Have Stole, Will Travel

Sermon - 22 January 2012 - 3rd after Epiphany

2012-01-22T17:23:00.002-06:00

3RD SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY — 22 January 2012
Trinity – 7:45, 8:45, & 11:00

Jonah 3:1-5,10 | Psalm 62:6-14 | 1 Corinthians 7: 29-31 | Mark 1:14-20

Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news.”

Mark Twain once wrote, “To be good is noble; but to teach others to be good is nobler and less trouble” [Following the Equator, more or less]. I’ve always loved this quip, and I’ve used it on this Sunday in previous cycles. I’ll probably use it again! It seems especially appropriate this year in which we seem not to be able to escape an interminable and generally appalling political campaign, even here in Iowa, where we thought we were done with it. There certainly does seem to be no lack of folks who are apparently very eager even to bully us into being good. And often enough they have very, shall we say? idiosyncratic, ideas about wherein “goodness” consists.

There has been a lot of discussion lately in the media, including and perhaps especially in the cybermedia, about how mainstream Christianity in general, and often focusing on The Episcopal Church in particular, is dwindling away. Well, I’m not so sure, and I suggest that there are lots of ways to spin statistics. (“Lies, damned lies, and statistics,” to quote Mark Twain again, although he attributed the phrase to Benjamin Disraeli.) But one thing does seem fairly obvious and is supported by some research data: young people, and young adults, are wandering away from the churches of their childhood. Which they have been doing for a long time; only now they aren’t coming back. And when asked, “Why not?” they are responding, “Why should I?” They aren’t necessarily hostile to God; they’re not active atheists; they don’t really think about it enough to be called real “agnostics”; they just don’t care, and don’t see why they should care. Sometimes they do have some hostility toward the organized church, and often enough they have plenty to be hostile about. These are basically decent, caring people, but they have been turned off, often driven into indifference, even deeply hurt, by rigidity, complacency, pride, hypocrisy and oppression masquerading as the Christian gospel. Many claim, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.” But many others show no interest even in being “spiritual,” whatever that means.

So it seems to me that we would do well to take a closer look at what we mean by “religion” or “spirituality,” and to ask how we are being heard when we use that kind of language, and perhaps get some hint as to how we can more effectively convey in our own time and world what Jesus was up to in his.

Today in the Gospel reading we hear about the beginning of Jesus’ public career. These first two verses may seem very simple and straightforward, but I suggest they are worth closer analysis: “Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news’.” A little like the message Jonah was commissioned to take to Nineveh, which is why the first reading today. But maybe only a little like Jonah.

Older translations of these words may still be more familiar to us, and so they color how we hear them: “Jesus came … preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God.” (That’s the King James Version.) “Preaching the gospel.” Well, yes; that translation isn’t wrong, but it sounds so religious! “Preaching the gospel” may be one of the reasons why many young people are heading for the hills. Those words have accumulated so much baggage over the centuries!

What the Greek text actually says is: “Jesus came advertising some good news.” In Athens a related word was used to mean the town crier. Jesus was making a public announcement – good news from God. “Now is the time – the time has come!” And the news is, “The world does not really belong to Caesar, it belongs to God!” (Well, you had to be a little careful about how you said that in public, or you’d end up on a cross. Which, actually, was what happened, and for just that reason.)

So what do we do about that? “Repent and believe,” the standard translations say. But in English “repent” is another one of those religious words, which may have all kinds of connotations but is likely to carry at least some resonances of beating on yourself and generally feeling miserable about yourself. In Nineveh they all put on sackcloth. But today ‘repentance” doesn’t sell. (It should, but it doesn’t.)

But the word we translate as “repent” in the original text is actually a perfectly ordinary word that means “change your mind,” and that’s how it was usually used in ancient everyday Greek. Today we might say “raise your consciousness.” In any case the idea is not really about feeling regretful about your past (however regrettable your past may be), but taking a new stance toward the future. It means “leave behind your own ‘reality,’ turn, and enter into God’s reality.”

“And believe in the good news.” Believe. Raise your hand. Subscribe to this list of propositions, some of which may sound a bit unlikely. But the word in the text means “put your trust in.” It’s primarily about commitment, not about cognition — about your heart, first of all, more than your mind. We sometimes make the distinction in English between “believing in” someone or something, and “believing that” a certain proposition is true. But in the New Testament the word we sometimes render “believe” always has the sense of “believe in,” or, I think better, “have faith in,” “put your trust in.” So “believe in the good news” isn’t primarily about reciting the Creed, it’s about putting your trust and confidence in Jesus and his announcement as good news, good news from the God whose world this really is and who underlies all meaning, all value, all being.

Okay, at this point — and we’re only 15 verses into St. Mark’s Gospel, remember! — there’s still not very much specific content to this good news that the world is God’s, that Jesus is announcing and asking us to put our trust in. But what Jesus then spends his entire career doing — making clear, by word and action, by instruction and image and story, by example and healing and forgiveness, and finally by giving his life on Caesar’s cross, is putting content into just what this good news is and just what God is like. Jesus not only announces that God’s world is near, he brings God’s world near, he makes God’s world a present reality for us. Jesus did not come to establish a religion or found an ecclesiastical institution, but to call us into real, true, full, eternal life. Jesus did not say, “Sign up to join my Religion Club.” Jesus said “Follow me.”

I’m not saying that “religion,” and institutions and doctrines and rituals and moral codes, are unnecessary or unimportant. Not at all! But they are secondary and instrumental. “Religion” is a human construct. “Religion” is our response that we make to the good news of God. And often enough we get this “religion” disastrously wrong. “Religion” is not the point of the good news; rather, the good news of God’s world is the point of the forms of religion. And therefore true, authentic religion can never be a club, a threat, a weapon to make someone else be good, but can only be a means and support for trusting in, and living, and sharing this outrageous good news that God, whose world this is, loves us and cares about us, and that fullness of life is available to us right now if we will but turn and receive it.

Sermon - 1 January 2012 - Holy Name

2012-01-01T11:53:00.002-06:00

THE HOLY NAME — 1 January 2012
St. Paul’s, Durant – 9:00 am

Numbers 6:22-27
Psalm 8
Galatians 4:4-7
Luke 2:15-21

After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb. [Luke 2:21]

Happy New Year!

Well, no, as you presumably know, that’s not what we’re doing here this morning. At least not for the next hour.

In the civil calendar the end of an old year and the beginning of a new year is completely arbitrary, though in the modern world virtually universal. There’s nothing magic about the first day of January. In fact, that we call today “the first day of January” instead of “the fifty-seventh day of Axlotl” is a purely human construct. We’ve done the “New Year” thing lots of different ways. The ancient Romans began the year in March. (This explains how September, October, November, and December got their names; once upon a time they were the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth months!) Later the Romans changed New Year's Day to the first of January. But that didn't settle it. The Christian Church's year begins with the First Sunday of Advent, about the end of November; although in fact throughout much of Christian history, the change of the year in Christendom was observed on March 25, the feast of the Annunciation, the moment of our Lord Jesus Christ's Incarnation in the womb of his mother Mary - a date which, in pious legend, was also held to be the date of the creation of the world and also the re-creation of the world through the resurrection of Jesus on the first Easter. The Jews, of course, celebrate the beginning of the year -- Rosh haShanah -- in the early fall. People elsewhere in the world calculate the year as beginning at various other times. Chinese New Year comes in late January or February, for instance. In the reality of our own lives, the year really begins for many of us along about late August, with the beginning of the school year; everything "picks up" again after a generally slower summer pace, including vacations. I've always rather envied people like the Australians and New Zealanders, in the southern hemisphere, whose natural summer break is occurring just now, coincidentally with the civil New Year which has in fact become universal throughout the world.

But in the Church's calendar today we celebrate the feast of The Holy Name of our Lord Jesus Christ. We used to call it the Feast of the Circumcision, remembering that on the eighth day after his birth, Jesus was circumcised, in accordance with Jewish Law, as we hear in the Gospel today. And it was, and is, at a Jewish boy’s bris that he is formally given his name. And so now we call this day The Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

But I’m not sure we’re completely getting the point. Yes, Jesus formally received his name on this day, and his name “Jesus” is important because – when you follow the English “Jesus” back through the Latin “Iesus” through the Greek “Iêsous” through the Aramaic “Yeshua” to the Hebrew “Yehoshua” – this name means, roughly, “The Lord saves.” And that’s who Jesus is. The Savior.

But this day was also the day when Jesus formally became a Jew, or, a bit more precisely, formally was received into the covenant community of Israel.

During much of the history of the Christian Church, we have apparently been embarrassed by, or even tried to deny, Jesus’ Jewishness. This, of course led to some really appalling episodes in our history, of which the holocaust under the Nazis was the most horrendous. But let’s not kid ourselves – what happened in Europe in the 1930’s and 1940’s was very much the product of a profound misunderstanding by generation after generation of Christians about who Jesus is and what God is up to in Jesus.

One of the reasons, I assume, that God selected the Hebrews to be the “chosen people” – (“Hebrews” is an ethnic designation for a particular middle-Eastern people; by ancestry they were called “Israelites,” that is, descendents of Israel, a/k/a Jacob, the grandson, or so the story went, of their first patriarch Abraham; a great-grandson of Abraham and son of Jacob/Israel was named Judah, and many hundreds of years later his tribe had become the dominant, though not the only, surviving Israelite group, and so after the return to their homeland from a period of exile in Babylonia they were generally called “Judeans,” or as we would say in English, “Jews.”) – by whatever name, one of the reasons God selected these folks to be the “chosen people” was to provide an effective context for God’s own Incarnation, that is, God’s “enfleshment,” in the human person of Jesus of Nazareth. (I don’t claim that this was God’s only reason for choosing them, but that’s another story for another time.)
So we need to understand that the whole history of the people of Israel – which, after all, takes up something like three quarters of our Bible – is not just a “backstory” to Jesus. God really did enter into our real human world, a very specific human world, among a very specific human community in a very specific geographical place, at a very specific time in human history, as a very real human being.

God is not a puppeteer. God does not sit up above the human world pulling strings and micromanaging everything that goes on. God is not a magician who runs the world with a wave of a wand. We actually have a hard time with that, and many folks get very upset with God because that isn’t how God works. (That’s how we would operate the universe if we were God, but, guess what? we’re not! Let’s get over it!)

The Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, which we celebrate especially at this season of the year, does not mean God coming and slumming among us in human guise but without really touching or being touched by our humanity and our historicity. That would not really be good news. The good news is that God is our Savior from among us, from within our human world, as a participant in our human history. In Jesus, God saves us from the inside, not by power but by love. The Word became flesh, and lived among us, and we have seen his glory. [John 1:14]

Homily -- 28 December 2011

2011-12-28T18:50:00.002-06:00

HOLY INNOCENTS — 28 December 2011
Trinity – 5:30 pm

Jeremiah 31:15-17
Psalm 124
Matthew 2:13-18

Perhaps you recall T. S. Eliot’s verse play, Murder in the Cathedral, in which in the Interlude, a Christmas sermon by Archbishop Thomas Becket a few days before his assassination in Canterbury Cathedral, Becket calls attention to the fact that on the day after Christmas, the celebration of our Lord’s birth, we celebrate the martyrdom of St. Stephen. As indeed we did this past Monday. But the point that Becket is making, in Eliot’s words, about the dark side of Christmas, is equally, maybe even more, applicable to Holy Innocents’ Day, which we observe (it’s not clear that “celebrate” is exactly the right word) today. This is indeed the Incarnation at what is arguably its very darkest. And since at Christmastide we are all light and joy, we tend to overlook the Holy Innocents, or at least to sentimentalize them. And that may be to miss an important dimension of Christmas.

It’s hard to know exactly what to say about the massacre of the boy-babies of Bethlehem. The only account we have of it is in St. Matthew’s Gospel, which we just heard. There is no mention of it in secular history, even in the first-century Jewish historian Josephus. We may assume that if Josephus had known about it, he would have said something about it, because Josephus had no use at all for Herod the Great and didn’t hesitate to record Herod’s many murders and atrocities. The Bethlehem slaughter would certainly not have been out of character for Herod. On the other hand, Bethlehem in the first century was apparently not a very large town, and the number of victims probably wasn’t large. Compared to the numbers of deaths in other massacres of women and children in the ancient world, and in the medieval world (including by Christian Crusaders), and in the modern world, and even in our own country (including of Native Americans), the Bethlehem “incident” was comparatively minor. (Not that that makes it any better!)

But what this observance forces us to realize is exactly into what kind of world God became incarnate, and what the cost of that incarnation would be. Our liturgical color today is red – the color of blood (appropriate enough!) and thus the color of martyrdom. But although the deaths of the innocents of Bethlehem were a martyrdom, a witness, of sorts, they would certainly not have been recognized as such at the time – only a bitter witness to the cruelty of those in power. And some of us remember when our custom on this day was to wear violet, the liturgical color of repentance, recognizing the sinfulness and moral corruption of a world in which such a bloodbath could take place. And still could. And still does.

Sermon -- 24 July 2011 -- Proper 12

2011-07-25T07:56:00.005-05:00

PROPER 12 / 5 PENTECOST — 24 July 2011
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00

Genesis 29:15-28
Ps 128
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33,44-52

When morning came, it was Leah!

I would love to write a screenplay of this episode for a TV movie. Dawn is breaking; the birds are singing; the sheep are bleating; Jacob wakes up in his tent and turns over toward his new bride, and looks into her eyes (which the New Revised Standard Version says were “lovely” but it admits in a footnote that the meaning of the Hebrew word is uncertain; God knows my Hebrew is uncertain; the lexicons seem to support translating the word as soft, delicate, or weak. Take your pick.) And she says, “Good morning!” And Jacob says, “OMG!” Hmm. Maybe it was Jacob’s eyes that were weak! Or maybe he just should have been more careful about how much wine he drank at the wedding reception.

Just to remind ourselves of the setting of this story a little, since the selection we heard doesn’t quite do that: Isaac is sending his son Jacob back to the Old Country to find a wife, much as his father Abraham a generation earlier had sent his servant back to the Old Country to get a wife for Isaac. Perhaps you heard that story as the First Reading three Sundays ago.

(This really isn’t all that uncommon even today. My understanding is that men from India, for instance, even though they have become successful businessmen or professionals in the United States, will still go back to India to marry a girl whom their families are proposing to them. And even in our own Midwestern tradition, it’s not that long since men who had come to America from, for instance, Norway or Sweden would write back to their home village to have a young woman sent over to be their wife. And they would hope that when he met her at the train from Chicago that it wasn’t too much of a disappointment for either of them!)

Anyway, Jacob journeys up to the family estate in Paddan-Aram, in the district of Haran in northern Mesopotamia, to get a wife in the Old Country. (It’s what is now northern Syria, or perhaps southeastern Turkey – I’m not sure exactly where the modern borders are.) And early on in his journey, Jacob has the dream of the ladder with the angels, which you may have heard about last Sunday. Well, Jacob finally arrives at Haran, and meets up with his uncle Laban, his mother Rebekah’s brother. And he works for Laban for seven years to be able to marry Laban’s younger daughter Rachel, with whom he has fallen in love. And then we get today’s story of the morning-after-the-wedding-night surprise. But oh well. Jacob gets to marry Rachel too, in exchange for an additional seven years of service, and as it turns out their maids Zilpah and Bilhah also get thrown into the deal. However, as it turns out, Jacob’s household was not a particularly happy home. (The Bible says the patriarchs practiced polygamy, but it doesn’t suggest this was really a very good idea.) There is a fair amount of family turmoil before Jacob finally gets back to Canaan (to say nothing of a wrestling match with an angel of the Lord, but that’s another story for another time – specifically, for next Sunday), and this Biblical soap opera goes on for several more chapters. I encourage you to read it if you haven’t already.

As nearly as I can tell, there is nothing in this story that is either of direct theological importance or particularly edifying. “Turn the light on for a minute on your wedding night to make sure you’ve got the right girl.” The Word of the Lord! The only point I might make in passing is that people who yammer on a lot about the Scriptural Doctrine of Marriage and Biblical Sexual Morality apparently have a different edition of the Bible than any of the shelf-full of Bibles that I have. The Bible does have some guidance related to sex and marriage, but this story isn’t it.

So why do we read this story today? As you are perhaps aware, during the “green” half of the church year we have the option for the Old Testament Lesson of a “course reading,” a connected sequence. In this Year A it consists of highlights of Genesis and Exodus and ends up in November with a bit of Joshua and Judges — the story of Israel’s early history, from Creation and Noah, then through the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and then going on to the Joseph saga, the liberation from Egypt under Moses, and the return to the Promised Land.

In short, we read about Jacob and Laban and Switch-The-Bride today not because it is of direct theological importance or because it is particularly edifying, but because it is a story, and most specifically and significantly, it is part of our story. (And so the fact that this is not a very edifying story probably shouldn’t come as a big surprise! Lots of events in our own story aren’t very edifying!) But we need to know our story in order to know who we are, and who God is.

And so, although I’m not sure there’s a lot in the content of today’s installment of All My Chosen People that is theologically important, I think that it is theologically important that this is a story and that this is our story.

In the Gospel today we hear Jesus telling stories. Well, actually, the ones we hear today are pretty short vignettes, but they are still little stories. Not as long as some of Jesus’ parables — I think for instance of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, which are more fully developed tales — today’s parables are not as long as the stories that just preceded these, and which we heard the last two weeks — the Parable of the Sower, which is actually about the ground on which the seed is sown, and last week the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds. Incidentally, in regard to both of those parables, they represent two rare examples — we hear a third brief instance this morning — in which Jesus is depicted as explaining his stories, using an allegorical type of interpretation which is unlike anything Jesus does elsewhere. New Testament scholars are in fairly general agreement (and I think they’re quite right) that these explanations of the parables were composed by the early church and don’t actually go back to Jesus himself. (The early church was just like the disciples – they didn’t understand Jesus’ parables the first time either!) Jesus’ parables are not allegories to be decoded; they are challenges to be responded to. In fact, I suspect that when the disciples came to Jesus after one of his parables, saying, “We don’t get it. What did you mean by that story?” Jesus didn’t explain it the way the later Gospel writers had him do. I think Jesus threw up his hands and cried, “Oh you of little faith and hardness of heart!” -- and then told yet another story!

A story, when it is functioning well as a story, has as its first purpose to draw us into the story’s world. In the case of some stories there may be some ultimate purpose of edification or because the author wants to share her or his vision of life, but with lots of stories it’s really just for entertainment, and that’s okay. (I read murder mysteries too!) The point is that a story creates a world and draws us into it. And that’s what Jesus is doing in his parables — he is confronting us with another world, an alternate reality — specifically the reality of the Kingdom of God. Some of these parables are just quick little snapshots, like the ones we hear today. Others give a fuller narrative picture. But they really all end up asking us — you, so what do you think about that? What do you say now? What are you going to do about your life?

I was thinking the other day — Just how much better has the world been made by some people telling other people how to live their lives? And the answer that came to me was, Not Very Much Better. And, you know, that’s not what Jesus did. Jesus wasn’t real big on handing out rules. Oh, there are a few, like for instance, “Love your neighbor.” But you’ll recall that when someone asked Jesus, “Yes, but what do you mean by that?” Jesus responded by telling a story. Jesus does not beat us over the head about our lives. Jesus does not hassle us (unless we are beating somebody else over the head about their life, and then he may get on our case, as he does with the Pharisees). Jesus draws us into a new world, Jesus invites us to experience an alternate reality, Jesus summons us to the Kingdom of God. And he does this by telling us stories.

And this is what the Bible really is: the story of God and humankind. It’s a very old, very full, very rich story. And in one of its early chapters, à propos of nothing in particular, the protagonist of the moment wakes up the morning after his wedding and discovers he married the wrong sister!

(Although, as it turns out, that too was part of the plot of the story!)

Sermon -- 5 June 2011 -- Easter 7

2011-06-05T14:03:00.006-05:00

7TH OF EASTER — 5 June 2011
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00

Acts 1:6-14
Psalm 68:1-10,33-36
1 Peter 4:12-14;5:6-11
John 17:1-11

“Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

Good morning and welcome to all of you who, like me, have been Left Behind!

Okay, I suppose after a couple of weeks we’re all getting a little tired of “rapture” jokes. One the one hand, the folks who got all wrapped up in and perpetrated that illusion probably deserve to be made fun of. I find it amusing that the more noise people make about how “Bible-believing” they are (the “God said it, I believe it, that settles it!” bumper-sticker folks), the less likely they are to have actually read the text of the Scriptures, at least with their brains as well as their lips. In fact, that whole “rapture” business is not in the Bible at all. (What 1 Thessalonians 4:17 is about is something quite different.) But on the other hand, a lot of sincere but gullible people lost their money in this silliness, and that’s just not funny.

But it does point to some real issues that really are in the Bible, and I think these are worth our attention. As you are perhaps aware, this Seventh Sunday of Easter is also the Sunday after Ascension Day, which day was this past Thursday. Did you have the opportunity to do anything to celebrate the Feast of the Ascension? Perhaps not this year. But the first reading today, from the Acts of the Apostles, is a partial repeat of one of the Ascension Day readings, and includes St. Luke’s account of the ascension to heaven of the risen Christ. The Gospel reading on Thursday was also the account of Christ’s ascension from St. Luke’s Gospel — Luke describes this event twice. (Once in Luke 24 and once in Acts 1. And not quite the same way!)

The Ascension of Christ to heaven is a major dimension of the mystery of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, which is absolutely central to the Christian Gospel. It is frequently referred to in the New Testament, in a variety of ways. But it is never actually depicted, except by St. Luke. In John’s Gospel, when the risen Jesus meets Mary Magdalene at the tomb, he tells her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” [John 20:17] But then John never gets around to describing exactly what if anything that “ascending” to the Father might look like. The authentic text of St. Mark doesn’t have any resurrection appearances at all — it ends with the discovery of the empty tomb. St. Matthew sort of implies an ascension, but doesn’t actually describe one. St. Paul in his letters writes about the ascension, though without describing an event; for instance, “God put [his great] power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion…” [Ephesians 1: 20-21] This is reflected in the Nicene Creed that we affirm every Sunday: “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” And of course in the Collect this morning we prayed, “O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven.” So this business of Jesus ascending to heaven is a solidly recurring theme in the celebration of our Christian lives together.

So, okay. What is this “ascension to heaven” about? For one thing, what is heaven? And for another thing, where is heaven? And for still another thing, when is heaven?

First, and skipping over the long parts, the bottom line is that “heaven” for us generally designates the immediate and direct presence of God.

Second, this then raises the question of whether to ask where heaven is may be a category mistake. God, after all, is, we believe, everywhere; although even to say God is everywhere may still be a category mistake. But, never mind. The word we translate as “heaven,” in both Hebrew and Greek, originally meant “the sky.” And it still often means that. (That’s true for us in English as well.) And probably way way back people thought that God, or the gods, lived in the sky. After all, if you looked at the sun during the day, and at the stars at night (in a non-electrical world in which you could actually see the stars at night!), that’s not all that unreasonable an assumption. But by Biblical times, certainly by New Testament times, people had done enough reflecting on God, and had enough experience with God, that they understood that the notion that “God in heaven” is “up in the sky” may be a colorful way of speaking, but it isn’t literally the case. Perhaps you remember that when one of the original Russian cosmonauts (I’ve forgotten which one) came back from an orbital flight, he said that he had looked all around and he didn’t see God or Jesus anywhere up there. He must have found that really embarrassing, to be required to recite a Soviet party line which to everyone else was obviously so stupid. No, God is not up in the sky (or at least not any more so than anywhere else), nor did Jesus “ascend” up into the sky. We know that, St. Luke knew that, the apostles knew that. But “up” and “down” are universally used metaphors in a wide variety of contexts — being successful is “coming up in the world,” we are promoted to a “higher position” (or demoted to a “lower position”!), and that kind of thing. There is an article in the Des Moines Register this morning about the "ten highest executive salaries" in Iowa based corporations. (And they're pretty high!) We use these expressions so often and so automatically that we don’t even think about them. But in that metaphorical sense “heaven,” “God’s immediate presence,” is “up,” and we are “down here.” (And hell is “even further down there”; but let’s not go there today!) The only thing wrong with that language is if we take it physically literally. And I don’t think St. Luke did.

Indeed, to the extent that we can use a spatial metaphor at all, “heaven” is right here, except that we cannot — usually — see it. And so, in a very important sense, Jesus in his ascension did not go away, although it does mean that he is no longer with us in the same way any more. Which is good, because that way was to be located in first-century Judea, which doesn’t do us much good in twenty-first century Iowa! But as Jesus himself said, at the end of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” [28:20] Or as we prayed this past Thursday, “Give us faith to perceive that, according to his promise, he abides with his Church on earth, even to the end of the ages.” And that’s an important dimension of what the Ascension of Christ means for us.

And this then points us to our third question, “When is heaven?” And the simple answer, but not always realized by us, is right now. Or at least, beginning right now. When Jesus talks about “the Kingdom of God” (or, especially in Matthew, “the Kingdom of Heaven,” which is exactly the same thing — Matthew’s largely still-Jewish community was a little careful about the way they spoke the name “God,” which was probably a good idea) — for Jesus “the Kingdom of God” is not off somewhere in the sweet by-and-by. The message of Jesus was, and is, “The time has come, and God’s Kingdom is here! Change your lives, change your world, and believe this good news!” [Mark 1:15] “Heaven” is not where we go when we die, if we have been good. (It may also be that too, but that’s not really what the Gospel of Christ is about.) Heaven is the command-and-resource center for the Kingdom of God, and God’s Kingdom is what Jesus calls us to start living right here and now. After all, it is our constant prayer that “thy will be done on earth (right now) as it is (already) in heaven.”

