[Jesus] asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him, "You are the Messiah."… He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”                                                                                                                                              Mark 8:29, 34

We have a challenge before us this morning: Jesus has upped the ante, thrown down a gauntlet, raised the stakes…call it what you will. It’s a challenge that calls us to get clear about who Jesus is and what it means to follow him. We hear this challenge as it’s spoken to the disciples, but it is addressed to us: “Who do you say that I am?” Jesus asks us; and “If anyone wants to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

Those are strong words – perhaps even daunting. In this year we have been reading the Gospel of Mark, and we should be pretty used to Mark’s plain, unvarnished approach to telling Jesus’ story by now – it’s spare, stripped down – but even by Mark’s standards we’ve reached a new threshold.

Today’s passage comes just about in the dead center of Mark.  Up to this point Jesus has been teaching, healing, casting out unclean spirits, preaching, announcing the immanence of God’s kingdom, calling and gathering followers, selecting those who will be his inner circle and will receive the most intense training. There have been a few instances of tension, a few whiffs of danger – especially when Mark related the fate of John the Baptist at the hands of King Herod – but nothing like what we hear in this passage.

Jesus has taken the disciples up to Caesarea Philippi, a Roman city twenty-five miles north of the Sea of Galilee; if last week we heard about Jesus lying low in Tyre on the Mediterranean coast, this week Jesus has intentionally pulled his followers away from the usual arena of their work and taken them to Caesarea Philippi on the slopes of Mount Hermon. From there, if they looked, they could look straight down the Jordan River valley, south towards Jerusalem - the seat of spiritual, religious and political power.

And Jesus poses a two-part question to the disciples: Who do people say that I am? Who do you say that I am? This is not Jesus having an identity crisis; in asking about identity, he’s asking about the meaning that people attach to him, how they understand him, wanting to know what the word on the street about him is.

And in answering: some say John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets, they are saying that people are equating Jesus with some of God’s most fearless representatives who stood up against evil and injustice and offered hope to God’s people.

OK, the public is getting the picture in a general way, and there are many people today who would answer the question in the same way, but then Jesus brings the question home: Who do you say that I am? Peter has a flash of insight and says: You are the Messiah, God’s Anointed One. Jesus doesn’t say: good job, that’s the right answer, you get a prize, you are to be commended for your spiritual insight…instead, Jesus starts to teach the disciples that the Messiah will suffer, and be rejected by the religious authorities, and will be killed, and will rise again on the third day.

That completely blows apart the disciples’ ideas of who and what the Messiah was to be – they expected a political king who would cleanse or rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, would liberate God’s people from their foreign enemies, and bring God’s justice to fruition  - for Jews and Gentiles alike. The Messiah suffering and dying was not the way they understood the plan, and so Peter starts to rebuke Jesus, to tell him off, to set him straight.

But it is Jesus who sets Peter – and the disciples and the crowd that was with them – straight:   "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”  Another translation puts it this way: “If any of you want to come the way I’m going, you must say “no” to your own selves, pick up your cross and follow me.” From this point on it is very clear – Jesus is heading into danger, into certain death, and those who choose to follow him will be open to the same.

So why did he say all that?  It’s certainly not a very inviting welcome or enthusiastic recruitment speech; who would want to follow Jesus if they knew that rejection and death would be the ultimate outcome? But Jesus had to be as clear as he could so that the disciples would understand that all of the more comfortable and comforting things that Jesus said and did in the first part of his ministry were part and parcel of what would come next.

To restore health and sight and life, to give hope to the poor and down-trodden, to right injustices, and to do all of this in the context of announcing the arrival of God’s kingdom – not Herod’s kingdom, or Cesar’s kingdom – but God’s kingdom, meant that sooner or later Jesus’ mission would bring him into direct conflict with the ruling authorities. It meant that God was king, was Lord, and not the Roman Emperor – Caesar’s claims to the contrary – and that God’s kingdom was beginning to unfold here and now in the lives of God’s people.

The powers-that-be, whether political or religious, could not countenance such a threat, could not stand competition for loyalty and allegiance. Jesus knew this and was doing his best to prepare those who were willing to make the journey with him; they, too, would have to expect danger, censure, rejection and even death. So why would anyone follow Jesus after such a speech?

Because what they had been seeing and hearing and experiencing with Jesus up until this point was the very thing that faithful Jews had been longing for throughout centuries – the signs of God’s kingdom breaking in to human life, coming to fruition in their midst, the ancient hope becoming a reality, here in their lifetime. So the disciples heard Jesus’ words, even if they didn’t absorb them, even if they struggled to put disparate pieces together, and they kept going, kept travelling with Jesus.

