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Jubilee Episcopal Church is an incense-swinging, sanctus-bell-ringing, stomp-your-feet- singing ancient way of following Jesus with more than enough room for you to bring your compassion, curiosities, and complete self. We're rooted in NW Austin, Texas, but connect with folks globally in sharing a joyful and inclusive Christian faith. The title comes from a prayer found in Compline, a service in the Book of Common Prayer, where we intercede for Jesus Christ to care and tend for the hurting, the sick, and the weary, but also, to shield the joyous. This prayer is our heartbeat at Jubilee. You'll hear sermons, devotions, and other occasional audio treats here -- including the occasional baby squawk or squeak from our decidedly family-friendly community!
We worship Sundays at 9:30am in person at 12129 FM 620 Ste 310 Austin, TX and online!
Watch Live: https://www.youtube.com/@jubileeatx/streams
Website: https://www.jubileeatx.org
IG: https://www.instagram.com/jubileeatx/
So four years ago, the diocese of Texas asked me to plant a church and they told me in a little handbook that I had 12 months to identify 12 households who are willing to be a part of this crazy thing called starting a new church. And once I had done that over those 12 months, finding those 12 households, I then could launch regular public in-person worship. I was told by many, many people, get ready for a long, exhausting slog of trying to find people who are willing to have church in these random places, like your living room or a restaurant or God forbid, a strip mall. I was told this is really hard to find people who want to be a part of this thing. And really my whole life up until this point, I had always heard the church is dying, the church is dying. And I heard a lot of naysayers say, if the church is dying, why are you trying to plant a new one? And then what was technically my very first day as Jubilees vicar, meaning I was officially on diocesan payroll, July 1st, 2022, I had so many DMs, emails, texts, calls, and friends asking when and where is church this week that I suddenly realized I was not going to need 12 months to find those 12 households. It turns out when you name a church after an extravagant harvest, the Jubilee year as found in Leviticus 25, one ought to expect an extravagant harvest. So some of you know this story, we rocket launched our first public pop-up service was a Pride Eucharist six weeks after that very first day. And a lot of people ask me why, why a Pride Eucharist? Because I wanted to make a rainbow bright statement of who this community already was and who we were going to be. I wanted a bright banner to be painted over us that proclaimed a divine love and welcome for everybody, because it's frankly just not a given for a Christian church to behave as Christ compels us to. I hardly need to say that in this room, right? Here in Austin, Texas, the powers and principalities that claim queer people are a threat while they actively strip away our rights, our visibility, and our safety, I mean, we're in the state capital, y'all, we know this. But queer people are not the ones calling meetings to obsess over how we convert people to our way of life. Queer folks are just trying to live. We're just trying to live. We're just trying to live our lives in peace. And what grieves me actually is that this is a double damning exclusion and persecution obviously hurts the queer people who have existed in every space, who will always exist in every space. But anti-LGBT-QIA plus exclusion and persecution, it also hurts the church because God has imbued each and every one of us with a divine dignity, with an image of God that means each and every one of us are bodies in the body of Christ, and each and every one of us have something to teach each other about who God is and how God is at work in the world. The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you, St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians, and he goes on to say, the parts of the body that are, that people think are the weakest are the most necessary. The parts of the body that have been disparaged, even cut off completely are the parts of the body that the body of Christ needs the most in order to be whole. And haven't we seen that to be true here at Jubilee? I love celebrating pride today, I really do, but here at Jubilee pride is not something out of the ordinary, even if it is not something we ever take for granted. And starting from day one with this energy, it actually meant that we could get down to the real business of following Christ. We as a church, we got to bypass frankly boring arguments over who gets to be considered really human or who's really deserving of love. We got to bypass that and get straight to the juicy and difficult and sacred work of wondering together, how on earth do we love God in this world? How do we do God's will in this world? How can we bless God and bless each other and be a blessing to this world that so clearly still needs it? Because this is not only a more interesting question to ask, it's also the question that Jesus basically asks us to spend our lives asking. The actual point of being a Christian is not to decide who gets access to Jesus. The point of being a Christian is to do our level best to follow Jesus. And following Jesus is really hard work, y'all. Because when we are actually willing to follow where God might lead us, we hardly ever end up where we expected we will be. And in this morning's text from Genesis, we hear perhaps the most famous story in scripture of two deeply flawed people who are earnestly trying to follow God and are asked to go so far from where they thought they would be. I'm speaking, of course, of Abram and Sarai, who are later renamed Abraham and Sarah. The first thing we learn about Abram is not actually from his own mouth. We hear the voice of God first in the narrative, and it is God who says to Abram, go, go, go. From your own country, go from your family, go from everything you have ever known and found safe and relatable. And go, go to a strange land that I will show you. And in this story, Abram listens to God. Tune back in in two weeks when it all goes to pot. But in this story, at least Abram listens to God and he goes far from all he knew. For God has told him, go, go, and I will bless you and you will be a blessing. Now, blessing is a word that we throw around a lot. But what exactly does it mean? Blessing, it's not the same thing as being lucky because blessing is not just sort of a random confluence of good things happening, nor is blessing the same thing