BRING YOUR KIN-DOM
A Sermon on Mark 13:1-8

Last week Eyleen and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. We had a wonderful vacation, first in the mountains of North Carolina, then in Memphis, visiting my parents, sisters and their families, as well as Eyleen’s children and our grandchildren, all the while renewing kinship with some good, old friends. It was truly a time of Sabbath, renewal and rest, before the two of us settle in to spend the holidays here, in Maryland.

In light of that, our enjoyable time away, I offer my gratitude. Thanks be to God for Tommy Rogers, my associate, and for all the other clergy and staff who covered for me while I was away. Thanks be to God for all of you who make a financial commitment to the ministry and mission of Christ through this parish. Among so many other things, you make it possible for me to have this wonderful job and a paid vacation! Thanks be to God also for the vestry and other leaders of this parish, who continue to be true companions with me and good Christian friends to us all. Your bulletin today speaks of our first annual Mutual Ministry Review, in which your leaders will be celebrating joys and addressing concerns of this beloved parish church we call All Saints’. Please keep your leaders in prayer today, as we seek to learn new ways to grow in our journey toward shalom – toward God’s healing, peace and new life for us all.

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“ America is in a funk.”

Perhaps you saw that headline last week. It was carried in the Memphis newspaper as an Associated Press story on Veterans Day. Actually, the full headline was: “The Euphoria of 2008 is over. America is in a funk.” A recent poll reveals “Americans grew slightly more dispirited over the past month….Some 56% of people say the country is headed in the wrong direction, up from 51% last month and 49% in Obama’s first month as president.”

We also heard this week that the official jobless rate is now 10.2%, highest in a quarter-century. Actually, for men it’s 11.4% and for African-Americans, 15.7%. Families struggling with job losses, home foreclosures, even personal bankruptcies are now falling out of the middle class. Yesterday’s front page article in The Frederick News-Post told us that Religious Coalition and homeless shelter clients now come from situations that are more like yours and mine than ever before. I suspect members of your extended family, like mine, are caught up in all of this. There are young people with baccalaureate and even advanced degrees, older people with good skills and tons of experience – so many of our loved ones, now suddenly out of work. On average, they’re vying for the same job that five other people in this country are qualified – and dying – to have. Families are also, it seems, in a funk.

This week, before we observed Veterans Day, we paused to honor thirteen more men and women. Before we gave thanks for all those men and women – like my father, like some of your own kin, members of your own families – who have offered and are now offering and will be offering their lives in service to our country, there was a memorial service for those killed at Fort Hood. Who has not heard the horrible news, that they were brought down on their own home base by the violent, illogical, even ironic actions of a man trained to help soldiers cope with the stresses of military life? At that service President Obama, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey and Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, Fort Hood’s commanding officer, read aloud the names of each slain soldier. Gen. Cone noted that his post had lost 545 service members in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past eight years of war, but “never did we expect to face such a high price at home, where soldiers feel secure.” Many who are serving our country, some for multiple terms of duty, military women and men are now also in a funk.

While we were on vacation last week Eyleen and I found ourselves quite unexpectedly in the company of a dear couple who are like kin, like family to us. Harriet is active in their church’s pastoral care ministry. Fred served on Eyleen’s discernment committee for the priesthood and was, in fact, my 10 th grade Sunday school teacher, a “few years” back. A lifelong learner, he is still teaching people, including me. Fred’s latest curiosity, as he approaches his 80 th birthday, is about how he might help Episcopal churches grow. He coordinates the Church Growth commission for the Diocese of West Tennessee. In that diocese more than a third of the churches have had fewer than 40 people attending church on an average weekend – and this for more than a decade. Regardless of size, there is a slow downturn in attendance in nearly all the Episcopal churches in west Tennessee. This matches, of course, a similarly long, slow decline in Episcopal Church attendance across the country – matching the Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and all of us who used to be called “mainline” denominations, now sometimes dubbed “sidelined” or “old-line” Christians. For me, the “bottom-line, up front” question is: How can the Episcopal Church, including All Saints’, get out of this funk?

Then, today, as we start a new week, we hear a Gospel story that doesn’t sound like very Good News. Nation rising against nation? The end that is still to come? We have, of course, come to the end, in Mark’s gospel account, of Jesus’ earthly ministry. It was, in fact, the end of the world, as people knew it. For us, it’s also the end of the church year. The season of Advent is – dare I say it? – only two weeks away. But today is not just about endings. Listen again to the last sentence of Jesus: “This is but the beginning of the birthpangs” (Mark 13:8). Beginnings? BIRTH pangs? Pain like a mother feels when her baby is about to be born? What does this mean? How can things that feel like dying actually bring forth life? How can birth come from death? How can Jesus’ words help us get out of our funk?

