Written and Delivered by The Rev. Canon Paul S. Nancarrow

Wow!-I'm back! It seems like it's been a very long time since I've stood here before you, speaking these words with you, praying these prayers with you, singing these songs with you, breaking this bread with you. This has been an amazing summer of travel and learning and work and rest, a summer filled to overflowing with wondrous things for me, and for Lee and me together. It feels like a lot has happened since we were last together.

And yet, in another way, it seems like this summer has just flown by. It seems like only yesterday I was standing here, preaching the Good News that "it's all about the companionship." Being back in this spot is being back in the familiar, back with the people I know and the places I know and the routines I'm accustomed to and the work I do.

I've got both these feelings: both the familiarity of being back, and all the novelty of things I cooked up on sabbatical. Standing here this morning puts me in a kind of creative tension between those two poles.

I think that same kind of tension drives our Gospel lesson this morning. The Pharisees say to Jesus "Why do you not live by the traditions of the elders?" And Jesus says to the Pharisees "Why do you not recognize the presence of the living commandment of God?

Those two questions express a classic tension in the religious life-the Christian life certainly, but I think also a tension in any serious attempt to live in a spiritual way. On the one hand you have the power of tradition, the accumulated knowledge and wisdom and ways and means of generations of spiritual seekers and finders, the shared remembering of doing things the way that works. That's what the Pharisees were all about: taking the accumulated insights of generations of interpreters of scripture, and applying those insights in fine detail to working through all the tasks and duties of everyday life. For a Pharisee, washing up for lunch could be a devotional exercise, if you did it according to tradition. You know, so often in Christian literature and teaching the Pharisees are presented as the bad guys, the ones who were always out to get Jesus-but in this story I think they really do have a point. Tradition is important, remembering what has always worked in the past is valuable. It gives you a place to start from, it keeps you from reinventing the wheel every time you want to do something. The Pharisees in this story are holding on to a genuine truth: it is worthwhile to respect the religious traditions of the elders.

But Jesus is speaking a genuine truth in this story, too. The commandment of God made clear and present and immediate, not just in the past but in the now, the will of God made manifest in the ways God moves our hearts and our spirits and our actions in the moment, the living word of God doing something new right in front of our eyes-that's pretty important, too. The God Jesus teaches about is a God of surprises, a Creator God who never stops creating new possibilities even out of our old wreckage, a God who turns our human expectations and familiarities upside-down in order to break down our barriers and open us up to unexpected grace. The God Jesus embodies for us is a God who calls us to purify our hearts, to put away all the evil intentions that distract and dilute our spirits, so that we can be mindful of the living Divine Presence in our midst right here and now.

So in the story Jesus and the Pharisees square off against each other. And in our spiritual lives we find ourselves in that same tension, too: between the old and the new, between the power of tradition and the energy of innovation, between what's always worked before and the new possibilities, the new works, God is giving us to work out now.

Our whole Episcopal Church is caught in that tension right now. One of the things I did over the summer was go be a deputy to General Convention in Columbus. I'm sure you all saw the headlines back in June: how we elected our first woman Presiding Bishop, how we wrestled with a resolution on gay and lesbian bishops, a resolution that would simultaneously tell the rest of the Anglican Communion that we were not walking apart from them and tell lesbian and gay Episcopalians that we were not abandoning them either. It was desperately difficult work, and I don't think we were altogether successful at it-we did the best we could with what we had, but there are no easy answers. We revealed ourselves as a church in the tension between the old and the new, between tradition and innovation-a church that is wrestling with the traditions of bishops and new ways of seeing as bishops people we've never seen in that role before-a church that is wrestling with traditional understandings of human nature and new ways of recognizing holiness of life in people the tradition has always condemned and marginalized before. And it wasn't just in those headline issues that General Convention wrestled with this tension. We passed a resolution authorizing a new lectionary for reading lessons in church on Sunday mornings. Changing the pattern of readings on Sunday mornings doesn't seem like such a big deal-after all, it's still the same Bible we'll be reading-but we'll be hearing different stories from the Bible, different combinations of passages from the First Testament and the Epistles and the Gospels; and those different combinations will influence how we hear the Bible, how we see connections in the Bible, how we see connections between the Bible and us, and those differences will bring out a refreshing novelty in how we grasp the Bible and how the Bible grasps us. The liturgies at General Convention were an amazing combination of the old and the new-everything from Rite I to Enriching our Worship-everything from folk music to dixieland to rock to massed choirs singing the rock-solid traditional hymns-languages from English to French to Ojibwe to Chinese to some Pacific Island languages I can't even name. The blending of styles didn't always come off, I have to be honest; but it was amazingly exciting to see us as a church that would open its arms so wide as to try to embrace all those worship styles. Time and time again General Convention revealed us as a church that is squarely in that tension between the old and the new, the power of tradition and the energy of innovation, what's always worked before and the new works God is giving us to work out now.

