A sermon by the Ven. Dena Harrison '87, Archdeacon of the Diocese of Texas, given in Christ Chapel on March 30, 2006

II Chronicles 36:14-23
Ephesians 2:4-10
John 6:4-15

I stand before you today and confess that I am a sucker for epic sagas. From Odysseus to Cecil B. DeMille, I can fall under the spell of sweeping narrative, dramatic action, and universal themes that speak to all of us. This is something of a warning, because when I came to the lessons for today, I just couldn't help seeing an epic played out across this span of readings.

Certainly we have before us the story of God's people: exiled and then restored, saved by grace through faith in Christ, blessed with an abundance of good things. But the preacher always brings her own preoccupations to the engagement with text. Although I am of course totally preoccupied with the search for our next Dean and President, please forgive me if that is not my primary lens today!

The framework that calls to me is the enormous challenge to our common life facing our church as we move toward General Convention. This framework of challenge I take up is NOT a position from which to advocate one political view or another. The choice to be challenged is to face a solemn difficulty with the willingness to hear God's holy call to pray, to study, to listen, and continuously to seek wisdom.

The last kings of Judah had a terrible time, with exile and the payment of tribute as themes. Today we hear about the "tipping point," when what had previously been a chronic pattern became a disaster. Judah went into exile, along with the vessels and the treasures of God's house. The house of the Lord is destroyed, and the land is desolate.

The people are kept in exile until the land could make up for its Sabbaths, which took seventy years. Although this "make-up" part is unclear to me, it seems that God desired a period of rest, of Sabbath, to renew both land and people. Then, in the fullness of God's time, the unlikeliest player steps forward. Isn't that just how God does things -- using that which is unlikely to us?

In this saga, the king of Persia, Cyrus, inexplicably sponsors the restoration of the people. Not only does he send them back to their land, but also sends along the vessels of the house of Lord. These vessels symbolized for that community the continuity of their covenant life, past and future. They found themselves in a new exodus, renewed and restored through God's miraculous provision.

There has been enormous clamor in our church. There has been a whole lot of talking from all sides and very little listening. Perhaps the Sabbath of which we are in need is not so much a ceasing of talking, but a "tipping point" time of listening to one another once more. Perhaps we are called to engage one another as though we really believe that in the Episcopal Church God has created something holy and valuable, something worth honoring, and something that can accomplish the work for which God created it, if we will allow God to provide for it.

The writer of Ephesians reminds us: … we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

We are what God has made us. I'm sure you all know that wonderful Greek word (or you will before you graduate!) which literally makes this sentence sing. Poiema -- it means "to do" or "to bring about" or "to bring forth." It is the root for "poem" and "poetry."

God has brought us forth as a particular people, a particular faith community. God has formed us, led us, disciplined us, and seeks to bring us forth once more, to renew us so that we may BE the divine poetry of God's imagination.

How can we endure the stresses and strains of our challenges so that God can bring us forth renewed? I don't have the definitive answer to that, but I believe I got a big hint from an unlikely source, from a "Cyrus factor."

It came from my twin grandsons when they were babies, about six or eight months old, and just learning to move around. We called it "the floor show" because it was endlessly fascinating to watch them on the floor together, learning all the tricks of motion that human beings have to acquire. Each twin had to master those tricks for himself, but they did it in close proximity to one another. No matter how far apart we placed them, they wiggled and squirmed until they were back together.

In their learning curve they crawled and rolled and dived all over each other. Little fists gouged the other's eyes, little feet kicked mouths and bellies, and sometimes the entire weight of one fell on the other and left him breathless.

The remarkable thing about all this is that neither of them ever registered distress when their brother was inflicting what looked to us to be painful blows. Apparently, because they had shared the womb, they were used to one another's elbows, feet, and idiosyncratic movements. They accepted jabs and pokes as just another day at the office, somehow seeming to know that their brother would make the same allowance for them and that they were engaged in an important enterprise.

We have shared the womb with our brothers and sisters in the church. We struggle together on a learning curve that is steep. Yet is it not possible that we can remain in it together? Yes, it is awkward and clumsy and inefficient to engage one another because we are all imperfect in our understanding and less than skillful in our movements.

But in our heart of hearts, we know that we are called to be God's poetry. Our church has a gift, a charism, for the life of the world; that charism will only be fully exercised through our reconciled lives together. God has brought us forth for particular work, and God yearns for us to embrace our calling with forbearance, gratitude, and joy.

I have a friend who is a pretty good handyman. He has lots of skills for all kinds of projects. He starts off really well, but he has a lot of trouble finishing things. This has become such a habit with him that his family calls him "80% Joe" and plans for others to finish what he begins.

We behave as though we have an "80% God" -- a God who may have begun a good work in us, but who cannot be counted upon to bring it to fruition. I believe that is called heresy.

And so we are called both into our individual learnings and into our sibling bonds. We have the option of remembering the fellowship of the womb, if we choose. God calls us to have the courage to travel together with the values of kinship and generosity instead of alienation and condemnation.

I continue to pray for a "Cyrus factor" to emerge: an action of the Holy Spirit which we do not know how to define, which comes out of nowhere, blows where it will -- without our voting on it -- and which makes of us a renewed and prepared people, able to build again.

You see, our journey together IS an epic saga. It has all the drama and possibility for which anyone could hope. It sweeps from creation to fall to restoration to renewal to the bounty of all the fish and bread we want.

As the saga continues, may God bring to maturity in our church something new, so that we may truly become the poetry of God's glorious future.

Amen.