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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
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Now, I just have to say, I'm so sorry, Fathers. That's not the, you know, if the church year knew about Father's Day when the lectionary was created, then this would be a cruel joke. It might be nicer if we got some words from Ecclesiasticus, Sirach. With all your heart, honor your father and do not forget the birth pangs of your mother. Remember that it was your parents. It was of your parents you were born. How can you repay what they have given to you? And we know that we can't, right? We kids can never repay what our parents, birth parents have given us. Whatever weaknesses there are. But anyway, we're not going to go there. I just thought I needed to say something like Happy Father's Day. A few years ago, I went to an Episcopal camp in Alabama for the first time. It's called Camp McDowell. And Camp McDowell is different from Camp Allen if you've ever been there. Camp Allen's in the eastern, east Texas, sort of central east Texas, piney woods, flat. Camp McDowell is near a river and it has some sandstone cliffs and interesting hiking areas. And we had a little bit of time off, so I was going to go find this cool place across this big bridge across the river that's on a hiking path. And I got directions from the staff and it's also not like Camp Allen. It's very spread out. And so I'm walking and walking. It's a long way back to get clarification. I don't have a map. And finally I get to a place and there in front of me is a fork. Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking a fork in the road. And it is sort of a fork in the road, but this is like an 8 to 10 foot high fork stuck in a road. You know, sort of light colored against the trees. A metaphor. And it was a fork in the road also. One road went to the right and one to the left. No indication of which one led to the bridge. Our life is a series of forks in the road. Most of them not marked by actual forks in the road. We're a series of crossroads. Places where you have to choose a direction, right? Which way we're going to live our lives. And the hardest ones are when two things or people or ways of life we value diverge. One person by their words and actions beckons us to go down one path. And another or maybe something inside of ourselves calls upon us to go in a different direction. Which will we choose? Now the candidates that are before us today for confirmation are making a choice to reaffirm a direction that perhaps they or someone else chose for them. Some of those before us were baptized here at Jubilee as adults. So this is a reaffirmation of a choice they made and others baptized as babies are reaffirming something that was done years ago. And the choice that we ask the candidates to make again today to reaffirm is to turn from evil and follow Jesus as Savior and Lord. And I also want to just say that we too make a choice today. We make a choice to renew our commitment to God and to them. We'll join in the baptismal covenant. And as a fellow bishop once said, you need to ask the congregation if they really mean it. You know, I hope we mean it today when we renew our own promises. But also when we say that we will support these candidates in their life in Christ. We make our commitment today to walk our baptismal way and to do what we can to help one another follow the right paths. In a service of confirmation, we, the household of God, reaffirm our support for our siblings in Christ. And we renew the invitations spoken at baptism. We invite our siblings to grow into the full stature of Christ. To take a deliberate step deeper in renouncing evil and following Jesus. We do this, we affirm these promises to them by two little words. We will. You all can say that, right? We will. We will. And I hope you mean it. I often tell candidates for baptism and confirmation that if they get to a point in their life where they need help, either in a moment of great joy or great sorrow or need, that they should call the church on the promise that they make. I hope you at Jubilee call each other, call the community to stand with you in those moments. And so, we will support you to grow in your life in Christ. We do invite you into the life of this body and urge you to take your place in its mission. We receive you into the household of God, we tell those who are baptized. Confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in Christ's eternal priesthood. The path to which Jesus calls us in this gospel today is the path of that priesthood, the path of making the common holy, speaking peace, sharing God's mercy, seeking justice, loving all people, and giving ourselves to the work of redemption. We invite you to set aside whatever keeps you from following Jesus. That's what Jesus is saying today in the gospel. And so, your witness, as you have made these new promises, will in turn keep us treading on that right path, doing those things, looking more and more like Jesus. And this path is a path that seems especially rocky and risky in today's world. Everybody around us is demanding loyalty. Every manifestation of our nation or our political parties, often our families, friend groups, all kinds of people are demanding our loyalty. Show us that you choose us first. And that makes it hard. That makes it hard when you have Jesus saying, give up your life, follow me. So, the path that Jesus calls us to is a path that we walk and stay on and return to by making choices when we come to forks in the road. Where one choice looks especially like Jesus and Jesus' love, and the other, well, if only it were that easy. Every choice is clear to you, right? Would you please tell me your secret? What Jesus invites us to is to look at him. And when the choices are hard, to look at what Jesus says to us, to live our lives in ways of mercy and love like he did. See, Jesus says to us today that you can only have one Lord, only one ultimate measure of how you walk and to what or whom you lay down your allegiance. So, a story. I want to tell you a story. My mom's stepfather, my grandpa Neil, was a man who was very generous to us. We were sort of a second set of grandchildren. He and my grandma got married long after their children were grown up and gone away. And so, we're like a whole second set of grandchildren. But when our birthdays would come around, especially when we turned 9, 10, 11, 12 years old, we'd always get an envelope. He would deliver to us, drive to our house in Albuquerque, and he would give us an envelope for our birthday. And inside would be a personal note that would say, here's a little something to buy some new gymnastics shoes or something. It was a little bit off that way sometimes. Like, I didn't ever need shoes for gymnastics. But his heart was in the right place. Like, he knew that gymnastics was my thing, and so he would include a little cash or a check, tell me buy something that would help me do the thing that was mine. He