So the angels’ question to the apostles is the same as their question to us: “Why are you standing around looking at the sky?” The Holy Spirit comes upon us with power also, that we may be Christ’s witnesses in the world. No, the Kingdom of God will not be accomplished just by our own efforts, but we are called by God to share in the building of the Kingdom. We believe that Jesus will come again to bring the Kingdom to fulfillment, but we do not know what that will look like or when it will be. (What don’t the rapture folks understand about “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority”?) [Acts 1:7] But what the Bible consistently says, right down to the end of the Book of Revelation, is that Jesus will come, not to snatch us away from this world in an imagined “rapture,” but to fulfill the resurrection of this world as a new heaven and a new earth. [Rev. 21:1, cf. Isa. 65:17, 66:22, Rom 8:19ff, 2Pet 3:13]

Sermon -- 21 April 2011 -- Maundy Thursday

2011-04-21T21:09:00.004-05:00

MAUNDY THURSDAY — 21 April 2011
Trinity, Iowa City — 7:00 p.m.

Ex 12:1-4 (5-10) 11-14
Ps 116:1, 10-17
1 Cor 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35

“Do this in remembrance of me.” [1 Cor 11:24]
“I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” [John 13:15]

Liturgically speaking, Holy Week is a very busy week!

But you already knew that! (After all, you’re here tonight!)

This past Sunday, as you recall, we celebrated Palm Sunday, which is what we have always called it for short, but you may have noticed, whether in previous years or just this year, that the full name of the day is “The Sunday of the Passion Colon Space Space Palm Sunday.” That’s because there are in fact two liturgical services that take place that morning: First, there is the Liturgy of the Palms, at which we read the Gospel of the Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and bless palm branches and parade around singing psalms and hymns, and then there is the Eucharist of the Lord’s Passion (his suffering, culminating in his crucifixion), which is very very different in its tone. (In fact, old guys like me remember when the clergy types used to stop, take off their festive red vestments, and put on somber purple vestments at the segué into the Eucharist.) But now we scrunch these two services right up together, apparently mostly for the sake of saving time, and so we may not notice how very different these two liturgical “moments” are.

Well, today, Maundy Thursday, is kind of like that. Except that we aren’t celebrating two different services right in a row (well, right at the end we sort of do), we are celebrating two different themes at the same time. The word “Maundy,” you may recall, is what the Brits did to the Latin word mandatum, “commandment,” from Jesus’ words in tonight’s Gospel reading, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” [John 13:34] And in this context this has been applied particularly to the footwashing, which we observed ritually just now, in remembrance of how, according to St. John’s Gospel, Jesus washed his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper. The footwashing may make some of us uncomfortable, because we find it culturally bizarre. We Don’t Do That Kind Of Thing. Well, Simon Peter and the other disciples found it culturally bizarre too — they didn’t do that kind of thing either. Yes, it was usual in those days to provide your dinner guests with a basin of water when they arrived so they could wash their dusty sandaled feet — on one occasion Jesus chides a Pharisee who is hosting him for neglecting to do so— but usually people washed their own feet, or maybe a slave might actually assist with washing the guests’ feet, But certainly the host would never do anything so menial, nor would a guest ever allow the host to do so. (As usual, good ol’ Simon Peter Just Doesn’t Get It, but at least he shows he has good manners!) And what Jesus says is, “Yes! This is not only bizarre, it is completely counter-cultural! Get Over It!”

So that’s one of the things (one of the many things!) that’s going on in the upper room tonight.

The other thing that’s going on — or at least another thing — is what for many of us may be what most comes to mind when we think about the celebration of Maundy Thursday, and that’s what we refer to as the Institution of the Holy Eucharist — when Jesus took bread and wine, said, “This is my Body — this is my Blood — Do this for the remembrance of me.” And we have been “doing this” ever since. (As the Anglican Benedictine Dom Gregory Dix famously put it, “Was ever another command so obeyed?” And then Dom Gregory goes on for a long paragraph listing some of the myriad ways and contexts in which we have “done this” over the centuries. [The Shape of the Liturgy, page 744])

You may have noticed this evening that the account of this first Eucharist does not occur in the Gospel reading, but rather in the Epistle, from First Corinthians 11. I might note that this is the earliest written account of “the Lord’s Supper” (as we sometimes call it) that we have; pretty much the same account occurs in St. Mark’s Gospel and from there also in St. Matthew and St. Luke. Not to say that they got the story from St. Paul — there’s no evidence that they, even St. Luke, had ever read Paul’s letters — but they are all reciting a narrative from the earliest tradition. St. John, however, does not tell that story in connection with Jesus’ final meal with his disciples. (John does talk about the Eucharist, as we would put it, but in another context; John relates it to the Feeding of the Five Thousand.) At the Last Supper, St. John wants to focus on his own story of the washing of the disciples’ feet, and then to follow up with his long account of Jesus’ farewell discourse.

Related to this is the fact that in the synoptic Gospels, and arguably in Paul, the Last Supper is explicitly a Passover Seder. In John it is explicitly not the Passover, but takes place the previous evening. In John’s Gospel the Passover lambs are sacrificed in the Temple on Friday while Jesus is hanging on the cross outside the city, and that’s the point John wants to make.

So which Last Supper version is more historically, chronologically accurate? Was this a Passover Seder, or not? Biblical scholars and historians have been having a field day with this question for generations. There are good arguments on both sides. (I’ll have to ask Jesus about this when I see him. And Jesus will say to me, “And just why is it that you think it’s important that you know this?”)

“Do this for the remembrance of me.” And here “remembrance” does not just mean, “Oh, yes, I recall how, way back then…” “Remembrance” is not an exercise in nostalgia. The Greek word anamnesis that we translate as “remembrance” means welcoming Jesus as living and active into our present and as setting our course into our future.

But, “to do what for the remembrance of him”? To share his Body, so that we may be his Body in the world? To share his Blood, that we may be quickened by his life in the world? So that he may dwell in us, and we in him? Yes.

To follow his example, that we should do as he has done to us — to love one another as he has loved us? Yes.

All this “in remembrance, in re-membrance, of him.”

Homily -- 20 April 2011 -- Wed in Holy Week

2011-04-21T20:59:00.004-05:00

WEDNESDAY IN HOLY WEEK – 20 April 2011
Trinity – 5:30 p.m.

Isaiah 50:4-9a | Psalm 70 | John 13:21-32

After receiving the piece of bread, [Judas] immediately went out. And it was night.

Judas Iscariot has become a byword for treachery. He is "The Traitor" - not so much in the political sense as in the personal -- the betrayer, the breaker of trust. Even in the Gospels themselves Judas becomes something of a stock villain.

What about Judas? Why did he do it? It's interesting to speculate, so long as we remember that there really isn't very much evidence, and what there is comes from what we might describe as hostile witnesses. Did he do it for the money? Only Matthew mentions the thirty pieces of silver, which was more than pocket change, but hardly a huge fortune and not really a convincing motive (it’s really a reference to the book of the prophet Zechariah [11:12-13]). John explains that Satan had entered into Judas, which may be true enough, but it isn’t very specific.

So why? Why this primordial, archetypal act of betrayal, from one who had presumably accompanied Jesus as disciple and companion for months, perhaps years? If Judas had simply become convinced that Jesus was wrong, why not just walk away? If Judas had decided that Jesus was a dangerous fraud, why not just publicly denounce him, and abandon him? Why this nasty, underhanded piece of treachery?

One speculation — and it's just a speculation, there's no evidence for this, but it's not contrary to the evidence — is that Judas had not given up the idea that Jesus was — or could become — the Messiah, the deliverer of Israel, but he thought that Jesus was dinking around. After that splendid beginning with the royal parade on Sunday, now Jesus was about to let it all slip away. He needed a little help, a little prompting, a little management. Jesus needed an occasion to rise to, a crisis to bring out the best in him. Perhaps Judas thought that if Jesus' hand were forced, he really would call on God for twelve legions of angels, and finally get on with driving out the Roman goyim and restore the kingdom to Israel. And only when it was too late did Judas realize what a horrible mistake he had made. But he had too little faith and too much pride for true repentance. So, says St. Matthew, he threw the money at the feet of the priests in the temple and went out and hanged himself in despair.

Well. Perhaps.

So?

We commonly see ourselves in the disciples, in the disciples in their weaknesses and frailties and sinfulnesses, and well we should: in Peter, engaging mouth before the brain is in gear, much bluster but not much spine; in James and John, squabbling for the best seats in the kingdom; in Thomas, not quite daring to believe. But not in Judas. Judas is outside the pale. We would never do that. Deny Jesus out of fear, like Peter? Yes, sadly, perhaps. Sell Jesus out, out of greed? I don’t think so.

But try to force God's hand? Try to engineer a divine complicity with our own agenda? Invoke the divine sanction upon our own kingdom? Make God be the kind of God we want God to be? Repackage God for more effective marketing?

Oh, yes, Judas is us.

"If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from the pinnacle of the temple; for it is written, `The angels will bear you up...'"

"Greetings, Rabbi!" and he kissed him. "Will you not now finally appeal to your Father for twelve legions of angels?"

"Do not put the Lord your God to the test."

Satan had indeed entered into Judas Iscariot.

Sermon -- 3 April 2011 -- Lent 4

2011-04-03T13:49:00.003-05:00

4TH SUNDAY IN LENT — 3 April 2011
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00 a.m.

1 Samuel 16:1-13 | Psalm 23 | Ephesians 5:8-14 | John 9:1-41

Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”

Last Sunday over at Trinity in Iowa City, Fr. Schlachter began his sermon on the Gospel reading — which, as you recall, was the story of the Samaritan woman at the well — by noting that that Gospel reading was the longest Gospel reading of the year (not counting the Passion-Gospels on Palm Sunday and Good Friday). St. John tends to tell very long stories in his Gospel, as you may have noticed just now!

Well, I sat there in the pew and thought, “Oh, I’m not so sure about that!” (You may have noticed over the years that I’m not too good about taking people’s words for things! Especially when I’m sitting in the pew!) So I checked when I got home. My basis was counting the number of lines in the Nestle edition of the Greek New Testament. Sure enough, the longest Gospel reading of the year (not counting the Passion-Gospels) is the reading today, about the healing of the man born blind. The second longest is the reading next week, the raising of Lazarus. (I’m not trying to scare you off from church next week!) The Samaritan woman at the well is only number three!

There now! If anyone asks you if you learned anything in the sermon this morning, you can say Yes! (And does this enrich your spiritual life? No!)

There is a point to this bit of introductory silliness, however, I think. It reminds us of something that we all know, but maybe haven’t really paid much attention to: The Gospel of John contains a lot of long stories. Not stories that Jesus himself tells, like the parables in the first three Gospels, but narratives, some of them quite substantial, about things Jesus does and says. In one case, of course, as you recall, in what we usually call the Farewell Discourse at the Last Supper in John’s Gospel, Jesus goes on for over four chapters!

What I’m trying to get at is that the four Gospels are not simply four variants on the Jesus story. As I think we all know, the first three Gospels — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — are very similar in many ways. First of all, Mark is the initial framework for all three of them. Matthew and Luke then add further material, some of which, mostly sayings of Jesus, they share between themselves, and then some other sayings and episodes that are unique to each of them. Even with all they have in common, each of these three Gospels has its own distinct “flavor.” But you can line them up side by side and compare them, you can look at them together, and so (because we never use an English word when a Greek one will do!) we call them the Synoptic Gospels — syn-optic, from the Greek words for “see together.” (In fact, you can buy a book that does just that — go to the Amazon website and search for “synoptic gospels” or “gospel parallels.”)

But the Gospel of John really is very different. And because all the Gospels are so familiar to us, we may not always notice how different the Fourth Gospel really is.

First of all, none of the Gospels are news stories that were written at the time of the events. Nobody was taking notes. The three synoptic Gospels especially drew on the memories of the communities of the followers who had been with Jesus during his ministry and in the first years following. I don’t suggest that these memories were not reliable — people then were generally at least basically literate, but they did not have notepads, much less iPads, and they had to be able to remember things, a skill that most of us have lost. But the way they told their recollections about Jesus was shaped by who they were and where they lived.

I think the stories in the Fourth Gospel, St. John, are based upon real events in the ministry of Jesus. But John, whose Gospel was the last of the four to be written, is not primarily interested in just telling stories about Jesus. By his time everyone already knew the stories. (There is no evidence that John knows the actual written texts of any of the synoptic Gospels, but his community already had long known the stories and traditions on which those Gospels were also based.) John’s purpose is telling what these stories mean and who Jesus really is — after decades of praying and reflecting on the stories themselves, those same stories that we know primarily through the synoptic Gospels. And, as you no doubt have long since noticed, what John does with these stories is very sophisticated from a literary point of view, and he operates on multiple levels. And we see that very much going on in this story of the healing of the man born blind.

Well, since we all would like to be home before lunch, I won’t work through all of the stuff that’s going on in the Gospel reading today, but it would take that long, or longer. It starts with the healing of the man (which presumably is a genuine story; Jesus was well-known for healing, including of blind people, and there are several instances in the synoptic Gospels), but then John starts to spin out the implications he sees in this event. To start right up front, Jesus is asked, “Being born blind is a terrible curse, obviously a punishment for sin: So who do we blame for this, the man himself? Or maybe his parents?” And Jesus says, “You people obviously Just Don’t Get It. Haven’t you read the Book of Job? (Although to be candid, that really doesn’t help very much; the author weasels out at the end!) Afflictions like this are not God’s punishment for sin” (— do we really Get This? Even today, among good Christian folks, there is still this notion that Bad Stuff happens to us because somehow we Deserve It) — “Afflictions are not God’s punishment for sin, but they may be an occasion in which the grace and power of God may be revealed.” Okay, there’s the beginning point. And Jesus now goes on to talk about light and darkness, and how he himself is the Light of the World (a statement which he has made before [John 8:12] and will make again [John 12:46; see also 1:4-9]). There’s another sermon for another time! And then Jesus spits on the ground and makes a clay of the earth (there’s another sermon in that), anoints the man’s eyes (still another sermon), and instructs him to go wash in the water of the Pool of Siloam (at least two more sermons; the Fathers saw this as a baptismal theme).

The story then goes on with a series of interviews between the Pharisees and the man (and his parents), in which the man by stages comes to realize who Jesus really is and what has been given to him (and there’s yet another sermon in that). The story then closes with Jesus addressing some Pharisees with the concluding point: if we confess our blindness we can seek the opening of our eyes and be empowered to walk in the light; but if we insist that we can see, we admit our blindness and remain in darkness.

And there are some more sermons! But not today!

Sermon -- 9 March 2011 -- Ash Wed

2011-03-09T21:15:00.004-06:00

ASH WEDNESDAY — 9 March 2011
Trinity, Iowa City — 7:00 a.m.

Joel 2:1-2,12-17 | Psalm 103:8-14 | 2Cor 5:20b-6:10 | Matt 6:1-6, 16-21

Back in the Good Old Days, Way Back! we used to confess our sins, at least upon occasion, in these words:

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders.

Well, when we last revised the Prayer Book, we altered that a bit, and we left out the phrase “And there is no health in us” and the words “miserable offenders.” This may be seen as an early triumph of political correctness, and I suppose it probably is, though the omission of these phrases had been proposed for over two hundred years on the grounds that they “tended often to be misunderstood.” And I suppose they probably were. But I’m always a little uneasy when people deal with problematic texts by expunging them rather than interpreting them. But interpretation is harder. It’s too much like thinking to be congenial to the modern American temperament.

Anyway, the notion that “there is no health in us miserable offenders” certainly seems overly dismal to the trying-desperately-to-be-optimistic modern mind. (Never mind that it’s true). But what is this sixteenth-century (not twenty-first century) language saying? “Health” in classical English is practically a synonym for “salvation,” certainly for “wholeness.” (Actually, in Old English, “health” and “wholeness” are the same word.) It’s not that there is nothing good about us at all, but that we are not able to fix ourselves, we are not complete, we are not whole. And “miserable” is an assertion about our objective condition, not about our subjective emotions. “But I don’t feel miserable!” So who cares? Preoccupation with our feelings is a modern fascination, in which Biblical faith has relatively little interest. Our feelings are vitally important as communicative of our subjectivity, but they are not reliable indicators of the objective reality of our lives in the world. Which is that we live in a world of misery to which our own offenses have contributed, and we do not have the capacity to heal ourselves. (And if you require evidence for that, circumspice. Look around. Buy a clue.)

We do need to seek healing. But part of our problem is that all too often we seek healing and forgiveness on the basis of an incomplete diagnosis. Most of us probably can, and sometimes do, compile a list of our sins — especially if we avail ourselves of the opportunity to receive the ministry of the Reconciliation of a Penitent, or as we have usually called it, Sacramental Confession. (“Father, forgive me, for I have sinned. Since my last confession I have [rustle rustle] umm…where’s my list?...”) Well, yes, our sins probably do include the behaviors on our list, mostly, though some of them are likely to be trivial and the really serious ones it may never have occurred to us to put on the list at all.

But in this Lenten season of penitence, let me suggest that perhaps what we mean, or should mean, by being “miserable offenders with no health in us” goes beyond —includes, but goes beyond — our lists of self-perceived, personal, individual screw-ups. Sin is not only personal, it is communal, corporate, societal, systemic. We are victims of the sin of the world, but we are also complicit in it, sometimes without even knowing it, often without being able to do much about it directly. Repentance does not have anything to do with groveling and cowering as “sinners in the hand of an angry God.” It has more to do with turning around, turning our values around, turning our commitments around, turning our loyalties around, turning our whole lives around, and following Jesus Christ into the Kingdom of God.

Sermon - 6 March 2011 -- Last Epiphany

2011-03-06T14:21:00.006-06:00

LAST EPIPHANY — 6 March 2011
Trinity, Iowa City — 7:45, 8:45, 11:00

Exodus 24:12-18 | Psalm 2 | 2 Peter 1:16-23 | Matthew 17:1-9

“Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

Today is called “The Last Sunday after Epiphany,” because it is, well, the last Sunday after the Feast of the Epiphany, which as you recall was way back in early January! This year this Sunday is as Last as it ever gets! And this coming week the season of Lent begins, on Ash Wednesday. (You will note that we are celebrating the Ash Wednesday Liturgy at three different times on Wednesday, so you have lots of choices!) And every year, no matter how many weeks it takes us to get here, on the Last Sunday after Epiphany, the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, for the Gospel we read the account of what we call the Transfiguration of Christ — Jesus’ appearance in glory to his chief disciples, Peter, James, and John. This year we hear the account from St. Matthew’s Gospel, and in other years we hear the accounts from St. Mark and St. Luke. Pretty much the same account, although with some variants.

Anyway, the Feast, and the Season, of Epiphany celebrate the epiphany (Greek), the manifestation (Latin), the showing forth (good Old English!) of Christ. It begins with the visit of the Wise Men, continues with the Baptism of Jesus by John, and goes on to include the transformation of water to wine at the wedding in Cana (by which, John says, Jesus “revealed his glory”). And the Epiphany season concludes, and transitions into Lent, with the Transfiguration of Jesus, his metamorphosis as the Greek text puts it, his appearance in glory.

Jesus takes Peter, James and John up on a mountain (to pray, according to St. Luke). And the three disciples have a vision of Jesus. It’s not clear exactly what they saw, and this is one of the points at which there are variants in the accounts, probably reflecting the fact that in the telling of this story, the early Christian communities and perhaps even Peter, James and John themselves, weren’t really quite sure exactly how to describe it. At any rate, Jesus was seen to be shining — his face, or his clothing, or both — evidently a sign of divine glory. (You may recall that the face of Moses shone when he came down from Mount Sinai after talking with God and receiving the Law — we didn’t hear this part this year in the first reading, but we did last year and we will again in two years. [Ex. 34:29-35]) The Second Letter of Peter which we hear today speaks of Jesus receiving “honor and glory from God the Father….while we were with him on the holy mountain.” [1:17-18] (No, Second Peter was not written by St. Peter the Apostle. If you are troubled by that, talk with me afterwards! But Second Peter does reflect the same early tradition as the gospels do.) It has also been suggested that this may be what St. John’s Gospel is referring to: “The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” [1:14]

And if that’s not enough, all of a sudden Jesus is joined by Moses and Elijah — the greatest figures of Hebrew history, who can be understood as representing the Law and the Prophets. They are talking with Jesus. And what they are talking about, according to St. Luke, is what Jesus is going to do when he goes to Jerusalem.

The disciples don’t know what to say. That, of course, does not stop Peter, who blurts out, “Let’s make three dwellings here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah!” “Dwellings” may not be a very helpful translation here. The Greek word is “skénas,” which normally means “tents” or “huts” — temporary shelters, not permanent residences. More to the point, in the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures (which was widely used by the early Christians and for that matter even by many Jews in Judea and Galilee) the word skéné is used to translate the Hebrew sukkáh. plural sukkóth, and perhaps a bell is beginning to ring for some of you: sukkóth are the shelters, sometimes called “booths,” that even today Jewish people build and live in, or at least eat their meals in, during the week-long Feast of Tabernacles, or Booths, in remembrance of the 40 years in the desert following the Exodus from Egypt and in thanksgiving for the harvest. So perhaps what Peter is crying out is, “Let’s all celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles, right here, right now!” In short, Peter is reacting to this startling vision of Jesus, with Moses and Elijah, by saying, “Let’s do something religious! Let’s keep a holy day, or build shrines, or something!”

Well. Peter misses the point, I think. Not for the first time. Nor for the last. You might recall that just a few days before this Peter had responded to Jesus’ question “Who do people say I am?” by bursting out, “You are the Messiah!” So far, so good; but as it turns out, Peter has no clue what “Messiah” really implies, and Just Doesn’t Get It when Jesus explains that when he goes to Jerusalem he will be killed, and then be raised from the dead.

And now on the mountain Peter still really Just Doesn’t Get It.

What happens next is that a voice comes out of the cloud, and says — I suspect not in a still small voice, since the disciples fall to the ground in fear — the voice says: “This is my Son! LISTEN TO HIM!” Don’t build shrines! This isn’t about being “religious”! Just listen to Jesus!

Father Mel has pointed out over the past few weeks that only when we get this long long Epiphany season do we actually get to hear in the Gospel readings major portions of what we call the Sermon on the Mount, from chapters 5 and 6 of St. Matthew. It’s really too bad that it’s so rare that we hear these readings on Sundays. (I don’t care what the Consultation on Common Texts says: we need to fix this!) Because those readings from the Sermon on the Mount are what makes this Gospel on the Last Sunday after Epiphany make sense: Listen to Jesus!

But we don’t want to listen to Jesus. We would rather be religious about Jesus. We would rather build shrines. That’s a lot easier. Because if we listen to Jesus, what he says is, “The kingdom of God is upon you, here and now! And this is what God’s kingdom looks like! So follow me! Join me in proclaiming and enacting God’s kingdom here and now, on earth (as it is in heaven)!” And Matthew 5 is a good place to start listening to Jesus.

And we might note that the next thing that happens after Jesus and the three disciples come down from the mountain is that Jesus heals a boy who is suffering from epilepsy. Which suggests to me that the glory of God, manifested in Jesus Christ, is not so much about Religious Celebration as it is about getting on with the work of the kingdom of God.

And so the Epiphany Season concludes and transitions into the Season of Lent. There are a lot of good things we can do in Lent, and the parish Lenten program leaflet and Father Mel’s letter in the latest Chimes have some helpful suggestions. But I think the best starting place for Lent is what God tells us today: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased; LISTEN TO HIM!”

Sermon -- 30 January 2011 -- 4 Epiphany

2011-01-30T12:27:00.003-06:00

4TH SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY — 31 January 2011
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00 a.m.

Micah 6:1-8 | Psalm 15 | 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 | Matthew 5:1-12

The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

This verse is the first verse of the Epistle reading this morning, from 1 Corinthians 1.18. You may recall that it was also the final verse of the Epistle reading last Sunday, from the previous verses in the first chapter of 1 Corinthians. But what is this — “the message about the cross”? (More literally the Greek says, “The word of the cross.”) What is this “word of the cross,” this “message about the cross”? When we read on a little further this morning, we hear Paul say, “we proclaim Christ crucified”; and that may make it a bit more specific but I don’t know that it clarifies it all very much. Oh, I suppose it means something to us — something like “we believe and know that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins” — although even that is not as transparently clear a statement as we may assume it is — but we have, most of us I think, a lifetime of context in which to hear that phrase. The folks in the Greek city of Corinth — a big, raucous, multiethnic port city — had no context at all in which to hear it. Not only were they new converts to Christian faith, the Christian community itself was brand-new. What can the words “a message about the cross” possibly have meant to them? For us the “cross” may have an important symbolic significance. We may wear a decorative cross, perhaps even jeweled, around our neck. We hang a cross on the wall, or in church we place one above the altar, or embroider it into our church vestments and hangings, as a sign of our faith. Sometimes that cross may even be sort of realistic, showing the body of Jesus hanging on it. But pretty dainty “realism,” compared to the coarse, cruel actuality of Roman crucifixion. And the actuality of Roman crucifixion is the only context the new Christians of Corinth knew. And they probably knew it pretty well, and had seen it firsthand often enough. Crucifixion was horrible. It was meant to be horrible. It was excruciating. (That’s where we get the word “excruciating.”) It was degrading and humiliating beyond description. It was arguably the worst possible thing one could do to a human being. The Romans didn’t waste it on petty criminals (they just sent them off to the salt mines, or whatever) — crucifixion was reserved for Public Enemies, for revolutionaries, for terrorists, for traitors. Crucifixion of these malefactors was the way Rome said to the rest of the community, “Don’t even think of ever being like these people, or this is what we will do to you!”

