The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
January 27, 2008

3 Epiphany – A
Amos 3:1-8
1 Corinthians 1:10-24
Matthew 4:12-23

When Jesus began his ministry he decided not to do it all by himself. He decided to call other people to help him with it, and right there he set the stage for trouble! “Follow me,” Jesus said to some folks who were fishing one day, “and I will make you fishers of men.” Or, as more recent, politically correct translations put it, “fishers of people.”

Maybe Jesus was like lots of other young people who “just want to work with people” when they grow up. I don’t know, but in any event, when we find him by the Sea of Galilee this morning, we find him inviting some ordinary people, fishermen, to come with him to share his life and work and destiny.

If I were the Son of God, I’m not sure I would do it that way. If I were the Son of God, I would think it easier to whip the world into shape all by myself. After all, as Son of God, I’d have the right credentials and I’d have the power. No fooling around with fishermen or committees or vestries, all of whom have wills of their own and who just gum up the works with all their conflicting ideas that get everything off track...

...which seems to be exactly what happened in the congregation in Corinth, where there were some people in the parish who said they followed Apollos, while there were others who said they followed Cephas, and others who said they followed Paul, and others who said they followed Christ, and probably not any two of them in the whole bunch could even agree on what kind of donuts to bring to the next meeting.

The folks in Corinth, your see, were pretty much like us. They all had their own ideas about what church should be all about. Some thought that Christians were free to eat meat sacrificed to idols, while others argued that they were not. Some believed that worship hadn’t really happened unless someone spoke in tongues; others, like Paul, believed speaking in tongues was one of the lesser gifts and ought to be kept under control. Some thought that women could attend church without a veil; others thought they should be both covered and quiet. Some believed Christian liberty included sexual license; others taught that sexual activity was to be kept within strict bounds.

So they were divided. “I am for Paul,” said some. And “I’m for Apollos,” and “I’m for Cephas,” and “I’m for Christ,” and “I am definitely for us, but not for them,” replied others, as if Christ were divided into parties.

Well, today we’ve pretty much settled the issue about eating meat sacrificed to idols. But sex and speaking in tongues and women speaking at all are still hot topics in some quarters. And everywhere it’s “I want a church that will meet my needs,” as if church were all about me. “I want a church with great music,” and “I think the parish budget should focus more on this” and “I think it should focus more on that,” we argue – all of which is Jesus’ fault in the first place, because he didn’t just put on a Superman suit and whip the world into shape himself. Instead, he chose to work with people.

No, if I were Son of God, I think I’d just tell everybody how it is, and lay out the work of the Church, and that’s that.

But what is the work of the Church, the mission of the Church?

St. Paul appeals to us this morning: “In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, agree among yourselves, and avoid divisions; let there be complete unity of mind and thought.” Is he kidding? What can unity of mind and thought possibly mean in a church made up of people?

I’m reminded of the story about the preacher who was trying to get his sermon written, but parishioners kept knocking on his door with questions and other needs, and later he complained to a fellow pastor about how he liked being the pastor of a church all right, but that he couldn’t ever get any work done because of all the interruptions. And his colleague said, “But the interruptions are your work.”

People, in other words, are what church is all about. “The mission of the Church,” we say in the catechism, “is to restore all people to unity with God, and [with] each other, in Christ.”

The mission of the Church is not caring for those with AIDS, or feeding the hungry, or making missions to Haiti, or seeing that meat that has been sacrificed to idols is not served at parish potlucks. The mission of the Church is not singing great music, or even teaching the Bible or balancing the parish budget. Those are all specific things Christians are often led to do when the mission of the Church calls for them, but the mission of the Church is larger than that.

The mission of the Church is prayer, worship, the sharing of the good news that God loves us – all of us – and the promotion of justice, peace, and love. (I didn’t make this up; you can check it out in the Prayer Book.) The mission of the Church is what we’re going to sing about as we go out of here today: It is the proclamation of Christ nailed to the Cross, the sharing of the message of God’s love for all of us, which is “music to the sinner’s ears,” a message meant not only for you, but also meant for you and me to share, starting with the people you see right beside you, and in the pews in front of you and behind you, and especially with those who disagree with you and who are disagreeable to you.

