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Last Sunday after the Epiphany
February 18, 2007 Sermon by The Rev. James Jelinek, Bishop

In the 13 ½ years I have been privileged to serve as Bishop of Minnesota, I have visited St. Paul’s many ties. Most often these have been visits with an emphasis on confirmation and/or baptism, or a post-convention or regional gathering, and it has not seemed appropriate to speak about your life as a congregation without slighting something else or preaching for an hour and a half. This time I am here for a simple visitation, including a visit with Bill Van Oss and a further one with the Vestry and some of your other clergy, namely David Hill and Margaret “Wild Woman” Thomas. So I would like to give you a summary of what I heard yesterday about your life together in the Spirit before preaching on today’s texts. I promise you, I will not go on for an hour and a half.

This is what I heard:

Not surprisingly, it is clear that you had a spiritually powerful ten years with Howard Anderson and a very healthy interim with Peggy Tuttle. With the departure of Howard, Lucie and Aron, there was some decline in ministry with children and youth, a bit less pastoral time available, the loss of a few families, and a “right-sizing of the congregation” to reflect the actual members who participate in your corporate life. Also, during the interim, some long-standing members of the congregation were welcomed by God into the larger life we sometime call the Church Triumphant.

All in all, some key dimensions of parish life held firm, like your strong commitments to outreach in the neighborhood and beyond it, your valuing of diversity and welcome to all people who enter these doors, your respect for each other even when in disagreement, worship that is Christ-centered, joyous and filled with good music, strong lay leadership along with excellent clergy leadership. You have continued to be generous with your time as volunteers and with your treasures in giving for the support of the parish. In addition, you have consistently paid your diocesan apportionment for the Common Good and contribute the gifts of many people on diocesan commissions, committees and boards, for which I am deeply grateful. You have discerned several for formation as deacons and priests.

Internally, I am most pleased – and not at all surprised to hear about your life as a community. Everyone affirmed that people are respected here:
• no matter where they are on their spiritual journey
• no matter how conservative or liberal they may be or what opinions they hold
• no matter how they dress or how much money they give
• no matter how long they have been here

Everyone affirmed that this is a welcoming congregation, and that newcomers say they feel it when they join you for worship and other occasions, such as the many social opportunities which allow you occasions to get to know one another and bond more deeply. Someone said very clearly, “The parish is very good at supporting individuals in ministry,” whether that be in liturgy, Befrienders, work for the environment, social action and outreach or in the other ministries in your personal lives.

The Vestry members individually and collectively, believe these things are so deep in this community that they count on sustainable growth in the future.

There is a great deal of excitement and praise for your new rector, Bill, and his wife Sue who brings her own rich gifts for Christian formation and the nurturing and equipping of teachers. You are doubly blessed in having both of them as they model team ministry as a couple that is rare in the whole church today. If you wish, this would be an appropriate time to break into applause – even in church.

You are extraordinarily blessed as a congregation. You have far more talent and expertise and skill than most congregations, and I trust you know that. It is my hope that in the prayers of the people each week you will become one of those rare congregations in which your thanksgivings take as long to name as your requests for healing and consolation and guidance. When we do not slow down enough to name those dimensions of life for which we are grateful, we risk taking God for granted and focus more on our spiritual poverty than our health.

Let’s take a look at the lessons for today. I love the season of Epiphany, and the lessons week after week telling of still one more way that God is revealed in the person of Jesus – wonder after wonder, miracle after miracle – each one showing how God works through love in this very real man to bring healing, forgiveness, abundance and resurrection. Every year we begin with Jesus’ baptism and we end with his transfiguration, to remind us that everything that is truly lovely, everything undeniably beautiful, everything unquestionably true begins as God’s gift, God’s self-disclosure, God’s self-emptying and out-pouring into the life we know and share in Jesus the Christ. I am not inclined to be exclusive, even as a disciple of Jesus. I am not as fond of the ancient affirmation of Jesus as the only-begotten son of God, because I do not want to limit God to any narrowness that suits my prejudices and predilections and the smallness of my own feeble mind or limited experience. But I love the more recent description of Jesus as “the unsurpassable revelation of God.” I love it because it allows God the possibility to speak to other people and other cultures in ways I do not understand. Yet it also affirms that I believe Jesus to be so completely one with God that I cannot imagine any other human being revealing God more clearly “unsurpassable revelation” denies nothing of Jesus’ fullness, yet it makes room for God’s glory to be found and seen and named wherever God chooses. Some might call that heresy. I risk it, praying that it may open more doors and windows for you rather than confining you in the dark room wherein we fight over some intellectual “truth” rather than embrace what is living and “true.”

I used to think that Jesus’ baptism and transfiguration were God’s gift to the church – to help us see God in Jesus so we might adore him. But over the years, I have come to see these events as God’s gifts to Jesus, to help Jesus to know God, to adore God and to help us follow Jesus and fall in love with God ourselves.

The transfiguration comes at a critical time in Jesus’ life. He has been hounded and persecuted. He is misunderstood by his own family. His faith is often invisible to his chosen disciples. The people of his own religion and culture reject him and run him out of many towns, starting with his home town. Again and again he goes off to a place apart, to be alone with God, to pray, to regain the power and the nearness he experienced with God at his baptism. And this is it! His vision at the transfiguration grounds him again in the faith of his ancestors, in a conversation with the two giants of Jewish history, Moses and Elijah, the great deliverer from slavery and the prophet of monotheism – one God. This event, this time of confirmation, of ordination of consecration is for Jesus – an affirmation that he is on the right path – that he has been faithful as God wants him to be. And Jesus is renewed. Jesus is restored to hope.

Unlike what so many others have done with a profound experience of God, it does not go to Jesus’ head. He doesn’t get all puffed up. He doesn’t become a spiritual autocrat, a dictator who uses God and God-language to get his way, to take control, to enslave others to his will. What this experience does for Jesus is to make him more compassionate, more understanding, more generous of heart, in a word – more loving. In future encounters, his harsh words are offered not to all sinners, nor even those who commit particular sins, but to those who pretend to love the God they have not seen while despising and disdaining the fragile human beings they have seen. He challenges the hypocrites, those who sin against the Holy Spirit by acting as if God’s love is as limited as theirs. I am trusting that you know the same stories I do, and if you do not, then dust off your Bible and read a chapter a day from Matthew, Mark, Luke or John between now and Easter. The gospels, mind you, not Leviticus or any of the other rule books we hear quoted far too often. And while you’re reading, at least once a week read this passage from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians.

Paul gets it, at least on a good day when he’s not overwhelmed by the sin and evil he sees and knows in himself. He knows it’s all about love, and this great hymn to love, this song of love, is written for us, for us to ponder over, to dwell on, to savor and take deep into our hearts, our very souls. Paul knows that everything else is partial, incomplete, even counterfeit. He knows that when we fall in love, when we live in love – with our partner, with our companions on life’s journey, our love will be tested and tried. Every one of our buttons will be pushed. We will want to be superior or judgmental and will do almost anything to protect ourselves from the pain of growing up in love and growing, as the collect reminds us, “being changed into [Christ’s] likeness from glory to glory.”

Let me close with Paul’s own words:

"If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. [Love] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. . . . And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love." AMEN.

Let the church say, “AMEN.”


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