And this was the Gospel that Paul and his companions were proclaiming — God’s Messiah as crucified, “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” — oh, you bet! — “but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

Okay, let’s hold that right there for a moment. We’ll come back to it.

The Gospel today is the Beatitudes, from the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, so-called, in the Gospel of St. Matthew. A well-known and popular passage, I think. But I wonder if we don’t tend to see the Beatitudes as some kind of lofty ethical or moral ideal that Jesus is holding before us. (Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if I could live like that! But of course, I can’t…) Well, I’m not so sure that Jesus is holding up a lofty ideal. I don’t think Jesus is into idealism. Jesus is always thoroughly realistic, thoroughly practical. He tells the truth. He tells us how it really is. Our problem is not that we fail to live up to his ideals, but that we don’t really believe him. We will not accept the reality that he proclaims and shows us. Jesus says, “Do you want to know what blessedness, true happiness, true joy, fullness of life, really is like? Well, it looks like this: Blessed are the poor. Blessed are those who can mourn. Blessed are the meek (actually, a better translation might be “the gentle,” or “the considerate”). Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness. This is what true life really is. Not an ideal to be striven for, but a reality to be accepted and embraced.

Here’s the thing, I think. We human beings are entranced by power. We want power. Oh, I don’t mean that any of us really want to be King of the World, or anything like that. Oh, there are people who want that kind of power — we’ve seen them in human history, both ancient and modern — but I assume none of them are in here today! But we want power over our own lives. And there is an important sense in which that’s not only valid but necessary. Our psychological health requires that we have a real sense of our power over our own lives. But how easily our concern for power over our own lives spills over into a grasp for power over those around us, over our circumstances! And at that point, as St. Luke makes clear in his take on the Beatitudes, our blessedness turns into woe.

“The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” The Gospel of Jesus Christ proclaims that things really are not the way we and the world generally assume they are. It is the cross that is how things really are. It is the Beatitudes that are how things really are. And if we can make the act of faith and trust, to abandon our own false realities and enter the true reality of God’s kingdom — to believe and embrace the truth, seemingly so topsy-turvy, that we do keep by giving away, we do preserve by sacrificing, we do live by dying — then the Beatitudes, and the cross of Jesus Christ, will become the character of our lives.

Sermon -- 2 January 2011 - 2 Christmas

2011-01-02T14:46:00.004-06:00

2ND SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS — 2 January 2011
Trinity, Iowa City — 7:45, 8:45, & 10:00

Jeremiah 31:7-14 | Psalm 84:1-8 | Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a | Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod.

We are just now coming toward the end of a season in the Christian Year — and not only the Christian year — that is especially rich and full of Holy Scripture and its stories, not only for many people active in the Church but also many who are less active, even non-active, at least so far: I speak of the stories of the birth of Jesus the Christ, and the surrounding events, in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. I hope it will not come as a surprise or a shock to you to be reminded that these stories are historically problematic. There are those who would say that these nativity stories are purely legendary. I do not say that; but I do recognize that they are historically problematic. And I say that on the basis of the Gospel texts themselves. You may also have seen that on the basis of your own reading of the Gospel texts themselves. The number one issue, which I assume you are aware of if you have read the Gospel texts, is that Matthew (whose nativity story we will read next Thursday, on the Feast of the Epiphany) and Luke (whose nativity story we read at the Christmas Eucharist) are not telling the same story. Oh, we have managed to cobble them together in such a way that we can pretend not to notice — we line the shepherds up on one side of the manger and the wise men on the other — but the truth is, Matthew and Luke are not telling the same story, and neither of them knows the other’s story. But the nativity stories are about far more than just the recounting of historical-biographical events, to whatever extent they may in fact recount such events. And that “far more” is where I would like to try to go this morning. Who is Jesus? And what is he all about?

It’s well known that there are no accounts in surviving secular history (although remember that not all secular ancient history did survive!) about a massacre of children in Bethlehem by King Herod the Great. The Jewish historian Josephus, whose writings do survive, does not mention such a horrendous deed, and given Josephus’s hostility to Herod the Great, we might surmise that if Josephus had known about the Bethlehem killings, he would eagerly have said something about it. But that’s speculation. What we do know with some certainty about Herod is that such a crime would not have been at all out of character. Herod murdered a lot of people, including many of his own family, in his determination to hold on to his somewhat uncertain throne. But be that as it may, what is the likelihood that the infant Jesus might have been taken by his parents to Egypt, whatever the historical role of Herod may or may not have been? It seems to me that it’s not really all that implausible, although admittedly we are wandering far into a speculative left field. For one thing, “Egypt” was not really a completely foreign land for Jews, especially if by “Egypt” is actually meant the city of Alexandria, which was a Hellenistic metropolis and not really very Egyptian. At that time there may have been more Jews living in Alexandria than there were living in Jerusalem. And there are many reasons why a young family might leave home. And remember that according to Matthew, Bethlehem was home for Joseph and Mary. And Bethlehem was a small village at that time, and possibly the employment opportunities for a craftsman who needed to support a new family were limited. And maybe their Bethlehem neighbors could count to nine. And then perhaps there was a threat from Herod, at least perceived if not actual; if Mary and Joseph had some idea of who their baby really was, then Herod’s Judea would not have been a good place for him to grow up. (And after all, here in Iowa it’s not all that surprising for young people to go off to Chicago or Kansas City.) So might Joseph have taken his family to Alexandria? Sure! Why not?

But that choice would not have been without it complications. Doubtless a number of the Jewish people living in Alexandria still spoke some Aramaic; but in fact most of them normally spoke Greek. After all it was in Alexandria that the Hebrew Scriptures had first been translated into Greek, what we call the Septuagint version, beginning over two hundred years earlier, because the Jews of the Dispersion could no longer read Hebrew. So whatever advantages there may have been for Joseph and Mary and their baby to live among Jews in Egypt, it was still very much not home. They were immigrants, even among the Jews. And if they understood something about who Jesus was and what his ministry would be, then they knew they could not stay in Egypt. They would have to go home eventually. But even after Herod died, the option of going back to Bethlehem didn’t really look good. When Herod died, his kingdom was split up among his sons (his few surviving sons!), and Archelaus, who got Judea, inherited all of his father’s nastiness and very little of his competence. (After ten years of messing around with Archelaus and his inability to keep order, the Romans said, “The heck with this,” deposed him, and took over direct rule through a series of Roman prefects, of whom Pontius Pilate was the fifth. But I’m getting ahead of the story!) So, we speculate, Joseph wanted to return to Israel, but not to Archelaus’s Judea, so instead he settled in Galilee, which was ruled by another of Herod’s sons, Antipas. Antipas was much more competent than Archelaus, though probably not much nicer. (Herod Antipas, as he was often called, was still ruling Galilee during Jesus’ adult ministry, as we know from the Gospels.) One of Antipas’s projects was rebuilding the city of Sepphoris, in central Galilee; for many years it was his capital. (Why Sepphoris needed to be rebuilt at that time is another story for another time!) And civic rebuilding meant jobs for carpenters. And a nice quiet place to raise a family, within walking distance of Sepphoris where Joseph could earn a living, was the little village of Nazareth across the valley. (Remember that in Matthew’s story, Joseph and Mary were not from Nazareth, they were from Bethlehem, and they only settled in Nazareth after they came back from Alexandria while Jesus was still a young child.)

So what of all this? Well, I’ll say again, this is all speculation, though perhaps not completely unreasonable. But this story says that when the Word of God became incarnate in Jesus, he came as an outsider. He started his life as a marginally legitimate child, who promptly became a refugee with no real home, a stranger in a strange land. When his family eventually settled down, it was not among their own close kin. (How many of you ever lived in a small town in Iowa? If your grandfather wasn’t born in that town, then you were still a newcomer! All the more that a prophet was without honor as a newcomer in his adopted home town!) Jesus’ dad earned his living, and as Jesus grew up he worked with him, over in that hybrid Greek-Jewish city across the valley, Antipas’s capital Sepphoris, a place that was probably morally despised by the Jewish country folk as much as it was economically necessary for them. Perhaps this will remind us that Jesus’ ministry, God’s action through Jesus, was not to create a religious establishment, not to found an institutional Church, not to exercise ecclesiastical power, but, in Isaiah’s words, to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed.(1)

Who is Jesus? What is he all about? The stories of his birth, in Matthew and Luke, despite their very considerable differences and the problems with their historicity, still far more importantly point to who and what Jesus is. And that may not be quite what we have assumed.

(1) Luke 4:18; cf. Isaiah 61:1.

Sermon -- 21 November 2010 - Last Pentecost

2010-11-21T19:26:00.008-06:00

PROPER 29 / LAST AFTER PENTECOST — 21 November 2010
Trinity, Iowa City — 7:45, 8:45, and 11:00

Jeremiah 23:1-6 | Canticle 16 | Colossians 1:11-20 | Luke 23:33-43

There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.”

This Sunday, the Last Sunday after Pentecost or, more elegantly, Proper 29, is also known and celebrated as The Sunday of Christ the King, or as some prefer to put it, The Sunday of the Reign of Christ. (A distinction without a difference, it seems to me; but, oh well.) This is a celebration that we, and a whole lot of churches that follow the Revised Common Lectionary, adopted and adapted from the Roman Catholics back that generation ago when we all enriched our selections of Sunday Scripture readings by expanding to a three-year rotation, in which we all generally read the same scriptures every Sunday. This has been a Good Thing, I think.

The celebration of Christ the King Sunday is itself fairly new. It began in the Roman Church in 1925, at the direction of Pope Pius XI, as a way of countering a perceived increasing secularism in the world (the 1920s were not a particularly pious decade, except perhaps in Dayton, Tennessee) by focusing on the sovereignty of Jesus Christ, to whom we owe our true and ultimate allegiance and loyalty. (This was right after Benito Mussolini had seized the dictatorship in Italy, a wolf in the sheep’s clothing of the Italian constitutional monarchy, so we can see why the Pope had some motivation to do something about who we really believe to be our King!) Originally Christ the King was celebrated on the last Sunday in October, which coincidentally was the same Sunday that the Lutherans were celebrating Reformation Sunday. Or maybe not coincidentally. But in 1969 Pope Paul VI shifted the celebration to the last Sunday of the church’s year, just before the beginning of a new year with the season of Advent, and that seems to be working pretty well for all of us. Especially the Lutherans, presumably.

But this leaves unanswered the question of what exactly do we mean in this context by “King,” and how are we to understand Jesus Christ to be our King? In fact, we in the United States, and a lot of other people in the world (including in the British Commonwealth) aren’t real big on kings. Well, at the moment we have William and Kate, but that’s supermarket tabloid fodder, not political theory. One of the few nations that still has a really serious king is Swaziland, and that is not working out for the Swazis. In this country we decided 234 years ago that we don’t do kings. So what does “Christ the King” mean for us? (I think we can pass on “Christ the President” or “Christ the CEO.” Even “Chairman Jesus” didn’t hang on too long!)

Well, what does the New Testament say about Jesus Christ as King? Not very much, as a matter of fact. There are a couple of references to Christ as King in the Book of Revelation — “King of kings and Lord of lords” — but one has to be a little careful about the imagery in Revelation. In the Gospels, when the issue of kingship is brought up to Jesus, he pretty much ducks it.

For Jesus’ own take on “kingship,” let’s look at a passage I consider over-neglected in the history of the Church: Jesus tells his disciples, “The kings of the nations are lords over them, and their great ones have power over them; but it is not that way among you.” [Luke 22:25-26] But the reason for this is not because Jesus is reserving this kind of lordship for himself, but precisely because this is not how Jesus is with us: “For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” [Matt. 20:28; Mark 10:45] Jesus says, “I am among you as one who serves.” [Luke 22:27]

The only real references in the Gospels to Jesus as “the King of the Jews” are, first of all and very briefly, in the nativity narrative in Matthew, where the astrologers from Babylonia (or Persia or wherever) find a peasant baby in the village of Bethlehem, who then has to flee the jealous wrath of the this-worldly King Herod. And then much more extensively, in the passion narratives in the four Gospels, beginning with the entry into Jerusalem but leading to the accounts of Jesus’ trials, suffering and death by crucifixion. So today, in the Gospel reading for this Christ the King Sunday, we see our King, reigning from his throne. Over his head, his royal title is written—not engraved in marble, not beautifully inscribed on parchment, but doubtless scrawled in charcoal on a scrap of old board: “King of the Jews.” Not exactly what we usually mean by “king.” Jesus is King only as one who by worldly standards is utterly powerless.

We seem to have a thing about power. The solution to all our problems is the possession and application of power. It’s no surprise that the kings of the Gentiles or their modern equivalents buy into this notion. The tragedy is that so does the Church. The Kingdom of God will be advanced if we can just make people behave themselves the way we think they should. We saw this reflected a few weeks ago here in Iowa, where, whatever you may think about who should be able to marry who, there are folks who not too covertly in the name of God want to control the issue by the imposition of political power; and 54% of the Iowa electorate were suckered into this. In the Anglican Communion, we are currently in dispute over a document called the Anglican Covenant, which is a thinly-veiled attempt by some churches in the Communion to exercise power over other churches. (If you know what I’m talking about, then you know what I’m talking about; if you don’t, consider yourself fortunate, although you will probably find out soon enough.) We all know a lot of folks — maybe including ourselves sometimes — who feel alienated from God because God does not exercise the divine power to fix their problems. And often enough these are very real problems. I have to say that, despite the fact that we say or sing it at every Eucharist, “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of Power and Might” does present some issues about what we understand about power and how we expect God to exercise it.

But it is on the cross that we see true kingship, true authority, true power. The scene on Golgotha, “The Skull,” is not just a temporary setback to God’s true power, not just a moment of irony to highlight God’s true power, but is the very thing itself. This is the supremacy of Christ: not being better than somebody else’s expression of religious faith, not exercising control of public policy, not compelling the outward forms of virtuous behavior or orthodox belief, but disclosing the Rule of God, which is always and eternally the rule of self-giving, life-giving love.

Sermon -- 3 October 2010 -- 19 Pentecost

2010-10-04T08:28:00.003-05:00

PROPER 22 | 19 PENTECOST — 3 October 2010
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00 am

Lam 1:1-6 | Psalm 137 | 2 Tim 1:1-14 | Luke 17:5-10

“We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!”

The Gospel reading today is not one of my favorites.

(And so I’ll begin immediately with a digression: One of the reasons why we have a lectionary of readings — that’s what the word “lectionary” means, a schedule of “lections” or “lessons” or “readings” — one of the reasons why we have a lectionary is so that we will not get to read, and to preach and hear sermons about, only our favorite Scripture passages. We have to read, and try to preach and to hear about, a lot of our unfavorite passages as well. There are some churches and Christian communities in which the preacher always gets to pick his or her own Bible texts. Presumably we realize pretty soon that this is Not A Good Idea. But, as I said, I digress.)

The Gospel reading today is not one of my favorites. First, the little saying about having faith and uprooting mulberry trees (that’s the first two verses; it’s not clear how, or whether, that is connected to the next four verses, about how a master treats an arguably worthless slave. (Or “unworthy” slave — there’s some dispute about how the Greek adjective should be translated.)

We seem to have gotten a number of unfavorite Gospel readings lately. A couple of weeks ago we had Jesus’ story about the dishonest steward, who cut himself deals with his boss’s debtors so he would have a soft place to land when he was thrown out of his job. I’ve always found that whole story a tough one. Did Fr. Hulme try to take it on that Sunday? If so I’m sure he did a much better job than I would have! I’m still not quite sure what Jesus is getting at in that story.

And then last week we had the Rich Man and Lazarus. We probably like that one a lot better, but mostly because we can gloat about that mean rich guy burning in hell while poor Lazarus is up in heaven with Father Abraham. But gloating over other people’s sins actually does not make well for our own spiritual growth, and the more we think about that story the more likely it is to become one of our unfavorites.

And then we have these peculiar sayings this morning. “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” This saying sounds like a version of a saying that occurs in Matthew and Mark [Mt 17:20; 21:21; Mk 11:22-24] about having the faith to move mountains. “Moving mountains” was apparently a common expression in Jesus’ day (and it still is among us today) for doing some very difficult, even apparently impossible thing. I don’t think I quite get the point in Luke’s Gospel today about the mulberry tree, or why you would ever want to uproot one and plant it in the sea, but it seems to share the extravagance of the expression about “moving mountains,” and we know that Jesus often, more often than we may be aware, used extravagant expressions to make his points,

(On the other hand, the prophet Muhammad is said to have said, “If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad will go to the mountain.” I have no idea how that relates.)

So now we have the little parable about the master and his slave. I think this is not an instruction course in Human Relations.

First of all, this is a parable, not an allegory. That is, it’s not a narrative network of symbolisms, in which this stand for this and that represents that. The master in this story is not God. This guy in fact is not a very good master, although by the standards of the age he is fairly ordinary. We are much more sensitive to the issue of slavery, although we also have to confess that it took most of the Christian world eighteen hundred years to realize that. (Remember that in St. John’s Gospel, Jesus does say “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” [John 16:12-13].) It may be the case that ordinary household slavery in the ancient near east was generally less oppressive than plantation slavery in the old American South, but it was still slavery. (To translate the Greek word doulos as “servant” is a bit wimpy.) A slave could not say to his master, “You really are treating me very rudely, so I’m going to file a complaint with HR, and maybe I’ll give my notice and look for a job somewhere else.” But that was all taken for granted by everyone at the time, and in this little parable Jesus is just assuming the social structure of which all his hearers were also a part.

The point, I think, is the tagline: “So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done.’”

And although this is kind of a rough way of putting it, it expresses a basic truth that Christians have hard a hard time getting for two thousand years. Life — whether our life now, or the eternal life to which we are called and for which we are destined — life is a gift — it is not a wage. We don’t earn it. We don’t deserve it. All we can do is accept it.

And this is so hard for us to understand! St. Augustine had a big fight with the British monk Pelagius (you might know he would be a Brit!) and his followers — Augustine insisting that we are saved only by the grace of God, and the Pelagians holding out for the notion that we can earn salvation by our own virtue. Martin Luther had to fight this issue all over again — salvation comes not through our performance of the works of the moral law but by God’s grace received through faith. (Sadly, after Luther much of the protestant reformation slipped back into “not getting it,” and in effect turned “having faith” into just another kind of “work” by which we merit our salvation.)

My point is not that we should run about beating our chests and whining about how unworthy we are, and wondering whether we have been good enough to make it into Heaven when we die. What Jesus, and St. Paul, and I think St. Augustine, and I hope Martin Luther, are trying to tell us is that that doesn’t have anything to do with it! God wants us, now and for all eternity, because God loves us; that’s why God created us. All we have to do is say “Yes.” That’s very simple, though perhaps not as easy as we might think. Saying “Yes” to God means saying, “Yes, God, you are God and I am not.” That’s what the story of the man and the woman in the garden is about — their sin was not just disobedience (although people, and churches, that are hung up in power might like to think that disobedience is the first and original sin). Their sin, as St. Augustine and other great teachers and theologians over the centuries have always insisted, was pride. The serpent’s temptation to Eve was, “When you eat of [this fruit] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” [Genesis 3:5].

Life — now, and eternally — is a gift, from the loving God who created us. It is not a wage. We do not earn it. It is not a reward. We do not deserve it. It is not a prize. We do not win it. All we have to do is accept it, as gift, from God.

Sermon -- 29 August 2010

2010-08-29T17:39:00.002-05:00

PROPER 17 | 14 PENTECOST — 29 August 2010
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00 am

Jeremiah 2:4-13 | Psalm 81:1,10-16 | Hebrews 13:1-8,15-16 | Luke 14:1,7-14

“Life is a banquet, and most poor fools are starving to death.”

That’s not a quotation from one of the Scripture readings this morning. It’s from Auntie Mame. (You remember Auntie Mame!)

In many ways a banquet, a dinner party, is a telling microcosm of human life. A good party is an occasion of refreshment and joy, of friendship, of hospitality freely given and openly received, a moment in which we share our lives with one another, and so become more completely ourselves. A good party builds community — unity together — which is, after all, God’s ultimate plan and destiny for the whole created universe. The Holy Eucharist which we are celebrating is, among other things, Jesus’ party with his people, a foretaste of the eternal banquet of the Kingdom of God.

But if a party can be the microcosm or the paradigm or model of all that is good and possible for human life, a party can also be a microcosm of the things that are wrong with human life. I suspect some of us have had the experience of attending a truly dreadful party, the kind where you are desperate for a plausible excuse to go home early! In the Gospel today, Jesus has been invited to a party, apparently a rather posh dinner party, but it’s not turning out to be one of your more successful soirées. Jesus takes advantage of the occasion to make some remarks about what he sees going on around him. (Have you ever noticed how Jesus isn’t real shy about doing that kind of thing? Not always the most tactful guest, either, is he?) “Look here, people,” Jesus says, “if you keep squabbling and pushing to see how high you can get yourself placed, you’ll very likely end up not only disappointed but rather badly embarrassed as well. [The fools are starving to death!] Don’t worry so much about your status! Have a little more modesty — and (who knows?) you may find yourself pleasantly surprised and honored!”

Very common-sense advice about how to behave at a party. And underlying it, of course, some profound truth about life. If our attitude toward life is “Get out of it everything you can, Take all you can get, Look out first for Number One,” then we will ultimately find that life is unsatisfying, unrewarding, and even hostile. That’s so. Show me somebody who grumps around all the time about what a bad deal life is, and I’ll show you somebody who’s trying to get something out of life. If we insist that life be on our own self-centered terms, then our lives become turned in upon themselves, small, nitpicking, guarded, closed off. We become obsessed with the fear that someone is getting the better of us, and we waste our lives trying to insure that other people owe us more than we owe them.

If, on the other hand, we take the stance toward our lives of seeking to give rather than to get, receiving life in thankful wonder as the gift of God that it is rather than as a right to be claimed and seized as something due us, then we are truly free to live.

This is what the Letter to the Hebrews is getting at this morning in the Epistle. “Let mutual love continue,” it says. Don’t be all hung up in your own selves. Life and the fullness of life comes to you as you give yourself away. This is one of the reasons why the New Testament repeatedly urges hospitality, especially to strangers, and caring for the sick and the prisoners — things that you’re not going to be paid back for. “Don’t be stingy with your life and with yourself,” the epistle is saying to us. “You may be so busy trying to safeguard and protect yourself that what life is really all about will pass you right by.” And then it goes on, “Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have.” We may not be too sure we want to hear that! It doesn’t sit very well with our culture’s fascination with possessions, with success, with growth, with bigger-and-better, with getting ahead in the world. The ideals of financial prosperity, the “self-made man,” showing the proper image to the world, are all drummed into our heads from our earliest childhood, and every day since, by our schools, our literature, our entertainment, the barrage of advertising constantly bombarding our minds. We all know perfectly well that material possessions cannot buy the truly good life — we’ve seen often enough how the lives of people we know, or even our own lives, have been damaged or even destroyed simply by having too much — and yet still we won’t really believe it. We’re brainwashed into thinking that true value is, ultimately, economic value. (That, incidentally, is the heresy, and the fatal flaw, of Marxism. But our consumerist capitalist society is equally guilty of it.) Possessions — not only money but status, reputation, image, “What-will-people-think?”, “How-will-I-look-to-the-neighbors?”, pride, self-centeredness, independence, self-sufficiency, self-fulfillment. If we stake our lives on these things, our lives will perish with these things. If we make these the end of our lives, they will be the end of our lives!

“Life is a banquet, and most poor fools are starving to death.” Auntie Mame was right. Jesus goes to a party and finds the guests squabbling over the place cards! What do we want? What is it that we really want? Do we want the seats of honor at the feast? Well, we can try to take them, I suppose, but it’s not a very sure thing, very likely to blow up in our faces, and even if we succeed, what have we got? After all, what difference does it really make? Who cares? God? I doubt it. Or do we want life, life received as gift from God the giver of life? That we can have. That we can always have — the banquet of eternal life, now and forever — the banquet to which Jesus is inviting us all and calling us all to join him at the head table.

Sermon -- 22 August 2010

2010-08-22T14:06:00.002-05:00

PROPER 16 / 13 PENTECOST — 22 August 2010
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:15 am

Jeremiah 1:4-10 | Psalm 71:1-6 | Hebrews 12:18-29 | Luke 13:10-17

“There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the Sabbath day.”

We’ve heard a lot in recent years from folks (folks in the newspapers, and folks on TV, and folks on the Net, and all the various places where “folks” hang out) who say they are “spiritual but not religious.”

(Do any of you consider yourselves to be “spiritual but not religious”? Okay. Are there any of you who would consider yourselves “religious but not spiritual”? Ha. You might want to talk with Elizabeth next month!)

The problem is that we throw these words around without being very clear about what we mean by them. “Spiritual” may be a fairly clear notion, although it covers a range of meanings. Generally, it seems to me and perhaps you’d agree (or perhaps not), “spirituality” has to do with the conviction that our human life has some sort of transcendent dimension, however we might understand or define that. In some way, and there is a wide variety of ways of thinking or talking about it, there is “more to us” than “just this.” Healthy spirituality looks beyond ourselves, both horizontally and vertically. (There is also a so-called “spirituality” that is mostly just about me. You may recall that Robert Bellah a generation ago pointed to “Sheilaism” as tending in this direction. [Habits of the Heart, 1985, pages 221, 235])

“Religion” is a much trickier concept. It seems to include a variety of notions, generally having to do with how human beings are related to God, or the gods, or whatever. St. Augustine and others thought that the word religio was derived from religare, “to bind together.” (Cicero, on the other hand, thought the word came from the verb relegere, “to go over again,” but I don’t really see his point, so he must not be right about this!) We use “religion” in a variety of ways. One of its narrow senses, for instance — used more often among Roman Catholics than among us as some of you may remember, although we use it this way too occasionally, is to say a person is “a religious,” meaning he or she is a member of a monastic or other vowed community — monks, nuns, friars, sisters, for example. They are bound (religati) to their communities by their religious vows. This leads to a distinction — again more common among Roman Catholics than among us —between the “religious” clergy and the “secular” clergy — i. e., priests who are vowed members of religious orders, as apposed to priests who are diocesan parish clergy.

