Opening sermon, Diana Butler Bass
Washington National Cathedral
Episcopal Diocese of Washington Convention, January 26, 2007

Texts: Isa 6:1 “Here am I; send me!”
Ps 98 “Sing to the Lord a new song”
Ephesians 4:11-16 “Until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.”Matthew 9:35-38 “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.”  

This evening’s scriptures open our diocesan convention with a gentle challenge, offering us a chance to reflect on why we are here and what God is calling us, as a community, to be and do.  

When praying through these readings, which were assigned to me, I was tempted to preach on mission. Two of the church’s great mission texts are here: the wonderful passage on Isaiah, “Here am I; send me!” and the Matthew passage “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” Indeed, I remember hearing these two passages in a sermon in 1979—I attended a national mission conference sponsored by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in Urbana, Illinois. On New Year’s Eve, sitting in a vast auditorium with 18,000 other evangelical college students, a preacher implored us to pursue a life of mission, to bring in the “harvest” and make Isaiah’s call our own: “Here am I, send me!” To ensure of faithfulness to this call, ushers passed out commitment cards for each person to sign. I listened, I prayed, I signed. Somewhere, in some basement or attic at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship headquarters, there is a little card, dated December 31, 1979, reading “Here am I, send me,” signed by a 20-year old “Diana Lee Hochstedt” (that would be me).  As I ruminated on Isaiah, the mission of the church, and that New Year’s Eve now long ago, the passage from Ephesians caught my attention. If John Chane or Sam Lloyd or Carol Wade or whoever picked these readings wanted me to preach about mission, why include these words?

The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.

Hmmmm. Mission? Well, it mentions apostles and evangelists, they usually have something to do with mission. But, other than that, this passage seems to have more to do with the internal life of the church. And, if you are made uncomfortable by it as I am, these words bear an eerie prophetic echo of what the Episcopal Church is facing today, with arguments, departures, threats, and potential schism.

Indeed, the harvest passage (along with its Hebrew bible counterpart in Isaiah) and the Ephesians passage are about two different things: the external witness of the church and its inner health and wholeness.

Christian leaders—those who wear collars and those who part of the great priesthood of believers—often emphasize one of these things over another, pitting the internal practices of being church with the call to mission in the world. “The problem with my church,” a woman recently told me, “is that we don’t pray; we don’t know how to listen. If only Episcopalians paid attention to their spiritual lives, we wouldn’t have these problems.”

My husband, Richard, works for the Alban Institute, an organization that pays a great deal of attention to the inner workings of churches. Just this week, he received a letter from a disgruntled customer attacking Alban for ignoring mission in favor of internal church structures. “Now those Gospel and Culture people,” he wrote of a specifically “missional” group, “they really get it. That’s how the church will be renewed.”

One of the divides that plagues the Episcopal Church is illustrated in these texts and comments: spirituality v. justice; renewing the church v. engaging mission. I suspect that some of you in the pews tonight have an agenda. Maybe you want to fix the church through centering prayer; maybe you want to renew the diocese by reaching out to the poor; perhaps you want to unify Episcopalians around spiritual practices, perhaps you want to unite us in policy.

This evening’s readings affirm your passions—and they may well challenge them, too. For, as these words remind us: both spirituality and justice, and renewal and mission are God’s work. Being church involves, as Elizabeth O’Connor wrote in the 1970s, a journey inward and a journey outward. We move from Christian maturity and the wholeness of our souls in community out toward the edges of society proclaiming the Good News of the kingdom. These passages insist on wholeness: the whole work of the whole diocese—indeed the whole work of the whole church. The truth is that we need all of us, with all our passions and callings, to live God’s wisdom.

The inward journey, simply put, is maturity in Christ. The writer of Ephesians contrasts “maturity” with “childishness” (which was an insult in the ancient world), conjuring images of brawling children, easily led into conflict by lies and manipulation. The goal of Christian community is “the full stature of Christ,” the unity of diverse peoples in faith and knowledge of Jesus. When this vision is “working properly,” the writer states, it “promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.”

Do we want a healthy church? A unified one? A loving one? Well, it is clear—from this passage and others in the New Testament—that Christian maturity, the spiritual wisdom that is in Christ, is the goal. This happens in a variety of ways in prayer, worship, and ordering our common life, but as the writer strongly implies in Ephesians, maturity results from focused Christian practices of discernment, theological reflection, and creating diverse community. This maturity flows from the head (as in source, as in the head of a river) of Christ to the whole body, which then, flows in the stream of grace toward love.

Without the inward journey, the outward journey is impossible. Sure, Episcopalians could do many good things our money, intelligence and influence. But what are those things, asked St. Paul in Corinthians, without love? Mission, without spiritual depth, is a noisy gong or clanging cymbal. Can you imagine anything worse than Christian mission being carried out by laborers who are not mature? Who are not themselves whole in Christ? What kind of gospel would they preach? What kind of healing would they offer?

Paying attention to the inward journey is intimately related to the outward journey of mission. And, in Matthew, Jesus tells us what that mission is to be: “preach the good news of the kingdom,” and “cure every disease and every sickness.” This is God’s shalom, the making peace between us and God and living God’s dream for humankind. It is a mission of proclamation and action, of making Christians and enacting God’s justice. This text is particularly interesting because—up to this point in Matthew’s gospel Jesus proclaims and acts all by himself and the disciples watch. But here, and in the verses of Matthew 10 that follow, Jesus invites the disciples to join him, to become brother and sister actors in his mission of shalom. Jesus commissions us—and gives us authority—to proclaim the Good News. Tell the world, he says, “The kingdom of heaven has come near. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.”

Indeed, Jesus sends us on the kingdom’s errands: Where are the sick that needed to be cured? Who are the dead we are called to raise? What lepers are we to cleanse? Which demons must be cast out? Think of all the sickness around us; gaze on the dying; consider the outcast and untouchables; imagine the evils that plague us. Look, look at the all the work Jesus has invited his body to do! He is our head, the source of our river of grace, because he himself once did it. Now we, in his full stature, are invited to participate in God’s dream.

What is our response to the call for both full maturity and the kingdom’s mission? To attend to the inner life of the church and tend to God’s justice? Well, I didn’t bring any little cards with me for you to sign. But, I suspect we all have agendas that need to be enlarged in accordance with the whole vision of scripture. And we might need to examine our hearts to see if we, the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, can say, along with the prophet Isaiah, “Here we are; send us!”