So what about us?  What do we hear other people saying about Jesus? That he’s a teacher, a prophet, a great religious leader? Or maybe he is irrelevant to their lives, someone they rarely think about? Or maybe they think Jesus is a pretty good guy, but his followers, the Church, has really messed up and has some serious problems.  You’ve probably heard all that, and more – and maybe even said some of these things yourself.

But what do we say about Jesus?  That’s the real question.  Who is Jesus for us? For you? For me? For us?

Do we see in the life and teaching and character of Jesus, the face of God? Do we hear hope in Jesus’ words and an invitation to healing and joy? Do we recognize that the power of God in Christ is greater than death? Do we know that the kingdom of God is not just about heaven, but about earth, as well?

This is what Jesus calls us to, this is the journey he asks us to make with him. He doesn’t promise it will be easy or pain-free; being a follower of Jesus won’t garner us money or status or accolades or earthly power; we may well encounter criticism, scorn, or rejection – death on lots of different levels. But at the same time, we are called to work and walk with the very source of all that is good, all that is holy, the fountain of all blessing, the life and light of the world.

When we walk with Jesus, when we follow him, when he is Lord and we serve him by helping to make God’s Kingdom a reality in our own corner of the world, then we know a peace and purpose and centeredness that no one else can give and that nothing can ever take away – in this life or the next.

In the words of the Covenant prayer from the Northumbria Community, let us pray.

I am no longer my own, but Yours.
Use me as You choose;
rank me alongside whoever you choose;
put me to doing, put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you, or laid aside for you,
raised up for you, or brought down low for you;
let me be full, let me be empty;
let me have all thing, let me have nothing;
with my whole heart I freely choose to yield
all things to your ordering and approval.

So now, God of glory,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
You are mine, and I am your own.  Amen.
                        ~ Celtic Daily Prayer

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 16, 2012

From there Jesus set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice. Mark 7:24

Over the past two months many of us have taken time for vacation – a week or two, a couple of days here or there. Maybe your vacation was weekend trips to the beach or campground or gathering with family for a reunion.

Maybe just having a slower or more relaxed schedule for the summer was refreshing and restorative for you – giving you time to spend with friends, go fishing, work in your garden, sit on the deck on warm evenings and enjoy the beauty of the night.

We who live in New Jersey know enough to savor good weather, and enjoy it while we have it, tuck the warmth and the sunshine of the summer away so that we can be cheered by its remembrance in the cold rains of November or the ice storms of February.

So we’ve been away, but now we’re back – to work, to school, to a regular schedule (I hear some parents cheering about that), and back to the full program-year here at Church.

Sometimes in churches you hear: We’ll, you may go on vacation, but God never does. That’s true, God doesn’t take a vacation; God doesn’t need to.

But during Jesus’ life and ministry amongst us there were often times when Jesus needed a break, a nap, a time apart, a little holiday. And we hear right at the start of this morning’s Gospel about Jesus going away to the region of Tyre; it’s a city on the coast of the Mediterranean, about thirty miles north of Capernaum, were Jesus based his ministry.

We don’t know why Jesus went to Tyre; Mark tells us “He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there.” Maybe he was taking a break, having a seaside retreat, a little vacation. “Yet he could not escape notice” the Gospel says.

Word got out that Jesus was there, and a very desperate woman with a sick daughter came to see him and prostrated herself before him. She was a Syrophonecian, a Gentile, someone outside the scope of accepted Jewish social relations – and she had a child who was possessed by an unclean spirit.

That is every parent’s nightmare – that a son or daughter will be taken seriously ill, suffer a traumatic injury, wander away emotionally or spiritually and take up with the wrong crowd, seeming to leave a stranger in their place. When these things occur, they very much seem like an unclean spirit.

No wonder the woman was so insistent that Jesus heal her daughter – any one of us would do the same.

But Jesus says something very strange to her: He said, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." To call someone a dog in the ancient Near East was an insult. This is not at all what we would expect Jesus to say, at least not if we think of Jesus as being endlessly available to all people at all times; his words bring us up short – what was he thinking?!

Listen to the rest of the conversation: But she answered him, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Then he said to her, "For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter."

In the Old Testament – starting all the way back with Abraham – it was understood that God had chosen a people for himself (the Jews) who were to be blessed by God so that they in turn would be a blessing to the world on God’s behalf. And then, in the fullness of time, God would expand that blessing and that relationship to all people, to the Gentiles – that is, the great majority of us sitting here this morning.

Jesus’ mission and ministry, his teaching and healing and proclamation and mighty acts, were all about announcing the arrival of God’s Kingdom – first to the Jews, and then to the Gentiles.