In a much wider and by far the more common context, of course, “religion” refers to systems of belief and/or behavior and/or ways-of-life that have to do with human relationships with and in reference to God (or the gods). Although there are, for instance, some traditions of Buddhism that seem not to have a place for a God. Whether therefore they are really a “religion” depends on how you define “religion.”

(“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.” [Through the Looking Glass] )

The Buddhists can speak for themselves on the issue of religion! Perhaps they might be willing to be the original “spiritual but not religious” folks! Although many forms of Buddhism have traditions and ways of life that many would consider “religious.”

I will confess that I have a great deal of sympathy with the “spiritual but not religious” stance. Critical, but sympathetic. The fact of the matter is, “religion” gets a lot of bad press these days, and a very great deal of it is fully deserved. And I am not just talking about “them,” I am talking about us too. It seems to me that a great deal of the fussing that is going on in the Anglican Communion, as well as in our Episcopal Church, is coming from folks who are, as I like to put it, “more religious than God.”

It’s really no wonder that “religion” isn’t doing very well these days. There’s so much “religion” going around, and a lot of it is pretty appalling. Especially those parts that focus on how some other people are going to hell.

(By the way, I am convinced that it is entirely possible to go to hell, if that’s what we really want. And I’m afraid some people really do want that — that is, they choose themselves over God. It’s an eternal choice, but it has its roots in now. But the criteria by which this judgment is revealed are I think very different from what some “religious” folks think.)

So I tend to be a little cautious about “religion.” What we call “religion” is
meant to be a means to our spiritual growth and maturity and fulfillment, with God and in community with all humankind and indeed with all creation. “Religion” is not an end in itself. Jesus did not say, “I have come that you may have religion and have it more abundantly.”

And I think this is one of the things that Jesus is getting at in the Gospel today. Jesus heals a woman who has been crippled for many years. And the “religious” folks get their shorts in a twist because Jesus did this on the Sabbath Day, when the religious law prohibited anything that might be defined as “work.” And Jesus responds, in effect: “You people just do not have any clue at all, do you?” Jesus says, “You hypocrites!” I don’t think he means “You phonies!” exactly, which is what we usually mean by the word “hypocrite,” and in classical Greek the word can have the sense of a stage-actor or a dissembler. But the roots of the word carry something of the notion of “faulty judgment” — in that sense, “hypocrites” are folks who just don’t really understand what they’re talking about. “Hypocrite” is not too far from “clueless.”

Jesus says: Look here. Freeing this woman from her crippling bondage is much more what the Kingdom of God is about than keeping religious rules, whatever value those may have in their proper context.

And the proper context of all religion is just this: the Kingdom of God.

Sermon -- 15 August 2010

2010-08-15T15:42:00.002-05:00

PROPER 15 / 12 PENTECOST — 15 August 2010
Trinity, Iowa City — 7:45, 8:45, & 11:00 am

Isaiah 5:1-7 | Psalm 80:1-2,8-18 | Hebrews 11:29-12:2 | Luke 12:49-56

“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”

You may remember — or maybe you don’t, and that’s okay — I’m not trying to lay any guilt trips on you, or at least not yet! — that last Sunday the Gospel reading, from just a few verses before today’s reading, began: “Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.’” This passage from the Gospel stuck in my mind this week, at least in part because this passage was also the appointed Gospel reading this past Wednesday when we commemorated St. Clare of Assisi. As a young woman Clare was inspired by the preaching of St. Francis to adopt a similar religious life of complete poverty and utter devotion to God and living out of God’s love, and there gathered around her a community of women, associated with the Franciscans, who became known as the Poor Clares.

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” — that’s what we heard last Sunday, and what we heard this past Wednesday. These are important words. How often do we get suckered in by the fairly common and allegedly “religious” but utterly false notion that God is “out to get us,” that God doesn’t really like us very much, that somehow we have to earn God’s approval? What is it we don’t understand about “God loves us”? Not “God loves us if…” Not “God loves us when…” Just “God loves us!” “It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

Okay. Got that?

So now today, just a few verses later in St. Luke’s Gospel, we get this: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”

(Well, as a matter of fact, we had rather thought that you came to bring peace to the earth! We were under the distinct impression that that's exactly what you were about! “The Peace of the Lord be always with you …” “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you …”?) “Peace I leave with you, my own peace I give to you,” Jesus said, “but I do not give to you as the world gives …”

This paradox of God's great love for us and the sternness of the divine word of judgment runs all the way through the Bible. We hear it in the First Reading this morning, for instance, from Isaiah’s “Song of the Vineyard.” The Lord plants a vineyard (God’s people Israel) with great love and care and devotion and hard work— but what happens? Instead of clusters of grapes (’onabeyim), the Lord’s vineyard produces sour, rotten fruit (be’ushyim — two completely different words in Hebrew). God expected from the beloved Israel mishpat but got mispah (a pun in Hebrew, untranslatable into English: instead of justice, bloodshed); God expected tsedhakah but got tse‘akah (instead of justice, a cry of distress).

It's easy, and it's attractive, to fasten upon one of these aspects of God's self-revelation to us, love and judgment, at the expense of the other. I prefer to hear about God's forgiving love! -- God's eager yearning to bring us together into union. Although I can see where some people might rather prefer the notion of a fearsome, wrathful God; it does provide some nice simple answers and meets some psychological needs, even if it does demand a rather cheerless outlook on life! (And especially for those folks who tend to be fearsome, wrathful people themselves!) But here, as so often, the tension, the contradiction, is only apparent. It's not that God is inconsistent, but that our perspective is so limited. God is always more than we can ever say or know about God.

And, after all, we do not love our children by letting them get away with anything they like and never calling them to account. Parents who let their children grow up undisciplined, untrained, uncorrected may seem like sweeties, but they're doing their kids no favor. They have spoiled them; they really have not cared about them, they have not cared for them.

But God cares for us. And so it sometimes appears to us that God is a little tough. God's love is no marshmallow — God's love is more than just warm fuzzies. Because God loves us, God tells us the truth - even though we don't always want to hear the truth. One truth that we must hear and understand, even though we may not always much care for it, is that between the Reign of God and the dominions of this world and its worldly values and priorities there is a great gulf. This gulf is not of God's making, but of our own - of humankind's making. We have a perverse determination to have things our own way, to cut ourselves away from the Kingdom of God, to wall ourselves off into a narrow, restricted, and largely hollow reality of our own devising. And given where we are, and what we have done to ourselves, restoration to God’s Kingdom can hardly come without pain, wrenching, strife, contention, division. Those who are faithful citizens of God's Kingdom must necessarily seem a traitor to the perversities that twist and distort this fallen world's values.

The Gospel of Christ brings division - not because it is God's purpose to be divisive (God's purpose is to bring us together), but because the world resists and rejects God's purpose. And so even families can become divided in the face of a value higher than family, in the face of a loyalty more demanding than blood. Jesus warns us: this is how it is! Be prepared for it!

In the end there must be decision and commitment: God and God's Reign - or ourselves? We must choose; to choose one is to reject the other; not to choose is to choose ourselves. To choose God is to reject the distorted values of this world - and thus to suffer the fury of a world scorned: ridicule, estrangement, hatred, persecution. Hardly what the world would call peace. But then, there's not very much evidence that the world knows very much about what real peace is, is there? “I do not give to you as the world gives . . .” Or as the hymn [#661] puts it: “The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod; yet let us pray for but one thing, the marvelous peace of God.”

Sermon -- 1 August 2010

2010-08-01T13:25:00.002-05:00

PROPER 13 / 10 PENTECOST — 1 August 2010
St. Paul’s, Durant— 9:00 a.m.

Hosea 11:1-11 | Psalm 107:1-9,43 | Colossians 3:1-11 | Luke 12:13-21

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.

The first reading this morning is from the 11th chapter of the Book of the Prophet Hosea. We’ve never read this particular passage at the Sunday Eucharist before — it’s assigned to this Sunday in Track One of the Revised Common Lectionary.

(Perhaps you’re aware that in the Long Green Summer and Fall season of Sundays, the Revised Common Lectionary provides a choice for the First Readings between Track One and Track Two. And you may not really care, and that’s quite okay! Karon knows about this choice, because she checks with the priest for that Sunday to see which Track he or she wants to follow in order to do the Sunday bulletin. In Track One, if you haven’t drifted off yet, the Old Testament readings follow a semi-continuous sequence from Sunday to Sunday, just as the Epistle and the Gospel do. It’s related to the other readings only coincidentally, which means, surprisingly often. Track Two is basically the same as our previous lectionary that goes back to the 1970s, and in that track the Old Testament reading is selected because it has, or at least is perceived as having, some connection to the Gospel reading for that Sunday. That’s the advantage of Track Two. The advantage of Track One is that there is somewhat more continuity from week to week in the readings from the Hebrew Scriptures themselves. This year, for instance, the first readings in Track One are mostly from the prophets: we heard about the prophet Elijah, and then about his successor Elisha, and then we had a couple of weeks from Amos and now we are getting a couple of weeks of Hosea. Amos and Hosea were prophets in the northern kingdom, the Kingdom of Israel (as opposed to the southern kingdom, the Kingdom of Judah — and all too often they were opposed!) in the middle of the 8th Century BC. The messages of Amos and Hosea were basically “If you people don’t get your act together, God will send the King of Assyria from the East to whup you.” And as it turned out, the people didn’t, and God did.

Anyway, in Track One, beginning next week the Old Testament readings are from Isaiah for a couple of weeks, and then from Jeremiah for most of the rest of the fall. The Track Two readings are an assortment, related to the Gospel reading for the day. Which one you get depends on what priest you get that Sunday!

Anyway: Although we’ve never used this reading at the Sunday Eucharist before, it’s possible that this verse rings a bell for you [you might want to put a finger in your pew Bible, even if you don’t usually follow along with the readings — page 632]:

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.

Yeah. Where have we heard that before? Well, it’s quoted in St. Matthew’s Gospel, chapter two, verses 14 & 15, just after the visit of the Wise Men to the infant Jesus. An angel appears to St. Joseph in a dream and tells him to take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt, because King Herod is out to kill him: “Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet [Hosea], ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son.’”

Oh, right! I thought that sounded familiar!

Of course, if we look carefully at today’s reading from Hosea, it seems that Matthew is taking this verse pretty much out of context. (What? Take a Bible verse out of context? Oh, surely not! Who would do such a thing?) This verse is not a prediction of the return of the Christ Child from being a refugee in Egypt. It’s about how God brought God’s people Israel out of Egyptian slavery into the promised land hundreds of years before — Israel referred to here metaphorically as God’s child, “my son.”

Oh, wait…

Well, maybe Matthew isn’t taking this verse so much out of context after all. Just with a bit of insight and imagination.

Anyway, Hosea isn’t predicting the future (at least not that he knows of!), he’s reflecting on the past and what it means for the present (which is what prophets do). And he’s saying here, “Look, God brought us out from bondage into freedom, and what have you people done? You’ve messed up! Over and over! You’re worshipping the pagan Canaanite gods, the Baals! What is it you didn’t understand about God’s command, ‘Don’t worship the Baals!’? This isn’t just like going to a different church, you know! But God still loves you, even though there are consequences for what you are doing. The Assyrian Empire will conquer the Kingdom of Israel, and you will be scattered from Mesopotamia to Egypt.” (This wasn’t an organized exile into captivity, like the Babylonians would do with the southern Kingdom of Judah a hundred fifty or so years later, but it was the beginning of the diaspora, the dispersion, of the people of Israel into the surrounding world.) But Hosea goes on, “But God still loves you. God will not utterly destroy you the way he destroyed Admah and Zeboiim.” (Who? Where? Admah and Zeboiim were neighboring cities to Sodom and Gomorrah, and shared in their destruction by fire and brimstone, or as we might say, volcanic ash and lava, back in the Olden Days.) “God says, ‘I will not destroy you, Ephraim’.” (Ephraim was the largest of the northern tribes; here it’s a figure of speech in which one stands for all.) “They shall come trembling like birds from Egypt, and like doves from the land of Assyria; and I will return them to their homes, says the Lord.”

God is not “out to get us,” as so many people even today seem to think. God loves us, and wants to bring us home, even when we have messed up. The prophet Hosea lived and proclaimed God’s word over eight hundred years before Jesus Christ, but he still had a great insight into the Good News of the Kingdom of God. This is Gospel.

Sermon - 23 May 2010

2010-05-24T09:31:00.002-05:00

THE DAY OF PENTECOST: WHITSUNDAY — 23 May 2010
Christ Church, Burlington — 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.

Acts 2:1-21 | Ps 104:25-35,37 | Romans 8:14-17 | John 14:8-17,25-27

“But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” [John 14:26]

Notice what Jesus promises his followers: the Holy Spirit to teach them. He does not promise them the Bible.

Jesus did not have a Bible. The first hundred years or so of the Christian Church did not have a Bible. Oh, of course they had the Jewish Scriptures — plural — because the only form in which they knew them was a multiplicity of scrolls.

Jesus and the first Christian generations knew the Scriptures, but they were not yet a “Bible.” There was actually a pretty solid consensus about what writings were to be counted as “Scripture,” including the Torah, the history books, the Prophets, and the Psalms — there was still some dispute about some of the others — but “Bible” was not quite yet a single hammer with which to pound people on the head. (Although “it is written” got used for a certain amount of smacking around, to which Jesus often replied, “Yes, but I say to you…”) And although the various writings that we call the New Testament were in the process of composition, and some of them were becoming widely known, they were not universally recognized as “Holy Scripture” and in fact some were still not accepted for quite a long time.

In fact, apparently many early Christian congregations functioned reasonably well without a “Bible” at all. In the later second century, St. Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons in what is now France, tells about “barbarian” churches who had salvation without written scriptures because they had the Apostolic tradition of the rule of faith. Irenaeus seems to be referring to Gallican rural churches around Lyons whose people did not read or speak Greek, and there was no Imperial Bible Society to translate the scriptures into Gallic, their Celtic tongue.

Now, I am not in any way trying to disparage the importance or the authority of Holy Scripture. I steadfastly affirm the ordination pledge from the Prayer Book: “I solemnly declare that I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation.” But we need to understand — as I think many so-called “evangelicals,” within the Anglican tradition as well as beyond, do not understand — that the Bible did not create the Church, the Church created the Bible. That is not to deny that the Bible may stand in judgment on the Church, and indeed often does. The New Testament writings are the authoritative witness to the original Apostolic tradition, and through them God the Holy Spirit constantly moves to renew us and recall us to our genuinely evangelical roots. But the Church of Jesus Christ is founded not on the Bible but on Jesus Christ, who committed the mission of the proclamation and enactment of the good news of the Reign of God to a community of followers empowered by his Holy Spirit with the promise that the Spirit would continue to lead them into all truth.

But being led by the Holy Spirit into all truth can be Very Very Hard. For two reasons: one is moral and spiritual: the simple fact is that we really don’t want to be led by the Holy Spirit into all truth, what we want is ratification of the validity of our own prejudices and preferences. So one reason why being led by the Holy Spirit is hard is because it means we have to recognize and surrender our precious Pride.

The other reason is a little less spiritual and a little more cognitive: it is sometimes just hard to tell what is really true. The evidence and the indications are often confusing and contradictory — not least from Scripture itself. I have never really understood the Biblical-literalist mind. (I’m staying away here from the term “fundamentalist,” which I think is not really very helpful.) These folks who make such a big deal of the inerrancy of the Bible — have they never read the text? But I digress.

My point is that the Scriptures are full of contradictions and inconsistencies. Does that mean that these writings are worthless, deceitful, untrustworthy? No! Of course not! But it does mean their contradictions and inconsistencies are aspects of them that has to be incorporated into their interpretation. And even in some of the most appalling stories from the early history of God’s People Israel, the Holy Spirit may have a word for us.

And then on top of that there is Christian history. I referred earlier, along with St. Irenaeus, to the Apostolic tradition. But the Apostolic tradition is no nice and tidy piece of work either. Roman Catholics have an infallible Pope, and conservative evangelicals have an infallible Bible. Anglicans like to say we have an infallible Early Church, but it’s just not that simple!

And being led by the Holy Spirit into all truth has to do in part with sorting all this out. It takes a lot of patience. It takes a lot of humility. It takes a lot of tolerance for the possibility that I may be mistaken. (And it’s not so bad to be mistaken, as long as we stay open and keep listening, keep thinking, keep praying. The Holy Spirit will eventually bring us around, though perhaps not quite on our schedule.)

It also takes a lot of willingness to be thoughtful. I don’t mean that one has to run off and get an advanced degree in Biblical Studies. Formal academic study of the Bible is a good thing, on the whole, I think, and I encourage you to do it if you are led in that direction, but frankly the evidence suggests that the Holy Spirit is not more likely to be heard in the ivy-covered halls of a university or seminary than in an ordinary parish Bible study group. But just because one isn’t academically trained in biblical hermeneutics doesn’t mean one has to be simple-minded about the Scriptures. A lot of it is actually a matter of common sense. If you are halfway adept at interpreting human life and human experience, it will take you a long way in interpreting the Scriptural witness. And the Scriptures are a witness to the acts of God in the human world, not in some religious fantasyland. (“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” after all.)

It is often said that Christianity is a “religion of the Book,” along with Judaism and Islam. But I think it really isn’t, at least not in the first instance. Our faith is not based on a Book, but on a Person.

(Islam probably really is a religion of the Book, the Qur’an. Judaism became something of a religion of the Book, the Torah and the rest of the Tanakh, and secondarily the Talmud, but originally it was a religion of History: God’s choice and redemption of the people Israel.)

We know this Person on whom our faith is based — Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God, the Incarnate Word — primarily through our foundational and authoritative written witness, through the memory and experience of the Christian community through the years, but also more directly, through the Holy Spirit whom Christ sends from the Father to be with us and in us, to breathe the divine life into us and draw us into God’s eternal love. It is this gift that we celebrate on this Day of Pentecost.

Sermon - 16 May 2010

2010-05-16T15:01:00.002-05:00

7TH OF EASTER — 16 May 2010
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:15 am

Ac 16:16-34 | Ps 97 | Rev 22:12-14,16-17,20-21 | John 17:20-26

“These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.”

The preacher was warming to his task: “Brothers and sisters, you’ve got to stop frequenting the saloons!” “Amen, brother, preach the word!” “Brothers and sisters, you’ve got to stay out of the casinos!” “Amen, brother, preach the word!” “Brothers and sisters, you’ve got to stop charging your customers too much and paying your employees too little!” “Hey, wait a minute, brother, that’s not preaching the word, that’s meddling in bus'ness!”

One of the things that has from the very beginning been a source of some contention within the Christian Church, and among those outside the Church looking in, has been the role the Church ought to play in regard to the carrying on of the world’s ordinary business. When the Church speaks to the world about the way the world does its business, it is exercising a prophetic ministry on behalf of God’s justice — or, depending on your point of view, it’s “meddling.”

And well before Christianity, the prophets of the Old Testament were constantly getting on the case of the powers-that-were in Israelite society about their greed and corruption and oppression of the poor. Often enough the prophets got themselves cast out, jailed, or even killed for their trouble.

In the first three centuries of the life of the Christian Church, there wasn’t a lot of outward, direct effect the Church could have on the Roman Empire; nor, for that matter, could very many other groups; the Roman Empire was not an open or democratic society. And the Christian Church, particularly, had to lay fairly low much of the time; Christianity was illegal, and although out-and-out persecution was only sporadic, you never knew when some gung-ho local magistrate might go on a tear, and so you had to keep your head down. The Church did have its effect, however, as leaven in the lump, and after the conversion (~) of the Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century, and the subsequent establishment of Christianity as the official imperial religion, the Church started wielding a lot more clout in secular society. The history of the later Empire and of the European middle ages is full of struggles between the Church’s concern for justice (at our best) and secular kings’ concern for their own power. (The assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral on December 29, 1170, by some of King Henry II’s national security staff is but one of the better-known of such episodes.)

Anyway, nowadays when the Church speaks to an issue like the environment, or foreign policy, or economic development, or international debt, or human rights, it’s not too uncommon for a lot a people (including some who claim to be members of the Church) to start having conniptions about “religion” “meddling” in the world’s business. (Some folks are gonna be real surprised when they discover that there’s only one place where the Gospel doesn’t mix with politics or economics—or anything else. And it’s very warm in that place!) The Gospel isn’t really about “religion,” you know. It’s about life. All of life.

Today in the first Scripture reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, we catch up with St Paul again. Continuing last week’s episode in our annual Eastertide continuing drama of The Missionary Journeys of St. Paul, Paul and Silas, and maybe Timothy (and maybe not — it isn’t clear whether he accompanied them from Lystra to Troas), but apparently now with young Luke tagging along, have ended up across the Aegean Sea on the European side in the Roman province of Macedonia (though today it’s not in the country of Macedonia but on the northeastern coast of Greece), in a city called Philíppi, which the Romans had taken over as a place to settle retired army veterans.

Here they encounter a slave girl. She is possessed by “a spirit of divination,” Luke tells us. I’m not sure how that would be described in modern medical or psychiatric terminology, and I’m not sure it matters much; the point is, she’s weird. She’s fey. She’s possibly schizophrenic. But she tells fortunes. And she’s real good at it, and her owners are making a lot of money off her.

The girl may be crazy, but she’s not stupid, and in her psychotic-visionary way she is able to discern who Paul and Silas and their companions are, and what they’re up to. And she runs around telling everybody, “Hey, listen to these Jewish guys, they have a message of salvation from God.”

After a while this gets on Paul’s nerves. He’s not mad at the slave girl — it’s not her fault, after all — still, it’s not a good advertisement for your new church if your biggest supporter is the town madwoman. And clearly the girl is (we would say) seriously mentally ill. So Paul heals her. He drives her demon out of her in the name of Jesus Christ.

And now she’s well. She’s happy; she’s calm; she’s at peace. And she can’t tell a fortune from a meatloaf recipe. Her owners are very upset. The Philippi Chamber of Commerce is very upset. The whole town is very upset. Here’s a bunch of religious do-gooders meddling around with the free-enterprise economy! They haul Paul and Silas off to court. “They’re disturbing our city!” (Maybe have to plead guilty to that!) “They advocate customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe!” (Like, they’re infringing on our right to make a buck any way we want. Like, they want us to give up sorcery, and exploiting our slaves, and ripping off the rubes! Like, they actually want us to change the way we live our lives! Can you imagine the gall of these people? Who do they think they are, to come busting into our nice little community and meddling?!)

Well. You get the point. We don’t have any problem granting the Gospel’s claim on us to be honest and kind and decent, at least as honest and kind and decent as we can afford to be while we go about our own business trying to make a living. It gets a little dicier if it begins to look like Jesus Christ wants us to make some radical changes in our own agenda for our lives—if he wants us to start going about his business. There is absolutely no area of human life that stands outside Jesus’ summons—or outside his redemption. Deep in our deepest soul, in our innermost heart, the thing that we care about the most, where we will hang on though all else be lost, that which we will not surrender—be it money, power, position, security, honor, pride, loyalty—precisely there it is that Jesus Christ comes and claims us for his own.

Sermon - 13 May 2010

2010-05-13T14:53:00.005-05:00

ASCENSION DAY — 13 May 2010
Trinity, Iowa City — 12:15 p.m.

Acts 1:1-11 | Psalm 93 | Eph 1:15-23 | Luke 24:44-53

God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.

When I first volunteered (or was volunteered; I don’t remember for sure!) to preach at our celebration of Ascension Day, I told Raisin that I promised not to drag out the “Toes” picture yet again. But she said, “Oh, drag it out! I’ve never seen it!” Those of you who have been around here for a while may recall seeing this before; if you’ve been around for a long time you may even recall having seen it a couple of times! (Is this only the third time I’ve dragged this silly thing out? If God is merciful and just, there won’t be a fourth.) Anyway, here it is. “L’Ascenzione di Christo,” attributed to Fra Gulielmo il Insensato.

What I didn’t realize — and I really didn’t realize! — and what I just discovered a couple of weeks ago — is that on the ceiling in the Ascension Chapel at the Shrine of our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk in England there is this:

I’ve been to Walsingham, and I don’t remember this at all. But that was almost fifty years ago, and so maybe it wasn’t there yet when I was there back in the day. But hey, I was only nineteen years old — I can’t imagine that if I had seen it I would ever have forgotten it! Nineteen-year-old boys love stuff like this!

(I think these are supposed to be beams of light, not super-long toenails. I think.)

Well, more than enough silliness for this important celebration. This is not what the Feast of the Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ is about.

Okay, then, what is it about?

The Ascension into Heaven is a standard part of our faith about Jesus, and has been right from the beginning. Paul (or an immediate successor, as the case may be) says in the Epistle today, “God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places” [Eph 1:20]. And the author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes, “We have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God” [Hebr 4:14].

