PATHS INTERTWINING
January 15, 2006
sermon given at St. Thomas Episcopal Church,
Medina, Washington
One of this year’s big teen phenomena is
called MySpace.com. MySpace is a website that owes its existence to the
principle of “six degrees of separation.” On MySpace, people extend invitations
to their friends to help build an ever-growing web of connections.
Recently, I created a profile for myself on MySpace just to see what the big
deal was. I browsed around and made a “friend” connection with one of the
members of the St. Thomas Youth Group. By doing this, I was able to look at her
profile and also see her list of 153 friends. It got me wondering just how big
this thing is. I started to search by name for people I know and found many of
them, even people my own age. I invited them to connect to my profile, and at
last count, I had 49 friends. That may not sound all that impressive, but listen
to this: If you count friends of friends of friends, that number goes into the
millions. I found that some of my friends from different parts of my life
already know each other. I also reconnected with two old high school buddies.
Now, the whole idea of MySpace is very appealing to me. My favorite word is
“camaraderie.” One of my images of heaven is of all the people from every facet
of my life meeting and forming relationships with each other.
The theme of this weekend’s HYC has been “Paths Intertwining.” HYC may seem a
little mysterious to some of you adults out there … What exactly do we do at HYC?
Well, I’ll leave it to the youth to tell you about the specifics. But for one
thing, we strive to make connections in all that we do. High schoolers come to
their first HYC, many of them knowing nobody, and they start to build
friendships. Over time, those friendships solidify and branch out as people
invite their friends into the HYC community. A couple years ago, I attended the
wedding of two former HYC-ers; nearly all the people in the wedding party had
some connection to HYC.
But what I want to say here is that HYC takes the MySpace principle to a whole
new level. Not only does it make connections between teenagers, but in doing so,
it also connects teenagers to God.
So would it shock you to know that God has called us to be with each other at
HYC this weekend? It’s as if God has logged onto MySpace.com and invited every
one of us to be friends with each other. If that sounds unlikely or cheesy,
consider the stories we heard just now.
A young boy named Samuel has been apprenticed to serve the priest Eli in the
Jewish temple. We don’t know how young Samuel is in this story, but I’ve always
imagined him being about five or six. Samuel is lying in bed and hears a voice
calling him. He assumes it’s Eli because there’s no one else around. The
elderly, learned priest doesn’t realize at first that it must be God calling the
boy. If God would call a little boy to be a priest, why wouldn’t He call you to
be here today?
Fast forward a thousand years or so. After calling Andrew and Peter, Jesus calls
Philip to follow him. Philip immediately invites his friend Nathanael to join
the movement as well. Nathanael says, “The Messiah, the guy we’ve been waiting
for all these centuries, is from Nazareth? You’ve got to be kidding.” Another
translation has it, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” It’s kind of like,
“The Messiah has returned to Earth, and he’s from Enumclaw?”
But it doesn’t take much to win Nathanael over—just the idea that he’s been
called by name. He asks Jesus, “How do you know me?” Jesus says, “Oh, I saw you
sitting under that fig tree one day a couple years ago.” And that’s all it takes
for Nathanael to believe Jesus is the Messiah, the Chosen One, the Savior of
Israel: Jesus knows who he is and remembers him. Have you ever been surprised to
find that someone you admire has heard about you before, or remembers you from
the last time you met? Jesus’ attention to individuals—in short, his charisma—is
what wins Nathanael over. If Jesus would remember some guy sitting under a fig
tree, why wouldn’t He remember you?
God calls us by name. And today’s Psalm explores just how intimately God knows
us: “From the first you held my heart. You know the secrets of my birth. You
fashioned me in hidden ways and molded me in depths of earth.” If God knew the
writer of this Psalm so completely (and we don’t even know who wrote this
Psalm), you can be sure He knows you just as well.
God knows you. God knows everything about you. God called you to be here today.
And God knows in what situations you’re likely to do what He wants and in what
situations you’re likely to screw up.
Now, I don’t believe God knows what you’ll do in any given situation. (Feel free
to disagree with me.) What you will do is totally up to you. It is not only
possible for you to take a wrong path; because you don’t have God’s perspective
on things, it’s inevitable. You will wind up in places you wish you’d never
gone. And wherever you go, no matter how dark the path gets, God will be there.
