Creating our Legacies-Deacon Charlie Barebo

In today’s Gospel John finds Jesus in prayer. The prayer is Jesus legacy, His last will and testament. Jesus has passed what he received from the Father onto us, His believers.

“They were yours, You gave them to me.”

The legacy is one of relationship, from the Father to the Son and onto we disciples. This relationship is eternal, forever, forged in life eternal. His prayer is not for the whole world but for us, the believers, those who have entered into His relationship with the Father. Christ prays that we are special; we are not of the world.

“As I was sent into the world, so I have sent them into the world”

In other words, we share not only in the relationship but also the responsibilities given to the Son by the Father. The responsibilities of loving our neighbors as ourselves, of being our brother’s keeper, of making disciples of the nations. Christ’s legacy is a powerful one. A legacy of relationship, blessings, sanctification and of responsibility.

As I prepared for this morning I began to think about what the composition of Christ’s legacy was. It is powerful, changing millions of life over 2,000 years. It is the composite of all His actions, teachings and preaching. It entails how He lived, how and who He loved, how He lived, the sum of all His values and lastly how He communicated these things in a meaningful way to future generations.

As the Father gave to the Son, here at the Cathedral we enjoy a rich and powerful legacy. I read the names carved in the stone of the cathedral walls and how they labored to build Christ’s church. A Senior Warden who served for 38 years, a Vestryman who served for 40 years. I imagine them kneeling and praying in these pews. They left us a rich legacy:

·         A beautiful sanctuary

·         Excellence in worship

·         A rich and strong faith community

·         A tradition of a wonderful music program

·         Outreach – A Room at the End, New Bethany, New Hope

·         Our Youth – baptism, confirmation, Sunday School and camp

We rest in the shade of trees planted by others.

What legacy will we leave?

It seems to me the church is under attack. Christians beheaded in the Middle East, churches bombed and burned.  It has been 1500 years since Christians were faced with these issues. In the courts, schools, government and in the media we are under attack. For Christ prays today,

 

“The world has hated them because they do not belong to the world.”

Can you imagine Western Civilization without the church? Or the US without the pilgrims who settled our country in Pa, Mass, Rhode Island and Maryland who came looking for religious freedom? Is our legacy to be the generation that saw the demise of the church or will our legacy be that we are Easter people, resurrectionists that saw the birth of a new day for the church?

William Covey writes about legacies. He suggests we start with the end in mind and work backwards to the present. That we write our own obituary.  An obituary is a value statement filled with info about who someone loved, where they found God and how they helped their fellow man. What he is suggesting is that we can intentionally craft our legacies.

In 1990 50% of all giving in the USA went to religious organizations. In 2012 that number had dropped to 29%, a decrease of 40% in revenues for religion. In the wake of 9-11, Katrina, natural disaster and the Great Recession the need for the church’s helping hands in greater than ever. We have more to do with fewer resources.

Planned giving creates a significant portion of giving. 50% of Americans leave no will. Those people elect to let the state decide who will raise their children, get their pets, family heirlooms and our financial resources. Of the 50% of Episcopalians who have a will, only one in three will leave a gift to the church in that will. One of your legacy choices can be to leave a gift to the church in your will. 80% of all planned gifts come from bequests in wills. A simple codicil is all one need to leave a percentage of your estate to the church. This is a vales based decision. Your lawyer or accountant cannot advise you about the eternal relationship you share with the Father and the Son.

Many ask about leaving everything to their family. Our last will and testament will impact a family for generations. It is your last chance to reinforce your Christian values to the family. Do those values include faith, abundance, love, blessing and generosity or scarcity, fear and creating a welfare state for the family?

Think of the ministry that changed your life for Jesus. Jesus calls us to change lives, to build His kingdom and to make disciples of the nations. We are Easter people! Support the ministries that bring you closer to Christ; outreach, worship, music, or youth.

We have inherited a legacy from the Father and the Son. We share an eternal relationship with the Father and the Son. We share an eternal relationship with them. Likewise we share a blessing and a legacy at the Cathedral. We also share in the responsibilities of loving God the Father and our neighbors.

“As you have sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so they might be sanctified in the truth.”

The truth is God’s word. And the choice is ours to make. How will you shape your legacy?

Canon Kim Reinholz - Easter 3B - April 19, 2015

The Rev. Canon Kimberly Reinholz
Cathedral Church of the Nativity
April 19, 2015 - Easter 3 B

In the end, we are all children, as we are in the beginning.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his philosophical work Act and Being describes baptism as the sacrament, which makes us all children of God.[1]  What Bonhoeffer and John seem to agree on is that the love of God and our covenantal relationship we are by nature and in deed childlike.

So what does discipleship look like in the context of childhood?