And we here at St George's are no different. We wrestle with all those same issues as General Convention-on a much smaller scale, to be sure-but we wrestle with them all. Sexuality and worship and lectionaries-they all are wrapped up in our parish life, too. And we have our own tensions between the old and the new. Over the summer I know that you all have wrestled with our parish budget, working to reduce the deficit, but even more importantly working to change the very ways we think about finance and stewardship and giving. Some of our Vestry members are saying that St George's is in "go for broke mode," that we are in a place where we must grow or we will die, that right now the most important question we can ask about any parish program or ministry or line item or staff position is "How will this help us grow?" That's a challenging place to be. It means we have to look at every single thing we do, no exceptions, not just in terms of maintaining what we have, but also in terms of expanding our mission and our ministry and our effectiveness in the world and our growth in the Spirit. Growth in membership and budget is also important, of course; but we must grow in those things only to serve growing in mission. I think your Vestry has taken a bold step in this by accepting a gift-not a fundraiser, but a gift-that will allow Mary to stay at St George's for another six months. With Mary's gifts in pastoral ministry, and Philip's gifts in ministry in the world, that will allow me to come back from sabbatical ready to focus on leadership and growth-and I think that's going to be a very powerful combination. It'll be different; it'll take some getting used to. But I think it will be very powerful. And it will be a way for us as a parish family to be right there in that tension between the old and the new, the power of our traditions and the energy of innovation, what’\'s always worked before and the new work God is giving us to work out now.

For me personally, for us as a parish, for us as the Episcopal Church, being in this tension is a difficult place to be. But the Good News is I think this is exactly where God wants us to be. I think, with God's help, we can make this tension a creative tension, and by holding these things together-the old and the new, the tradition and the innovation, what's worked before and what we need to work at now-by holding them together, God will do amazing things through us.

When Lee and I were in Salzburg, we toured a lot of old churches. There was one in particular that stood out to me: the Franziskanerkirche, the Franciscan Church, right in the middle of Salzburg's Old City. There are records of a church on that site going back to the 700s. The present nave was built in the 1100s, and the chancel and sanctuary in the 1400s. The chancel is in the Gothic style, with huge soaring pointed arches and tall windows, so that the light floods through them and transforms the entire space into a room of light. I love Gothic church architecture, and I just wanted to stand there and absorb the spirit of this space. But it's not only Gothic. Some time after the building was finished, church fashions changed, Baroque and Rococo moved people's hearts. So within this Gothic structure they built tremendous Rococo altars and side chapels, with wooden reredos screens, painted and gilt and covered with florid little carvings; three-times life-size statues of bishops and saints looking down on the congregation sternly or looking up into heaven in ecstasy; cherubs and putti floating around the figures, carrying banners with their tiny little wings and chubby fat hands. These frilly Rococo pieces climbed partway up the walls of the chancel, but after that the bare Gothic stonework soared on alone to the ceiling's peak. And just in front of the overwhelming Rococo main altar, there were two modern pieces: a simple, straight-lined, white altar table, with a green cloth for the season after Pentecost, and a simple, straight-up white lectern holding a large lectionary Bible. After the busyness of the Rococo, the simplicity of the modern pieces was elegant, even restful, and it was clear that was where today's congregation gathered for prayer and communion every Sunday and many weekdays as well. All of those styles were there in that one building: when Gothic was new and innovative, they added that to their traditional church; when Rococo was new and innovative, they added that to their tradition; when the simplicity of Vatican II was new and innovative, they added that to their tradition, too. The whole building spoke of a spiritual community that was willing to live in the tension, and by God's grace to make it a creative tension, holding together the old and the new, the power of tradition and the energy of innovation, what had always worked before and the new work God was calling them to work out now.

And I think we can all be like the Franziskanerkirche in Salzburg, dwelling creatively in the tension, both respecting the tradition and being mindful of the living commandment of God. I think that's what God wants to create here in us. And now that I'm back, I'm ready for us to get creative.