Two summers ago, when the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference of the world’s Anglican bishops had ended, the Rt. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, our own Presiding Bishop, described that conference with these words: "We have prayed, cried, learned, and laughed together, and discovered something deeper about the body of Christ…. We have not resolved the differences among us, but have seen the deep need to maintain relationships, even in the face of significant disagreement and discomfort….The Anglican Communion is suffering thebirth pangs of something new, which none of us can yet fully appreciate or understand, yet we know that the Spirit continues to work in our midst. At the same time, patience is being urged from many quarters, that all may more fully know the leading of the Spirit. God is faithful. May we be faithful as well."

Our Presiding Bishop’s remarks remind me of one of my favorite passages in all of Holy Scripture, from Romans: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us….We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved.” (8:18, 22-24). Dear friends in Christ, it’s all about hope. Hope saves us. Hope helps us get out of our funk. Hope keeps us going. And hope is what our Bible is all about.

Today’s collect, one of the most-loved in our Book of Common Prayer, reminds us that when we hear, read, mark, learn and inwardlydigest the Holy Scriptures – even when they don’t “speak” to us, even when they talk about “end times” – something happens. When we feed on the Bible, when we let it nurture and sustain us on our journeys, we can embrace and hold fast to hope – the same hope that can feed us this morning during Holy Communion, the food and drink of new and unending life in Christ. And we need to seek that hope together – as friends, as fellow members of Christ’s body, as God’s family, God’s kin-folk.

Friday night I saw a piece on Bill Moyers’ Journal about Poets House, a safe place in New York City, a haven of hope created after 9/11. It inspired me to write a prayer poem, using today’s Scriptures. It’s called “Bring Your Kin-dom.”

(see below for the poem)

BRING YOUR KIN-DOM

Bring your kin-dom, O God.
Just bring your kin-dom.

We come before you today, O God,
beaten down by the changes of this world.
God, we really do need you to preach some Good News
in the midst of all that’s Bad.
We need to worship you, God,
like the Hebrews did in today’s lessons, like they do throughout Scripture.

We need to weep and wail and pour out our prayers.
We need to tell you just how
sick and tired we are of being sick and tired.
For deep down we know that we need you, God,
you and only you.
We also need you to remind us
of your mighty and mysterious love
for all of your world…and for us.

So, we come to you, gracious God, here, today, together, and
we ask you a favor.
We ask you and beg you – yes, we even implore you! – just like Hannah, to
Bring your kin-dom, O God.
Just bring your kin-dom.

In the bittersweet surrender of Hannah’s groaning prayer,
you showed her how this was
but the beginning of the birth pangs.

In the constant discouragement of the Hebrews’ Christian life,
you showed them how this was
but the beginning of the birth pangs.

Down through your history of salvation
you show us time and time again how this is
but the beginning of the birth pangs.
In the political tsunami of a collapsing Berlin wall,
In the religious upheaval of a post-9/11 world,
In an economic downturn creating more and more jobless lives,
In our personal losses and disasters that depress, even sink our souls,
In the challenges of transforming a 267-year-old, now our 21 st-century church...

You show us time and time and time again how this is
but the beginning of the birth pangs.

Even yet, even so, we come together and cry out to you, praying:
Bring your kin-dom, O God,
Just bring your kin-dom.

In the ending of this season filled
with leaves that turn to dust…and seeds,
In the ending of the church’s year
with warnings dire…but still your promise,
In the ending of all the honeymoons of life
with disappointments, and yet – still dreaming…
help us.

Help us, O God.
Help us dare to prepare for the beginning – your new beginning.
Is this really the beginning of the birth pangs?

Well, if it is, then
Bring your kin-dom, O God.
Just bring your kin-dom.

In the midst of our funk, free us – and give us some heavenly hope!
Help us, O God.
Help us, help us, help us, so that together, we, as one another’s kin, can help
bring your kin-dom, O God,
once more, like Jesus did,
so that we this time, we might help you bring your kin-dom once more
to this fragile, fractured earth we kinfolk share,
as it is, as your kin-dom is already growing and overflowing
in your glorious, kin-filled heaven.

Alleluia. Alleluia! Amen.

For more on the interruptions of life, go to http://fathermom.wordpress.com