Luke’s gospel reading today concludes with the statement that we are called to be witnesses of these things, of the death and resurrection of the Messiah, and of the promise of forgiveness in the response to repentance.  But John tells us that the world does not know us because the world did not know him, which is true.  To the world what we proclaim as truth seems irrational and juvenile.  

How often have you heard—so you believe that there is some all-powerful, all knowing, all seeing guy with white hair sitting in the clouds controlling everything you do?  Or some variation of that theme…

To the world believing in any God, never the less one God who became incarnate from a virgin, who walked on water, turned water into wine, healed the sick, ate with sinners an tax collectors, was executed as a criminal, rose from the dead and has ascended into heaven, seems more myth and fairytale than real.  You would have to be a child to believe in such a thing- like Santa Clause, the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny.

To those who say that, I agree.  You have to be a child to believe in such a thing.  Because believing in the Trinity, believing that God loves humanity so much that he was willing to empty himself of all divinity and serve as the servant of servants rather than remain in heaven as the lord of lords, believing that Jesus loves each and every one of us does require a certain amount of child-like faith. 

And our witness to these things is childlike.  Imagine a child, learning to walk; unsteady on their feet, but fearless and passionate, likewise we in our journey of faith from the font to the table, from the table into the world, are called to be fearless and passionate no matter how unsteady we may be in our faith.

The truth is that we will stumble.  We will fall.  We will pull others down with us when we fall at times.  But when we stumble, through the grace of God, the love of Christ and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, we are able to get up, dust ourselves off and start again on the journey.

It is when we forget that we are subject to God’s law of eternal love that we fall into the lawlessness that John describes.  It is when we try to break out on our own; when we forget that we are not subjects of this world, but of the kingdom of God, that we find ourselves falling into sin.

Sin is not something to feel guilty about; it is something that happens, throughout our lives.  While sin is unavoidable, it is not unforgiveable.  Like that toddler who fearlessly goes out into the world one foot in front of the other as fast as their little legs can carry them will inevitably fall.  When they fall they can sometimes bounce right back up, they can sometimes use a little help from a friend or sibling, or they can need a little more help and a good cuddle from their parent.  When we fall into sin, we can also sometimes find ourselves repenting and returning to a right relationship with God, with little to no help from anyone else, we recognize we have fallen, we dust ourselves off and return to the table seeking forgiveness and it is received without reproach.  At other times we may need our brothers and sisters in Christ to call us back into relationship, to invite us back into the community of faith when we have strayed.  And sometimes it quite literally takes an act of God to bring us back into our natural state as children of God.  We call this act of God, the sacrament of reconciliation or confession, and as our tradition is oft to say about this rite, “all may, none must, some should.”  However, sometimes when we fall we feel that we are so irreparably hurt that we cannot get up; we cannot return to the community, we cannot be reconciled to God.  This is the ultimate deception, which John warns against, none of us are so damaged that we cannot be healed.  The love of God is so much larger than anything we can even begin to understand.

Our comprehension of God’s love is also like the comprehension of a child.  We describe God through our experiences only.  We understand what we have been told in bits and pieces.  We are cobbling together the stories and the experiences and the knowledge we amass over the course of our lifetimes, but each of us only have our own lives to use as the basis for our understanding and as such we cannot begin to understand God.  But we are invited, not only invited, but expected to act as a witness to the love of God in the world which seeks to deny Jesus’ very existence.

So we maintain hope.  We maintain hope that God loves us, that God has adopted us as children and our faith sets us apart from this world which is lawless and sinful.  We maintain the expectation that who we are called to be has not yet been revealed, and we rest assured in faith that Jesus, the incarnate God, died, rose from the dead, and calls each of us to be a witness to this resurrection in our life and work.

So go into the world, and be a witness, go passionately, go fearlessly.  You will fall, but you will get back up.  You will dust yourself off, or you will get help from one of your siblings (all of us here are your brothers or sisters), or you will seek the sacrament of reconciliation and God will provide the means of grace, which will soothe your soul and reunite you with your divine parent.

Beloved, you are a child of God.  It doesn’t matter how old you are.  It doesn’t matter if you walk on four legs, or two, or three.  It doesn’t matter if you were baptized as an infant or an adult or anywhere in between.  What matters is that you are beloved by God and marked as Christ’s own forever.  What matters is that you witness to the resurrection in the world by sharing the love that you know, the love that God has shared with you, with those whom you come to know, those who know God and those who do not know God.  What matters is that you walk in faith as best you can from this day forward, and when you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord.  This is the absolute gift of the Resurrection, that you know, in the most simple and childlike way that you can, that God loves you, God died for you, God forgives you.  No matter what, Amen.

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[1] http://blog.bakeracademic.com/the-child-as-eschatological/