Sermons by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
The Holy Spirit Called Us to Kingston
By Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Sermon at the Sharing the Bread Festival
May 9, 1998 -- At the Armory in Kingston, PADo you remember Jackie Gleason? He began his shows with an almost-quotation from the Psalms ... "How sweet it is!" What else can I say to you? How sweet it is. How sweet it is when God's people live in the unity and community we have here today. How sweet it is that so many people, women and men, lay and ordained, from every district in the diocese, musicians from Pittsburgh and our dearly loved bishop from Virginia, have worked to make this day a gift to the Diocese!
How sweet it is, and how profoundly and humbly grateful I am that this day is an offering of hundreds of sisters and brothers to the glory of God and for the good of the household of faith. They have driven to meetings and rehearsals; they have prayed, planned, and schlepped; they have put up with me and one another; they have set up and tended all the exhibits and learning centers today; they've done thousands of tasks. Then there's the rest of the assembly who have taken their Saturday, packed up the kids, ridden the busses.
And having made these efforts, we are all here with the same words on our lips: To God be the glory. How truly, blessedly, hilariously, unexpectedly sweet it is to be here today.
We have had roughly twelve percent of our baptized membership here today. If the Episcopal Church as a whole would gather a similar assembly, it would be three hundred thousand strong. I hope David Laquintano and the sandwich-makers are not listening at this point! But lest we get off on the wrong foot about this crowd, it's well to remember the closing scene of The Devil's Advocate, a film I am not recommending, by the way. At the end, the Devil stares right into the camera and says, "Vanity is my favorite sin." Because no matter how good a deed you do is, he'll be standing at your shoulder asking you to think that it's you.
But rather than celebrate our numbers today as any achievement of ours, I believe that the Holy Spirit has been lovingly but insistently calling us to Kingston for eighteen months, lovingly but insistently calling us to celebrate the wonderful gifts God gives us in northeast Pennsylvania, calling us to share laughter, food, and song with one another, calling us to rejoice as we continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers, calling us to do the Christian thing: celebrating life in Jesus Christ. Live God's love: tell what you have seen and heard.
That new mission statement comes from our renewed sense of ourselves as people through whom God wants to bless men and women and children in northeast Pennsylvania. In the Diocese of Bethlehem, Hebrew for the "House of Bread," or just "bakery," we have been called to share the bread of life with those whose minds and hearts are starving. Let me explain that.
We have almost two complete generations in America who in their schoolbooks and on television have been told that life is the result of a bizarre accident millions and millions of years ago, and that that is all there is, period. It's perfectly logical for them to conclude that life has no meaning or purpose, and so life can mean whatever you say it means, and if it feels good do it.
That is spiritual anorexia, and it terrifies me because for so many people in my generation there's been a confusion between "having" and "living." Americans are working longer hours than they did 20 years ago to maintain not quite the same standard of living, one that the rest of the industrialized nations can barely imagine - and, having all that, the pollsters tell us we're still not happy.
But something terrifies me even more about our culture of meaninglessness. The very concept of moral standards that we all have to obey is almost unthinkable in our world today. Last year at a major university a professor took a survey in his course. About 85% of the students were willing to say that what Hitler and the Nazis did in the death camps was wrong. But most of them would not say that the Holocaust was absolutely wrong, because they didn't feel that they had the right to judge other people's moral standards. Now you have to admit that they were at least consistent, but do you see how they are starving and don't even know it?
We have a crisis in character in America because we have a crisis in meaning. We have a crisis in meaning because people are hungry and thirsty for life with God and don't know that this is what they crave, this is what they were made for. They're starving for the knowledge that life itself is not an accident, not a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing at the end. They need to hear what we celebrate today: that life itself is an expression of the love that is the community of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They need - as you and I always need - to hear a very un-idiotic tale, the ancient story of the Creator on hands and knees in the mud, forming a body from the clay and kissing it with the breath of divine life to hear the story of humanity bearing and sharing a divine image to hear and believe that life itself is sacred because it is itself an expression of God's very being.
Let's put this very simply. People need permission to imagine again, to take a revived imagination and experience joy and wonder at all creation, to imagine themselves as something more than their social security numbers - living, sensing, imaginative beings, every one of them an tangible expression of the love that is the center of God's life. By the way, do we routinely think of ourselves that way? When we get up in the morning, when we look at our bank accounts, when we deal with our families, do we recognize our lives as an expression of God's being? I think many of us sometimes succumb to the starvation diet of work, consume, procreate, work, consume, die. Those six steps and you're done.
When Jesus says he is the bread of life, he is trying to teach us something. We know that if we ignore physical hunger, we will die. He wants us to know just as well that if we habitually ignore spiritual hunger, our inner life will shrivel to something stale, flat, and useless. But more than that, the Lord Jesus wants us to know the richness of the life with God that he brings for us, that he gives us. He says, "I am the bread of life. The bread that I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.
You see, to eliminate all question of the value of human life, Christ came to us in our flesh. To eliminate all question of how much God loves you, Christ went to the cross, continuing to love in the face of concentrated and focused human evil. And in a universe we understand as being marked by slow decay, to show us that new life can burst forth, Jesus rose from the dead. Risen, victorious, he gives that life to us, now, at this table, in our baptism and forever. We have tasted the goodness of God in so many ways today, and in a few minutes we will taste it in the blessed sacrament of his body and blood.
Before we do that, however, we will renew the vows and covenant of baptism.
First, I have a question for the children in the soft space in front of the altar. I usually don't ask trick questions, but this is a trick question. When you pray, whose ear is closest to your mouth? We have one hand up for God. Well, I suppose. In the room you are sitting right now whose ear is closes to your mouth? That's right -- your own. And that's why we renew baptismal promises. We need to hear ourselves. We need to year two thousand of us claiming the bread of life as our own as we repeat what we believe and how we want to respond to God's love, how we will nourish and sustain our life, how we will reach to the whole world.
So today we dine as sumptuously as we can at this banquet so we will know without doubt when we leave here the riches of God's love for us, and to see how many it takes in the Diocese of Bethlehem, the 14 counties in northeast Pennsylvania.
Realizing how richly we are fed, if there is a human heart beating in us at all, the desire to share this bread with those who do not even know they are hungry cannot help bursting into flame. Imagine. Imagine what it would be to have ten thousand people sharing what we have today.
How sweet that would be. Tell what you have seen and heard.
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