A Sermon Preached January 20, 2011 at Crissey Farm

by The Rev. Jesse Zink

Jesse is a Transitional Deacon in the Diocese of Western Massachusetts and a Senior at Berkley Yale Divinity School, New Haven, CT

Epiphany 4 - Year B

Deuteronomy 18:15-20

Ps. 111

I Cor. 8:1-13

Mark 1:21-28

I am sure you have all seen one these before - it’s an iPod Touch. Now I can’t say for sure but I imagine this was built in a place called Shenzhen in China by a company called Foxxcon that manufactures products for Apple. It’s not just Apple, though. They also make products for HP and Dell.

Some of you may have seen the lengthy article in the New York Times this week or seen the earlier stories about working conditions at Foxxcon’s Shenzhen factory. Workers are not paid much money at all, living conditions are not great, and there was a recent spate of worker suicides.

One of the reasons Apple is able to be such a successful company is that it has succeeded in driving down production costs so far that it makes a giant profit on each item sold. Now the fact that I can stand here and hold this iPod in my hand is an indication of two things. First, relationships in this world are global in nature. That I am holding this puts me in relationship in some way with the workers in Shenzhen. Second, relationships in this world are broken. I can check my e-mail during class on this iPod and not think twice about the conditions people endured to get it into my hands. You don’t need me to tell you but this is not the only place in the world where there are broken relationships. Think about the ideological polarization of our country where our representatives in Congress can’t seem to summon the courage to actually - gasp - speak to someone of a different party In that, they are only reflecting what is going on in the country, where, sociologists tell us, Americans are spending more and more time with people who are more and more like themselves. 

I’m not that familiar with the lay of the land in the Berkshires or Great Barrington or this congregation but I am familiar enough with community living to guess that there are problem a few broken relationships in this part of the world. Now, on the one hand, this is pretty understandable. We are human. We pursue our own ends. We put our own good above that of others. We withhold forgiveness. We fail to engage people who are different to us. We sin. Original sin, I learned in seminary, is the only empirically verifiable theological doctrine. Just look around you - or within you - for the proof.

We’ve been reading Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians these past few Sundays and they are some difficult chapters to get a hold of. In them, Paul is answering questions the Corinthians have asked him but we don’t always know what the questions are so it can seem at times like we are only hearing part of the onversation. In this morning’s reading, the Corinthians have asked Paul what they should do about eating meat that was sacrificed in the temple.

Now, on the one hand, eating meat that was sacrificed to another god was harmless. The other gods don’t exist so you might as well enjoy the food and the company. The banquet hall of a temple could be a great place for what we might today call networking. Moreover, poor people’s only chance at meat in their diet might be some of what was left over from temple sacrifices.

On the other hand, Paul is concerned that new Christians, Christians who are not that deep in the faith, might get confused by seeing others eat sacrificial meat and think the other gods actually exist. The love that the Corinthians share in the community, which builds them up, means that those who would like to eat the meat might have to put restraints on themselves in deference to the weaker ones among them.

This is not a surprising argument for Paul to make. Throughout this letter to the Corinthians he is constantly reminding them of the importance of the relations within their community. In a few chapters, he will reprimand them for their practices around Communion. It was supposed to be a common meal but it had turned into a church potluck gone wrong. Rich people brought good food and shared it only with one another. Poor people had little to give and had little to eat. That, Paul, says is a travesty of what Communion is supposed to be. Then, after that, he will teach them about what it means to be the Body of Christ. All of you need one another, he tells them. And someone needs the gifts you have to offer. You are both needed and needy in this community. In placing so much emphasis on the health of the community, Paul is just doing what Jesus did. It was Jesus who told his disciples that by this all people will know you are my followers if you have love one for the other.

The quality of relationship between Jesus’ followers will affect their witness to the world. Later, Jesus is even more explicit. He prays to God that “they may all be one…so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” The quality of relationship in the community that seeks to follow in the way of Jesus is a central part of its witness to the truth of the Gospel it proclaims.

There’s a problem with this reasoning of course. Community is fine. But community can be wrong. If we restrain our behaviour for the weaker members of our community which is what Paul concludes in this section of the letter to the Corinthians we might constrain ourselves from the truly prophetic and important action this world needs. Indeed, in speaking to the people of Israel in his concluding sermon in the book of Deuteronomy Moses promises them that there will be other figures like them, people capable of leading them to new levels of obedience to God’s commands and people capable of interpreting what God is doing in their midst.

We need people like that among us who can tell us when our community has gone off track and can call us into new ways of following Jesus. As we look back at his birthday and approach Black History Month, I often think at this time of year of Martin Luther King. A group of religious leaders - including two Episcopal bishops - wrote to him and said they just wished he would not be so aggressive in his bus boycott but wait for a better time. If Martin King had listened to those members of his Christian community he might never had any success.

Instead, he wrote them the Letter from a Birmingham Jail in which he said that black people had for too long heard others say “wait” and that waiting had turned into never. Our life as a community matters, Martin King knew, but he also knew that God raised up prophets who weren’t always the most popular people in their communities.

I was thinking about this tension between prophetic action and community life this summer. I spent about a month visiting with other Anglicans in Nigeria. We American Episcopalians are related to Anglicans in Nigeria through the Anglican Communion the worldwide body of churches that have something in common with one another and some sort of relationship to the Archbishop of Canterbury. But you might have heard that relationships between American Episcopalians and Nigerian Anglicans are not all that great. 


