly due to Kay’s struggles with mental illness.  I was attracted to Kay because of her warmth, humour, and creativity, but I soon realized that these moments came at a cost.  She had violent swings into depression and despair, and her darkest period was when she had to walk away from the university environment that she had built her identity on.

 

I don’t doubt for a second that it was God who led Kay out of that dark valley.  It took years for us to build a new life together.   Her career was ending as mine was taking off and that was a source of tension as well.   We learned the hard way how to build a marriage based on mutual respect, careful listening, giving and taking.  Early on I mostly took, and Kay gave, a lot.  She found satisfaction in building elaborate and beautiful gardens, in which she combined a scientific method with the flair and soul of an artist, and then she had to walk away from them, repeatedly.   Becoming a military spouse, at an age when most people are looking forward to settling down and staying in one place, meant that she had to move, frequently, and that got harder and harder on her.   Soldiers get the medals, but really the medals should go to spouses like Kay, who gave so much to advance my career.

 

I think the last ten years of her life were probably the best.  Kay found the right psychiatrist and the right medication, and the black clouds of her depression mostly lifted and vanished.   She made friends, and opened her house to others - wandering chaplains, military people far from home, strays and misfits - all were welcome at her table.  Kay thrived in a series of churches - St. Barnabas in Medicine Hat, St. Columba’s in Waterloo, and, of course, here.  I have no doubt that Kay could have made significant contributions to the life of St. Margaret’s and St. Giles in the years to come, had it pleased God to leave her with us.  I also have no doubt that God completed his work in Kay, by bringing her to a good place in these years.  Kay’s deep and integral goodness, her joyfulness and compassion for others, her plain speaking and prophetic voice, all these things came through strongly.  Kay was no longer a flaming atheist, she was simply flaming, a bright beacon of God’s power to bind up and restore.

 

I will always be profoundly grateful for the privilege of being Kay’s husband.  In my mind’s eye I will always see her as she was, her strong and capable hands weeding a garden or paddling a stream, her mouth quirked in wonder or humour, her eyes wide and seeing the beauty of the world and the people around her.   In her last years, as she grew increasingly sick and frail, Kay would talk about the resurrection body that God would give her.   She hoped that when she got to heaven, that God would give her some challenging scientific assignment, like designing a new plant species, or managing a supernova.   No sitting around playing the harp for Kay! I have no doubt that one day we will look on Kay again, in whatever form God pleases to give her, and that she will burn as bright and fierce and glorious as any star in heaven.