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"Freely you have received, freely give." Matthew 10:8

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.

Grace be unto you and peace from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

My text is from the eighth verse of the tenth chapter of the gospel of St. Matthew, which we have just heard: "Freely you have received, freely give."

The story is told that a late dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London stood up in that splendid place and announced to his congregation, "Before I begin my sermon, I have something to say." What I have to say is what great pleasure, what great joy it gives me to be here on this second anniversary service for Oasis/California. Now I think that it is not unusual for people to have first annual events; our mailboxes are full of invitations to the first annual this and the first annual that, but I think it takes some imagination, not to mention courage, to have a second occasion, and it shows that the idea is right and good, that it has found a responsive congregation and struck a resonant chord. So, I am delighted to be a part of this occasion, and I look forward to many more of them.

We stand amidst the most favorable and demanding of auspices today, for this is none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven. No one, even here, could describe this as a cozy place--we are meant to be intimidated, overwhelmed, dwarfed, by the glory and the splendor of God's house, and anything less than this would be unworthy of the God whom we worship and who has given us life itself.

Not only are we in auspicious spaces dedicated to the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we are also in the octave of St. Peter and St. Paul, the church's two greatest apostles. This week, between the testimony of St. Peter and the conversion of St. Paul, has for many years been kept as the week of prayer for Christian unity, and thus it is fitting--"meet and right"--as the Book of Common Prayer used to say, that this Oasis/California Eucharist occur in this context and that we should find our place at the heart of prayers for Christian unity, for we gay people are a part of all of the household of God, and always have been, and always will be. It is this context which urges me to invite all of you to consider the work of an apostle as your own. We are here not on sufferance but by right; we are here not because we are curious, although we may be, but because we are committed to the whole, full, and complete revelation and dispensation of God. We must never be required by ourselves, by our friends, or by our enemies to seek justification for our place at the altar, at the foot of the cross, and in the presence of the Most High. We have always been here, and we are here today both by right and by grace.

When we think of these apostles and listen to the gospel which has just been read to us this afternoon, we are reminded of the fact that Jesus calls ordinary people to extraordinary, some might even say impossible, tasks and responsibilities. The apostles who are collected together in these opening chapters of St. Matthew's gospel represent no quality control at all, if we understand anything about them as the Bible presents them. They are not intellectually distinguished; they are not cultural leaders; they are not financially astute; they present no outstanding credentials either in deed or ability; they do not even represent morally exemplary people: Matthew was a civil servant, a tax collector; the fishermen were not particularly good at their calling. All we know is that when Jesus invited them to join him, they did. There is not even a hint of deep-seated, closeted, internal piety in any of them, and any of these qualities that we attribute to them we do only after the fact of their commissioning, after the fact of their invitation to join the motley crew. It was only when they risked everything and accepted the invitation to "Come, follow me," do we find any interesting qualities emerging in the span of their lives. So, it's an important thing to recognize that to be a follower of Jesus is to be so not on the basis of the merits of the follower but on the basis of the merit of the one who calls.

The first work of an apostle, at least according to the gospel, must be obedience in risk-taking, following the summons, taking the invitation wherever it may lead, going from what we know and who we are and who we think we are and who we are thought to be, from stable places into that place into which Jesus calls us; and Jesus calls us into those places by our names. He does not say, "Come you"; "Come one"; "Come all"; he says, "Come, Matthew"; "Come, James"; "Come, John"; "Come, Peter." He knows us by name and calls us by name to join him. The work of an apostle is to be either smart enough or crazy enough to know an offer that cannot be refused, and to accept it.

The work of an apostle, then, in this case, is very much like coming out, is it not? It is a bold and obedient and sometimes foolhardy risk in which security is sacrificed for the chance, the opportunity, of knowing and being fully known, of knowing something better and doing something better than we could possibly otherwise imagine. We, more than most people, know what that involves; we know the risks but we also know the joys. Apostleship is no stranger to our community, but the work of an apostle is not just becoming one, important as that is, for the Lord has a very particular agenda, a very particular set of things that he now requires his apostles to do. If you are courageous enough to follow him, according to St. Matthew's gospel, you are then to "heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons." No small order, this apostle business; it is not even an invitation to a seminar, or to graduate school, or, heaven forfend, to a coffee hour. No! Straightaway you are to heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. An apostle is not one who is meant simply to put band-aids on the wounds of society, which they could do with a little help from the government and some social service agencies. Our Lord is not in the business of band-aids, nor are apostles; the apostles are meant to do nothing less than announce that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. It is no longer 'business as usual,' and we are not normal, we are peculiar, bizarre, unusual because we refuse to accept the status quo as God's will: God rules, Jesus reigns, we must work the work of the one who calls us. The good news is that we are no longer restrained or defined or inhibited by the constraints of this death-embracing secular, material, mendacious world in which we make our way. We are the children of the light and not of the darkness, we are children of the day and not of the night. To raise the dead, to cleanse the lepers, to cast out demons -- these are not simply impossible actions, as they may appear to be by the standards of contemporary society, but attitudes which defy the petty logic of this world and this life. They are attitudes of liberation, of resurrection, of cleansing and of healing; attitudes which are the acts of ultimate freedom for those of us who claim to do the work of an apostle.

