Fr. Jordan Griesbeck: Well, today is rally day, one of the most fun days of our calendar of the whole year, and the day in which we come to celebrate our church. We come to look forward and hope to the ways God will work in our church and through our church in the year to come. So I wonder, what are your hopes for our church, especially over the next twelve months? It strikes me that so many of our hopes for the church are actually fears. There's things we hope won't happen.
Another day, I saw a graphic that was being sent around on social media showing the rapid decline of Sunday attendance in the Episcopal Church. In 2009, 725,000 Americans were worshiping in the Episcopal Church on Sunday morning. And in 2024, that number was just 413,000. So in other words, in just fifteen years, there's been a 43% decrease in Episcopal Church attendance. And when we see these graphics and we think, what will happen in forty or fifty years?
I mean, in forty or fifty years, will my children or grandchildren be going to church? I mean, will there be an Episcopal Church? Will there even be a church of the Incarnation? And so we're driven by this anxiety and this fear of decline. And our hopes for the church become primarily about self preservation.
And it's all about holding serve. Don't decline. Don't die. Don't let giving drop off. Don't let attendance drop off.
Don't let children's ministry or youth ministry drop off. Make sure Incarnation continues to be what it has always been. And this can be especially true in an interim season like the one we find ourselves in now. We say don't mess up director search. Don't make a bad hire.
Don't let us fall behind the other big churches in Dallas. Don't put our rich legacy in jeopardy. And these hopes are not bad. They are just so defensive. It's all about holding serve, so that what we believe and hope and want for the church is basically just defense.
But the picture of the church we received in our lectionary this morning could not be more different. In our readings, the church is not dead, but it is alive. And the church does not play defense, but offense. And what does Jesus tell Peter and the disciples? Disciples?
The church is built on rock and the gates of Hades, which is to say hell, will not prevail against it. And so in Jesus' image, you have the gates on the one hand and you have the church on the other And so which is playing defense? It's not the church but the gates. I mean, think about it. Gates cannot play offense because gates cannot move.
At their best, all they can do is play defense and keep things out. But Christ says that when the church is on the move and it is, nothing can keep it out. And so if that is true, our hopes for the church, the church at large, this church really should be larger. Because the question is not if the church will prevail, but how. And this morning we get two answers to that question of how the church will prevail.
The answers are with our lips and in our lives. These words will be familiar to many of you, those who pray morning prayer in our book of common prayer, because you will know that that is how morning prayer ends. With the general thanksgiving, this beautiful prayer which reads this, and we pray. Give us such an awareness of your mercies that with truly thankful hearts we may show forth your praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives. And this morning we see both.
We see lips in our gospel in Matthew when Peter makes his famous confession or proclamation. Jesus comes to the disciples and asks them, who do you say that I am? And Peter says, you are the Messiah, the son of the living God. In the original language, the phrase is actually so much stronger and the emphasis is on the repetition of this definite article the. Three times, you are the messiah, the son of the living God.
The only messiah, the only son of the only God. Peter is saying there's one God, one savior, one king, and you, Jesus of Nazareth, born of a carpenter, are him. And it's in response to these words from Peter's lips that Christ says, I will build my church on rock and gates of hell will not prevail against it. In other words, it is this proclamation with our lips that gives the church its power. That what gives the church its power, whether it's this church or the church at large, is never money or strategy or branding, marketing, fonts, logos, cultural relevance, charismatic leaders, the perfect lives of those inside.
But it is always and only when with Peter we say, you are the Christ. That we say, God, in your mercy, you have sent the one messiah, one son, one living God to live and die as one of us and to offer himself as a perfect sacrifice for the whole world. And that therefore those who have been united to this one Christ, one God, one savior cannot lose. Cannot lose God, cannot lose salvation, cannot lose forgiveness, but will, even if our eyes cannot see it now, prevail over everything, over decline, sin, addiction, depression, guilt, estrangement, death. And so that is the first way we in this room join up with the church as it marches against Hades.
