Sermon for the Episcopal Church of St John the Baptist, Capitola,
given by Rev. Steve Ellis/October 21, 2007


  The Episcopal Church of Saint John the Baptist welcomes all to worship God and to share
Christ's love in the world.  We are a parish family committed to provide liturgy, Bible study, music, counseling, and Christian education for children, youth, and adults, and to equip all our members for life and for service to other

Genesis 32:22-31 The same night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me." So he said to him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob." Then the man said, "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed." Then Jacob asked him, "Please tell me your name." But he said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved." The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. 

2 Timothy 3:14-4:5  As for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 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.

     In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.

Sermon

     God loves Jacob.  Grasping, cunning, scheming scoundrel that he is, God loves him and believes in him way too much to leave him be.  And when Jacob finally wrestles with God he emerges a new man, fit for leadership, with a new name for himself and his people. God’s agenda was to fit Jacob for leadership.  To make him the great leader Israel.

     When St. Paul writes a young pastor he has ordained, he urges Timothy to make his people wrestle with the Scriptures so that they may be formed into leaders: "so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work."  Being formed for leadership isn’t theoretical.  You can’t teach someone who isn’t engaged in the struggles of life.  Jacob can only face God and learn when enemy armies are going to arrive the next morning, when he can’t escape any longer.  Then he learns the power of God.  And we all learn faith and leadership best in times of testing. 

     Do you know the story of the terrible plane crash in Chile, in Oct. 1972?  Forty-five people crashed high in the Andes, and over the next two months 29 of them died of avalanche, hunger & exposure.  Ordinary people turned into leaders in that time of testing, and finally two leaders decided to walk out and get help.  After all they’d endured, they reached the summit of a 17,000 foot peak wearing their street clothes, hoping to see a green valley and civilization, and found nothing but snow and more mountains in every direction.

     Nando Parado writes of that terrible moment: I don’t know how long I stood there, staring.  A minute, maybe two.  I stood motionless until I felt a burning pressure in my lungs, and realized I had forgotten to breathe.  I cursed God and raged at the mountains.  The truth was before me: for all my striving, all my hopes, all my whispered promises to myself and my father, it would end like this.  We would all die in these mountains.  We would sink beneath the snow, and ancient silence would fall over us, and our loved ones would never know how hard we had struggled to return to them.  In that moment, all my dreams, assumptions, and expectations of life evaporated into the thin Andean air.  My love for my father swelled in my heart, and I realized that, despite the hopelessness of my situation, the memory of him filled me with joy.  It staggered me.  The mountains, for all their power, were not stronger than my attachment to my father.  They could not crush my ability to love.  I felt a moment of calmness and clarity, and in that clarity of mind I discovered a simple, astounding secret: Death has an opposite, but the opposite is not mere living. . . The opposite of death is love.  How had I missed that?  How does anyone miss that?  Only love can turn mere life into a miracle and draw precious meaning from suffering and fear.  For a brief, magical moment, all my fears lifted, and I knew that I would not let death control me.  I would walk through the godforsaken country that separated me from my home with love and hope in my heart.  I would walk until I had walked all the life out of me, and when I fell, I would die that much closer to my father.

     Jesus lived a path much like that.  Leadership is living for love’s sake.

     Much of our culture is at sea without a compass, without GPS, when it comes to values and vision of the good life and the good society. Herbert O’Driscoll said, years ago at clergy conference, that there hasn’t been a time – since the Middle Ages were dying and the Enlightenment beginning – when the governing paradigm is as little trusted, by most people, in their bones. People don’t know what to trust.  The old answers seem tired.  The new answers, if you can find them, seem shallow, untested, and people lose courage and just - serve themselves.

     During that change people were in moral and intellectual chaos.  We, too, are between the ages, and we do not know what the new consensus will be.  And while the broad culture still continues compulsively to pursue technical knowledge and wealth, we are not satisfied with the answers they give; we are obsessed with them rather than satisfied.

     It isn’t that the Christian faith has been tried and found wanting.  It is that our vocabulary has changed so much – the broad symbols by which we get hold of life, our vision of the good life, our understanding of what makes a good person – this vocabulary has changed so much that for many it is hard to see how faith is relevant. 

     How many people ask these days what they can do for God’s sake?  What they can do for their country?  Their community?  The symbols that are constantly before us are of acquisition, of power, of license to do as we please passing itself off as freedom.

     The world is becoming one.  We see it from the vantage point of outer space, and know that it is small and vulnerable and we are interdependent.  We see ourselves increasingly as one small and possibly insignificant spot on the periphery of an ever expanding universe.  Every faith on earth, not just Christianity, now asks itself, "can my faith be right if other good people have a different tradition?". We watch governments the world around fight one another over resources.  We have the ability to annihilate ourselves, and we don’t know if the hand of God would stop us, how often it might have stopped us from destroying the human race.

     These questions are not new, but if faith is to help, it must be understood and stated anew, it has to be won again, spoken in ways that can be understood by this generation.  So many people who were raised without a faith and people who have misplaced their faith, need us to speak to them not pretending we have all the answers, but need us to stand with them as people who have hope.  We can make that hope contagious, if we let them articulate the questions and we ask our own and walk with them through these things.  We’re well-equipped, supported as we are by the Sacraments, by daily prayers, by the Scriptures and a life formed in the baptismal promises.

     That is a form of leadership.  It is the very stewardship of the gospel of Christ, which exists in the world today because there are communities of people who are being transformed by Christ, who are carrying on Jesus’ forgiveness and fellowship and justice.  If it exists in the world tomorrow (this has been true in every age) it will be because we have carried it to tomorrow.  It only moves through time and space as it is embodied in the lives of those who share its sacraments, study its Scriptures, live its principles and walk with the living God.  If other’s learn faith it will be because we have been an exemplar of hope for others.  Maybe by our SHINING example.  Maybe by our stubborn refusal to let go of the questions even though we can’t answer them as we continue to reach for God and for one another, because that is where God meets us. 

     Sometimes our leadership is simply to stand in a world afraid to hope, and to say, "You know, I’ve asked those questions, too, but I stand here as one who believes that this path leads to life. This faith is how I grapple with reality and to let God take me to deeper, to more committed living.  I find the Divine as elusive as you, maybe, when I demand that God give answers on my terms and in my time; but I also find the Divine relentless in the pursuit of my heart and my mind and my will.  I find that these questions won’t go away, that the other people God has put on my heart won’t go away, their need for justice won’t go away, their need for hope won’t go away. That my need to live in a just society and be just myself won’t let me alone, that my need for Jesus’ forgiveness won’t go away – and that’s God at work in me."

     So the way you lead isn’t by being some paragon, but to be who you are, where you are on the journey.  That’s what evangelism is.  That’s what stewardship of the gospel is.  The world is dying for people who will show up, and lead in this simple way.  And like Nando Parado on that mountaintop, only love could make you do it.

     I am blessed to look at leadership in so many forms:


     What luck is God having forming you for leadership?