Now that's a lot to ask. I understand that, and it will not come easily, this work of an apostle, to you Episcopalians. I know you very well indeed; I'm a closet Episcopalian myself, but, I figure, one closet at a time in my life. You know that marvelous old line which asks, "What do you get when you cross an Episcopalian with a Jehovah's Witness?" You get somebody who knocks on your door every Saturday morning for no particular reason at all! I know that there is more to you than that; and have you ever noticed the empowering freedom with which our Jehovah's Witness brothers and sisters manage to navigate the shoals of this treacherous life? We think they're crazy but they're the ones who seem to me to be mighty stable and secure. Maybe they know something? Maybe they've seen something? Maybe they're going somewhere? Maybe we might want to pay attention. They know what one of the greatest of all Anglicans knew, for it was John Henry Newman before he 'poped,' that is, converted to Rome, who wrote in a sermon about waiting for Jesus that our assurance, the only thing that we need to hold on to, consists in these three facts: life is short; death is certain; eternity is forever. Think about it, my brothers and sisters: the one who knows those facts can fear nothing that this life or anybody in it can say or do or think, for that is the knowledge that makes the impossible work of an apostle possible.

Now the work of an apostle, as it is given in today's gospel, is impatient work. "Get on with it!" Jesus seems to say, and if they don't like you in one town leave them, let them eat your dust, and go to another town. That's what it says, that's the translation, and it's very reassuring to a preacher and sound advice for everybody else as well. It is an invitation to accept the impossible mission that God has placed upon us and if they won't hear your message, go to where they will listen to you. In other words, be prepared for rejection but don't be overwhelmed by it. Sound advice for anyone who is to teach, or to preach, or to live contrary to conventional wisdom.

A. A. Milne once wrote that "the third-rate mind is happy only when it is thinking with the majority; the second-rate mind is happy only when it is thinking with the minority, and the first rate mind only when it is thinking." That explains why ours is a two-party system. The work of an apostle is thinking work of the first order, which is why Jesus invites us here to be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves. This, I suggest, is an invitation which can be easily misconstrued and has been, frequently, by less able preachers than myself, but it an invitation neither to naivete, with which poor doves are burdened, nor cynicism, which is an attribute applied to the serpent. This invitation of Jesus is rather to an enriched, enlarged imagination which while understanding the world on its own terms is no longer willing to be defined exclusively by those terms. We are meant always to be strangers, sojourners, foreigners in this world; we are meant to live here with our bags packed for someplace else, and it is that readiness which should be reflected in our attitude which stimulates both courage in the face of terrible adversity, and serenity in the face of chaos and confusion. That is what it means to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, and that, Jesus makes quite clear, is also the work of an apostle.

So, the work of an apostle is that ordinary people like ourselves are called to do extraordinary, even impossible, things. Well, what happens to such apostles? If the script was written out here by your neighbors and friends in Los Angeles the apostles of course would all have lived and loved happily ever after, never growing old, never gaining weight, never losing money. That is how the gospel would be written in this world and in our time, but such things happen only in Los Angeles. The apostles were at first ignored, then they were persecuted, then they were killed. You must read more than the gospels in the Bible to find out what happens to those who take up the work of an apostle. It is not success that defines an apostleship, it is faithfulness, fidelity, fortitude to, through, and beyond death, and it is because of their faithfulness unto death that we can now afford to be faithful in life. We can know and share in that peace which passeth all human understanding, which this world can neither give nor take away.

You and I are a spiritual people, not just because we are gay people but because we are God's people, which means that by definition we stand against all that corrupts or compromises our spiritual identity in a corrupt and material world. Therefore the work of an apostle, to which we too are called in Christ, is the ultimate definition of who we are. We are not defined by our sexuality, we are not defined by our lifestyles, we are not defined by our diseases or our angers, and we will not be deprived by anyone of our spiritual inheritance as sharers in the work of the apostles. We are, even here in exotic San Francisco, when you get right down to it, very ordinary people. Now, you may not be ordinary, but the person next to you is doubtless very ordinary indeed, and so when you put it all together we are a pretty ordinary bunch called upon by the vows of our baptism to do impossible things by the God who created us, each of us in his own image, and who loves us so much that he came to be as one of us that we might become as he is.

When you are confronted, as you may be from time to time by religious people who will imply some deficiency in the authenticity of our faith because we are homosexuals, there are three words which you must always invoke not in defense but in proclamation. You must invoke the power of the Creation, by which you and I are made in the very face, function, and image of God: that cannot be disputed. Then you must invoke the doctrine of the Incarnation, for it is to become as one of us that the Creator entered into the world in our form. Then the third one you must never forget is the great doctrine of the Resurrection, that we shall be made into his likeness even as he appeared in ours. There is no anthropology, no sociology, no psychology, no theology that can compromise that trinity of affirmation, and you must remember it and affirm it. Creation, Incarnation, Resurrection: these are indeed the "gifts of God for the people of God," and to know this is to be freed and empowered and liberated to do the work of an apostle.

Thus, as our Lord has said, we have freely received all of these goods and graces, we have freely received this good news; now let us freely share it and give it to our weary, needy world, for Christ's sake, for that is the work of an apostle and the work to which you and I have been called.

Now unto God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, be all honor and glory, dominion and might, both now and forever. Amen.

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