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VISION2020May 18, 2008 Trinity Sunday At the Christ Church auction ten days ago, we welcomed the Reverend Jerry Kramer, rector of Church of the Annunciation in New Orleans, with whom we have partnered in redevelopment efforts since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Jerry is an agitated passel of kinetic energy, already recovered from one heart attack and managing a number of other health related matters tied up with the stress, chaos, and overwhelming burden of working within a community of lingering malaise — a community that has been stripped of every service and convenience we take for granted here, like access to healthcare, for instance. The Broadmoor section of the city in which Church of the Annunciation is located has been in crisis for nearly three years now. In one sense, Jerry is a crisis manager. Three years is a long time to be managing a class A crisis. Sadly, this neighborhood won’t be out of crisis mode any time soon. Many of our members and friends have seen the situation firsthand helping in rebuilding efforts, and many more of you have shared your resources. In his remarks, Jerry mentioned that his church has given over its campus to the various rebuilding efforts they initiated in partnership with other community groups. For a couple of years they held worship services in a doublewide trailer. God has continued to be praised, and the work of holy restoration has continued apace despite the continuing grim reality of daily life. Grace abounds in the midst of the devastation because of the church. His church, of course, but many other churches as well, including Christ Church New York City, working in concert to address the human suffering. That church could not exist but for the support of the wider Christian community. Surprising themselves, researchers from The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard have discovered that the most successful agency addressing the human-scale needs in post-hurricane New Orleans is the church. No governmental agency, no political group, no other societal organization has had as much important and useful impact as the church. And by church here, we mean the often maligned purveyor of so-called “organized religion.” I would point out to you that were it not organized it could not be delivering the services that no one else is evidently capable of delivering. The church in all of its many shapes and sizes and flavors – the church that has been called out as God’s agency for the transformation of the world. Church of the Annunciation is one outpost of God’s people making a difference. Because that outpost exists, we too are present there as agents of transformation in New Orleans. This is a small, but poignant sample of what I want to tell you about today. Last Sunday I mentioned that I would provide part two of my remarks about the spirit of Pentecost. Recapping what I said then, by using stories from our own family album called Spiritual Mosaics, I spoke of how the Holy Spirit mediates grace in persons lives. I quoted the gifted and spiritually alert 20th century American writer, Flannery O’Connor – a robust Christian believer – who said, “Grace changes us and change is painful.” I said that “we can’t be associating ourselves with God’s ravishing Spirit and not expect something to change within us. This is a relentlessly logically obvious outcome. To worship the God we see revealed through the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth and expect everything to stay pretty much as it is would be great foolishness. To expect our lives to follow a static and rigid path would seem, at a minimum, well-defended against the Spirit having her way with us.” I added that “If we thought we were worshiping this God of transforming grace and nothing changed in our lives, we’re probably worshiping something close in appearance to what we see in a mirror.” That’s because, I argued, Flannery O’Connor was right – grace changes us. It changes us in wonderful, sometimes painful but always astonishing ways we cannot predict. It changes us in ways that bring us into greater conformity to what God had intended in the first place. When someone asks what business the church is in, we should truthfully respond “the transformation business.” Surely that’s the business God engages. We don’t normally think of it like this, but consider the dynamic creation story we just heard Jim read. We tend to think of this as a static-state condition, that is, first there was nothing and then there was something and its been that way every since. But creation has always been on-going, still is on-going, and we’re in process all of the time. If you think about your own life you see the truth of this proposition. God had a vision of the cosmos and it came into being, still is coming into being – that’s the profound metaphoric image out of which everything else emerges for people of faith. Everything is in the process of becoming. It stands to reason that when God’s Spirit invades individual lives it will bring transforming power because that’s the nature of God. Here’s the piece I’m adding today: God’s ravishing Spirit creates dynamic, transforming community. Not only are individual lives made different, but so to are people drawn together, bonded as family. We’ve talked about this many times in the past, how despite the remarkable diversity in appearance of those who walk into this space, peeling back the visible veneers we