As much as I no doubt share your curiosity about today’s parables, I am moved today to talk about our church. And to tell you, as well as I can, what drew me into your fellowship. I developed a relationship of trust and respect with the Search Committee, each one of them being outstanding individuals whom I learned to love quite quickly. Actually, it was the collective witness of the whole Committee that mattered to me The way they presented themselves to me corporately.

St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church is like ….

your search committee patiently and carefully told me, and then they handed me a document entitled "Our Vision." It is copied on pink paper and you have it today in your bulletin. The text recalls the origins of the statement of the vision. 120 persons came together and offered their ideas and hopes for the congregation. And I want you to know that this vision statement made a big impact on me and on my decision to enter into this search process with you. And please understand that I was not a part of this goal-setting exercise.

This document was given to me as a faithful assessment of the spiritual resources and goals and attitudes of this parish. Now that I am here I want to interpret this document and lend my voice to what it expresses.

Today I simply want to look at the mission statement - "To know Christ and to make Him known." I’ll preach again next Sunday and I will look at the vision components that are listed below the mission statement.

"To know Christ and to make Him known" is a simple, but richly evocative, statement of purpose. To know Christ is, of course, our reason for existence. At the very heart of this is our baptismal covenant with God where these fundamental questions about relationships are asked of us.

Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Savior?

Do you put your whole trust in his grace and love?

Do you promise to follow and obey him as your Lord?

These are the questions which evoke commitment in us. And in the Episcopal tradition, we answer these questions by the way we seek to know the Lord. I would speak of two ways. I would mean in our private devotions, our faith journey, at that heart level where we seek to know Jesus Christ as our friend and as our Lord. I believe that our private faith journey is checked and balanced by our corporate worship, by our Book of Common Prayer, by our rubrics, where we gather together with form and order to be devoted, not just as individuals coming before God but as a whole body of people with one faith, one baptism, one Lord, one hope together. So devotion, faith and worship is one component of knowing Christ but there is another that I believe is so essential.

I believe that we are also invited to "know Christ" from an intellectual, thinking standpoint. Knowing Christ involves a willingness to study and learn. I believe that we in the Episcopal Church are committed to lifetime learning. I believe that adult education never ends and that our minds need to be wide open to whatever it is that God’s trying to present to us.

Back at St. Paul’s in Meridian a young couple came to the church. She pulled me aside and said "I’d like to come to your Inquirer’s Class, but I’m just not sure I am worthy to be there." I said, "what do you mean?" She said "I didn’t grow up in a church. I’ve heard about Jesus and all the claims of everything that he did. I’ve read parts of the Bible and I’m just not sure that I can accept it all as being true. Do I have a place in your church?" she said to me.

And I said, "Of course you have a place in our church. Come be a part of the fellowship, come and learn." And then huge tears began to flow out of her eyes because it was the first time she had been in any kind of relationship with a minister who hadn’t said something dismissive to the point that "we’ve got the whole truth and you’ve got to accept it if you want to be a part of our team or if you want to be faithful to God."

And now I am going to tell you how I filled out the rest of my discussion with her.

I said to her, "As our teacher, Jesus is inviting us to engage the spiritual life with all of the human resources at our disposal. If we are to bring faith to knowing Jesus, we are also to bring our doubts. If we are to honor an emotional connection to Jesus in faith and prayer then we are to cultivate and honor the intellectual curiosity within each one of us. I told her that to know Jesus is a heart and a head process. I told her that in the Episcopal Church, we value human reason - thinking power - which is harnessed for God’s purposes. We value artistic expression, creativity, open-mindedness.

We value this because we believe that God has authoritatively revealed himself to us in Christ, in the holy scriptures and in the faithful traditions of the church. We also believe, and in indeed rejoice, that God is still opening us, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to new truths heretofore unimagined.

So I said to her, the Christian life is a journey of learning and growing. And I also told her, for this reason, that we do not fear science or philosophy or any wholesome academic pursuit.

My family and I went to the IMAX theater this past Friday and saw the show on the space station and it was absolutely stunning. I was truly inspired by the work done by people all over the world gathering together scientifically to think through how we can get out into space together in order to learn more about ourselves and better understand God’s universe. And I believe that God smiles on those achievements because he sees us using the faculties he has given us. I do not see any difficult dichotomy between faith and science that so many struggle with. I see science and faith as friends which nourish one another at very deep levels.

Let me tell you a little bit more that I told my friend back in Meridian.