In the depths of a living hell, God will be right beside you, enduring hell with
you. There is no place in your life too impure for God to tread.
God is with you when you pray. But even when you don’t pray—even when you’re too
embarrassed to pray or really don’t believe it makes any difference to pray—God
is with you then, too. And God is also with you through other people.
Our paths intertwine. That’s why our faith can never be an individual pursuit.
In the words of author Jim Wallis, “God is personal, but never private.” I’ve
also heard it said, “You can’t be a Christian in a vacuum.” Feel free to
disagree with me on this point, too, but I doubt you’ll convince me otherwise.
By definition, being a Christian means being with other people. It’s never just
about me and my buddy Jesus.
Christianity is all about relationship, about our billions of paths
intertwining. A few decades after Jesus called Nathanael, Paul was writing about
paths intertwining in his first letter to the church in Corinth. He was trying
to explain Jesus’ radical shift from living by a book of rules to living in
relationship with God and with other people. There’s a book called 101 Reasons
to Be an Episcopalian, and one of the reasons given is that “Our faith is an art
form, not a law book.”
Of course, when you’re no longer subject to a set of rules, the temptation is to
say, “Hey, I can do whatever I want!” But Paul writes, “Just because something
is technically legal doesn’t mean that it’s spiritually appropriate.” In another
translation, he says, “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are
beneficial.”
Paul then launches into a discourse about sex. Our paths intertwine, and one of
the ways we intertwine with each other is sexually. What an appropriate topic
for HYC weekend! Most teenagers think about sex sometimes, right? And please
allow me to add here that when I refer to sex, I’m not just talking about the
kind that produces babies. For the sake of this sermon, sex refers to anything
that stirs sexuality within us, even something as little as a kiss or a glance
from across the dance floor. Those are powerful, too.
And what does Paul have to say about sex? I love the paraphrase we heard just
now: “There’s more to sex than mere skin on skin. Sex is as much spiritual
mystery as physical fact.” … “We must not pursue the kind of sex that avoids
commitment and intimacy, leaving us more lonely than ever.” … “The physical part
of you is not some piece of property belonging to the spiritual part of you. God
owns the whole works.”
Many Christians think that sexual morality is all about purity. It’s a mistaken
notion that’s deeply ingrained in Christianity. But Jesus spent his entire
ministry working against the purity system of his culture. And when God calls us
to action, purity is not a prerequisite. Adam and Eve took the forbidden fruit,
but they still got to produce all of us as descendants. David messed around with
Bathsheba, but he still went down in history as the greatest King of Israel.
Paul was persecuting and killing Christians before God called him to lead the
Christian church. The Bible is loaded with stories of unworthy people who became
God’s chosen ones. To say that someone is not pure enough to be called by God is
to impose our own judgment in place of God’s. As I said before, there is no
place in your life too impure for God to tread.
So no, sexual morality is not about purity. And it’s not about some romanticized
loss of innocence that we partly dread and partly long for. It’s simply about
how we choose to treat others, and we almost never find ourselves in situations
with one right choice and one wrong choice—one pure choice and one impure
choice.
Sex is powerful, and that’s why it can be so live-giving or so death-dealing. It
can bring two people ever deeper into relationship with each other and with God.
It can bring new life into the world, creating a new path intertwining with all
the others. But it can also be a method of brutality or a platform from which to
exert power and maintain control. Sex can produce both shadow and light.
But all is touched by grace. Be not afraid.
Yes, God called you to be here this weekend, whether you’re a teenager attending
HYC, a parishioner putting up a teenager for the night, or a newcomer who has
accidentally stumbled into a very spirited church service. There’s a reason you
came this morning. Part of it was God’s decision, and part of it was yours. God
called, and you answered. God invited, and you accepted. Your path has
intertwined with our paths, your space with MySpace. And God’s grace is here,
too, as it is everywhere, transforming all our paths from shadow to light.
I hope you’ll all sing with me now the theme song for this HYC weekend:
Paths intertwining/ Shadow and light/ All is touched by grace/ Be not afraid