The Gospels themselves say less about the Ascension of Jesus as an event (as opposed to a theological reality as a dimension and consequence of the Resurrection) than we might think. Mark doesn’t mention it at all as an event; the authentic text, at least as we have it, ends with the women fleeing in fear from the empty tomb. (Subsequently, probably in the second century, there was added a “longer ending” which is clearly dependent upon knowledge, though apparently not actual copies of the texts, of Matthew, Luke, and probably John.)

In John’s Gospel, the risen Jesus in his appearance to Mary Magdalene at the tomb, says to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them… [John 20:17]. However, nothing further is said explicitly about any subsequent event.

In Matthew’s Gospel, quite to the contrary, Jesus at his appearance to his disciples in Galilee, gives them the Great Commission to go and “make disciples of all nations,” and then simply concludes, “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” [Matt 28:19-20]. (I am inclined to think that the final verses of Matthew’s Gospel would be a better reading for Ascension Day than the conclusion of Luke’s. But, oh well.) It is only in Luke that we actually get the narrative picture of what I so reverently refer to as “Toes.” But possibly you have noticed, in the readings today first from the Book of Acts and then from Luke’s Gospel, that although Luke tells this story twice, the actual event of the Ascension takes place on different days. In Acts it is forty days after the resurrection (hence our festival today), but in the Gospel it is on the Sunday afternoon of Easter Day itself.

(Excursus 1: Two or three hundred years down the line this inconsistency between Luke and Acts upset some people, and so they tinkered with the conclusion of the Gospel text so that it read just “While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them.…And they returned to Jerusalem…” [Luke 24:51-52] So Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Bezae, if you’re taking notes; but most of the early manuscripts include the full text of these verses.)

(Excursus 2: All of this suggests to me that St. Luke himself was not deeply concerned about the issue of exact chronology. He was typical of ancient historiographers, in that he was much more concerned about what events meant than with precise accuracy about all the details of timing and sequence. We know, for example, that that’s how Luke handles his account of the evangelization of the Gentiles by the infant Church.)

“Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” That’s the real heart of what we celebrate on Ascension Day. If the Risen Christ had just continued to hang around in Jerusalem, none of his followers would ever have been willing to leave and get on with making disciples of all nations. Jesus’ Ascension is not about his going away from us, least of all his going “up there” (whatever that might mean for our generation in which we have actually been “up there” and can telescopically see thirteen billion light years into “up there”). “Heaven” — that is, the presence of God and the reign of Christ — is not “up there,” it is right here if we will accept it and live into it. Because Jesus is ascended into Heaven, he is no longer stuck back in Galilee and Judea in the first century but can be and is present to all people in all times in all places. Jesus is Lord, not just long ago and far away but here, now, forever. “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Sermon - 25 April 2010

2010-04-25T17:27:00.004-05:00

4TH OF EASTER — 25 April 2010
Trinity, Iowa City — 7:45 and 8:45 a.m.

Acts 9:36-43 | Psalm 23 | Revelation 7:9-17 | John 10:22-30

“My sheep hear my voice. I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.”

This Sunday is traditionally referred to as “Good Shepherd Sunday,” because today in the Gospel reading each year we hear a portion of the tenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel in which Jesus talks about the “good shepherd” and himself as “The Good Shepherd.” In this third year of the cycle of readings, Year C, we hear a follow-up or extension of that theme. We also refer to Jesus as the Good Shepherd in the Collect today, and you may note that we read Psalm 23, "The Lord is my shepherd," as well!

“At that time,” the Gospel reading begins. Well, not exactly. The last time stamp, back in chapter 7 [7:2], was the Feast of Tabernacles, which occurs September-Octoberish, and chapters 7, 8, 9, and the first part of 10 (the “Good Shepherd” sayings) appear to be part of a continuous time frame. Or not. Neither John, nor Mark and the other Synoptists, are all that committed to chronological precision; they build their narrative themes in other ways. But in any case, the beginning of today’s reading is better translated as “It happened that…” and the temporal reference is now to the festival of the Dedication (of the Temple). If that doesn’t immediately ring a bell, that’s because we now normally refer to this celebration by its Jewish name, Hanukkah (“Oh, right!”), which occurs in December. And although winter in Jerusalem is hardly like winter in Iowa, still it could be a little chilly, and Solomon’s Portico was on the east side of the Temple where it was in the lee of the December winds.

That this conversation between Jesus and “the Jews” — in this case the Greek probably more specifically means “the Judeans,” residents of Jerusalem — that this takes place at Hanukkah is not just passing trivia. (There are no passing trivia in the Fourth Gospel. We don’t always catch on, but this Evangelist never uses any stray or throwaway words.) Hanukkah, of course, is the celebration and commemoration of the Rededication of the Jerusalem Temple. King Antiochus IV Epiphanes (you remember Antiochus!), the Seleucid Emperor (you remember the Seleucids -- they were the Syrian partition of the Hellenistic empire of Alexander the Great a century and a half earlier) -- Antiochus had militarily took Judea away from the Ptolemaic Empire (that was the Egyptian partition of Alexander’s brief domain). Antiochus was rabidly Hellenistic, that is, culturally Greek, and one of the things he did in the year 167 Before the Common Era was to erect an idol of the Greek god the Olympian Zeus (whom the Syrians called Baal Shamem) in the Jerusalem Temple. This was an act of unspeakable defilement which the Jews called the Abomination of Desolation. Three years later the Jews under Judas Maccabeus drove the Syrians out of Judea and cleansed and reconsecrated the Jerusalem Temple. Most of us have at least a little familiarity with how Hanukkah is celebrated among Jewish people today, especially in the United States (where in December there is all that quasi-Christian stuff going on around them). I’m not sure what they did in Jerusalem in the first century of the Common Era, though I suspect it did not involve dreidels, but for the Jews of Jesus’ time Hanukkah was not a happy domestic holiday but was still very much a Big Patriotic Deal — the liberation from the Hellenistic Syrians was, if not exactly living memory any more, at least an emotionally very powerful remembrance. It was like the Fourth of July. But the bitter irony was that Judean independence had only lasted for a hundred years or so, and Judea had then again been conquered, this time by the Romans under the general Pompey the Great. The Romans had the good sense not to try to mess with the Temple, on the whole, and they installed an Idumean puppet king, that is, an Edomite, which was sort of like being Jewish, known to history as Herod the Great. Herod wanted to curry favor with the Jews and he sponsored a major renovation of the Jerusalem Temple, about which the Jews on the whole had very mixed feelings. (They were glad of the renovation, but why did it have to be Herod who did it?) And so the celebration of Hanukkah in those years was dripping in irony: "We rejoice in the liberation of our people from the conqueror and the rededication of the Temple of the Lord; but on the other hand now we are occupied by another conqueror and so we need God’s Anointed One, like another Maccabee, to liberate us again."

So anyway, the opening verses of the Gospel reading this morning are Very Heavily Loaded. And so they come to Jesus, walking in the Temple during Hanukkah, and they ask, “How long will you keep us in suspense?” Or something like that. It’s a somewhat obscure idiom in Greek, literally meaning “How long are you taking away our life?” So it's something like, “How long are you going to keep driving us nuts? If you are God’s Anointed One, the one who is finally going to liberate Israel permanently, then say so!”

And Jesus says, “I did say so, only you didn’t get it! I am the Shepherd, yes, like David if you will, but you aren’t my sheep.” One of the reasons why they ask Jesus whether he is the Anointed One (in Hebrew, the Messiah; in Greek, the Christ) is because he has not said so directly. (Well, in John he tells the Samaritan woman, and he hinted at it to the man born blind, but those conversations were private and in a sense off the record. In Mark's Gospel we do talk about the “Messianic Secret,” but scholars may push that a little too far. Nevertheless, Jesus does not go around saying, “Hi, folks, I am God’s Messiah.” Not directly. Jesus just does the works of God’s Anointed One, indeed of God’s Son, of him who is One with the Father, and then he asks, “Well? Do you get it?” The problem is that for everybody but Jesus himself, and that includes the disciples, the “Messiah” means the one who militarily, or miraculously, or both, is going to drive out the Romans and liberate Israel (as Judas Maccabeus had driven out the Syrians and liberated Israel, for a while, almost two hundred years earlier) — thus the irony of this encounter in the Temple during Hanukkah.

And Jesus says, “You have your expectation of the Messiah, but that’s not who I am, and that’s not what I am doing — what I am doing in my Father’s name and in union with my Father. The true sheep hear me and they follow me as their true Shepherd King, but what I give them is not mere political independence. Babylonians and Greeks and Syrians and Romans come and go. What I give them is fullness of life eternally, and they can never be snatched out of my hand.”

Sermon - 18 April 2010

2010-04-18T15:31:00.002-05:00

3 OF EASTER — 18 April 2010
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:15 a.m.

Acts 9:1-20 | Psalm 30 | Rev. 5:11-14 | John 21:1-19

Get up and enter the city; and you will be told what you are to do.

Have you ever had a vision? I never have. My guess is that you haven’t either, most of you, but I might be wrong about that. The state of the world and the church is such that if you did see a vision, and you told anyone about it—even a priest—maybe even especially a priest!—they might well call some nice people to come and escort you away to a new home! If you have had a vision, or think you might have, and you want to tell somebody about it, I promise to listen and not to assume from the outset that you need nice people to come for you. But most of us don’t have visions; and those who do have them don’t normally have them very often. Some people who have visions — especially a lot of visions — really do have problems, and their visions may be arising out of their problems. But some visions really do come from God, and some people really do have them.

Today in the first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, we hear about a couple of visions which we believe were visions which genuinely came from God. The first vision was given to one Saul of Tarsus, a young and zealous Pharisee, who had grown up in the province of Cilicia on what is now the south coast of Turkey but who now studied and lived in Jerusalem. We more often refer to him not by his Hebrew-Jewish name Shaul, but by his Greco-Roman name, Paulos. (Lots of Jews had two names in those days.) The second vision was given to a Jewish Christian named Ananias who was a member of the new community of followers of Jesus in Damascus, in Syria northeast of Galilee. (Right where Damascus is now. In fact, Straight Street is still there.) And in these two visions we see something of what God is up to, and how God operates, and, perhaps incidentally, why visions are rather rare things and why that’s okay.

Paul was one of those people who was so single-mindedly religious that the only way God could get through to him was by knocking him off his feet. So God knocked him off his feet. We call that “The Conversion of St. Paul.”

Note what happens in this encounter. (Incidentally, this story occurs three times in the book of Acts; it’s first told here in chapter 9 that we just heard, and then later there are two accounts of Paul himself telling it, in chapter 22 and again in chapter 26. I’m picking up from all three tellings.) Paul sees, apparently, a blinding light, and he falls down and hears Jesus speaking to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” And Paul says, “Who are you?” And Jesus says, “Who do you think? So who else have you been persecuting? And why do you keep resisting me so hard?” “Okay, okay,” Paul says, “I take your point. So now what?” And then Jesus says to Paul (and I think this is significant): “Get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.”

Jesus doesn’t tell Paul very much in this vision. All he really tells him is, “Go on into Damascus and wait for further instructions.” That’s all. After such a big flashy start, it ends up being kind of a disappointment, as visions go. But, Paul goes on into town. Well, he’s led into town; you see, God not only knocked Paul down to get his attention, God also blinded him so Paul would know God was serious about this whole thing.

(We have this notion that a word from God is always going to be soothing, and comforting, and supportive, and just the thing we’ve been wanting to hear. Well, I’m sure God does some of that, but actually, in the Bible, God kicks a lot of backside. Be careful if you have a vision in which you are told just what you wanted to hear. “Oh, you poor thing, I know how hungry you must be out here in the desert! You really need something to eat before you starve! Why not command these stones to become bread?” Beware of visions like that!) (But I digress.)

So Paul goes on into Damascus. Meanwhile the second vision is taking place. This is a much less dramatic and much more businesslike kind of affair. Jesus appears to Ananias and tells him to go find Saul of Tarsus in Judas’s house on Straight Street, and heal him of his blindness. (Simple enough!) Ananias says, “Say what? Saul of Tarsus? That Saul of Tarsus? Hey, maybe instead I could just go sell subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal in Teheran.” But Ananias is a good disciple, and he goes. And Ananias finds Saul, lays his hands upon him, and says, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” And Paul regains his sight, and rises and is baptized by Ananias into Jesus the Christ, whose followers Paul had come to persecute.

Sometimes God works very directly. (“Hey Saul! [Smack!] Listen up!” Or, “Ananias. I need you to run an errand for me and I need it right now, and I’m in a hurry, so here it is.”) But most of the time, and generally as soon as possible, God gets others of us into the act. (“Saul! Have I got your attention now? Good! Okay, Ananias will come to see you. He’ll tell you the rest.”) God normally reveals the divine self to us through other people. Again: God normally reveals the divine self to us through other people. Not normally in visions. And when God does give us a vision, God is very likely to do something like giving somebody else a vision too, to be kind of a check-and-balance on us. Because some visions are delusions, and some visions do come from the Devil, and if a vision tells you all sorts of wonderful secret knowledge that only you know now, and nobody else is in on it, and because of this vision you are now the Great and Wise Seer, then your vision may not be very reliable. On the other hand, if the vision is basically a kick in the pants to get you doing what you really knew you should have been doing all along, and it immediately leads you into collaboration with other people for the building up of the community, and it all fits in with the Holy Scriptures and with overall Christian experience, then there’s a much better chance that your vision was the real thing.

But even more to the point: we don’t have to sit around waiting for visions of any kind. It is primarily—not exclusively, by any means, but primarily, directly or indirectly—through other people that God speaks to us. Through the worshiping community as together we hear and meditate upon God’s Word in the Scriptures, and through the world whose need for healing God is sending us to meet: there it is, here it is, that God makes the divine self known to us.

Sermon - 4 April 2010

2010-04-04T14:34:00.003-05:00

EASTER DAY — 4 April 2010
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00 a.m.

Acts 10:34-43 | Psalm 118:1-2,14-24 | 1 Cor. 15:19-26 | Luke 24:1-12

“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.”

Well, you never can quite be sure, but it does seem that maybe spring is finally sprung in eastern Iowa. (It seems to me that I remember a few years back when it was warm and sunny on Palm Sunday and on Easter we had six inches of snow. Oh well.) But it’s very easy for us to forget that the conjunction of Easter and the return of spring is part of the experience of only a minority of the world’s Christians. Most of the Church lives in tropical or at least semitropical regions (did any of you just get back from Florida?), or else in the Southern Hemisphere (where summer is passing into autumn right now). Spring, in the dramatic way we know it, is largely a northern European and northern North American phenomenon. Still, I guess if our little corner of the world presents us with a vivid image of resurrection, it’s okay to use it, as long as we remember that the analogy does break down: the yearly, cyclical, dependable renewal of growing things as winter turns to spring — the whole business of eggs and lilies and bunnies and chickies — is not the same thing as what God is doing in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. A fertile egg, no matter how inert in may look on the outside, is full of life inside. A daffodil bulb in the ground does not really die during the winter; it simply goes dormant, to awake (as it were) when the soil warms up again. These are the regular processes of nature.

On the other hand, Jesus was dead. Dead as a doornail. And God raised him to life. Raised him to a whole new kind of life. Not back again for another round of the same old thing (like spring does), but something utterly new. As God says in the lesson from Isaiah [65:17] today (that we didn’t hear because it’s more usual to read Acts as the first lesson instead): “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth!” And we shall share that utterly new life, if we are in Christ. We can experience the beginnings of it, a down payment as it were, even now. But St. Paul makes clear, in the letter to the Romans [6:3,5]: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death?…For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” And to the Colossians [3:3] these words: “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” In order to be raised with Christ, we first must die with Christ. We first must die.

I hate to think what this world would be like today without the witness and ministry of the Christian Church, the community of the people of God in Jesus Christ, over the past two thousand years. We may sometimes wonder whether we’ve done any good at all. Well, we have. Despite everything, we really have. But not nearly what, in the full power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we could have done. We ourselves over the centuries have been as much a part of the problem as we have been the solution. If the world still remains unconverted to the Kingdom of God as proclaimed and inaugurated by Jesus Christ, let’s face it, there isn’t all that much of God’s kingdom that the world has seen in us. The history of the Church, right up until and including the present, is one appalling chapter after another. We do not show the world the new life of resurrection, the life of the risen Christ in us, because we ourselves have refused to die.

It isn’t, I think, just that we stumble and fall. It isn’t just that we are sinners. The world understands about stumbling and falling. Heaven knows God understands that we are sinners. No, it’s that our vision itself is so short and narrow. We have a Gospel, Good News, of the radical transformation of human life in Jesus Christ, the Gospel of the Kingdom of God; yet we ourselves are so resolutely resistant to transformation, we insist on puttering about in a petty religiosity that has very little to do with the Reign of God. The world continues to be plagued with hatred, greed, violence, vengefulness, exploitation, oppression, self-gratification, arrogant pride, the thirst for power. We have good news for this world, good news of new life, life for the dead, good news of love and peace and joy. But the world does not see that good news in us. Our vision of the Kingdom of God in our own lives is dim and blurry. It’s so hard for us to let go of ourselves. It’s so hard for us to die to ourselves that we may live for one another in love. Because we refuse to die, we are unable to live. And being ourselves unable to live, we are unable to share life with the world.

But what can you or I do about all the problems of the world? They are so massive, so global. Well, directly, this week, maybe not a lot. But every world problem started sometime, somewhere, as a personal problem, as a family problem, as a neighborhood problem, as a local community problem. Hatred and injustice among nations has its roots in hatred and injustice between persons. We can do something about our own little corner of the world, and it is all our own little corners that make up the world as a whole. Those of you who are as old as I am will remember Pogo the Possum, “We have met the enemy and they is us.” “Us” is a place to start. And if we will die to ourselves, die to our blind narrow self-interests, so that we can live with the transforming life of the risen Christ, it will not end there. It will not end any short of the transforming and healing of the world.

The Easter Gospel is the Good News of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. But it is not just good news about Jesus, it is good news from Jesus for us, good news in Jesus for the world. God can and does and will raise us from death to life. But this Gospel of Resurrection is not a mere cheery hopefulness that things will get better, it is not a message of “if winter comes can spring be far behind?” It is good news of new life, utterly new life, news of the triumph of love and peace and joy, news of life from death. God can raise the dead to life; but God can only raise the dead to life. We first must die — die to ourselves. Then and only then can we live — live in Christ to God, live for the life of the world.

Sermon - 28 March 2010

2010-03-28T14:57:00.003-05:00

PALM SUNDAY — 28 March 2010
St. Mark’s, Maquoketa —10:00

Luke 19:28-40 | Ps 118:1-2,19-29
Isa 50:4-9a | Ps 31:9-16 | Phil 2:5-11 | Luke 23:1-49

When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”

Human beings around the world and through the ages have generally been in agreement on some assumptions about human life, and the values of our lives. One of these assumptions is: “You get what you pay for.” Or at least that’s what’s fair; and conversely, you shouldn’t get what you don’t deserve. (You shouldn’t get what you don’t deserve!) Another assumption is that it’s only fair, and a matter of justice, that we should give as good as we get. If you do to me, then I have a right to do to you in return. A further correlated assumption is that we should stand up for ourselves and not let other people get the better of us. This is, as we say, only fair.

These assumptions have a couple of things in common. One is that they are all very much based upon common sense. Another thing that they have in common is that they have the nature of sin.

We have great admiration for the generosity of Jesus, who, while enduring the body-wracking agony of having iron spikes driven through his wrists and ankles, nevertheless has such greatness of heart that he can forgive his own executioners as they pound home the nails. Indeed, we become very sentimental about it. Our admiration and sentimentality can be a cover-up for the fact that we don’t really take Jesus seriously in this. We recognize that if we were in that kind of situation, the spirit of forgiveness would be the furthest thing from our minds. We admire the forgivingness of Jesus, but the one who really makes us stand up and cheer is the condemned prisoner who disdains the blindfold and cigarette and spits in his executioner’s eye. Yes, we admire Jesus, but our hearts are really with the feistier heroes.

All of which is very much why Jesus died, and why he died the way he did. Because our values, our assumptions, the things most likely to thrill our hearts, are all wrong. Sin does not have to do just with a laundry-list of misdeeds: it has to do with our whole outlook on life. Retaliation under the guise of justice is not an authentic value. Jesus was perfectly serious when he counseled us to turn the other cheek. We are not here to get all the gusto we can out of life, or even “our fair share,” or indeed to get anything at all out of life. And “deserving” has absolutely nothing whatever to do with anything.

We don’t know very much about the soldiers who actually did the dirty work of crucifying Jesus. It would be misleading to say that they were much like any soldiers anywhere anytime; because at least in our society, our armed forces are made up largely of citizen-soldiers with strong ties to their families and homes. On the other hand, in the first century of our era the legions of the Roman Empire were largely made up of men who literally had nothing better to do. Their enlistments were for the full term of their vigorous years, twenty years or more. They were often provincials, or even barbarians from outside the Empire, rather than Romans from central Italy, and they usually had no family ties, no real homes to return to. They were good fighters, well-disciplined, but hard and tough and not a little mean. No, they didn’t know what they were doing specifically — they didn’t know that they were crucifying the Lord of Glory. But they knew they were crucifying a man, and they didn’t much care; they had crucified men before and they would do it again. This one was apparently some kind of religious fanatic, which was mildly amusing. He was a Jew, and a Roman imperial soldier stationed in Judaea would certainly not consider the death of another Jew as any great loss to the world. We can get very romantic about these poor benighted troops staunchly doing their very unpleasant duty, fortunately unaware of the horror taking place at their hands, and have a certain sympathy for them. But that doesn’t ring true. Crucifixion details weren’t much fun, except to the sadistic, but the soldiers were hardened to them, they had ceased to care, they had developed a repertory of coarse gallows humor to keep what they were doing from affecting them too deeply. They didn’t deserve to be forgiven, on the basis of ignorance or anything else.

But Jesus prays for their forgiveness anyway — indeed, forgiveness hardly means much if the one forgiven deserves to be forgiven. Because forgiveness is the only way we can really deal with that kind of situation. Forget about all the bravado and the heroics and the blustering about “justice” — only one thing can really defeat evil, and that is love. Have done, Jesus says, have done with all this nonsense about self-preservation, and retributive justice so-called, and charity beginning at home, and looking out for Number One first, and “I don’t get mad, I get even,” and never letting anyone else get the better of you, and keeping up with the Joneses, and what will people think, and sticking up for yourself like a man. Forget it! It’s all going right down the tubes with your old bones anyway! That’s the junk that will really kill you.

Take all that injustice, that pain, that blasphemy, upon yourself and return only good for evil, blessings for curses? To be reviled, and not to revile in return, to suffer and not threaten?? To forgive those who do us evil, whether they deserve it or not?

In this scene on Golgotha, Skull Hill, who are the ones whose very names we have forgotten? and who is the One who is the very hinge of history? Who are the ones who in themselves are almost completely unmemorable and long dead? and who is the One who is the First and the Last, the Living One, who was dead and see, he is alive for ever and ever, and has the keys to Death and Hell? Who is the One?

Sermon - 14 March 2010

2010-03-14T14:55:00.002-05:00

4TH SUNDAY IN LENT—14 March 2010
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:15 a.m.

Joshua 5:9-12 | Psalm 32 | 2Cor 5:16-21 | Luke 15:1-3,11b-32

"Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends."

One of my favorite windows on what’s really going on in people’s minds is the advice columns in the papers. In the Iowa City Press-Citizen that would be Dear Abby. (Although of course now it isn’t the original Dear Abby any more, it’s her daughter, who actually is a pretty good counselor. But I digress.) Sometimes these columns are kind of depressing, because it’s fairly clear that there are a whole bunch of people running around out there who are profoundly clueless. But one of the recurring themes that keeps popping up in the letters that come in to these columnists has to do with gifts. “My nephew who lives on the west coast and whom I haven’t seen since he was seven has sent us a high-school graduation announcement; do we have to send a gift?” “My cousin is getting married for the fourth time; she could furnish a whole house with the engagement, shower, and wedding presents we’ve already given her, and we don’t even like her very much! Do I have to send a gift?” I remember a marvelous one from some years back — “Should the value of the wedding gift equal the price-per-couple being spent by the bride’s parents on the reception and dinner?” Or this: “I keep getting Christmas presents from so-and-so, and so we give presents back, but it’s more than we can really afford, and we really aren’t all that close anyway . . .” And on and on. You know how it goes. Most of us have been in that situation ourselves a few times.

What this suggests to me is that we have a real problem with the whole business of gifts. We don’t understand about Gift. Gifts are free. Absolutely free, or else they aren’t really gifts. We don’t pay for gifts (then it’s not a gift but a purchase we’ve made). We don’t deserve gifts (then it’s not a gift but a wage we’ve earned). We don’t owe gifts (then it’s not a gift but a debt we need to pay off).

But no. We’re all brought up to believe the wise old saying, “There’s no free lunch, you get what you pay for, and nothing’s going to come in the mail.” And so too often for us there’s no real giving in our lives, only transactions.

There is no virtue in irresponsibility, and real life is not lived in idle wishfulness. God knows our modern society understands poorly enough about actions and consequences. But our normal operational prudence must not blind us to the realization that at the deepest level of how things really are, everything is Gift. That’s at the heart of our faith as Christians.

The religious establishment in Israel—the pillars of the Church, the Scribes and Pharisees—have been grousing at Jesus because he hangs around with sinners, outcasts, non-observant Jews, and other such riffraff. The Pharisees’ basic problem is that they think that the old dictum “there’s no free lunch, you get what you pay for, and nothing’s going to come in the mail” is a Fundamental Law of the Universe. And so they think that God’s special favor rests upon those who, like themselves, have “earned” it by observing all the minute details of the Law of Moses, and further that God’s favor does not rest upon “undeserving” folks like Jesus and his trashy friends. The Pharisees were very much hung up with the question of “deserving.” Like the older brother in the parable this morning. Like us. (And of course, it is the older brother and his father that the “Parable of the Prodigal Son” is really about. And us.)