"For me," I said to her, "Christian growth is not a fear-based process. The more we grow, the more we are equipped to live with the ambiguity of modern life. I treasure the Episcopal Church because I believe that at our best, we avoid the temptation to construct definitive, final answers to very difficult questions. I would call this intellectual honesty and I believe it is the fertile field necessary for authentic faith. We avoid the popular practice of gathering an array of scripture verses and presenting them as the whole truth of God on any particular topic. We avoid this because we have seen how the scriptures can be abused to justify almost anything."

So I told her that faith and reason are not opposites but are dance partners, following the music together though often they step on one another’s toes.

Now, to be sure, at St. Matthew’s, as at any church, some of us tend to the academic side and will lead with our heads and will bang into one another and that can bruise us. And some of us will lead with our hearts and feelings and hearts can bleed. Such is the depth and complexity of our lives and our efforts of building a coherent Christian community. I believe we are like a symphony each playing an instrument with love in our hearts and with skill flowing from ever-sharpened minds. Sometimes we will be more of a cacophony than a symphony. Sometimes, thanks be to God, we will make glorious and sublime music together.

So what does "To know Christ" mean to me as I see it from my own background? I see it as a balance of faith and reason - of heart and mind. I see it as an unwillingness to suppress doubt or skepticism and to eagerly open our traditional ideas and beliefs to the marketplace of the worlds ideas.

And it means, of course, a balance between our private faith and our corporate worship So to know Christ is indeed a heart and a head process. That’s what it means to me.

But there is more. To know Christ and to make Him known – this expands and deepens the height and breadth of the statement and again we refer to our baptism, the source of our common life in Christ. "To make Christ known" is to answer these questions:

Will you proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ?

These are questions that should probe our hearts week after week after week for they claim the very essence of our commitment to God. This is how we make Christ known, by our answers to those questions and each of us in our independent walk is going to answer the question differently, but as a whole, we can be a symphony.

To make Christ known.

I cannot describe how important that short phrase is to me. I love it for what it says and means and for what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say that we are to make Christ known so that people can be converted to our way. Or so that people can think exactly as we think. Or feel exactly as we feel. It is subtle and dignified.

I interpret "to make him known" to mean that our job is to grow in our faith walk as individuals and as a congregation and then to be out into the world encouraging people for Christ’s sake. If they come to us we are to offer them an hospitable and safe place to be themselves. To be themselves. That they may know Christ and make Him known.

While we are here in the church on Sunday’s, gathered together, we are being prepared to be sent out. We are sent out to be faithful to that baptismal covenant, seeking and serving and loving and striving for justice and peace and respecting the dignity of every human being. What a wonderful privilege.

To know Christ and to make him known so that….and our mission statement is open ended in order that God may finish the sentence. And I believe, and I hope you believe this with me, that God will quietly whisper an answer that will be unfolded for us in God’s time and in God’s manner. God will finish that sentence for St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church.

To know Christ and to make him known, what a noble mission. An affair of the heart and the head. And as we contemplate our mission, our gifts of faith and reason, our commitment to the Lord, we must finally admit that the future is God’s alone. We are, to be sure, to declare a mission and a vision. We are to make plans, set goals, seek to achieve them, and then, and then, do our best to let God be God and transform our aspirations and hearts and minds as God sees fit.

This brings to mind Jesus parables in today’s gospel.

For the kingdom of heaven is like, he says, small seeds that grow wildly and surprisingly, out of control, out of control. These seeds grow out of our control and for the ultimate benefit of other birds that will roost in the branches of trees that we are now planting, but cannot envision. Like it or not the Christian church exists for the future. It exists for people not here. Certainly the Lord reaches out to each one of us in ministry. But who we will become is God’s business. We cannot control who will benefit from our faithfulness.

The kingdom of heaven, he says, is like yeast that mixes with our faith and love and intellect and produces a result we couldn’t even imagine. True. We try to imagine. We have established a vision, but we don’t know what is coming.

The kingdom of heaven is like the pearl worth everything. I believe St. Matthew’s understands this parable. "To know Christ and to make Him known," is the pearl of great price. It is worth selling all else for, because we believe together it is God’s reason for calling us into being. God planted this church, sustains this church, and will grow this church as we remain faithful to this clear mission.

The kingdom of heaven, Jesus said, is like a big dragnet hauled through Austin, and Round Rock, and Pflugerville, and Lakeway, and Cedar Park and all points here and there catching fish people of every type and stripe, throwing out the bad and keeping the good. I am caught in that net with you. Who is the bad? Who is the good? We will discover that, Jesus says, at the end of the age.

So until then, lets just rejoice in God’s wonderful sense of humor. We are all caught in this vast net together. We are a wild jumble of humanity. A church with feet and hands sticking out of the net in every possible direction, often with bruised heads and bleeding hearts, incredibly in love with the Lord, seeking to know Christ and to make Him known. AMEN.