once gave my sister a car because she didn't have a car, and her truck kept breaking down. And it was like, well, you can have this car. And he just did things like that. I mean, he was that kind of guy. Okay, I had to set that up because that's not the story. So, one day after my grandma died, my grandpa Neil was visiting us in our home. And I was about 12 years old, and I was sitting on the floor. Exactly where I was sitting, leaning against my dad's armchair because there weren't enough seats in the room to hold all of us. And my grandpa was telling us about being in the army during World War II. And he was talking about some of the other men with whom he had to fight or serve. And I heard a word come out of his mouth that I knew we were not supposed to use. And he described someone of a different race, and it was like a thing in the middle of the room. And I couldn't believe that my grandpa, who had shown me so many good things, spoke of other people in such demeaning ways. Now, I always loved my grandpa. I still love my grandpa. But I felt like that was a choice, right? Am I going to go that way, or am I going to go the other way, try and continue to love everybody and speak well of them? Now, I haven't lived perfectly, but that still rings in my head, that moment where somebody I loved showed me a way to go that was contrary to what I had learned from my family and at church, from my parents, from my teachers, everything. We come to a fork in our journey. Which path will we choose? You don't reject the person who showed us the wrong way, but can we choose to become more like Jesus? Now, this is especially hard because family holds us at such a deep level. Because our ties to parents and our children are our safety and our comfort, our responsibility and our joy. We want them to be first, or at least equal to our obedience to Christ, don't we? And we might say the same for some people about their political party or their country or their group, their identity group. We want to be able to hold them as first, or at least as equal to following Jesus. And yet, Jesus says, only one Lord can be first, only one Lord. This is the hard word in this gospel, only one Lord can be first. Though Jesus is all about peace and love, following him, he says, creates conflicts and demands decisions. Do you not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law and one's foes will be members of one's own household. These are the startling verses we have from Jesus. And you could substitute those things for other kinds of relationships that have become very important to you. Jesus comes and he says, not because he's a man of violence, but because inevitably, when you have these kinds of choices about whether to go for justice or whether to ignore injustice from a member of your family, when you go for mercy or you choose to ignore oppression by a member of your party, when you choose love or you experience hatred from somebody that you admire, there's a choice. There's a choice we must make. We have to make that in our families and in our nation and in our church. We have to choose which way will we go. And we can find ourselves on opposite sides when loyalties to God and those other things are tested. Now, I was going to remind you that if you're worried about family conflict, you need to go no further than that story of Abraham and Sarah and the casting out of Hagar and the crying out of Ishmael. I'm not going to go through that whole story, but I do want to say this. Who comes and acts as father to all in that moment? God shows up. God shows up and encourages Abraham in his relationship with Sarah, in his commitment to Isaac and in his care for Ishmael and Hagar. And God shows up and lifts up Hagar because he sees Hagar and he hears Ishmael and their misery. And God, in that time of family breaking up, God shows up as the father of all. It's the Lord's provision that meets us at the fork in the road and sometimes carries us through when things seem the most bleak. So, I've now been married for 37 years. I say this not to brag because marriage takes like, I don't know, marriage is every day, right? Every day is a test. And by God's grace and support and, I don't know, ignorance, we've come this far. The first time I met my husband, I learned that his dad was a priest and that his dad was a priest who didn't approve of the ordination of women. I was just a college student at the time, but I knew what I wanted to do with my life. And lo and behold, Tim and I still like started dating and we stayed together. And years down the way, we decided we were going to get married. And the thing I had to do when we decided to get married was write my future father-in-law a letter and say, by the way, I want to be a priest. And the agreement was that we would agree to disagree. And he and I fought. We fought about like, well, if you don't want us to be priests, why do you baptize us? Right? This is my basic argument. I don't know if it's a good one, but it's still there. There you have it. All right. So we argue in this every every time we'd come together for a week at a time. And there would be this tension in the household because we would fight over this question about women's standing in the church. When we got married, my father and mother-in-law wouldn't invite our female deacon to the rehearsal dinner and complained that we had young women acolytes. I mean, this was like a serious trial, but we both kept hanging in there for the sake of our family. And then one day I was pregnant with my oldest child and my rector went away across the seas to do a wedding. And my baby came early and my mother was dying of brain cancer. And my father, mother-in-law came to see the baby before I went to New Mexico to see my mom. And we didn't have anybody to sub for me. Like, you know, Jubilee, just be standing here like, isn't there somebody to celebrate the Eucharist? And so I asked my father-in-law if he would go celebrate the Eucharist at St. Luke's where I was. And he did. And from that day forward, he started taking communion from me. And when he celebrated the 50th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood, he called and asked me if I would come and assist him in that service. Now for him to make that move, he had to lay down a lot of relationships with people who had been important to him for decades. And yet, by God's grace, because God is the father and provider for us all, by God's grace, with Christ as Lord, we could both walk together until God could reconcile us to one another. I tell you, my friends, this is a hard reading because life is challenging and every day we face choices. But Jesus tells us a couple of things. One is, God will never abandon us. No matter how many times we turn the wrong way down that road, there will always be another fork in the road where we can choose to follow him, to lay down our life and find our life in him, to take up our cross and follow where he has led the way. In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.