Sometimes we lose sight of the mission of the Church because of the agendas of the Church.

I want to tell you a story which I hope will illustrate what I mean, the story of Sir Ernest Shackelton’s voyage to Antarctica in 1915. Shackelton’s ship was named Endurance, which, when you think about it, is a good name for Jesus’ Church as well, and Shackelton’s agenda was to lead the first group of men to travel across the continent of Antarctica.

They sailed from England to Buenos Aires to the island of South Georgia. At 54 degrees south latitude, South Georgia was the southernmost port available to them. On December 5, 1914 – midsummer in the south – they embarked for the Weddell Sea on the eastern, or Atlantic, coast of Antarctica. The agenda was for The Endurance to drop Shackelton and his explorers off at the coast, along with their dogs and sleds and provisions. The Endurance was to return to South Georgia, and the explorers were to be picked up later at a bay in the Ross Sea on the western, or Pacific, coast after the small landing party had succeeded in traveling by land across the frozen continent.

But unforeseen circumstances intervened, which immediately altered their agenda. Heavy ice prevented the ship from reaching the eastern coast, and for six weeks they zigzagged south through ice floes and icebergs, hoping somehow to reach their goal. But then, on January 18, the ship came to a grinding halt less than one hundred miles from its destination, stuck fast at 77 degrees south latitude by ice floes that squeezed the ship tight.

For the next nine months, throughout the darkness and bitter cold of the Antarctica winter of 1915, the men lived on the ship, stuck firmly in the ice as the winds and currents moved the ice and them steadily north, away from their intended destination, and this interruption of their agenda quickly became their work.

In October, as the spring ice began to thaw, the ice floes once again became more active and unstable, and the enormous pressure of the ice, pressing against the ship, crushed The Endurance. Tore it to pieces as if it were but a balsa wood model made by a child. And, in November, it sank.

The men – explorers, scientists, and sailors alike – were now completely exposed to the skies and the sea. Capturing penguins and hunting seals for food now became their work, and they spent the next five months steadily floating northward on ice, moving themselves and their three small life boats and the supplies and provisions they had been able to salvage from one ice floe to another.

At times, as the ice would thaw and break, they would find that a floe they thought was secure and stable had broken in two, separating the men from their boats or separating one part of the group from another, and they would have to scramble to get everybody, and everything, back together again, because separation meant probable, if not certain, death.

In April of 1916, facing a second winter on the ice with their supplies dwindling and their nerves fraying, the winds and currents brought them within sight of Elephant Island, north of Antarctica. It was not a particularly hospitable refuge, but it was the only land available to them, and they decided to make a run for it in the three small open boats, the largest only twenty-two feet long. It was a race for survival. They constantly had to dodge icebergs that were drifting together and that threatened to crush them, and they would have to pull themselves and the boats quickly up onto the surface of a floe to avoid the collision. And throughout it all, they had to row with the three boats tied together to keep them from drifting apart in the darkness and the winds.

Amazingly, the entire crew of twenty-eight men made it to Elephant Island, which is uninhabited except for penguins and Elephant Seals, for which the island is named, but which is home to lots and lots of ice and snow and wind. Now marooned, and aware that no one in the world knew where they were or whether they were even alive, they decided to rig the most seaworthy of their boats, The James Caird, with a sail and to ballast it with large rocks (on which they would have to sleep in the open sea!) so that Shackelton and five others might try to sail back to South Georgia, eight hundred long miles to the east, to get a rescue party, leaving the remaining twenty-two men on the island to wait for rescue – to wait for a rescue that would come only if The James Caird actually made it to South Georgia.

It proved to be a sixteen-day journey on heavy, icy seas in a twenty-two-foot boat that required constant bailing, with no relief from the winds and the ice and with waves at times twenty to forty feet high.