So Jesus was saying to this Syrophonecian woman, that it wasn’t time yet for the Gentiles to be brought into the fullness of God’s Kingdom.

Well, she was desperate; you would be, too. She didn’t argue Jesus’ point – if the Jews were considered the children in Jesus’ figure of speech, and God’s blessing was the bread, then even the dogs could share in the abundance, the crumbs that fell from the table, the scraps, the leftovers – and that would be enough.

Somehow, this Syrophonecian mother was able to glimpse the power and the overwhelming goodness and generosity of God, and trust that even a scrap of that power would be enough to heal her daughter. And she was right - and Jesus knew she was right.

On the way to fulfilling his mission, announcing and inaugurating the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven, there would be extra, overflow, leftovers that fall from the table, like the twelve baskets of leftover pieces of bread at the Feeding of the 5000.

It may not have been fully time for the Gentiles to be brought into the blessing of God’s Kingdom – that would happen after the Resurrection – but it was getting pretty close, just like being able to smell the sea air before you actually arrive at the beach, and the Gentile woman knew that there would be enough to heal her daughter.

Now there are many more things we might like to say about this passage, to puzzle over, to ponder about – and I hope you will do so.

I hope you will take the lectionary insert home with you, tuck it in your pocket, stick it in your purse, post it on your refrigerator – and read it over during the week. Daydream over it, pray over it, meditate on it and be open to whatever the Holy Spirit might reveal to you about the meaning and importance of this passage for your own life, your own faith, for your work, your neighbors. No one of us can ever have the whole story or the last word when we are talking about Scripture and the way God speaks to us through it.

But for now, for this morning, it is enough to know that the power and the grace   and the love of God is abundant and overflowing – is there for all of us…maybe not in the ways we might wish or expect, but it is there, no matter what.

And God longs to give us the good gifts of grace and wholeness and joy and hope. And we, in turn, can share those gifts with others, can offer the abundance of kindness and generosity and faith and courage and steadfastness with those who need it most.

Listen for who might be the Syrophonecian woman in your life, in your world, asking for help, for healing, for blessing, and offer what you have.

Take what God offers, take what you need, and then pass it along to someone else who needs it also, knowing that God is at work in whatever you share.

Let us pray.

God of your goodness,
give me yourself,
for you are enough for me…
and if I ask for anything les
I shall ever be in want,
for only in you have I all.  Amen.  
                        ~ adapted from a prayer of Dame Julian of Norwich, 14th century

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 9, 2012

Jesus also said, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade. Mark 4:30-32

The Kingdom of God – we have just heard Jesus talking about it in today’s Gospel reading; he says the Kingdom of God is like someone scattering seed on the ground, or the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.

These are odd associations – seeds and kingdoms – but maybe for us the whole idea of a kingdom itself is a little odd, sort of quaintly old-fashioned, after all: didn’t we give up the idea of kingship in this country two-hundred-and-thirty-six years ago? For most of us, kings are people found in history books or fairy tales; they don’t have much to do with us.

And yet we hear Jesus speaking about the Kingdom of God – and we’ll hear more about it as time goes on: so many of the Gospel stories we get in this Season after Pentecost are stories of the Kingdom. In fact in Matthew, Mark and Luke combined, the Kingdom of God is mentioned forty-one different times; and in Matthew alone the Kingdom of Heaven is mentioned another thirty-one times. Don’t get confused; for Matthew the terms Kingdom of God and Kingdom of Heaven are interchangeable. Clearly, this idea was very important for Jesus if there are seventy-two different references to it in only three books!

So what is this Kingdom stuff all about?  What’s Jesus trying to get at? When Jesus preaches and teaches about the Kingdom of God/Heaven, he is trying to tell the disciples, the Pharisees, the general public and anyone who will listen to him (including us) what life in this world is like when God is in charge, when we move into that place where God’s dream and God’s vision for us and for this world start to become a reality, even though we will never see a complete fulfillment of it.

The most fundamental, the most basic prayer we pray is the one Jesus taught the disciples - we call it the Lord’s Prayer – and the version of it that we know best includes this petition: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We always need to keep in mind that when Jesus taught us to pray this way, he wasn’t telling us to pray that God’s will would be done in our lives only, but in society as a whole, in the world at large – beginning with us who follow Jesus, and spreading out into our neighborhoods and communities. The Kingdom of God, as Jesus tells us, is about the flourishing and well-being of all people, of all that God has made.The God’s Kingdom is fundamental to Jesus’ teaching and to his understanding of his mission.

So – here is Jesus telling us that the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. OK, you might think, I know all about that, checked that box: a mustard seed is really tiny and then is grows up to be a great big plant, and that’s what our faith is supposed to be like – it starts out very small and then, over time, it grows and becomes substantial. That’s all very true, but it’s also a little tame – because, in reality, the wild mustard plant that Jesus would have been familiar with was actually much more like an invasive weed that got into everything, including the carefully planted and cultivated crops if you weren’t watching.

So Jesus is saying that God’s Kingdom, God’s activity in and for the world is like an invasive plant; you didn’t plant it yourself, you don’t really know how it got there, it’s gotten right in the middle of everything, and now it’s taken over your garden! It’s like pachysandra where you don’t want it, or bittersweet, or even poison ivy. The Kingdom of God appears in human life and the world like this invasive wild mustard plant that takes over and changes everything, including attracting birds that you may not want among your crops or fruit or fields.

Well that’s a very different way of thinking of the Kingdom of God; it’s very dynamic and surprising and not easily controllable – a far cry from the old stereotype of God as an ancient being with a long white beard sitting on a throne in the clouds somewhere far removed from us. But that’s exactly Jesus’ point: the Kingdom of God happens where we live and work, among us and around us; it is vibrant and eager and full of surprises in all kinds of places we might not expect.

Many of you will remember that a number of years ago we had to close our parish nursery school. It was a good school, and it had served the children and families of our community well for fifty years, but times had changed, and the needs of families had changed, enrollment dwindled, and the vestry made the hard decision to close the school. We did not know where that decision would take us, we did not know fully what the financial impact would be. But we were pretty sure that God wanted us to do something different with that building, to use it in some way that would serve our community.

And over time, that is exactly what happened; we have been able to exercise a ministry of hospitality for many different groups and events for the wider community – some sponsored by us, like the Rummage Sale or the Fish and Chips or the Solar Screening; and some are events and programs by outside groups – Scouts, Moms Club, the recreation department, being a polling place for Long Hill Township – and especially Alcoholics Anonymous.

AA has been a presence here at All Saints’ for many years, meeting either in the Undercroft of the Church or the Lower Room of the Parish House, but in the years since the nursery school was closed three more meetings have been added – there are now seven every week, offering hope and strength and healing to people who suffer with the disease of addiction. Even more remarkably, when the lunchtime meetings were bursting at the seams in the Undercroft, we were able to move those meetings to the Parish Hall, where there was not only more space, but a lovely room, with more convenient facilities, and very few stairs to deal with.

When the lunch-time meetings moved across the street attendance at them grew even more, and reached more people; and we started the annual Gratitude Mass where AA members and their families could come and give thanks for the AA program and fellowship in an explicitly Christian setting. Yesterday’s Gratitude Mass was the fourth annual; when I mentioned to the assembled congregation that we pray for them on an on-going basis, there was an audible sigh of surprise and appreciation. After the service one man asked if we could increase the frequency of our prayers for AA – from every five or six weeks to every three weeks, because there are still so many out there suffering from alcoholism.

It was a great day, people were indeed full of gratitude, and what I was seeing and experiencing was the Kingdom of God in action, in flower. People’s lives are being saved: they have stopped drinking, they’ve recovered their health and sanity, marriages kept intact, families restored, jobs secured – the Kingdom of God, indeed!

But we didn’t know that was going to happen, back when we closed the school; we didn’t know how or why God’s Kingdom would show up and develop in us and through us and around us, but it did – not all at once, and not in any steady progression, and what has taken place so far is certainly not the fullest expression of the Kingdom, but it’s rolling out in the way the Holy Spirit is directing for the good of our neighbors and our community.

There are many other examples and stories of how the Kingdom of God is unfolding all around us that we could highlight, both here at All Saints and in the lives and experiences of the people around us.

I’m going to give you some homework. Set yourself a little challenge in the next week or two: see if you can notice and identify examples of Kingdom of God activity in your neighborhood, where you work, among people you know or groups you are aware of. Talk to people; be curious about what is important to them; listen with the ears of the Spirit.

Ask yourself what God might be up to for the good of the community, and the well-being of both individuals and groups of people; see if you can recognize that wild mustard plant of faith and action growing where you least expect it. And then ask God how you can cooperate and join in with what the Spirit is doing so that God’s mission and God’s plan can become an even truer reality in the here-and-now.

Let us pray:
Lord Jesus, you call us to be your disciples, always learning and growing in the ways of faith, and in the hope and joy of new life; open our eyes to see your hand at work in the world about us, gives us courage to step forward further into your Kingdom, and gives us hope that we will see glimpse of your glory on earth as it is in heaven.  Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Third Sunday after Pentecost
June 17, 2012

But someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith without works, and I by my works will show you my faith. For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead. James 2:26

It is wonderful to see you all here, to be gathered with you as you celebrate Founder’s Day, and sobriety and new life. It is a joy and an honor to share this day with you.

And I’d like to ask you to think for a moment about how it is that you came to be sitting in that pew, here in All Saints’ Church today. You might answer that someone at a meeting invited you,

or strongly suggested it to you; or maybe someone handed you one of those cards with the picture of the church on it and all the particulars of the service and you thought it sounded interesting or curious – at least enough to check it out.

Or maybe you were here last year, and you found this service a good way to gather with others to give thanks to God for strength and sanity and healing - and just plain fun!

All of that may be true, but there’s another, deeper reason why you are here today - and that is because someone, somewhere along the way, reached out a helping hand to you in your path to recovery.

In fact, I hope that there have been a good number of people who have helped you - whether as a sponsor, or a friend, or someone who was willing to share their strength and story at a meeting; but when it comes right down to it, we all are here today because someone, at some point took the trouble to tell us the truth about ourselves, about human nature and about the reality of God in such a way that we could hear and absorb it.

We are all here today because someone acted in faith to offer us hope.

A few minutes ago we heard a reading from the Letter of James in the New Testament:

“Someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith without works, and I by my works will show you my faith. For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead”

I want to make sure we get the right picture here.

When James says “faith without works is dead” he’s not talking about trying to buy your way into heaven, or earning brownie points with God, or trying to be a really, really good person so that God will think well enough of you to overlook your faults.

God doesn’t work that way; God loves us just as we are, just the way we come. There is absolutely nothing we can do to make God love us anymore than he already does when we are at our very worst, nor love us any less than God does when we are at our best. God’s love and favor for us is a gift that we don’t earn or deserve – in the Church we call that “grace.” That’s what we have faith in, put our trust in, count on and give our hearts to: faith in God’s grace.

But when we put our faith in God, when we entrust God with our lives and draw close to him, we will naturally want to become more and more like him – not to try to be in charge of the universe, or be the Savior of the world – thank God there is a Savior, and that savior is not us!

So when we turn our lives over to our Higher Power and seek to live a spiritual path, then we are drawn to reflect the truth and goodness and self-giving love of God in our own lives.­­ If our faith is alive and active it will be reflected in our desire to reach out in compassion and love to others; that’s what James means when he says that faith without works is dead.

This is not always an easy position to come to. There are lots of people in every Church and every religious tradition who come to a service for their own private reasons, for their own connection to God, their own spirituality, and then go away again, never looking beyond their own concerns, never asking God how they might help or befriend ­another person, or relive their suffering or sorrow or loneliness.

Now, there are certainly days and seasons in life when all you can manage to do is to drag yourself to church, put your butt in the pew, listen to the words from the pulpit or altar or Scripture reading, and maybe say some prayers, and hope that God will sustain you for the next week or day or hour – and to try to add anyone else into that equation just seems way too much to handle.

And I can imagine that the same might be true for some of you with attendance at AA meetings; has anyone here ever had that experience?

Good – welcome to the human race!

And guess what? You walk in the door of a meeting or worship and God meets you there – actually, God walked in the door with you, and he welcomes you and loves you; no doubt about it.

But the catch is…you can’t stay in that place of having your prayer and your meditation and your life be only about you. Sooner or later, if you are to grow and deepen spiritually, if you are to maintain your health and sobriety and (using the church word) salvation, you have to move beyond yourself in a generous and self-giving way, to help others find the peace and hope and wholeness that you yourself have found.

Each person does this in their own way; there is no cookie-cutter approach to service and compassion; there is only a deep and attentive listening to another person and to the Spirit of God speaking in and through both of you.

If you listen thoughtfully and prayerfully, God will show you how you can be of service to the person in need. You won’t be the only one who will help them, you probably will not be the most important or most memorable one, but your service will be valuable – even on a small level – and it will form a link in a chain of hope and strength. And at the end of the day, you’ll find your own faith strengthened, as well – maybe not in ways that you expected or imagined – but you will be blessed if you serve with an open mind and a humble heart. That is what James means when he says “faith without works is dead.”

So we are here today because someone, somewhere, reached out to us in loving concern to offer us hope and strength and salvation – in the Kingdom of God, and in AA in particular - a reaching out that stretches back seventy-seven years to Bill W. and Dr. Bob.

And so let our hearts be filled with gratitude for that chain of compassionate action, and let us pray and listen and act so that we may take our place as the next links in the chain, for the good of others and for the salvation of the world.  Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
AA Gratitude Mass
June 15, 2012