This and next Sunday are exceptional days for Trinity Cathedral. Next week is our annual parish meeting, and today people who will be at Trinity in person will not be hearing a regular sermon, but rather contemplating a Biblical text together. So I’d like to invite you to engage in something similar alongside us, all with the goal of faithfully imagining God’s promised and preferred future for us.
But let’s begin with the scripture that the lectionary gave us for today. Recall that we’re hearing from the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark, where we meet Jesus preaching good news, calling disciples, and teaching in his home district of Galilee. For the most part, people are responding positively to his message, but this morning a demon definitely did not. He cried out “have you come to destroy us?”, then convulsed the man he had been tormenting, and departed from him rather violently.
Which sounds pretty chaotic, but is actually a good thing. We’ve already learned from Mark that Good News requires repentance and change. And today we learn that Jesus has the authority not only to call forth the good in people, but also to get rid of the bad. Which—let’s face it—we all need. And if we’re honest, we all want. If we’re listening to this video, we want to live better lives. We want to follow Jesus towards God’s best for us. And we probably have a few—or many—demon-like things we could afford to let go of. Bad habits and addictions, unhealed disappointments and angers, and unhealthy distractions that keep us from doing what God most wants us to.
And that’s true not only of individuals, but also of communities and congregations. So you might think of the Vital+Thriving process of ministry discernment—that Trinity has been involved over the past year under the leadership of our steering team Natalie Lias, Woody Wood, Ned Nix and Tom Moriarty—as our own learning from Jesus. Who illuminates the good in us, calls us into ministry, and allows us to let go of the bad and the sad along the way.
Through an intensive process of listening to our community—including you, if you responded to the online survey, and a congregation-wide review of our 160-year history—our leadership team has come to learn a great deal about how God works through our community. Here are some of the ways in which we recognize and faithfully follow Jesus—
- We take pride in our history and longetivity.
- We love our beautiful sanctuary, and consider it to be a holy place.
- We are joyful in community, and trust that our worship builds our community.
- We are welcoming, in word and in deed. A place at God’s table for all is a truly meaningful mission statement for us.
- We’ve been quick to respond to the special needs of our time and place, such as church-planting, the Sudanese and Spanish-speaking ministries, and our COVID response.
- We treat each other with respect, and genuinely care for each other.
At the same time, there are some things we could afford to let go of. We don’t feel good about the history of scandal still lingering from events long past, and we have some unhealthy ways of dealing with conflict. We’re sad about the decline in membership during and after COVID. We’re also still learning about how to communicate between our congregations and cultures, and how best to serve with and support our homeless neighbors.
Our weaknesses are particular to Trinity—our debilitating demons, so to speak, that we might need to release—and they’re also pretty consistent with the experience of other mainline churches in the current era. So we can feel confident that we’re not alone in the work before us, but we also have some challenges and opportunities particular to our downtown location and far-flung citywide membership. In short, we have a calling that is shared with other Christian communities, and simultaneously specific to our place and time. Like the first disciples Jesus called from their personal nets in order to fish for people, we are called from our own particular history to embody good news for the future.
Over the next year, we’ll be exploring ways to do that, and using this scripture from Paul’s Letter to the Philippians will help us to imagine the way. At Trinity, people are talking about it together in pairs today. We’d love to have you join that conversation. But in the meantime, please pray it with me, and let these ancient and sacred words illuminate your imagination—
“Only, live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that, whether I come and see you or am absent and hear about you, I will know that you are standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
“He… did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” Pay attention, disciples of Jesus. God’s own authority looks like this—not like that of the scribes—but like that of a human servant. Who invites all of us at Trinity to both repentance and to rejoicing. So let us leave our nets, learn from our past, love one another, and be of one mind: the same mind as was in Christ Jesus.
Bravo, VR!