July 19, 2009 - Rev. Wayne Sherrer, preacher

II Samuel 7:1-14; Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

Last Sunday Father Dick preached a sermon about the beauty of a plan than works out perfectly, just the way it was designed. It is satisfying, it is amazing to watch as such a plan unfolds and it is also quite rare. The circumstances of our lives and the actions of other people so often lead to changes in our schedule or revisions in our plans. Even a simple drive to the store can take a detour to avoid traffic or road construction. Sometimes the store has sold out the item we came to purchase. And plans become more complicated when they involve other people and not just ourselves. Just ask any parent or think back on your own experience as a parent. A request was made and you gave your consent. Then before the request was complete, the situation changed, or maybe you just came to your senses, and you needed to tell the child that the party had to move indoors, the vacation was canceled, or an item could not be purchased today. Suddenly a person who couldn't remember to brush their teeth or to make their bed has perfect recall of what was told them weeks ago. The words of consent might as well have been carved in stone. We know the three words that have been spoken so often—we know them all too well. In fact we have all used them ourselves. Those words are “But YOU SAID. . . . .

Our first and last lessons today share this theme. In the first David tells Nathan of his desire to build a house for God. Nathan was God's prophet and his words were accepted as coming from God himself. Listen again to his response to David. “Go, do all that you have in mind; for the Lord is with you.” That's as clear as can be that God through Nathan was telling David “All systems, go; full speed ahead!” Then, hours later, Nathan hears a new word from God to stop David from building a temple. You know and I know and Nathan knows how David will react, “But YOU SAID I could build a temple . ..” and what David will mean is “But GOD SAID. . .”

Then we look to our Gospel and see Jesus' compassion for his weary disciples. He invites them to come away to a deserted place to rest for awhile. But the crowd figured out their destination and beat them to it. Imagine the disappointment of the disciples when they reached the supposedly deserted shore and found it filled with another great crowd. And instead of staying offshore in their boat and heading for a new place of rest, Jesus led them onto the beach as he began to teach once again. Can you hear the disciples? “But YOU SAID we would get a rest. .”

We believe that God is perfect and expect that God's plans are also perfect. But those plans are put into action by imperfect people like you and me. Imagine an architect who designs a beautiful building and who carefully draws page after page of detailed blueprints. But the excavator digs the hole too deep, the building supplier delivers bricks instead of cement blocks and the carpenter uses a tape measure that isn't quite accurate. Picture the architect patiently revising his blueprints and carefully working the new materials and different measurements to create a building equally as lovely and just as functional and appropriate as his original design. And in time that architect might draw additional blueprints to remodel that building so it might serve new purposes.

As dwellers in the world God designed for us, as members of the Church God designed for us, we at times catch a glimpse of one of God's old blueprints and think we need to return the world or the church to some earlier, more original condition. Or we see the mess involved in God's current remodeling effort and we protest to God “But YOU SAID that priests should be men or YOU SAID the 1928 prayer book and the King James Bible were the authorized books for us to use.” A treasure of the Episcopal Church has been our belief that God's blueprints for his Church and for his world are made known to us through Scripture, through the tradition of the Church and through human reason. Our Church today is not identical to the Church in the days of St. Paul, nor is it the same as the Church of Queen Elizabeth the first or King James. Our Bishops and other representatives have just ended another General Convention for the Episcopal Church. They have listened to the Biblical witness, they have listened to the voices of tradition from the Archbishop of Canterbury and other strands of the Anglican Communion, and they have prayed that the Holy Spirit would guide their reason and their hearts as they asked God to reveal his blueprint for the church at this time and in this place.

In St. Paul's time there were many Jewish Christians who pointed to the holy scripture of their day—the books we call the Old Testament—and they loudly argued “But GOD SAID that to follow the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob a man must be circumcised.” Time after time some believers have tried to put God and his Church into suspended animation and to understand God's perfection as something as unchanging as the Mona Lisa or Michaelangelo's statue of David. But a better model of God's perfection might be Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or Bach's St. Matthew Passion or a song by Eric Clapton or Mariah Carey. We can't stop the music and say this is the perfect chord—the rest of the notes are imperfect and unnecessary. Our God is alive. As King David, the disciples and the early Jewish Christians discovered, that sometimes means God changes the details of his divine plan--for our good and for the good of his Church and his creation. God spoke to them and God is speaking now to us. And we can trust that his plan is still good. Amen