as privileged because to say that would mean that God consecrates a kind of social hierarchy. I remember as a child being taught that the word blessing means to make God happy, and it makes God happy to bless us. And also God never moves for just one of us in isolation, for God made us intimately, tenderly, and deliberately to be in communion with God and with one another, therefore blessing is always relational. It is the abundance of God pouring out on us, all of us, never just one of us. And this is why that verse, I will bless you and you will be a blessing, is not only about God giving God's abundance to Abram and Sarai to then bless the whole world, it is also a verse that has been used with very particular purpose in the Episcopal Church. It is the reason, or it is one of the reasons why the Episcopal Church specifically identified it as sacramentally good, orthodox, and beautiful to bless same-gender marriage. Thirteen years ago, a monumental document was released by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, which contained within it newly approved liturgies that updated our marriage liturgy to be more inclusive. However, as is our Episcopal way, this new liturgy was nested within a short 150-page theological treatise that both explained why this liturgy needed updating and what the updates were. And this treatise is called, I will bless you and you will be a blessing, taken of course from the same Genesis 12 reading we heard this morning. Now, I don't know exactly why they picked this verse to be the title, and I have read every page looking for a nice explanation, but I've made a few inferences. I think first they picked it because it embodies what happens in the sacramental life. God blesses us in the Eucharist, in marriage, in baptism to be a blessing to the world. And also, I think God's blessing changes us. It changes us as individuals, but it also changes us as the church. God's blessing is a dynamic event. The blessing of God is not static. The blessing of God did not leave Abram and Sarai right where they were. The blessing of God did not leave the bleeding woman still bleeding in the gospel today because God's blessing is not a one-time luck of the draw. God's blessing is a love that constantly transforms us, beckons us into deeper love with God and therefore with our neighbors and the whole world if we let it. As this I will bless you treatise goes on to say, the blessing of divine goodness does not automatically transform lives. We must be willing to receive such a blessing. And yet, even when we are not willing, God will continue to offer blessings in abundance. Abram and Sarai were chosen to be blessings to the whole world, sometimes for reasons inscrutable to me. Even when they strayed from God, God continued to pour out blessings on them, not because they were exceptionally good, but because God is. And maybe God picked them because God knew that they would keep trying. They would keep trying to participate, to be transformed by the blessing. Honestly, it takes a special combination of courage and foolishness to follow the blessing of God. A particular willingness to look a little ridiculous to the outside world because world because you have an outsized trust and a God who is neither easy nor predictable. And I think Jubilee has been blessed like this. I'm not so grandiose to think that we have been blessed to bear a unique cosmic covenant, but I do think we have been blessed. We have been blessed for this moment, in this time, in this place, Austin, Texas, in our own sweet, homespun, quirky, bedazzled way to show the whole church, the whole church, our family, our siblings in Christ. What is actually possible when we start with abundance instead of scarcity? What is possible when we start with love instead of anger? What is possible when we start with joy instead of fear? When we start gathering as a church with a bold, clear, loud welcome of people who have been so systematically harmed, excluded and oppressed by the church. And when we in the most unexpected, but frankly, divinely whimsical way, we gather to be the church. Jubilee is blessed and Jubilee is special not just because we are blessed, but because we have been willing to be a blessing. We have allowed ourselves to be transformed, changed, healed, and sent forth to do the work we have been given to do. That's why so many churches are looking to us and our small but mighty congregation gathered here in a strip mall in the suburbs of Austin, Texas. I am asked all the time, how did y'all do it? And I say to you, by the grace of a glimmering God who is offering these very same blessings to you, if you are willing to be transformed by them. We have done this and are doing this and by the grace of God, we'll continue to do this by having the audacity to do exactly as that woman did in our gospel today, even when we were pushed to the side and cast out, we had a holy audacity. We lunged with crazed trust, grasping at only the hem of Jesus's robe, knowing somehow that God's blessing would not leave us where we are and God's blessing would take us to places greater than we could have imagined. And the thing about blessings is that they're not contingent on the powers or principalities of this world. God's blessings are too wild for that. So hear me very clearly, beloveds, even if the world is afraid of us, even if the world is afraid of the divine transformation imbued in the blessing of God, we do not need to be afraid. Because you, you are blessed to be a blessing. You, in who you are, in your gender and your sexuality, in the whole of your story, which is that, and so much more, in your faithfulness and in your doubt, in your curiosities and in your certainties, in the parts of your story that you cherish and the parts of your story that you lament and where you have come from and where you do not know yet that you are called to go, you are a blessing. You are blessed to be a blessing. You are a blessing to me. I can say that 10 toes down, but you are also a blessing to the church. You are a blessing to this church and this church family, but also to the whole church, to this body of Christ, the Word of God, the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit that will take the world over throughout time and that will persist throughout time. You are blessed. You are blessed to be a blessing. And you are blessed by God and therefore you are defended from every enemy, crowned with a love that is a mantle about your shoulders and a seal upon your hearts. You are blessed to be a blessing. So let us bless the Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen.