SERMON AT ST THOMAS BY LYNN CUNNINGHAM

EASTER 7, May 28, 2006

Acts 1:15-26; I John 5:9-15; John 17:11b-19

1.         Most people enjoy getting new things. New clothes. New jewelry. New cars, new houses, trying out new foods. Visiting new places. In fact, there is also a spiritual dimension that is referred to in the bible and the prayer book as “newness of life”.

2.         If you turn to page 861 of the Catechism in the Book of Common Pray, the question “What is Christian Hope?” is answered by

            a.         “Christian hope is to live with confidence in newness of life and fullness of life, and to await the coming of Christ.”

3.         The phrase newness of life also occurs in Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 6, where he says that we too might walk in newness of life, since we were buried in Christ by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

4.         What is this newness of life? How can a 2000 year old religion talk about newness of life?

5.         Today is the graduation ceremony for the Dubois High School. What is this change for these young people that is honored in the high school graduation ceremony? Students who have labored through the school system most of their lives today are honored for their achievement with a special graduation ceremony moving them onto a new life as high school graduates ready for college or for their new jobs. The graduation ceremony itself does not make this happen, but clearly something new comes into life when one finishes high school, ready to move on to something else.

6.         But the reality of newness of life is not confined to recognition at high school graduation. If we look around at our congregation, you can see people of a wide range of ages, from new born babies, young children, folks in the middles ages of life, and some of us who are well along in years.

7.         Zoe Eakin seems to be rehearsing to become one of the preachers to this congregation.

8.         Those of us who have been privileged to live for many decades still have, I observe, a sense of the newness of life and hope for the future. I believe this is because one of the qualities of creation itself seems to be that it is ever new, each day. I believe that God creates the world anew in each moment. You and I experience this creation in the way life seems to bring one surprising new thing after another, some good and some bad.

9.         Young children seem best able to bring to each moment a profound sense of how new and strange the world is in each moment. Childhood at its best is a time of exploring and continually seeing new things. When life has been lived for only a few weeks or months, there is so much more that is new to explore and discover. The phrase newness of life can easily be understood with very young children.

10.       As the years of life begin to add up, however, and memories and experiences start to fill up our minds, the way a person encounters the world begins to be shaped by what they have already experienced.

11.       For example, as a small baby, I had trouble taking milk from my mother, when I was still nursing. So my early years were fraught with unease about drinking milk. I grew up never liking the taste of regular milk. This made for some complex emotions in my family during my early years, since in the 1950's all children were expected to drink regular milk for their health. Moreover, my father was professor of farm management, and his specialty was dairy farming. So milk formed an important part of our family life, and avoiding drinking milk was not an option for me as a child. I was well into adulthood before people started talking about lactose intolerance, and the apparently basic fact that cows milk is really meant to feed baby cows, not baby humans. One of the new things I had to discover as a very small child was that milk tasted disagreeable, yet was something that had to be drunk every day. I brought echoes of that experience of food with me into adulthood.

12.       Probably if we went around church today, every person here could come up with events from early childhood that left certain situations for you fraught with an emotional complexity that is just below the surface of awareness, and yet hard to ignore.

13.       In fact, all human encounters can be fraught with emotions that come out of our histories, patterns of reacting that were laid down in our earliest years. Much of who each of us is, comes from our personal histories. For example, looking at someone’s job resume can reveal a surprising amount about their personality, because the jobs and career choices they made show much about the kind of person they have become.

14.       Becoming an adult basically means building up a kind of protective shell of emotional habits around oneself, ways of being and thinking about the world, attitudes about the way the world is, some good, some not so good.

15.       All these habits and shells, and attitudes sometimes can get in the way of experiencing the newness that life brings.

16.       So how is God supposed to go about getting close to us as adults, if every encounter a person has is already fraught with emotions and feelings about how the world is? In fact, most people as adults seem to have pretty well made up their minds about who God is, and whether to believe in God at all or not. How is God supposed to go about getting through to a person in this state?

17.       And in America, where individualism reigns supreme, most Americans think that it is their God-given right to believe whatever they please about God, or about organized religion, or about politics, or about the state of the world. Freedom of religion and the right to form our own opinions about God and politics is one of the values that is honored most highly on this Memorial Day weekend.

