FRAPs

The Second Sunday in Easter
April 27, 2003

The Reverend Dr. Stephanie J. Nagley

Many of you have heard me talk about and some of you have even meant my five-month-old bundle of love and terror, Jackson, the Golden Retriever. The last few weeks I've found myself reaching often to the bookshelf and pulling down my copy of Golden Retrievers for Dummies.

Golden Retrievers for Dummies, page 94, "Puppy Fraps". And I quote:

At about 4 or 5 months of age, puppies enter a period some experts call the "puppy crazies," the "zooms," or puppy "FRAPS"…

…FRAP stands for Frenetic Random Activity Period, a wild time in his young life when for no apparent reason he'll run like a demon possessed, through the house, over the furniture. Zoom back and forth; growl at imaginary beasts that exist only in his fuzzy madpup head.

What made me think of puppy FRAPS for this Sunday? Maybe because on this Sunday we'll celebrate the Second Sunday of Easter, The Feast of St. Mark, gather for the Annual Meeting (with a silent auction to benefit the youth and their summer service trip) and burn the mortgage! Somewhere in all my seminary training, in all my parish experience, I've never had a handy reference book for parish FRAPS!

Today does have the look of being frenetic. And the day certainly doesn't lack for activity. Is it random? Perhaps. On the surface it could appear random. But, I'm wondering if such a packed day points us to something more.

Like my puppy, certainly more conscious than my puppy, this is a community that needs to celebrate life. We burst with the kind of energy that comes with the joyous recognition of what we can make happen when our gifts are put to the test.

We are a community that revels in being together. And Sunday morning is the time when most of set aside the morning to do just that.

We are a community that has distinguished itself with the signs of creativity and boundless energy.

Is there more? I think so. Like a puppy zooming through the house with quantum leaps we are responding to a call.

Yesterday I had the privilege of being in Greensboro, North Carolina to preach at the ordination of a priest, a young woman, who was my spiritual directee at Virginia Seminary. So, I've been thinking a lot about being called these days.

Of course, the call to the ordained ministry is a very particular kind of call, but each of us is called. Each of us is called by the Mystery again and again and again.

Those who participated in the Next Step Campaign responded to a call. Those who organized that campaign had a dream, a dream to retire a debt that was weighing on the church budget. They had a dream to open the future of St. Mark's that our gifts of money, our pledge gifts, could be used in ways other than debt. And you who gave to the effort caught the dream and made it a reality in a few short months.

But that debt also came from a dream. A group of people who years ago could see that St. Mark's was destined to grow. We needed more space. And so the undercroft was dug out and space was made for classes and Sunday school and the music program.

There is another dream for the community and that is that we continue our long ago commitment to be a progressive Christian community.

We have an important voice to offer the world around us. It is the voice of a new kind of evangelism. An evangelism that offers everyone who seeks it a place to find a spiritual home.

We know, too well, the voices of old time evangelism. Maybe those voices had an important role at a particular time. But they were also voices that too often forced people to choose a box. The box was that of living inside a God of rules, a God that seemed to deal in spiritual blackmail. You do this and I will love you. You do this and I will condemn you.

I've never been convinced that was a true vision of God. But I think it was the one we could understand and either accept or reject out of hand.

But we are called to proclaim a different God, not a new God, but a different God. We are invited to be the heralds of a God so wide and deep and vast that this God can and does embrace all sorts of questions and doubts and wonderment.

Many in the world, I believe are hungry for that God, and a spiritual home that is confident enough to suggest there is such a God. And a spiritual home where one may even dare to not believe in God.

But I must acknowledge that many in the world are not ready for the possibility of such a God.

Without being too reductionistic there seems to be two basic ways of looking at religious possibility. There are those who are most comfortable operating in an exclusionary paradigm. A world in which one must have rules about who gets in and who stays out. Who is acceptable and who is undesirable. That is a view that takes a lot of work on the front side.

Then there is our paradigm. I think it a paradigm that is a hallmark of the St. Mark's vision and the vision of a progressive community. Our community is one of inclusion. We aren't perfect. There are those who fit in better than others. There are people we would rather exclude, but we try hard not to shut the doors from points of view with which we have trouble agreeing. We don't always know how to have the conversation but we try.

As an inclusive community we have the work, not up front, but in the middle. We're messy that way. We are willing to let everyone in and then we'll try to figure out a way to be together. We even are called to let in those who would exclude us.

Perhaps, it's just my prejudice, but I think that is what Jesus was about. He wasn't in the business of exclusion. That's what got him into so much trouble. Even the disciples had trouble with his "y'all come" attitude.

Everyone now and then we see the paradigm of exclusion in the gospels. Like today's gospel from Mark. Today's gospel is the last part of Mark and there's been a long debate about whether the writer of Mark even wrote it. But that section of Mark talks about condemning those who can't get with the program of God. Perhaps, Mark didn't write it and we can let him off the hook. But we can't ignore that there is too much about our belief system that is condemnatory rather that encouraging.

We are called to be encouraging. We are called to not only be evangelical and tell people of the "good news" of new life in the midst of death, and of a love that exceeds anything humankind could imagine, we are called to be the prophetic voice of a new vision.

Maybe our parish FRAPs come out of a sense of the call bubbling up. We are called to criticize that which is life defying. We are called to challenge those powers and principalities that block the way for justice, peace, mercy and compassion. We are called to uphold those murky boundaries of God's vision that don't survive by the rules, but thrives through people who are willing to lay down their certainty and live into possibilities of new life, new ideas, and new visions for the world.

Mercy, peace, compassion and justice are as messy as inclusion. But they are the things of which our story with God has always pointed to.

And on this Second Sunday of Easter there is another truth to which our story points. The tomb is empty. The stone has been rolled away. And in some fashion or another some folks have seen the risen Christ. It is a messy story that confuses at best and leads only to more questions. But given the answers are few isn't it right that we are called as a community to be as open as that tomb and to welcome the mess God has created in suggesting the dream is ours to realize?