In this morning’s epistle, St Paul reminds us that God does not keep score on the past. “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” No, God’s plan is to give everyone a whole new start. “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” God “made him (who knew no sin himself) to take on sin for our sake, so that we, in him, might take on God’s righteousness.” A whole new start, not earned, not deserved, but given. “All this is from God,” St Paul says. God’s doing, not ours. Gift. Free gift.

That’s hard for us to accept. The economics of our world doesn’t work that way. “You only get what you pay for.”

We’ve heard and told and retold the story of the prodigal son for so long that we instinctively see the older brother as a hardnosed coldhearted whiner. He’s not. The older brother is the good guy, by our own usual standards. He’s the one who is hard-working, loyal, thrifty, responsible, brave, clean, reverent. The older brother is us. He’s the one who embodies all those ideals that you and I usually hold about human life. He understands that there’s no free lunch in life, you get what you deserve and should deserve what you get, we’re not to sit around waiting for something to come in the mail. And by these standards which all mature and responsible people share, his father is not being fair.

Well, no. God isn’t fair. Not if by “fair” you mean some human standard of “deserving” or “just deserts.” God’s justice is really a whole lot more encompassing than our rather narrow and often retributive notion of justice. (And a good thing, too. If God were really fair, and gave us all what we deserve, then we would all have long since perished in our sins!) Thanks be to God, divine justice is concerned not with what we deserve but with what we need; not with fairness but with forgiveness, with love and with life, new life, new creation.

At the very deepest level, all is Gift. Lunch at God’s banquet table is utterly free, if we will just sit down and eat. We get more than we can ever pay for, if we will just quit fumbling around with our wallets and reach out our hands to receive. “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him,” [1] if we will just go look in the mailbox.

[1] 1 Cor. 2:9; cf. Isa. 64:4

Sermon - 7 March 2010

2010-03-08T12:35:00.003-06:00

3RD SUNDAY IN LENT — 7 March 2010
St. Mark’s, Maquoketa — 10:00 a.m.

Exodus 3:1-15 | Psalm 63:1-8 | 1 Cor. 10:1-13 | Luke 13:1-9

God said to Moses, "I am who I am."

“What’s in a name?” So wonders Shakespeare’s Juliet, whose beloved Romeo bears the name of the Montague family hated by her own Capulets. “O, be some other name! What’s in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Alas, it was but wishful thinking, for there is more in a name than Juliet thought, and therein lay their tragedy.

For the Hebrew people of the Old Testament, there was a lot in a name. Your name somehow touched the essence of your identity, it expressed who you really were. Thus, if other people knew your name, they knew you; they had something of a claim on you; in a sense they had power over you, in knowing your name.

This same idea is found in other cultures as well: for instance, some Native American cultures, in which you have a public “nickname” by which you are known by other people, and then your own real name — often discerned in the course of a vision quest — which you never disclose to anyone else, lest it give them power over you. In a more positive mode, to be known by name opens the possibility of fellowship, of welcome, personal relationship, as for instance in the famous tavern of the old television series Cheers, “where everybody knows your name.” (But I digress.)

Young Moses has escaped from Egypt after assassinating an abusive slavemaster, and he has fallen in with the desert Midianite sheepherder Jethro. He has married Jethro’s daughter, and now, like a good son-in-law, Moses is out taking care of the sheep. And God speaks to Moses out of a burning bush. Which right in itself is a pretty remarkable thing!

Even more remarkable is what God has to say to Moses; God wants Moses to go back to Egypt (where Moses has a price on his head) and lead the Israelites out from under Pharaoh’s slavery. Just like that.

And perhaps most remarkable of all is what God says when Moses very naturally asks, “Ah . . . who are you? Just what kind of a God am I dealing with here? What is your name?” God responds, “I AM WHO I AM.”

Now, what’s in that name?

This is one of the things that Old Testament scholars have a good time with, trying to figure out what the Hebrew words which God gives us as the divine name (and which we see translated here as “I Am Who I Am”) really mean. It’s not completely clear. In Hebrew there is a play here on the verb häyâ, “to be,” and its relation to the usual divine name in the Hebrew Scriptures, spelled “YHWH” (or, as it was not-very-accurately rendered into English some centuries back, “Jehovah”). Later on among the Jews, respect for the divine name, God’s proper name, grew so great that they refused to say it out loud at all, lest sinful mouths pollute the sacredness of The Name. (I personally prefer to respect this tradition, though some Christians and some Christian bible translations do not.) Instead, when the Jews encounter the Sacred Name YHWH in the Hebrew text of the Bible, they substituted the word Adonai, “the Lord,” or sometimes the usual word for “God,” Elohim. You will recall seeing in your Bible perhaps — and this was the case with the King James Version, as well as the Revised Standard and New Revised Standard Versions and other many other modern translations, and also with the Psalms in the Book of Common Prayer — instances of “the LORD” printed in small capital letters. The small caps are to alert us that the original Hebrew text does not actually read Adonai (the title “Lord”), but in fact reads YHWH — a name too sacred to be pronounced aloud in Jewish practice.

And the underlying meaning of the Divine Name, “I Am Who I Am”? Interpretations of the Name may tell us as much about ourselves as they do about the text. The early Fathers of the Church, and the medieval scholastics, suckled as they were on Greek metaphysics, saw in the Divine Name the expression of God’s Being, the one who is Being Itself — not just one being among other beings, not a being in the way you or I or a rabbit or a rock is a being, not even as the Supreme such Being, but “Being Itself,” “The Ground of All Being,” The One Who Is.

But most directly and literally, I think, “I am who I am” points best into the mystery of God, which is what God is trying to get across to Moses at the burning bush. Because in telling Moses the divine name, God is really not telling Moses very much at all. It is as if God were saying, “Do not attempt to name me — especially if you think that to name me is to tame me. My name is not something you can invoke with impunity for purposes of your own, and certainly not a formula you can conjure with. I Am Who I Am. My identity will always, ultimately, be opaque to you, for I infinitely exceed your ability to conceptualize me. I Am Who I Am.

“But there is another side, too [God says]: for you can trust that I Am Who I Am, and not another. I Am Eternally Who I Am; I am always consistent with myself; I do not waver; I am never fickle; my loving-kindness is steadfast and faithful; I keep my promises, and I do not change my mind, for I Am Who I Am.”

What’s in a name? In the case of God, everything, and nothing. At the burning bush, God reveals a name which points to God but does not really disclose God, except as the one who is beyond our naming.

But in the fullness of time God does bring the divine self within our naming, enabling us, not to comprehend God fully (finite creatures cannot do that), but to know God truly. God brings the divine self within our naming — not in a burning bush, but in a stable, and in a workshop and a fishing boat, and in the streets and on the hillsides, and on the Cross.

Sermon - 28 February 2010

2010-02-28T19:01:00.003-06:00

2ND SUNDAY IN LENT — 28 Feb. 2010
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00 a.m.

Genesis 15:1-12;17-18 | Psalm 27 | Phil. 3:17-4:1 | Luke 13:31-35

“For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ.…their minds are on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

I think we’re all aware of the distinction we commonly make, specifically in a religious or spiritual context, and even more particularly in a Christian context, between “heaven” and “earth.” To take perhaps the most obvious example, we pray — not only every Sunday morning but I hope a number of times in every day — in the words of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” But what do we mean by that? Well, there is a variety of things we could mean, and do mean, when we talk about “heaven” and “earth.” But I suspect that for lots of us lots of the time, the default meaning is something like, “Heaven is ‘up there’ somewhere, and that’s where God lives, and earth is ‘down here’ and this is where we live. And further, earth is ‘now,’ whereas heaven, at least to the extent that it includes us, is “then,” “someday,” “in the sweet by and by.”

Perhaps you have already suspected that I suggest that this is not what St. Paul means in today’s Epistle, nor is it what Jesus means when he talks about the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God (which are essentially equivalent phrases).

You perhaps noticed that the Epistle this morning is from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Philippi was a city in northeastern Greece, named after King Philip of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great) who founded it in the fourth century B.C. It languished for a time, but was re-established by Octavian, shortly to become Caesar Augustus, Emperor of the Roman Empire, in the 30’s B.C. He used it as a colony to settle retired legionnaires — a form of military pension — and part of what made this a good deal for them was that they all were granted Roman citizenship, a status which had a variety of political, social, and economic advantages, even though they did not actually live in the city of Rome. Philippi was organized as a “miniature Rome,” a mini-version of the imperial capital.

Well, now, that was a fascinating excursus into ancient history! (And your point would be…?) I think this underlies Paul’s remark, “But our citizenship is in heaven.” For the people of Philippi, “citizenship” was a big deal. It gave them an important identity, even though they did not live in central Italy but in northeastern Greece. A major event in the life of one of these Roman colony-cities would be when the Roman Emperor came to visit them. (Although I can’t find any indication of whether Augustus or any of his successors as Emperor actually did visit this city.) But Paul, who had founded the church at Philippi, is now reminding them, “our true citizenship is not in Rome but in heaven, and the savior whom we await is not the Emperor [whose titles routinely included ‘Savior’ and ‘Lord’], but the true Lord, Jesus Christ.” Our real identity, political or otherwise, is not defined within this world, but is defined from beyond the limits of the merely human. We are indeed but sojourners, transients, resident aliens here. This world is not our ultimate home, and we must beware lest we find ourselves too completely at home in it. We are here now, and we must take that seriously. But we are on a journey, we are not settled, and we must take our destination even more seriously. And the way we make that journey is to live here and now the life of the Kingdom of God to which we are pilgrims.

Which means that complacency about our lives, and the values by which we direct our lives, can be a great enemy. Even the holy city Jerusalem itself was not immune to faithless complacency. How moving is Jesus’ lament over her: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often I have desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Jerusalem was not, after all, the City of God.

“Our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory.” We march to the beat of a different drummer. We are in this world, but we do not belong to this world. In the world’s eyes we are weird. Not silly weird stuff, like not going to the movies or dancing or playing cards — some Christians are weird, but about all the wrong issues. But we are weird because we do not buy into this world’s “sensible,” “practical,” ‘realistic” value system. Weird because we keep mumbling a little too loudly that anybody who looks at this world and the way it does business — poverty, exploitation, oppression, injustice, war — all rooted in greed and the lust for power — and insists that that’s being “sensible, practical or realistic” obviously doesn’t have both oars in the water. We are weird because we will not let this world define reality for us, we are weird because we believe (and how absurd and arrogant of us, unless of course it’s true) that it is we who have a definition of reality to proclaim to the world. If the world does not think we are weird — if the world thinks we are safe and harmless — then maybe we’d better ask ourselves where our citizenship really is, and where our minds are really set.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” Are we the prophets sent to proclaim the word of the Lord? Or are we Jerusalem?

(These are the only options.)

Sermon - 14 February 2010

2010-02-14T19:36:00.004-06:00

LAST SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY — 14 February 2010
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:15 a.m.

Exodus 34:29-35 | Psalm 99 | 2 Cor. 3:12-4:2 | Luke 9:28-43a

Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to Jesus. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.

It has been the custom for many many years now that on the last Sunday after the Epiphany, and before the beginning of the Lenten season this coming Wednesday, we read for the Gospel the account of the Transfiguration of Christ — in a three year rotation from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and this year Luke. (I remember before this became our custom. Some of you probably do too, but I’ll leave it up to you to confess whether you do or not!) I remember thinking at the time, what a splendid way to conclude the Epiphany season celebrating the Manifestation of Christ before entering our Lenten pilgrimage to the cross and the Resurrection. I still think that!

So today we celebrate this climactic vision of Jesus Christ in glory by his closest disciples, Peter and John and James. But it may be helpful to back up a little and pick up the context. About eight days earlier (Mark and Matthew say it was six, but I’m not going to go there just now!), Jesus had asked his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” and Simon Peter replied, “You are God’s Messiah” [9:20]. We know that story. And Jesus “sternly ordered them not to tell anyone” [9:21], and went on to predict his upcoming suffering and death. And he continued, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it” [9:23-24].

So it is in this context that the disciples of Jesus — Peter and John and James, and all of us through the centuries — now are given the vision of Christ in glory. In glory — in Biblical imagery, the presence of God — and in that divine glory appear also Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophets, the great figures of God’s chosen people Israel. Moses, of whom we hear in the first reading today, coming down the mountain with the tablets of the covenant, his face shining with the glory of God [Ex. 34:29]. And the prophet Elijah, who you may recall was whirled up to heaven in a chariot of fire [2 Kings 2:11]. And Moses and Elijah converse with Jesus about his “departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem” [9:31]. “Departure” — a word that can also be translated as “death.” In the midst of the divine glory, they talk about Jesus’ death. Hold that thought.

In the original Greek of Luke’s account, the word most English translations render as “departure” is exodos, literally “going out,” and thus figuratively “departure” (that is, from this life) or “death.” But here’s Moses, talking with Jesus about his “exodus.” How do you suppose Luke means his readers and hearers to understand this? I think so, too. All of the above. For the people of Israel, the Exodus from Egypt was their deliverance from slavery into freedom. And now, for the people of God, the Exodus of Jesus on the cross is our deliverance through death into life.

But I think it’s interesting to see just where this event, this experience, goes. First of all, Peter — God bless Peter, his mouth well ahead of his brain, as usual — Peter says, “This is great! This is so religious! Let’s build shrines!” Whereupon God interrupts with the cloud of the divine presence, and proclaims, “This is my chosen Son — listen to him! Did I say build shrines? I said listen to him!” And then it’s all over. The three say nothing about this at the time, as well they might not. They go with Jesus back down the mountain, and the next thing that happens is that Jesus heals an epileptic boy. Everything is back to normal. To the extent that Jesus’ ministry of healing is “normal.”

One of the deep questions with which many people wrestle — actually, most people wrestle with this at least sometimes, including me, and I assume including you — anyone who doesn’t wrestle with this at least sometimes just isn’t paying attention — is: “If God is good and God is omnipotent, why is the world so screwed up?” This question is called “theodicy,” which is derived from Greek words and means, roughly, “God’s justice.” (Although the word does not occur in ancient or biblical or patristic Greek, as far as I know; it was coined in the early eighteenth century by the philosopher [Gottfried Wilhelm] Leibniz.) We talked a little about this question last fall when we were reading Job. The problem is that there just are no easy answers to this, on either side. Christian or other “religious” answers, in the way they are articulated, often seem to me to be shallow and cheap. On the other hand, agnostic or atheist answers — or refusal to seek answers — also seem to me to be shallow and cheap. I don’t want to seem to be minimizing the seriousness of this question; nor do the Scriptures themselves have any simple solutions.

But there are some hints, some directions, and I think the Gospel today offers them, in the turn from the Mount of the Transfiguration to ministering to the needs of people, a second prediction of the Passion, and the start of the trek up to Jerusalem where the cross awaits. What God is up to in Jesus is not about power, not as we understand power. But what we want is power — God’s power, especially as it may serve as source and support for our own power. And it can be a severe test of our faith when God does not exercise divine power, particularly in the way that we want God to exercise power, in the way that we want God to enable our own exercise of power.

So now we prepare to enter into the Lenten season, to start our own trek up to Jerusalem, where the cross awaits. And yes, in the end there is power — but no kind of power we could ever have imagined.

[See Walter Brueggemann’s Reflections on this Exodus passage in the New Interpreter’s Bible; he includes references to Paul’s discussion in 2 Corinthians 3 as well as the Transfiguration narratives in the synoptic Gospels.]

Sermon - 7 February 2010

2010-02-08T13:12:00.003-06:00

EPIPHANY 5 — 7 February 2010
St. Paul’s Durant — 9:00

Isaiah 6:1-13 | Ps 138 | 1 Cor 15:1-11 | Luke 5:1-11

Simon Peter fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.”

A remarkable man, this Simon Peter whom Jesus chose as chief of his followers—after Jesus himself, and your patron St. Paul, whose own writings we have, we probably know Simon Peter better than any other figure in the New Testament. A hearty, blustering man, whose mouth was usually several steps ahead of his brain, a man of many promises made and somewhat fewer kept, a man who swore unswerving loyalty yet sold out at the first temptation before the night was out—and then wept bitterly for his faithlessness.
In today’s Gospel we get a typically human glimpse of Peter—Peter, as he is confronted by God’s power in Jesus, as he confesses his sinfulness, begging that God’s Holy One depart from him, lest his weak and silly soul be burnt up in the radiance of the awesome righteousness of God.

It’s part of long-standing Christian tradition that we spend a lot of time whining about what sinners we all are, how unworthy we all are, how much less we are as persons than we are meant to be, how in our unwholeness we are as nothing before the holiness of God. Sometimes when we talk about our own sinfulness and unworthiness we’re just fishing for the reassurance that we’re really not so bad after all. But often enough we really mean it. And it’s good that we mean it, and it’s good that we say it, because it’s true. We are sinners, we are unworthy, we are as persons far less than we are meant to be and called to be, in our unwholeness we are as nothing before the holiness of God. It’s true of me, it’s true of you, it’s true of Simon Peter.

But we mustn’t stop with that, because that’s only half the truth. The full truth is that God knows perfectly well what we are, and God loves us anyway—loves us enough to go all the way to win us back. “While we still were sinners Christ died for us,” St. Paul writes to the Romans [5:8].

Too much concern over our own sinfulness can be a dangerous thing, actually. It focuses our attention on ourselves, and we become fixated with the notion of how rotten we are, and spend so much time moaning about our own unworthiness that we can no longer see God and the life God is calling us to. If all we see is our own sinfulness, we grow to detest ourselves. And pretty soon we detest everyone else, too. Because they’re even worse than we are; or, what’s really even worse, they’re better than we are! And so, having learned to detest ourselves and one another, we learn to detest God as well.

Christian people in the past, and some even yet in the present, have taken this sort of attitude: we are “sinners in the hands of an angry God” (as the noted American colonial preacher Jonathan Edwards put it in his most famous sermon). But this can result in the sterile heartlessness of puritanism perverted — and then all too often we go out and displace this hostility onto everyone else around.

Well, we do need to take our sinfulness seriously — but in a way that leads to confession and repentance. It has been suggested that our society has lost its sense of shame, and we need to recover that — not that we may be degraded, but that we may be moved to repent. Repentance is turning around, changing direction, letting the past be past and starting anew by God’s grace—repentance is not morbidly wallowing around in our own filth or hammering on the gates of heaven with noisy protestations of our utter wretchedness. God knows perfectly well how wretched we are—God knows it far better than we do ourselves. And God says, “All of that is really quite beside the point, you know; the point is, I love you and I want you.”

The Scripture readings today all have to do with how God calls human beings who are really quite unworthy of being called; but you see God doesn’t care about that. We hear Isaiah’s account of his great vision of the LORD in the Temple in Jerusalem. And he said, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips!” And a seraph flies to him and says, “Well, we can fix that! (Though this may hurt a little.)” And God says, “Whom shall I send?” And Isaiah says, “Umm…send me?” And God says, “Okay! You’re on!” (This is kind of like what God said to Jeremiah last week, you may recall.)

Then we hear St Paul proclaiming the Good News of the resurrection of Jesus, the breaking in of new and eternal life, the death of sinfulness and unworthiness. “Unworthy? I’ll tell you unworthy!” says Paul. “I persecuted God’s Church! I’m not worthy to be called an apostle. But my unworthiness doesn’t have anything to do with it! So by God’s free gift, no strings attached, here I am, me of all people, an apostle of Jesus Christ!” We might think that Saul of Tarsus was the last man in the world God would want to do business with. But that’s the kind of God God is. God doesn’t call us because of who we are; God calls us because of who God is.

Jesus summons us all to proclaim and enact God’s Reign with him, to catch people for God’s Kingdom. He calls us with those joyful and exhilarating words which we so rarely see in the employment ads any more: “No experience or qualifications required. Will train.” Jesus calls us, not because we are worthy, but precisely because we are not worthy. Yet he loves us, and his love gives us worth. We can cry with Simon Peter, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinner!” But Jesus replies, “Yeah, yeah, I know that! But that’s just why I won’t go away! So don’t be afraid! It is you whom I am calling! Come! Follow me!

“(And bring a net!)”

Sermon - 31 January 2010

2010-01-31T16:24:00.002-06:00

4 EPIPHANY —31 January 2010
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00

Jer 1:1-4 Ps 71:1-6 1Cor 13:1-13 Luke 4:21-30

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

Have you ever been asked to do something, and your immediate response was, “Oh, I can’t do that! I don’t know how! I don’t have any training! I’m not good at that! It’s too much for me! Find somebody else!” Most of you have probably been there at one time or another. I certainly have.

And sometimes the word came, “Well, try it anyway!” And, by golly, you tried it and you found that you could do it after all! You never know what you can do until you try! Remember the Little Engine that Could? “I think I can, I think I can . . .” And sure enough, he could, and he did!

Or maybe when the word came, “Well, try it anyway!” by golly, you tried it, and sure enough, you couldn’t do it, you didn’t know how, you weren’t good at it, it was too much for you, and the whole thing was an utter disaster! I’ve been there, too!

Though I can’t help but observe that, no matter how disastrous the thing may have been, the world is still here, you and I are still here, and so perhaps failure is not always quite the catastrophe that we sometimes make it out to be!

I’m not peddling the power of positive thinking. Life isn’t quite that simple. If we are properly humble (I don’t mean false modesty, but if our knowledge of ourselves is realistic), then we will recognize that there are some things we are not good at and cannot do well. God knows there are plenty of things I don’t do well. But it still remains true that we can do more than we usually think we can; there are things we will find we can do if we just try; we do have abilities we don’t always give ourselves credit for. And—what we so easily overlook, and this is the key to the whole thing—we are not completely dependent upon our own resources. We are not alone.

And so my text for this morning, from the book of the prophet Jeremiah:

The word of the Lord came to me saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

And Jeremiah said, “Oh, God. Oh, — God! Oh, Lord God! Not me! Don’t look at me! I don’t know how to be a prophet! I’ve never been a prophet before! I don’t want to be a prophet! I can’t be a prophet! (To the nations??!!) Oh, no! Look, I didn’t take prophecy in school! I don’t know how to speak—I wouldn’t know what to say! I’m only a boy!”

And the Lord said, “Oh, Jeremiah, for my sake! Shut up for a minute and listen to me! Just do what I tell you—and don’t be afraid, for I am with you!”

The Epistle today will no doubt sound a little familiar to you! It’s the beloved 13th chapter of Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth. A favorite chapter for many; in some danger of becoming a cliché, I suppose; but a central Scripture to the Christian Gospel: Paul’s great treatise on love.

You’ll remember from the Epistle readings the last two Sundays that Paul has been discussing the variety of spiritual gifts in the Church in chapter 12 of First Corinthians. Paul has been pointing out that everyone has a gift; different people have different gifts; they are all important; the Body needs all its various members. But you recall, last Sunday’s reading from Paul ended up: “Strive for the greater gifts.” And now we turn the page to Chapter 13, and here’s the most important gift of them all, and that’s the gift of love, the love that comes from God and fills us and enables us to love each other.

And love is the greatest gift, because love is the ultimate gift. Love is the gift that finally endures when everything else has served its purpose and has passed away. Including all the other things that we were good at, or not good at. All our great successes, and all our utter failures. But it is faith, hope, and love that endure, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Today’s Gospel—continuing from last Sunday’s—is worth meditating on at such times. Jesus has come back to his home town of Nazareth, and is asked to preach at the Sabbath service in the synagogue. He reads from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me [in Hebrew, those are the same words that we could translate, “made me Messiah,” the anointed one] -- he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor,” etc. Then Jesus proclaims this as his own ministry: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And the congregation thinks that’s all very nice, until they realize what Jesus is really saying. And then they go wild with rage and try to kill him for blasphemy. Jesus, too, had more than his share of failure. It must often have seemed to Jesus that he wasn’t getting anywhere at all. Remember, Jesus didn’t end up getting a Presidential citation in the Rose Garden. He ended up getting nailed to a cross.

Well, not exactly “ended up”! And that’s part of the point, too.

So when we respond to God’s call to be Christ’s Body, in ministry to the world, by saying, “Oh, no! Not me! I can’t! We can’t! We don’t know how! Our church is too small! We’ll fail!” God says to us, “Oh, hush! You sound just like Jeremiah! He failed a lot, too. So what? I failed a lot myself, and I still fail a lot! (You think my will is being done on earth as it is in heaven very much?) Remember, I didn’t say you had to do all this all by yourself! Be not afraid—for I am with you,” says the Lord.

Sermon - 24 January 2010

2010-01-24T15:29:00.003-06:00

3 EPIPHANY—24 January 2010
St. Mark’s, Maquoketa — 10:00 am

Nehemiah 8:1-3,5-6,8-10 -- Ps 19 -- 1Cor 12:12-31a -- Luke 4:14-21

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

The human body is a remarkable thing. I think we instinctively know that; most of us, I suspect, have given some explicit thought to it. Have you ever meditated upon your own body, or some part of your own body? Even some of the silliest little things are occasions of wonder. Why do we have two hands, and not three or four? (God knows there are times when three or four would come in handy!) Why don’t we have eyes in the back of our heads? (That might have a certain usefulness too!) Why do children take so long to grow up? I don’t mean, “Why do children take so long to grow up!!??!” but, some little animals like mice grow to maturity in a few weeks; even big animals like horses and cattle are mature in, what? three or four years. Depending on how you define “grown up,” it takes us twenty years, plus or minus. Human beings—just as bodily creatures, without getting into all our personal diversity—are astoundingly complex and sophisticated systems. We often discover this precisely when something breaks down: we are very fragile, and malfunctions in some apparently minor part of the body can hamper and even seriously threaten the whole organism. Consider the toothache!