discover we’ve come from the same spiritual genetic stock. Oddly and shockingly enough, we are brothers and sisters born from the same lineage that stretches back in time and mystery to the one God. This truth gave birth to Christian community that transcended tribal, cultural and ethnic identities in the first century. It exploded all norms and boundaries in much the same way that Jesus did. And that’s as it should be since those earliest disciples came to believe that the resurrected Christ was the closest we were ever going to get to a real-life image of what God intended for humans. What Jesus lived and espoused came to hold transcendent meaning and was then reflected in how they went about organizing their lives. When the resurrected Christ instructed the disciples to go forth teaching and baptizing, this was a fundamental piece of their message – God had broken down all barriers and created a transforming human community sustained by sacrificial love. Baptism then wasn’t an initiation into some exclusionary club based on saying the right words; instead, it was a mark of emancipation and freedom from all that prevented us from loving God above all things and our neighbors as ourselves. This was a liberating, wonderful and simultaneously challenging and rigorous call. And it bound the early believers together as family sustained by grace that constantly, yet lovingly called them to recognize their role in the transformation of the world. One major outcome of this message was the birth of the church. As the scriptural record makes clear, this forming of church was not easy, fraught with old human habits and patterns. Yet for all of its many flaws and failings over the centuries, the message entrusted to the church has nevertheless been at the heart of most of what we value: things like freedom, a commitment to the dignity of every person, compassion, generosity, forgiveness, reconciliation, health, education, and yes, perhaps most importantly, vital connection with the living God, the author of love itself. God’s ravishing spirit creates dynamic, transforming community. One outpost of this community is found on the corner of Park Avenue and 60th Street in New York City. I began by briefly describing another outpost in New Orleans. I mentioned how we’re connected – outpost to outpost. We’re part of the world-wide network of outposts, linked by spiritual genetics as family, held in loving embrace by the one God of us all. So here we are, sitting in this space that has been given over to our care as a place of sanctuary for our city, an astonishing space for transforming love to do its work. I’m guessing that most of you had not planned on being grafted into this part of the family tree. Surprise! Here we all are! Within its walls a remarkable community has been gathered. Vital, engaged, diverse, growing, emerging, becoming, and very, very talented. God has been assembling a really gifted community here. We are not the largest outpost, but from where I stand, I will tell you I don’t know of another that is any more blessed than us. We’ve been working hard at listening and learning about our own role in God’s emergent plan. Many different hands and hearts have had a part in fashioning the specifics of our vision for the future God intends. Just as God’s vision brought forth very specific outcomes, some of which have come in the form of our very selves, we, too are inspired to vision the future with very specific outcomes that we have organized into four main areas: worship, outreach, spiritual growth and community building. These don’t have snappy insincere monikers because they form our sincere intentions for the future, they provide our framework as a community of faith for how we can love God above all things and our neighbors as ourselves. We’re calling this VISION2020. In the process of bringing this vision to life we are committed to worship being the core of our life, to live and practice dynamic hospitality, to welcome and affirm diversity and to strive for excellence in all that we do. In the weeks ahead we’ll put more flesh-on-the-bone of each of these four areas. You will be hearing how this vision makes a claim upon our priorities, and how we believe we are called to participate in the work of transforming community. For all the reasons I’ve listed, in the process of bringing our vision to life we will continue to change, continue to be challenged to grow into a closer approximation of what God intends. Christ Church is not a static-state condition. Do not expect to remain the same as the process of enacting our vision unfolds. We will be challenged to give of our resources – money, time and talent in ways that we, quite frankly, had not considered until this time. We will be stretched in our thinking, in our believing, in our giving and most especially, in our faith in our God who has been pleased to shower us with every good thing. On June 15 all of us will have an opportunity to make clear our intention to share in God’s future for this outpost of his family. Mark your calendar for that Sunday: June 15. I’m convinced of the rightness of this vision that so many have helped fashion as they’ve listened to God. I consider it a very great privilege to be serving this family at this time and place. What a gift has been given to us – what an astonishing gift! It is now our turn to claim for ourselves the role that is clearly before us. Agents of transformation – imagine that! 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