For many years and certainly since the ordination in 2003 of Gene Robinson as the first openly-gay bishop in the church neither side has really seen eye-to-eye. Some bishops in Nigeria have anathematized us. And we have not always responded with Christian love and charity. It’s a broken relationship, just the same way my iPod embodies another kind of broken relationship or our Congress a third kind. There are plenty of people calling for prophetic action in the Anglican Communion.

Unfortunately, it’s often diametrically opposite courses of action. We haven’t figured out a way to hold together the loving restraint in our actions that Paul calls for with the deeply-held belief that the actions we are engaging in - whether in welcoming openly gay and lesbian people into full participation in our church or standing firmly opposed to the forces of secularism and revisionism that are stalking our church - are truly prophetic.

This slice of the global community is marked and marred by broken relationships Jesus’ prayer for unity is unrealized. Our branch of the church is just like the rest of the world a world that can produce a device like this iPod only by breaking relationships within the global community.

I had no idea what to expect when I got off the plane in Nigeria I had made some arrangements in advance with some Anglicans but in the weeks leading up to my departure I wasn’t always sure if they would work out. So it came as something of a surprise to be enthusiastically and warmly welcomed everywhere I went. It wasn’t just perfunctory hospitality to a visiting stranger. No, it was genuine welcome to someone who was like a long-lost brother returning home. “You are Anglican and we are Anglican” I heard. “We rejoice that you are here to worship and pray and study with us.” “Make sure you come back. And bring your friends. We want to meet them as well.” 

As I spent more time there and came to know people better and better they began to ask deeper and more probing questions. I spent a lot of time talking with one man, Paul, who was the dean of the cathedral in a diocese I stayed in about how Christianity was received and shaped in each different culture it spread to. “The Gospel can be at home in every culture,” he said. “But every culture has something that needs to be converted by the Gospel." He told me that in Nigeria he thought Nigerian culture needed to be converted

away from its heavy corruption, theft, and cheating in business and politics. “What is it that needs to be converted in your culture?” he asked me. It is a not a question I had given much thought to in the past

and I didn’t have a good answer at the time.

A day or two later I was with another priest and asked him to stop at a store so I could buy a new notebook. When we reached the cash register, he reached to pull out some money from his pocket but I beat him to the punch. “No,” I said, “I’m the one who needs this and I will pay for it.” He insisted I let him pay and it was only because I was faster in getting the money out of my wallet that I paid.

When we were back in the car, he said to me seriously, “You know, what you did disrespected me. In our culture you can’t turn down my offer of hospitality” I apologized to him. He said, “In our culture, we don’t have this independence you have in your culture.”

Thinking about that encounter I wondered if maybe I didn’t have an answer to the question Paul had asked me. What is it about our culture that needs to be converted? Perhaps it is our excessive focus on the individual. And the de-emphasis on community. It is no mistake that this is called an iPod, not a wePod. We don’t make wePads and wePhones - it is about I, I, I. And to make this iDevice we have to break relationships, ignore how others are living and being treated.

So perhaps in our world in this time, the truly prophetic act is to affirm that we are all part of the same Body. When I pass someone asking me for money on the street I often think, “I can’t be bothered right now and this isn’t my problem anyway.” The prophetic act might be to say, “What is your name? You matter to me because we are part of the same community.” When I see members of my church doing or saying things I think are wrong or silly I am often tempted to ignore them, cut them off, or mock them to others. The truly prophetic act might be actually to speak to the person I am having a problem with and seek to find out what it is that divides us and what it is that draws us together. When I politicians saying things I disagree with my response can often be, “Well, I won’t listen to them anymore. They’re clearly wrong.” What if my response instead was, “What is it that motivates you to speak like this?” “How can you and I have a relationship across our differences?” 

It is sad to say but in our time, talking to people who are different than us has become an unusual act. Taking the next step and saying that people who are different to us whether they live down the street or around the world are part of the same community we belong to is even more unusual - and, I believe, prophetic. It points out the truth of the Gospel message if we want to follow in the way of Jesus, we do that not as a group of individuals but as a community of people committed to one another in spite of and because of our differences.

For some of us that means working on relationships within a global community. For others of us it means working on relationships with people just down the street. Difference is all around us and the prophetic act is to engage it wherever we find it.

I spent some time in Nigeria in a remote part of an eastern diocese. Because of the mission history, the big church in the area is Methodist and the Anglicans meet in a single room. They get about six people on Sunday morning. I spent a Wednesday afternoon there, praying and talking with them. At the end of our time together, one older man stood up and said ,“Sometimes we are ashamed to be Anglicans in this village with our little church. But today you have come here. It is evangelism for you to be here. People will be saying, ‘That man came all the way from the United States to see that Anglican church.’” I didn’t know what to say in response so I told him we are all part of the Anglican Communion and the worldwide body of Christ and that is nothing to be ashamed of.

As I was leaving, one of the women ran home to get a pineapple from her yard as thanks for my visit. That is the spirit of generosity and community that motivates some of our sisters and brothers around the world. I think we’ll find that when we encounter those who are different to us they are often eager to give and when we see that giving - represented in this case by a pineapple how can we turn away?

Amen.