I think we’d probably do well to consider “bodiliness” more deeply than we do. “Bodiliness” is an important way of being. And it doesn’t just have to do with our own individual bodies; it has to do with the way we are in relationship with each other.

The Latin word for “body” is corpus. That may be a boring piece of information; but it’s the root of the English word “corporate.” We talk about our “corporate life”—in the Church, in business, in human society—and what we mean is our life together as a body. In the Epistle this Sunday, St. Paul talks about the Church as the Body of Christ.

In thinking about human society, there are two extreme poles which we need to avoid. One of those poles is “collectivism.” That’s the notion that human society is just like a beehive; it is the group that is important, the individual is not; one person is but a cog in a machine; conformity is all-important. If any of you were television science-fiction fans, you may remember “The Borg” on Star Trek. More realistically historically, this “collectivism” has been represented in the world by Marxist-Leninist regimes. Part of their internal contradiction is shown in that while Communism claimed to be the party of the “working class,” it had little real care for working men and women as persons; “the people” are simply “the masses.” It’s not surprising that it is primarily the working people themselves who brought about the demise of Marxism, especially in Eastern Europe. But there were also significant collectivist elements in Naziism, which exalted the state and the ethnic and racial identity of the nation above any concern for individual persons; conformity was essential there, too.

The other pole is “individualism.” That’s the notion that every single human being is complete in him- or herself, by him- or herself; that we do not need other people (except in certain instrumental ways), and that dependence upon another is a sign of weakness. Individualism sees human society, and any human relationships, as a matter of practical convenience, no more. Life becomes a matter of competition rather than cooperation; life is a zero-sum game, so that if I am to win, you have to lose; the goal is the self-fulfillment of the individual. Our own society has a very heavy streak of individualism in it, and we are not the better for it.

As you might suspect, I suggest that the truth is at neither of these poles. It’s not so much a matter of the truth being “somewhere in between,” as if it were a compromise, “half a cup of collectivism and half a coup of individualism, beat briskly for two minutes on ‘high’.” No, human life is really a different kind of thing, not on the scale between those two poles at all. As human persons, we have our own integrity, our own autonomy, our own value, our own importance, and yet we are created to live not by ourselves but in relationship to each other; we are persons in ourselves but we cannot be persons by ourselves. We are meant to live in “community,” which is a very different sort of thing either than an all-subsuming collective or a mere aggregate of individuals. We are, in short, as human beings, very much like the organs of a body. Our life as human beings is, and is meant to be, corporate.

And so is our life in the Church; and in fact, the life of the Church, as a corporate community, is meant to be a model for the life of the human world as a whole. It’s a model in which (and this is what Paul is getting at in the Epistle this Sunday) every member has his or her own uniqueness and importance. It’s a model which requires cooperation and participation. It’s a model characterized by mutual responsibility and interdependence (to revive a good expression once common in the Church), in which the common good and the individual good converge. And what makes it work, and what makes the corporate life of the Church a model for the common life of the whole of humankind, is precisely that we are the Body of Christ. It is the grace and power of Christ’s love which is the life of the Body. For in the end it is only love which makes true human community possible; and it is our calling as Christians to enact and model the true human community in the world.

Sermon - 10 January 2010

2010-01-10T17:50:00.003-06:00

1st AFTER EPIPHANY — 10 January 2010
St. Mark’s, Maquoketa — 10:00 a.m.

Isaiah 43:1-7 Psalm 29 Acts 8:14-17 Luke 3:15-17,21-22

“I baptize you with water, but . . . he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

Well, we’re coming off Christmas, and I guess we’re mostly done with it. How many of you have taken down your decorations at home? No, we haven’t either. We normally leave everything up through the full twelve days of Christmas, that is, through the Epiphany, and we were going to take the decorations down yesterday, but we decided to go see Rosenkavalier in HD instead, which was a much better decision. I’m always a little sad at heart when, as I did this year when I went down to the post office the day after Christmas, and there on the curb were a couple of Christmas trees to be hauled away. On the other hand, we noticed last night that there were still a lot of trees still up in people’s living rooms, and most of the outdoor lighting displays were still up. But then, who wants to go take down outdoor Christmas lights in weather like what we’ve been having for the past three weeks? So we’re okay with the fact that our Christmas tree is still up. We can still use a little quiet time with the lights like little stars in the evening.

Christmas is kind of an inward-looking celebration. (That’s not a criticism!) Christmas is a time of peace and goodwill, a time for caring about others, a time of generosity. But at its heart, as we mostly experience it, Christmas is a “homey” festival, a domestic celebration. Our own homes and families are important, even central, aspects of it. After all the hustle and bustle and busyness of the preparations, all the shopping, the parties, the celebrations (not really what Advent is meant to be like!), but then Christmas itself is kind of quiet. The central story of Christmas has about it the hush of the nursery. For many people, the favorite Christmas carol is still “Silent Night” by candlelight.

The Church in her wisdom lets us enjoy that for a while, but not too long; Christmas is followed by the Epiphany. And the Epiphany represents the world breaking in upon the quiet romance of the manger. In the Gospel appointed for the Day of the Epiphany itself, which was Wednesday, the Wise Men come from a far-off land to see the Christ-Child, bringing rich, and mysterious, and foreboding gifts. In their wake, and at their unwitting guidance, a paranoid tyrant comes a-murdering, and the Holy Family must take the Child and flee the rustic quiet of the Judean hills and lose themselves as refugees in the turmoil of the second city of the Empire, Alexandria in Egypt.

But the visit of the Wise Men is but the beginning of the Epiphany, of the Appearance of Christ to the world. Today we celebrate the next moment in the Epiphany, perhaps a more central moment (and indeed so in the observances of the early Church): The Baptism of Jesus, the visible attestation of his anointing by God as Messiah, and the beginning of his public ministry.
“I baptize you with water,” says John Baptist the forerunner; “but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

And here, maybe still in the warmth of the quiet joy of Christmas, we are brought to a turn, a turn back to the world. For the Epiphany is not a cozy domestic celebration. The Epiphany is about the mission of Christ in the world. If Christmas is something of a Sabbath and a Lord’s Day, Epiphany is a Monday morning: it’s time to go back to work.

But we go back, not as we so often come to a Monday morning, our tails still dragging! Or at least we need not and ought not! We go back renewed. We go back empowered. We go back glowing, burning, with the good news of God and of God’s gracious Reign.

For all that we enjoy the Christmas season and its family celebrations and its quiet relaxations—and it is right and needful that we should do so—we also now shift our gears and get going again, and it is right and needful that we do this too. The Epiphany, the Appearance of Christ to the world—not just the Wise Men, but the Baptism, the Power and Love of the Cana Wedding, the Proclaiming of God’s Reign Now at the Nazareth Synagogue, the Calling of the Disciples, culminating in the Transfiguration on the Holy Mountain — all the ways the Messiah shows himself to God’s broken world that we will hear in the Gospel in the coming weeks — the Epiphany of Christ calls us to our mission as Christians. As Jesus began his public mission at his baptism, sealed in power by the Holy Spirit, so we take our commission (our com-mission, our mission together with him) from our baptism into Christ, likewise sealed in power by the Holy Spirit, kindled aflame by God’s love for us and for God’s world.

And in acceptance of our commission, and I hope with your forgiveness for breaking with the line printed in the bulletin, for this Sunday in place of the Nicene Creed, I ask you please to rise now and turn in your Prayer Books to page 292:

As our Lord Jesus Christ at his baptism was shown to be filled with the Holy Spirit, so we too, in him, are baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire. I call upon you, therefore, now as we enter upon this Epiphany season, to renew the solemn promises and vows of Holy Baptism, by which we once renounced Satan and all his works, promised to serve God faithfully, and committed ourselves to the mission of his Holy Catholic Church.

The Renewal of Baptismal Vows, BCP 292

Sermon -- 3 January 2010

2010-01-03T16:39:00.004-06:00

2nd SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS — 3 January 2010
St. Michael’s, Mount Pleasant — 10:00

Jer 31:7-14 Ps 84 Eph 1:3-6,15-19a Matt 2:1-12

Wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”

This story is a very familiar one. It’s not clear to what extent this is actual history, and to what extent it is theological legend; but that’s another issue for another time. (I keep meaning to write a paper about it, and I keep not doing it. Oh well.) Perhaps this story is a little too familiar to us: we know this story better than the Bible itself does! Tradition has filled in a lot of details that just aren’t there in the text. In the first place, the visitors weren’t kings. (We knew that.) That’s a bit of lore that first shows up in the second century, undoubtedly reflecting the fact that this story reminded the early Christians of Isaiah 60 and Psalm 72, which talk about foreign kings coming to Jerusalem to worship God. (That’s where the camels come in, too — not in Matthew, who doesn’t mention camels.) Nor does the Gospel text say that there were three of these sage visitors; that’s an inference from the three sorts of gifts that are mentioned, and it first shows up explicitly in the tradition only in the fifth century. Nor are the names Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, traditionally given to the wise men, apparently any earlier than the eighth century. And the depiction of Caspar as a Moor is only 14th century — practically yesterday!

Well, then, who were these wise men? The Gospel calls them Magi from the East. The “Magi” were apparently originally a tribe of the Medes, who lived in what is now northern Iran, north of the Persians. These Magi were famous for their knowledge of the occult and astrology, and it is from them that the word “magic” comes, via Greek and Latin. Later on in Persia and Babylonia, magicians and astrologers were known generically as “Magi” whether they were actually ethnic Medes or not; and such seem to have been the Magi of the Gospel story. We refer to them as “astrologers,” but that’s not the same thing as the fortune-telling baloney of which the supermarket tabloids are so fond. We no longer buy the basic premise that earthly affairs are influenced by the positions of the stars and planets — as one of the first of “modern” men, William Shakespeare, put into the mouth of Cassius: “Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Nevertheless, despite their premises, the astrologers of ancient Persia did approach their study of the stars with a fair amount of scholarly rigor. Given the relative primitiveness of their instruments, they described and were able to predict astronomical phenomena with remarkable accuracy. But they were not interested only in the scientific phenomena as such, but in the supposed meaning of these phenomena for human affairs. They were both scientists and seers. By religion they were probably Zoroastrians, but they would have been familiar with the Hebrew scriptures — there were many large Jewish communities in Babylonia and Persia, dating from the exile centuries earlier — and one of the prophecies they may well have known is this verse from the Book of Numbers (24:17): “A star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel.” A somewhat obscure verse, perhaps, but we know that in the years just before the Christian era it was regarded as a prophecy of the vindication of Israel by the Jewish sect (Essenes or something like) that wrote the War Scroll, one of the documents found fifty years ago in a cave at Qumran by the Dead Sea.

And so when our Magi saw the star, it was not just a matter of scientific interest but of deeper import for world history. What was it they saw? We don’t know. One speculation has been that they saw a supernova — an exploding star suddenly dominating the night sky for some weeks — although there is no certain corroborating evidence of such a phenomenon at that time. More likely is a conjunction of planets, and apparently there was indeed a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation Pisces a few years before the death of Herod, right before the turn of the era. Conjunctions of planets were the kind of thing which were of immense interest to astrologers but not particularly obvious to anyone else.

The Magi were not just educated men, learned men by the standards of their time, they were wise men. Their life work was seeing the significance of phenomena — the meaning of things. They not only charted and computed the movements of the heavens, or what they interpreted as the movements of the heavens. (As Galileo would insist sixteen hundred years later, it is not the heavens, but the earth that moves. But I digress.) The Magi attempted to perceive what this all meant for human beings; and if we today would want to say that astrology was the wrong tree to be barking up (swat that metaphor!), we would still want to affirm and admire their fundamental quest for meaning. Ultimately, to be in quest of meaning is to be attentive to God. In fact, we might define being wise as “having a taste for God,” a sensitivity to God’s action in the world. As the Scriptures often remind us, “The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.”

And the Magi were wise men. They perceived that God was up to something, and that God wanted their witness. So they packed up and went on pilgrimage to find the newborn king of Israel. And they found him. But not where they first looked — not in the royal palace in Jerusalem. They found him in a humble rural village. That in itself is a mark of their wisdom, of their taste for God, of their sensitivity to how God does things in the world: they recognized Jesus when they found him, no matter how unlikely the circumstances may have appeared.

Remember the bumper sticker that said, “Wise men still seek him”? So they do. And from the wise men we learn something of what true wisdom is. Not only to see what’s going on in the world, but to see what it means, to see God’s hand at work in the world about us, to see what it requires from us in response. True wisdom is to have in the midst of this world a taste for God.

Sermon -- 1 November 2009

2009-11-01T16:41:00.002-06:00

ALL SAINTS DAY — 1 November 2009
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:15 am

Wisdom 3:1-9 Psalm 24 Revelation 21:1-6a John 11:32-44

Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you.

If we look at the Calendar of the Church Year in the front of the Prayer Book (that’s pages 19–30 for those who would rather page through the Prayer Book than listen to me!) we see the listing of those saints’ days that are Major Feasts together with a whole lot more that are called Lesser Feasts. The Major Saints’ Days celebrate figures from the New Testament; the Lesser Feasts are commemorations of people a few of whom are Scriptural but mostly are post-Biblical, including some even of our own generation. (Well, at least of my generation!) And as we look through them, we note that these were pretty much all people who were famous, or at least in retrospect historically significant.

And yet: “sanctity” (or “sainthood”) isn’t supposed to be about being famous, it’s supposed to be about being holy.

Although, in order to be celebrated by others for being holy, at some point one’s holiness has to be well known!

How does one get to be recognized officially as a “saint,” or at least make the list in the front of the Prayer Book?

As you may be aware, the Roman Catholic Church has rather an elaborate process for canonizing saints (that is, putting them on the official list). One of the criteria is that you have to have at least two verified miracles ascribed to your intercession, which is proof that you really are in heaven and thus a Real Saint, not just cooling your heels in purgatory like the rest of us. (No, don’t ask me to defend that theology!)

See, here’s how this scenario goes: Blessed Fred and Blessed Susie are both on the track to sainthood, they each just need one more authenticated miracle. The Joneses have a critically ill child, and they appeal to Blessed Fred for his prayers. The Rodriguezes also have a critically ill child, and they appeal to Blessed Susie for her prayers. The Jones child is suddenly and inexplicably healed. The Rodriguez child dies. The Pope by and by canonizes Saint Fred. Susie languishes among the merely Blessed. The Rodriguezes are pretty thoroughly bummed out. They picked the wrong Blessed. But they aren’t nearly as bummed out as the Stanislawskis, who also had a critically ill child and who appealed both to Blessed Fred and to Blessed Susie, but their child died anyway.

Does anyone else share my profound discomfort with this whole scenario `and what it implies about God?

There are three ways of looking at what a saint is:

1. A saint is somebody famous. Well, I think we understand that that’s not necessarily the case, although as a matter of fact in order to become an official saint (with a day in the calendar) you do have to have gotten yourself noticed by the folks who make these decisions. But when we sing a song of the saints of God and we mean to be one too, we probably don't mean primarily that we want to be famous and have a day in the calendar, and so we can still be in the running to be saints even though we probably won’t be well known or have a day in the church calendar.

2. A saint is somebody very religious and churchy. Well, this can be a little off-putting, because most of us are not very churchy most of the time (although we go to church and work in the church), not very religious (not that we aren’t faithful believers, but our lives are lived in the secular world), yet an awful lot of the saints in the calendar are religious and churchy folks, monks and nuns and priests and bishops and theologians. And this isn’t too surprising, really, since the folks who make the decisions about recognizing official saints — whether it’s the Pope or the General Convention of the Episcopal Church — are to a great extent religious and churchy folks themselves. But we understand that being a saint is not necessarily to be religious and churchy, and so we are still in the running for sainthood, and there is still not any reason why I shouldn’t be one too.

3. A saint is somebody who is morally perfect, or at least mostly so. Aha. This one catches us. This is the one that is operative in the protest, “Hey, I’m no saint!” (as if sainthood were too lofty to be aspired to by mere us). Here’s where we feel cut off from the whole sainthood business. Because we are sinners. We are a long way from moral perfection. Oh, we are repentant sinners, I hope, recovering sinners if you will, but still obviously sinners. And thus we are the opposite of "saints," as in the self-evident polarity of “saints and sinners.”

Well, the fact of the matter is, the saints were sinners too. And not just before they became saints. I don’t want to suggest there is no connection between moral virtue or righteousness, and sanctity or holiness. On the contrary. But sainthood, sanctity, even holiness, is not defined primarily by moral perfection. St. Jerome, the great fourth-century theologian and translator of the Latin Bible, was a notorious grouch. His contemporary St. John Chrysostom (one of my personal patrons, by the way, his feast day is my birthday), the great preacher and Patriarch of Constantinople at the end of the fourth century, was a virulent anti-Semite. St. Bernard, the great medieval monastic reformer, teacher and writer, also preached a Crusade against the Muslims. (Thanks a lot, Bernie, that was very helpful!)

My point is not to deconstruct the great saints of our tradition, but just to observe that it is not moral perfection that distinguishes them from the rest of us. We are, after all, not justified by our own works, but by the grace of God. And that’s what marks out the saints — they are beacons of God’s grace, even in the midst of their imperfections. The love of God shines in their lives, even with all their warts and all.

And that is our vocation as well — whether or not we are ever well known in the church or the world, whether or not we have some position in the institutional church or in organized religion, even as our lives continue to be an ongoing struggle against our besetting sins and moral flaws — to be nevertheless people through whom God’s love shines to enlighten the world.

They lived not only in ages past,
there are hundreds of thousands still,
the world is bright with the joyous saints
who love to do Jesus’ will.
You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,
in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea,
for the saints of God are just folk like me
and I mean to be one too.

And so, by God’s grace, may we all.

[“I sing a song of the saints of God,” words by Lesbia Scott; Hymnal 1982 # 293.]

Sermon - 25 October 2009

2009-10-25T17:33:00.004-05:00

21 PENTECOST / PROPER 25 — 25 Oct 2009
Trinity — 7:45, 8:45, & 11:00

Job 42:1-6,10-17 Ps 34:1-8,[19-22] Hebrews 7:23-28 Mark 10:46-52

“I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”

You may have noticed — or you may not have noticed, and that’s okay too! — that for the past few weeks we have been taking our first reading from the Book of Job. Four Sundays. Not a lot for a book that is 42 chapters long, but it’s more than we had before. And I think Job is worth some attention.

How many of you have actually read all the way through the Book of Job? [A number of hands raised.] That’s good — but those of you who haven’t, I’m not trying to make you feel guilty about it. It starts out fairly easily but then gets a little harder. I do encourage you to give it a try.

The Book of Job addresses the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” You may be familiar with a book from a few years ago, with pretty much that same title, written by Rabbi Harold Kushner. It’s a very good book, and I commend it, although he doesn’t really solve the problem; but then, neither do any of the rest of us. (Including the Book of Job itself!)

Job is apparently based upon a middle-eastern folk tale, which we see reflected in the first two chapters (three weeks ago) and then the last part of the 42nd chapter (which we hear this morning). In the story, Job is a man of great wealth but also of great virtue and faithfulness to God. Well, one day the heavenly host comes before God, and the Satan — in Hebrew ha-satan, which means “the accuser” or “the adversary,” sort of “the Devil’s advocate,” but he isn’t to be identified with “the Devil” yet — the Satan says to God, “Well, yes, this Job fellow is very faithful to you, but why shouldn’t he be? Look at all the stuff he’s got! Let’s take it all away from him, and see how faithful he stays!”

And God says, “Okay.”

(Yeah, I know. Just go with me on this, we’ll come back to this later.)

So the Satan sets it up that Job loses all his flocks and herds and camels to rustlers and to lightning storms, and all his hired hands are killed, and then his seven sons and three daughters are all killed by a tornado, and finally Job himself is struck by loathsome sores all over his body and he is left sitting in the ashes, and his wife tells him, "Curse God and die!" But “in all this Job did not sin with his lips,” it says — Job remained faithful to God.

Along come Job’s three friends to console him. And they have a great dispute in superb Hebrew poetry for the next 29 chapters, in which the friends argue, “Admit it! You are guilty of some great sin, that’s why God has done this to you!” And Job says, “No I’m not! I'm innocent!” And then a fourth friend pops in, and he chews on Job for six chapters more. Then out of the whirlwind God intervenes and answers Job, “You don’t know what you’re taking about! Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Who do you think you are?” And God then goes on in this vein for another four chapters, and it’s really a quite wonderfully impressive celebration of God as Creator. And then today we hear Job’s reply, “Okay, I finally get it! I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you — I now see the mystery of you, I see that you are not to be called into account. Therefore I despise myself and repent, for I am but dust and ashes.”

This first part of today's reading is the conclusion of the poetic discourse that began between Job and his friends, and then continued from God to Job, and ends today with Job’s reply. The rest of the reading today is the final resumption of the old prose folktale with which the book began 42 chapters earlier. God restores Job’s fortunes — twice as many flocks and herds and camels as he had before, and a new family of seven sons and three daughters.

Well. How nice.

Too bad, I guess, about the first set of kids.

So after hearing God blithely let the Satan take all Job’s stuff and kill his children, we’re now supposed to think that it’s all okay because God gives Job a new set of stuff? [*] That’s right, it’s a cop-out. At least on the surface.

Please understand that I am not trying to put down the Book of Job! On the contrary, Job is a very complex and sophisticated reflection on the suffering of the innocent, perhaps the first really sophisticated such reflection in all human literature. And I include, maybe even especially include, the naïve or pseudo-naïve telling of the folktale with which the Book of Job begins and ends. There is significant dissonance between the folktale, and especially its conclusion that we hear today in the second half of the reading, and all that has gone on in the poetic dialogues up through the first part of the reading. And we should not assume that the author of Job just didn’t notice this dissonance! This book wrestles with very hard questions about God, and God’s power, and God’s justice, and God’s love. And to say, as I would say, that the Book of Job does not successfully resolve these hard questions is not to disparage it: we don’t successfully resolve them either. But we can be enriched by sharing in this book’s wrestling with the reality of suffering and evil in the world and the ultimate justice of God.

But we do have one advantage, one that the author of Job did not have (and one that presumably would not have occurred to Rabbi Kushner either): We know the cross of Jesus Christ. (And his resurrection: but first his cross.) God does not manipulate our suffering in the world — God shares it with us.

That doesn’t make it any easier; in fact, it may make it harder for us. There are no easy answers for us. There are no easy answers for God either.

[*] At one of the services a child cried out at this point, "No!" which of course was quite right!

Sermon - 4 October 2009

2009-10-04T15:05:00.002-05:00

Proper 22 / 18 Pentecost — 4 October 2009
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:15 am

Job 1:1; 2:1-10 Ps 26 Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12 Mark 10:2-16

One of the good, and sometimes exciting, and sometimes challenging things about the Revised Common Lectionary is that it forces Old Guys like me who serve as supply priests in other parishes not to just dive into the sermon barrel and dust off a homily that I’ve preached before. Actually, some years back for this Sunday, I wrote what I thought (and still think) was a pretty good sermon on the Gospel reading for today. In those days the reading was just the first part, about marriage and divorce; it hadn’t had the second part about “Let the little children come to me” added yet. I wrote it for a parish I was supplying, and then three years later I dug it out and preached it again (over at Waterloo, as a matter of fact). But it seemed to me that at this present point in the life of the Episcopal Church, we probably don’t really need another sermon about sex, particularly from a visiting priest!

So then I looked at the Epistle, from the Letter to the Hebrews. But Hebrews is not easy to preach from, since it’s really a fairly complex essay and doesn’t lend itself to reading in short snippets, as the Gospels do (even John, although they are longer snippets!), and even Paul’s letters, although it helps if you are aware of his overall argument. (Don’t rely on quotes from Romans without bearing in mind the whole letter!)

And then I thought, well, it’s St. Francis’ Day, and we’re blessing the animals, so maybe I should talk about the animals, and so there immediately came to mind a thing that was on the internet lately. Maybe some of you have seen it — two churches across the street from each other, having a church signs duel. (By the way, this posting was entirely an internet construct, and never occurred in real life. You can create and post a church signs duel like this yourself. Here are the URLs: )
http://www.snopes.com/photos/signs/dogheaven.asp
http://www.says-it.com/churchsigns/

[In the sermon as given, this posting was described.]

In the past, on Sundays we have never read much from the Book of Job. There was one year when we picked up on the “I know that my redeemer lives” verses, and another Sunday when we heard the part near the end where God tells Job to stop whining, and yet another Sunday when Job gets it, and repents, But these are bits and pieces and the context isn’t very clear, and there’s no attempt to wrestle with what the Book of Job as a whole is about. Now, at least in Track One, we have a four-Sunday sequence (which is still just bits and pieces, but it’s still a sequence) in which we hear the beginning of the story (today), next week we hear a representative sample of Job’s lament, then the week after that the part closer to the end where God says, “Just who the heck do you think you are?” and then finally in 3 weeks the end where Job repents and gets all new stuff. That’s a start, anyway. So let’s go with it.

“Stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to his face.” The Lord said to [the] Satan, “Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life.”

How many of you have read the Book of Job (all the way through!)? [A number of hands are raised.] Good! But I’m not trying to make the rest of you feel guilty or ashamed! It really is quite all right, and very understandable, if you never have read Job, or even if you tried you never finished it. (My guess is that some of you have read it more often, and more deeply, than I have!) But let’s face it, five or six chapters in you are very likely to say, “This is heavy going!” But I encourage you to persevere! Take notes — it helps if you can keep track of who is saying what. Chapters 3 through 37 are long poetic dialogues between Job and his friends.