18.       Most Americans approach the holy as an experience which is fraught with childhood emotions about religion, and with a powerful sense of entitlement to believe whatever they please. I have heard a number of people in Dubois say that they would never go back to church, since their childhood experiences of church were so negative or so boring. This is understandable. If you went to see a movie and it turned out to be a lousy movie, would you want to back and see it again? I doubt it. But what if you saw a movie as a child and then happened to see it again as an adult, and discovered the second time there was more to the movie than you realized the first time you saw it?

19.       But just because a person had bad experiences with church life as child or as a young adult, does not mean that that person has no spiritual needs. Moreover, not attending church and not learning more about Christianity can leave a person without any language or ideas or hope for handling the spiritual crises brought on by death, or severe injury and illness, or just any of life’s crises. Several times in doing pre-marital counseling for a young couple who are unchurched, they have no clue about how to bring God into their married life.

20.       I would like to see St. Thomas continue to practice the openness and tolerance towards persons who wants to walk in our doors, no matter what kind of experience with church they might have had in the past, but still challenge them and each of us to come more deeply into the richness that Christianity has to offer.

21.       When a member here just says, well, I am going to come to church and believe whatever I please, I am going to accept God in my life only on my own terms, that kind of approach can be acceptable, but it risks that person missing out on the depth of Christianity. That kind of approach can mean staying trapped in some negative old habits from childhood. Just because the church experience is fraught with emotions from your past, does not mean that that is all Christianity has to offer. Most people want newness of life. Most people hope for more out of church than what happened in the past. How can we as a church community help members here celebrate more deeply genuine newness of life and get past the fraughtness that usually brought to religion?

22.       Clearly God accepts and loves each person profoundly. The Bible story makes this crystal clear in story after story, teaching after teaching. When Jesus prays to the Father says, as he does in today’s Gospel, “they may be one, as you and I are one”, he is expressing the deep unity among himself and God the Father, and among you and me as his followers. God invites us more and more deeply into relationship with him, in a kind of newness of life that is hard to fathom.

23.       Think about it, and I said this in the confirmation service sermon a week ago, Saturday: the psalm 139 is quite clear: God knew us when our bones were being knit together in the womb. God created the world in the beginning and in that sense knew that we were to be part of his creation from the beginning. Many of you were baptized as little babies, before you had any idea of what this world was all about. Jesus died for us more than 2000 years ago, died for each one of us, and so God was deeply prepared for what we were to become. God sent the Holy Spirit into the world well before we were born to reveal God’s truth in the world.

24.       So here we come into this-God created world, which is ablaze with the Holy Spirit, and instead our everyday life is lived out fraught, there is that word again, with the experiences of our childhood. Too often we live our daily life trapped in the feelings, and thoughts, and habits that we learned long ago, unless we are fortunate enough, like Zoe, to be just on the start of the journey of life.

25.       And so, there is a kind of paradox in Christianity. And the paradox is, Christ is always instantly available to us every day, in newness of life, and yet it may take a lifetime of prayer and study to prepare ourselves to incorporate Christ into the existing habits of daily living.

26.       It may take a lifetime of prayer and study to learn to hold the biases, and prejudices about life, which every one has in one way or another at bay. By holding them at bay the newness, and Godly createdness of it all can wash into you, as if you were still a new born child.

27.       Prayer and study. I promised two weeks ago in my sermon, then, to find a way to provide more adult Christian education opportunities, even during the summer months.

28.       Here are my proposals:

            a.         A four week series of classes to delve into the Gospel of John using the book by the theologian, William Countryman, called, the Mystical Way of the Fourth Gospel.

            b.         A four week series of classes on preparing for the end of life: the spiritual, emotional, and legal preparations that can be made to prepare for the end of our lives on this earth.

            c.         A weekly meeting to do bible study together on a topic of mutual interest. Perhaps, for example, the class could study the Exodus story, since that seems to be the least familiar narrative to many of you.

29.       In addition, I want to hold some one day retreats:

            a.         including another quiet day at some;

            b.         a walking retreat, perhaps up to Lake Louise or Double Cabin;

            c.         And a one day retreat built around the theme of healing in mind and body and spirit.

30.       My plan is to ask around among you briefly for you ideas, and then simply to announce a date or dates for these things, and then see who signs up for each one. If no one signs up for a class, then we can skip it for now.

31.       Real study and prayer is needed to find the newness of life that God intends for us, in spite of our emotional histories. Genuine membership in an open and tolerating community such as St Thomas is deepened by seeking God with as much passion as God is seeking us.

32.       In Jesus name, Amen.