We confess with our lips, you're the one messiah, the one son of the one god. But the second way we join up is not only with our lips but in our lives. We see this in our Romans passage, if you wanna turn back to it in your bulletins. We're in Romans, which we've been going through all summer, we come this morning to this pivotal moment where Paul transitions from chapters one through 11, in which he has been describing the mercy and the grace of God to hear in chapters 12 where he says, in light of God's grace and mercy, here is how I want you to live. Here is the life that gives the church its power.
And he says a lot of things, but we can narrow it down to two. He says, I want you, the church, to live sacrificially and then charismatically. First, sacrificially, in light of God's mercy, offer up your bodies as living sacrifices. And Paul has in view here the the sacrificial system of Israel in the Old Testament, in which they were to go to the temple and offer up animal sacrifices in order to gain atonement. But what Paul is saying here is that if if Jesus' perfect sacrifice has ended your need to offer up animals, bulls, goats, rams, every day in the temple, here's what you have been freed to do instead.
Instead of offering up animals bodies, you now offer up your own body. And instead of ritual worship, your life is one of spiritual worship. Because instead of going to the temple, you can offer these sacrifices, you can offer up your body anywhere and at any time. You can offer up sacrifices in your home, in your office, on the soccer field, at the dance recital, in the middle of the night, middle of the afternoon, 3AM, 3PM, simple prayers, simple offering up of yourself, reminding yourself that your life does not belong to you but belongs to God and to your neighbor. Belongs to God and your spouse, your son, your daughter, your friends.
And that this sacrificial life gives the church its power. The second thing is charismatically. And this is perhaps the hardest definitely for me and probably for most Episcopalians. But Paul says the reality is everyone in this room has been given a gift, a grace, a charisma for the sake of everyone else in this room. He's saying that you've been given this grace by the Holy Spirit for the sake of the body.
That that is what the church fundamentally is. That it is a body comprised of many members, and what gives the body its power is when everyone is using their gift for the sake of everyone else. And by the way, as we think about this next year in our church, this is perhaps the most important reason why you should come to church not just this Sunday but every Sunday. It's not so God will love you more or because the priests are taking attendance, because if you come, God will somehow more reward you or bless you. But it is because when you are not here, the body suffers.
I mean, you suffer because you need the gifts of everyone else in this room, and we suffer because we need There's a beautiful image of this church and everyone using their gifts in c s Lewis' Narnia book, The Silver Chair. As you might remember, this book is actually centered around Hades and around the underworld in which the children go down into the Underworld to rescue prince Rillion who's been trapped there. So they go down into the Underworld and they rescue the prince, and then they slowly make their way back up to air and back up to the Earth's surface. And as they do and as they climb up through this hole and near the Earth's surface, first they begin to hear these noises. They hear the sound of thumping.
And then they hear the sound of music playing, and fiddles and flutes and drums. And they make their way up and they feel this cold air and this cold breeze. And then they see these figures all dancing in a circle, fawns and dryads. And then around that circle there are dwarves who are throwing snowballs in and through all of the dancers and through the circle. And here's what Lewis says.
The dwarves are throwing the snowballs through the dance in such perfect time with the music and with such perfect aim that if all the dancers were in exactly the right places, at exactly the right moments, no one would be hit. This is called the great snow dance and is done every year in Narnia on the first moonlit night when there's snow on the ground. Of course, it is a kind of game as well as a dance. Because every now and then, some dancer will be the least little bit wrong and get a snowball in the face, and then everyone laughs. But a team of good dancers, dwarfs and musicians will keep it up for hours without a single hit.
On fine nights when the cold and the drum taps and the hooting of the owls and the moonlight have gotten to their wild woodland blood and made it even wilder, they will dance till daybreak. I wish you could see it for yourselves. And that's the church that Paul described for us this morning. It is the great snow dance in which people, men, women, children dance together helplessly sinful and often hitting one another in the face to be sure. And yet, in our most beautiful moments, learning to live sacrificially, learning to pour out our lives for one another.
And when the church lives like that, I mean it really is unstoppable and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. In the name of God, father, son and holy spirit. Amen.