On May 9 Bloy House faculty, students, trustees, and friends gathered with graduates in Kresge Chapel for this year's commencement ceremony and Eucharist. The preacher and presider for the service was the Rt. Rev. Jon Bruno. The following students received certificates and diplomas at that gathering.

     Paul Elder

By Sylvia Sweeney

Below is a sermon I preached for Pentecost at St. Mark's Church, Altadena.  I hope you will find in it an invitation to explore for yourself what God might be calling the church to do and to be as we leave the turn of the century and step sure-footedly into what it must mean to be a 21st century Christian church.

It is Pentecost, one of the three great feast days of the church.  It is the day we celebrate what it is - or perhaps we should say, who it is - that makes us who we are.  It is the day we celebrate the birthday of the church.  For it was the gift of the Holy Spirit given to Christ's faithful disciples which transformed them from a group of baffled and perplexed shell-shocked followers of Jesus into passionate, articulate, courageous members of a Spirit-led, Christ-centered community of faith.  

It is the Spirit alive and indwelling that gives voice to the church still today.  A Spirit that surrounds us, indwells us, and inspires us to faith and hope and most especially love.  It is the birthday of the church... and yet somewhat paradoxically our Old Testament lesson today begins with an image of death not birth, of the dry bones of those who had been slain.  And God asks God's prophet Ezekial, "Mortal can these bones live?"

Today I want to talk about something that is being talked about in professional church circles across America and Europe but only rarely gets discussed openly for the whole community to hear and be a part of.  When the church began now over 2000 years ago, it began with a tiny cadre of followers who spread their message through their infectious zeal and their passionate belief that Christ had come, not just to save them as individuals but to save and transform the whole world.  To bring an end to violence and oppression, human suffering and death.  For the early church, Christ's resurrection was a promise that a new age had begun, an age of healing and transformation, of forgiveness and love, of equality and justice and the full and realized reign of God.  

The early church waited with aching longing for Christ to return and they fervently believed that it was their work to do all in their power to prepare the world for Christ's coming, to share Christ's message of love and reconciliation.  Nothing less than full and complete commitment to Christ and to the church could be given if the church was to survive and participate in Christ's mission to the world. Christians gave their lives to this work willing to suffer hardship, rejection by their families and their societies, even to suffer death for their faith.

But over time things changed.  The Spirit still spoke.  Lives were still transformed.  Hearts were still filled with love.  But the costs of discipleship seemed to lessen, and with the lessening of the costs there seemed to come a lessening of the passion that had stood at the heart of the church.  The church began to institutionalize and calcify and entrench itself not in radical differentness from society but in a deep adherence to societal norms and maintenance of the status quo.  The vision of the reign of God as something to be actively worked for and fought for and not just awaited grew dim, and many Christians grew passive and even uninspired in their faith.
While the Spirit lives on and still speaks in the hearts of many a believer, there is also much about the church that over the last two thousand years has lost its vigor, its vision, its ability to dream new dreams.  There are times and places in the life of the church where one must stop and wonder if what the church is becoming is a growing heap of dead, dry lifeless bones. And once again it may be time to ask, "Mortal, can these bones live?"

Across the church, in virtually all Christian denominations in Europe and the United States, the church is shrinking, rapidly and irrefutably shrinking. Fewer and fewer and fewer people are coming to church to be baptized, to receive communion, to hear sermons and sing hymns, to teach their children the faith, and to be formed by the love and prayers of a community of faith.  And therefore we must ask ourselves, "Mortals, can these bones live?"  Will there be a thriving, vital sacramental community of Christian faith still practicing that faith in the coming centuries - decades, even?  Will there be another millennium for the church?  Can God put breath back into our dying bones before it is too late?

I think the answer to that question lies within each of us. It is an answer to a question posed by today's Acts lessons. Did you notice how in the Acts Pentecost story today each heard in their own language?  It doesn't say that each understood the language of the Galileans who were speaking.  The disciples learned to speak in the languages of the people they wanted to witness to.  They learned how to be intelligible to people who were different from them, foreign to them, unaware of the Christian message with which the disciples had been entrusted.

Good people, I believe that one of the biggest reasons why so many of our churches are emptying is because we have stopped speaking to people in the language of their hearts.  Now we expect them to learn our language, live into our culture, take on our traditions, learn to do things our way.  We have somehow managed to communicate to the world that the Christian faith is more about our particular stuff: our ideas, our theologies, our liturgical practices, our morality, our pews, our hymns, our Sunday mornings, our Bibles, our prayer books, our correct ways of doing all these little things.  We have communicated that our Christian faith is much more about all this stuff than it is about them. Their joys, their sorrows, their dreams, their disappointments, their suffering, their loss, their hope, and most especially their deep and unquenchable yearning for love!  When did it stop being about them and instead come to be all about us?

Let me give you a concrete example of what I believe God is calling us to do and to be. Two weeks ago now the clergy of the Diocese of Los Angeles gathered for their annual clergy conference, a conference that had been built by a team of us around the topic of Christian marriage in the 21st century - a topic the whole church will be discussing at General Convention this summer. We asked the question; now in the 21st century what is that makes a Christian marriage holy? And we spent two solid days listening to one another speak about this and doing case studies that invited us to move out of the traditional boxes we had been given for what marriage is and into a broader vision of marriage and intimacy, sexuality and procreation, family and community  - a vision that asked questions of the contemporary church that none of us had ready answers to.

We tried to describe important life questions being asked every day, questions being asked often by people sitting in our pews, and more and more often by people who are not sitting in anyone's pews but still need to understand and make sense of love and intimacy, friendship and family, kin and community.   

We used, as part of the starting point for our discussion, materials produced by the Episcopal Church's Task Force on Marriage, materials that invited us to reexamine our own church traditions around marriage and see our Christian history and theology of marriage from the vantage point of 21st century eyes.  It was a full and rich discussion with more questions than answers, more pondering than promoting, more probing than propagandizing.  We all left that gathering knowing there was much work to be done if we were going to be prepared to speak to a 21st century world beyond our doors about our deepest Christian convictions about the nature of a holy, Spirit-filled, life-giving love.

If we believe in our heart of hearts that the Christian life is a life that invites us into God's deepest blessings, mustn't we share those blessings? Mustn't we all learn to speak to those outside our doors in a language they can hear and understand? Mustn't we ask the hard questions with no easy answers?  Mustn't we with honesty and humility and compassion hear the cries of the world and go out to where they are and speak to them in a language they too can understand? Mortal, these old dry bones of the church - can these bones live? They can and they will if we breathe life into them.  Yes, my friends, with all of us reaching out together, speaking with the help of the Spirit in tongues that at first seem strange and foreign to us but which speak directly to the needs of the world, with all of us speaking and acting together, these bones can live!