Miraculously, on May 10, 1916, with only a sextant for navigation and little sun to use it by, they landed at South Georgia, but on the wrong side of the island, with the seas too high and the boat and themselves too beat up and exhausted to do what they would have liked to do, sail around the island to the whaling station.

Circumstances had once again interrupted their plans. So, leaving three of the men on the west side, Shackleton and two others walked across the steep, snow-packed, altogether uncharted mountains of South Georgia to the Norwegian whaling station on the east coast.

Whalers picked up the other three in a matter of days. But because World War I had begun, England was not able to to supply a rescue ship. So for four more winter months, from May to August, Shackelton worked tirelessly to find a ship and crew in South America that would return to Elephant Island to rescue the twenty-two men still marooned there. Shackelton was now safe, but his mission continued to be the rescue of the others who remained on Elephant Island. And after several abortive attempts and much political disappointment, and almost two full years after their original departure from South Georgia, Shackelton and two of his officers returned to Elephant Island on a small tug lent them by the government of Chile. All twenty-two of the men on the island were still alive, the only serious injuries being one heart attack, from which the sailor had recovered, and the amputation of five toes because of frostbite.

Was the journey a success or a failure?

Shackelton’s original agenda, his idea and the budgeted plan for the crossing of the continent, was a total failure, made so by the interruptions of circumstance and fortune. But the journey as a whole was a whopping success of community, the holding together of the entire crew for the mission of their eventual rescue.

“Have this mind among you,” says St. Paul. “Do not confuse your ideas, your plans and your agendas, with the mission of Christ’s Church. Do not confuse your agendas with your destiny. Endure in agreeing among yourselves and avoid divisions, regardless of circumstance or fortune. Let there be complete unity of mind and thought. Christ is not divided. We proclaim Christ crucified, which is an offense to the Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, an offense and foolishness to those on the way to destruction.

But to us, to those called to the destiny of salvation, it is the power of God. This destiny is your mission. So proclaim this: “God loves you, every one of you, regardless of agenda or circumstance or fortune. God loves you so much that his own Son died for you on the Cross, lest any one of you be lost.” So avoid divisions, and endure with this mind among yourselves: “Publish glad tidings, tidings of peace, tidings of Jesus. Proclaim to every people, tongue, and nation that God, in whom they live and move, is Love; tell how he stooped to save his lost creation, and died on earth that all might live above.”

The agendas of the Church – our human ideas of doctrine and polity, our plans and expectations, our personal goals for favorite church activities, the agendas of commissions and vestries and budgets, the personal agendas or charisms of particular Pauls or Cephases or Apolloses – or, to put it in the context of our own day, the personal agendas or charisms of particular Gene Robinsons or Don Armstrongs, or of particular Bishops Akinola or Jefferts-Schori – all these come and go. They all suffer the shifting fortunes of winds and tides and circumstance. They are as unstable as this spring’s ice floes, as unreliable as this year’s political promises, as insubstantial as this year’s football hero or basketball season.

But the mission of Christ’s Church is secure, because it is the mission of good news and reconciliation regardless of fortune and circumstance. “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity,” is the way St. Augustine described it. In other words, ultimately, there is only one way for the Church to fail in its mission. The only possible failure of the Church is the failure of charity, the failure of love, the failure of community that happens whenever even one is lost because the agendas of those who are for Apollos or Cephas or Paul or anyone else, or because the agendas of those who are for us but not for them, are substituted for the mission of Christ, which is the rescue of us all.

But Christ is not divided. He is the captain of a ship that sails turbulent waters, to be sure, but whose crew survives every circumstance and every interruption if we are of unity of mind and thought as ambassadors of him who died for us, because his mission is that all of us might live.

This is an offense to those on the way to destruction, Paul reminds us. But to us, buffeted as we are by the winds of destruction but called to the destiny of salvation, it is the power of him which restores us to unity with God, and with each other, and leads us home.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.