Do not try to read the Book of Job this afternoon while you are also watching the football game.

I have absolutely no idea what a rock-hard fundamentalist Biblical literalist would make of the Book of Job. (Even ordinary conservative evangelicals have pretty much the same problems with it as the rest of us.)

Basically the Book of Job is about “Why does bad stuff happen to good people?” It may represent the first time — at least the earliest instance of religious literature — that seriously tries to deal with this question, or is even aware that the issue exists. Probably — not certainly — Chapters 1 and 2, and the last part of Chapter 42, are, or are derived from, an older middle-eastern folk tale, which in our Bible is in Hebrew prose, and then Chapters 3 through 37 are Job’s poetic dialogue with his friends who come to console him and explain to him why God is letting all this bad stuff happen to him. Job doesn’t buy it. Chapters 38 through 41, also still in Hebrew poetry, is God challenging Job for challenging him. Then in Chapter 42 Job says, “Okay, I give up,” although it’s not entirely clear why he should, and then in the last part of Chapter 42, back to the old prose folk story, God gives back to Job all the family and property and health that Job had lost in Chapters 1 and 2.

No, this is not at all satisfactory, for a whole variety of reasons. Not the least of which is that Job’s original family of sons and daughters are still all dead. But that’s a question that will arise for you in three weeks on Sunday the 25th. And for me, too, since I am scheduled to preach in Iowa City that day!

The reading this morning leaves out most of Chapter 1. That’s where God grants to the Satan (ha-satan, the adversary, the accuser, sort of God’s inspector-general, not yet The Devil) the power to take away all of Job’s flocks and herds and finally even his children. Even so, Job does not blame God for his misfortune. Then in Chapter 2, which we hear most of this morning, the Satan gets permission to ramp up to step two in the testing of Job, and he takes Job’s health away from him. That’s more than Mrs. Job can stand. But Job himself remains faithful to the Lord.

Incidentally, when I was in seminary, we put on a production of Archibald MacLeish’s “J.B.” based on the Book of Job. I played J.B. Typecasting, no doubt. The classmate’s wife who played J.B.’s wife (“Curse God and die!”) gave a very moving performance.

Okay, let's review this story. Job is filthy rich, but he is blameless and upright, and he has seven sons and three daughters, as it goes on to say in the part that gets left out of the reading today. (I don’t see anything nefarious in that omission, it’s just a matter of editing for length.) Well, the “sons of God” as they are called — the heavenly court, the angels, whoever they are — not “Sons of God” in the sense that Jesus is — get together and the Satan says, “Well, sure Job is blameless and upright! Look at all the stuff he has. But take it away and we’ll see how long he stays blameless and upright!” And God says to the Satan, “Okay, take away all his stuff. Just don’t hurt Job himself.” Then a series of disasters follows, and Job loses his 500 oxen and 500 donkeys, and then his 7000 sheep, and then his 3000 camels — together with all the servants who took care of them — and finally all his children who are killed while they are having dinner together when a great storm blows the house down on top of them. (Hmm. Job lives in the "Land of Uz".... Naaahhh….) And in all this Job did not sin. He said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Then we come to the next part, that we hear this morning. Not having been successful in the first round — foiled in his attempt to prove that human beings are faithful to God only as long as God is faithful to them — the Satan gets God’s permission to continue in a second round, and to strike Job’s own body, save only his life. Yet even now Job does not sin; he does not curse God.

Well, I hope we see there are some problems in all this. Do we want to say that God is a God who can pull this kind of stuff on us (or specifically allow this kind of stuff to be pulled on us)? I certainly don’t want to say that. And yet it’s true that Stuff Happens, and God doesn’t seem to stop it. What are we to make of that? We have to admit that we know people — and sometimes we are people — who are God’s fair-weather friends. If God does not take care of us, why should we care about God? If God abandons us, why should we not abandon God?

We do need to remember that the God in whom we believe is not first of all the God of the Bible; first of all we believe in the God who is the Father of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. And yet this God also let Jesus die on the cross. God raised Jesus from death, but first God let him die. God will raise us from death, but first God will let us die.

This is hard stuff. There are no easy answers, and the Book of Job does not provide any easy answers. It makes an honest effort, perhaps the first honest effort, and it offers us a lot to meditate on and to pray about, but my judgment is that in the end it does not succeed. I think that ultimately Chapter 42 is a copout, though I guess we’ll all see in three weeks what we think about that!

Jesus is not in this story. Not yet. And in our own story, in this story when it has become our story, Jesus is the center, Job is prelude. But it’s still very hard stuff.

Sermon - 13 September 2009

2009-09-13T16:18:00.002-05:00

PROPER 19 / 15 PENTECOST — 13 Sept 2009
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:15 am

Proverbs 1:20-33 Psalm 19 James 3:1-12 Mark 8:27-38

Jesus asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.”

We call this incident “The Confession of St. Peter” and we also celebrate it every year as a holy day on January 18, as well as on this Sunday every three years and also in August of Year A, in Matthew’s telling. It’s a turning point in the course of Jesus’ ministry. Before this, in Mark’s narrative, Jesus has been puttering about the Galilee in the north of the land of Israel, teaching, healing, gathering his followers, proclaiming the Reign of God. From here on out, things take a more foreboding turn: it’s right after this that Jesus turns south, to Jerusalem, and although the teaching and healing continue, the conflicts with the religious establishment intensify, and more and more Jesus himself becomes the issue, until matters finally reach a crisis in Jerusalem at the Feast of the Passover.

But at this point, where we are in the Gospel today, the sun is still shining and the birds are still singing, and trooping about the highways and byways of the Galilean hills is still something of a lark for Jesus’ followers. As we have seen in the Gospel readings this summer, from the early chapters of Mark mostly, Jesus has been proclaiming God’s Reign, and not only proclaiming it but enacting it, performing the signs of the Reign of God, what we might call the signs of the Messiah.

And so now Jesus and his friends are hiking around up north of the Sea of Galilee. (Near where today the borders of Israel, Syria, and Lebanon meet, the area we call the Golan Heights. In Jesus’ time this was not within Galilee, which was ruled by Herod Antipas, one of the sons of Herod the Great [the Herod who was King of Judaea when Jesus was born]; it was in a district ruled by another son of Herod the Great, Antipas’s brother Philip. Philip had rebuilt a city and renamed it for Tiberius Caesar as a way of currying the Emperor’s favor; the city was renamed “Philip’s Caesartown,” or, as it was actually put in Latin, “Caesarea Philíppi.” As distinguished from Caesarea Maritima, on the Judean Mediterranean coast. And as distinguished from Caesarea of Cappadocia, in the highlands of eastern Anatolia. Actually the Roman Empire had more towns named “Caesarea” than we have “Washington” in the United States. And for much the same reason. But I digress…)

Anyway, Jesus and his friends are walking down the road, and Jesus says, “So. What are they saying about me?” As it happens, people are saying a lot about Jesus, some of it pretty much off the wall. “Well,” say the disciples, I heard one guy saying he thought you were John the Baptist come back to life.” (John the Baptist had recently been arrested and then executed by Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee, the brother of the Philip who had built Caesarea Philippi. [Are you getting all this? It’s a little like the episode summaries on the websites of the TV dramas — sometimes it’s hard to keep track!] Remember Salome and the dance of the seven veils and John Baptist’s head on a platter? Of course, some of that is in the Gospel and some of it is Richard Strauss. [I’m digressing again, aren’t I?] Anyway, that was still hot news just then, and some people thought Jesus was the Baptist come back to life.)

And, the disciples went on, “Some other people are saying that you’re the prophet Elijah come back from heaven.” Elijah, you recall, was the great prophet of the Kingdom of Israel, and been carried up to heaven in a fiery chariot, and it says in the book of Malachi that Elijah will return before the final Day of the Lord. So. If you’re following the reading sequence in the Daily Office Lectionary, we are currently wading into the Elijah saga.

Anyway, the disciples went on, “Some say you’re one of the other prophets come back to life — or maybe ‘The Prophet Like Moses’” predicted in Deuteronomy — whom many expected the Lord to send to bring in God’s Kingdom.

“Mmm,” says Jesus. “But what about you? You’ve been with me for a while now. You’ve heard what I’ve said. You’ve seen what I’ve done. Who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter, as so often the spokesman, answers him, “You are the Messiah.”

I’m not sure our English Bibles always catch the full flavor of that reply. Oh, the translation is word for word — Su ei ho Christos — “You are the Christ.” But what does Peter mean by that?—when he actually said it, not in Greek but in Aramaic? “Christ” (Christos) is a Greek word, meaning “the anointed one,” and it translates the Hebrew Mashiah or Aramaic Meshikha, “Messiah,” “anointed one.” But for us Christians almost two thousand years later, “Christ” has simply become the common title for Jesus, almost his surname; for Peter to say “You are the Christ” seems perfectly obvious to us. It wasn’t obvious for Peter. What did Peter think he was saying when he said “You are the Messiah”? And why does Jesus seem not exactly tickled to death about it? Why did he tell them not to talk about it?

For Peter, “Messiah” means “savior-king.” The Messiah is the one whom God is going to send to rally the people, purge the sinners, expel the imperial Roman occupation army, and restore the nation of Israel to its glory. The Messiah is the one who is going to come and fix everything for us.

And, in effect, Jesus says, “Not me.”

Jesus goes on to explain that he will be rejected, and finally put to death; and Peter says, “No way! Not God’s Messiah!” And Jesus says, “‘No way!’ to you, Peter—you’re the one who is opposed to God. What you mean by ‘Messiah’ is not who I am. That isn’t what I’m doing here. I am not the one who is going to come and fix everything. You’re going to have to learn a whole new definition of what God’s Messiah is, because I have come to die on a Roman cross.”

Much of the Church, through much of our history, and probably most of us at least much of the time, range ourselves on the side of Peter; and thus we are not on the side of God but of corrupt self-seeking humanity. Because we expect that God is a God who is supposed to come and fix everything for us. We demand that of God. And the plain truth is, God doesn’t do that. Oh, in the ultimate end, in the fulfillment of the Reign of God, all will be well. But in the meantime, God doesn’t come and fix everything. We still lose, we still suffer, we still die.

But winning, and power, and having everything fixed for us, is not what life is about. We live by giving our lives away. That’s the Gospel. Listen to what Jesus says: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” That’s God’s truth. That’s the kind of Messiah Jesus is, one who gives it all away. And what God gives us in this life is not any promise of success, or prosperity, or health, or satisfaction, but limitless opportunities to give our lives away to each other. What God gives us is limitless opportunities to give our lives away to each other, because that’s what it’s really all about.

And it is really — almost — just as simple, and just as difficult, as that.

Sermon - 23 August 2009

2009-08-23T20:16:00.003-05:00

PROPER 16 / 12 PENTECOST — 23 August 2009
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:00 a.m.

1Kgs 8:1,6,10-11,22-30,41,43 Ps 84 Eph 6:10-20 John 6:56-69

For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” an old French proverb runs. History is a fascinating tension of change and identity, of continuity and discontinuity. I myself think that people are pretty much the same as we have always been — human nature as such isn’t a lot different now from what it was a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, or two thousand years ago. But the world has changed, in important ways. It really has. And the world has changed in two senses. First, the actual conditions of the world have changed. The world itself is a different place from what it was just a few generations ago. This is largely the result of the building of the infrastructures of human society. Much that was formerly wilderness is now under cultivation. (Some real problems arise from this, but I’m certainly not suggesting that in itself this is a Bad Thing!) Communications with virtually any place in the world are instantaneous, and very difficult to impede. Still new to many of us is the notion that from your own telephone — in your own home or in your pocket! — you can call directly to almost any other telephone in the world. And travel to anywhere in the world isn’t that much more difficult (only somewhat more expensive!). (I’m still not quite used to all the ordinary folks I run into who want to tell me about their trip to China or Russia or West Africa. It used to be a big deal just to go to Chicago!)

And as a direct result of all this (what we might call the “infrastructural change” of the world), the second sense in which the world has changed is that we perceive the world in a different way. Our technology has brought the world largely (not completely! but largely) under our control, and we assume that things will continue in this direction. The world is the venue of human action, the object of human manipulation, configured by human infrastructures.

In the world when the New Testament was being written, and in fact in the world in any pre-modern period, people had a much clearer sense of their world, their universe, as a personal living environment — not a dead impersonal thing to be used, and manipulated, and exploited. Even the stars of the heavens were seen as gods, or powers, or angels. Nature around us was often (not always, but often) seen as the habitat of spirits, and of demons. The world was enchanted.

The “modern” view of the world, which began to be operative somewhere along about the sixteenth century — in part because of the foundational scientific work of people like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and others who demonstrated that we are not at the center of the universe, that nature obeys discoverable rational laws and not just the whims of the gods, or even God, and (more arguably) that human consciousness is the measure of reality — this “modern” view dis-enchanted, de-divinized, de-spiritualized, de-demonized, de-personalized the world. Now, that’s not all bad! Sometimes we get very romantic about (for instance) Native American, or African, or Aboriginal Australian perspectives on our relation to the natural world, and indeed there is much wisdom among these peoples. But the enchanted, personalized, divinized world of pre-modern societies can also be a place of fear and terror, where human beings are at the mercy of famine and flood, ravaged by disease, tossed to and fro by the whims of gods and demons over whom they have no control and whom they can only desperately try to placate by magic or sacrifice. (Well, we’re still at the mercy of famine and flood, but at least we now understand that in large part it’s our own fault.) For our forebears, the world was different than it is for us, and not always for the better. The “modern,” scientific, technological view of the world brings with it (or should bring with it; it certainly demands) a maturity, a sense of responsibility, which is appropriate and necessary to our full stature as human beings created in God’s image. Superstition is not a fitting stance or behavior pattern for the children of God redeemed by the blood of God’s Christ! But clearly also there is a very real danger of overemphasizing and overestimating our own competence and our own degree of control over the world, and we very easily assume that the evils of the world just need a little more applied technology, a bit of sociological adjustment, one more Federal program, and everything will be made well again.

St. Paul is telling us this morning — for our purposes I’m assuming Paul wrote the Letter to the Ephesians; there’s a fair amount of serious and legitimate dispute about that, but for the moment let’s just go with it — St. Paul is telling us that the enemies of the Kingdom of God are not just private evils and personal sins; something much more is at stake. (And thus Christian faith is not, cannot be, must not be concerned just with personal morality and private spirituality.) (Bishop Katharine said this a few weeks ago and a bunch of people beat up on her about it. But of course she was right. She reads Paul.) Paul talks about “the rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers of this present darkness, the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” — within his own world framework what he’s talking about are demonic spirits, and that’s probably not the way we’d put it; nor should it be the way for us to put it, I don’t think. But the truth is that there are powers of evil which are bigger than private hearts; the evil of the world is greater than the sum of its parts. Technologies, ideologies, “isms,” political and economic structures, vested interests, communications media, public opinion polls, the infamous “They” (as in, “They say that...”) — all of these can be “evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.”

Against all this we as Christians are called to stand.

And as the evil against which we must stand and struggle is larger than our own personal petty sinfulnesses, even, apparently, larger than all our own personal petty sinfulnesses put together, so we cannot rely simply upon our own strength, our own wisdom, our own virtue. They aren’t enough. They are too easily corrupted. No, St Paul calls us to rely on “the whole armor of God.”

But let us note carefully what that armor is (listen to St Paul again): “Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” Here are God’s weapons: truth, righteousness, the good news of peace, faith, salvation, the Word of God. Not our own swords, but only the “Sword of the Spirit.” We cannot use evil’s own weapons against it. In this realm of what ultimately matters, we cannot fight fire with fire. We don’t need any more Crusades, no more wars of religion, no more inquisitions, no more persecutions. God’s Kingdom is served not by power and force and craft, but by humility and patience and love. And always, in all things, by constancy in prayer, through which the powers of evil within ourselves are vanquished by God’s grace, and we, ever more closely conformed to the Reign of God, are strengthened as faithful soldiers of the Cross of Jesus Christ our Lord.

More on Absalom

2009-08-12T12:46:00.002-05:00

Here's another -- and much better! -- sermon on David and Absalom from last Sunday. This is by the Very Rev. Kelvin Holdsworth, Provost of St. Mary's Cathedral, Glasgow.
http://www.thurible.net/20090809/davids-lamentation/
A hat tip to the Mad Priest ("Of course, I could be wrong..." http://revjph.blogspot.com/) who passed this on.

Sermon - 9 August 2009

2009-08-09T18:41:00.004-05:00

PROPER 14 / 10 PENTECOST — 9 August 2009
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:00 am

2Sam 18:5-9,15,31-33 Ps 130 Eph 4:25-5:2 John 6:35,41-51

“O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!”

I have commented before — I think it was to you last summer, but perhaps it was in another
parish — that one of the great opportunities of the Revised Common Lectionary, and particularly Track One thereof, is that we read great stories from the Hebrew Scriptures at the Sunday Eucharist, stories that in the past never quite fit in with the rest of the Sunday readings. (Well, they still don’t fit in, but we no longer care!) Of course we have always read them if we have some systematic way of reading through the Bible, such as the Divine Office (Morning and Evening Prayer), By the way, the Office Lectionary just this Friday and yesterday caught up with the David and Bathsheba story we read at the Eucharist on the last two Sundays; and for fun I got the old Gregory Peck-Susan Hayward movie from Netflix and watched it last night! Yeah, well… Very Hollywood. An interesting take on the story, though. An imaginative incorporation of some tales from elsewhere in the Books of Samuel. Somewhere there a Strict Rule that Hollywood can never do a story from the Bible straight.)
For the next two weeks the Office Lectionary will be working through the Absalom saga, of
which we get just a little piece today. Which is the downside of Track One of the lectionary. The Absalom story goes on for eight chapters (beginning with Chapter 13 of the Second Book of Samuel), and it is a rich, fascinating, and complex tale. I encourage you to go home today, or this week, asking yourself, “What was that Absalom business all about?” and take your Bibles and start in with 2nd Samuel 13. It’s a story that has inspired other stories — I think of the novel Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner, which I’m sure some of you have read and I suspect others of you have not read (not yet; that would include me!).

The Absalom saga is a story about how we manage to mess up our lives by a series of bad
decisions. And the fact that they may have been well-intentioned at the time really doesn’t help. The roots of it are actually a consequence of the Bathsheba story; you may recall last Sunday we heard the prophet Nathan chew David out about his murder of Uriah the Hittite, and he said, “Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house.…Thus says the Lord: I will raise up trouble against you from within your own house.…” (In the movie the prophet Nathan was played by Raymond Massey, so you know this was serious business!) What goes around comes around, and it starts coming around when David’s son Amnon has the hots for his half-sister Tamar (his half-brother Absalom’s full sister). Well, the Hebrew text says he “loved” her, and that’s how it’s usually translated into English, but “had the hots for” seems to be more to the point, since it quickly becomes clear that “love” is not the issue. This is not a Sunday School Bible story, by the way. So if the kids would like to color on their bulletins for a while now, that might be a good idea. (We might also note that the folks who talk a lot about “the Biblical doctrine of marriage” might want to explain themselves a little more clearly.)

Anyway, Amnon manages to get Tamar up to his room, where he rapes her, and then in disgust throws her out. (The biblical scholar Phyllis Tickle includes this passage as one of the Bible’s “Texts of Terror.” Yes.) When King David finds out about this, he is very angry, but he — does nothing. Amnon is his firstborn and heir-apparent, the “crown prince.” And after all, David is hardly on the moral high ground, as you will recall from the last couple of weeks. Still: Absalom is not only enraged at his brother for having violated his sister, he is also deeply angry with his father for not doing anything about it. Absalom bides his time, but in due course he engineers Amnon’s murder, and then flees into exile. The story goes on; ultimately Absalom comes back to Jerusalem, but he is already plotting rebellion to dethrone and replace his father David. And by the time we get to today’s part of the story, Absalom is leading an open revolution; he declares himself king at Hebron (where David had originally become king in Saul’s place before his conquest of Jerusalem). David flees to the Jordan valley, and Absalom occupies Jerusalem. (There is a whole series of intriguing little subplots in connection with all this. This is not a simple story!)

Well, now, comes the great climactic battle. The royal army of David — apparently mostly men of Judah, David’s own tribe — defeat Absalom’s insurgents, apparently mostly Israelites from the northern tribes. (The tension between the northern tribes of Israel and the southern tribe of Judah goes back long before the division of the kingdom following the death of King Solomon.) Absalom himself gets his hair caught in a tree. We learned earlier [14:26] that Absalom had a magnificent head of hair, which he cut annually, and the hair trimmings weighed five pounds; so let this be a lesson for you boys: Get a haircut! (Not a problem for some of us.) But I digress. Absalom gets his hair caught in the branches of an oak tree as he rides under it (Israel in those days was heavily forested, before the loggers and the sheepherders over the centuries turned it into a desert; there’s an environmental lesson in that; but I digress again). Today’s reading leaves out a few verses of plot here; it’s actually David’s general and all-purpose hit-man Joab who first plunges three javelins into Absalom’s heart, before his flunkies finish him off. We might note that Joab has a long history of
being David’s hired gun: it was he who killed King Saul’s general Abner after the death of Saul; it was he who set up the death of Uriah the Hittite at David’s order. Joab was the guy whom David used to keep his own hands clean of blood. Now after the death of Absalom David can mourn the death of his son, in a scene which is well known, and deeply touching, the deep grief of a father who has lost his son — a grief which is, alas, not an unknown experience in any age. But we should also realize that David’s grief should not be taken completely at face value. In the chapter after today’s reading, Joab challenges David about this — he reminds me of Dr. Phil: “David, what were you thinking? We all just risked our lives to save your throne, and you’re whining about that faithless brat of a boy. Get over it!”

I said at the beginning that the Absalom saga is a story about how we manage to mess up our
lives by a series of bad decisions. And the fact that they may have been well-intentioned at the time really doesn’t help. I think this is the appeal of David especially among the figures of Jewish history recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures. A great leader, a hero, most certainly, but a very real and deeply flawed human being. Intensely devoted to the Lord God of Israel, and yet over and over he keeps finding ways to mess up — for which he must pay very high and painful prices. Just like us? Well, I hope that we are not just like him. But, alas, we too manage to mess up our lives by bad decisions, if usually, I hope, in less catastrophic ways. But in any case, I hope we understand that God is with us — God is with us even when we abandon him. God will not save us from our own consequences, as he did not save David. But God does not leave us. God stays with us. God weeps for us. God loves us.

Sermon -- 2 August 2009

2009-08-02T14:30:00.001-05:00

PROPER 13 / 9 PENTECOST — 2 August 2009
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00 a.m.

2 Sam 11:26-12:13a Ps 51:1-13 Eph 4:1-16 John 6:24-35

The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.

A few Sundays ago over at Trinity in Iowa City I was observing that one of the features of the Revised Common Lectionary that we are now following is that it takes the Old Testament readings seriously as stories, indeed our stories, not just as some kind of prophecy of the Gospel reading for the day. That’s fine. The downside of that is that sometimes the stories themselves are fairly long, and so we don’t always get the full picture in any one Sunday. The selection from Second Samuel this morning assumes we remember last Sunday’s reading. We have to recall that the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of David’s generals in the Israelite army, was named Bathsheba? Remember Bathsheba? Well, David had an affair with Bathsheba and got her pregnant, and then arranged to have her husband Uriah killed in battle against the Ammonites. But at the end of today’s reading the lectionary gnomes leave out the final part, another ten verses or so, after David confesses his sin: the Lord still punishes David by striking his and Bathsheba’s baby with a fatal illness. How just of God! (I’m not at all sure what the fundamentalists make of this story. I suspect that those who interpret the Bible strictly literally probably haven’t actually read it.) The story of David and Bathsheba was made into a fairly awful movie with Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward back when even I was very young. I’ve put it in my Netflix queue. So we’ll see!

I have absolutely no idea how to link this story with the Gospel today. But it’s an important story for its own sake.

In the Gospel we have been hearing about the feeding of the five thousand. The folks got fed last week, you recall, as we switched from St. Mark’s Gospel to the sixth chapter of St. John to hear his account of the feeding. (The feeding of the multitude is the only story, apart from the Passion narrative, that occurs in all four Gospels. Actually, it occurs six times in four Gospels. But I digress.) This Sunday we continue working through John’s sixth chapter, and we will keep that on for a few weeks yet, hearing Jesus' discourse about the Bread of Life, before going back to St. Mark at the end of the month.

So today the folks catch up with Jesus again after the feeding of the five thousand, and Jesus tells them, "You are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves." (Not because you put your faith in the in-breaking Reign of God, but because you got your own perceived needs met.) "Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you." God does not always agree with us about what is really important, or about what we really need.

Well, then, the folks go on, "what must we do to perform the works of God?" And Jesus replies, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent."

Believe in Jesus. What's this about? I've come to the conclusion that "believing in Jesus" is one of the most misunderstood notions in the Bible. "Believing in Jesus" is not the same thing as assenting to certain doctrines about Jesus. I don't mean that doctrines about Jesus aren't important, or that what the Church teaches about Jesus isn't true, or that we shouldn't believe them. I just don't think that's what Jesus was talking about when he said, "Believe in me." I also don't think Jesus meant anything very much like, "Accept me as your personal savior." I don't mean that personal commitment to Jesus isn't vitally important, I just mean that I don't think Jesus intended to present himself as an object of religion. Being doctrinally correct, and having a personal relationship with a savior, however important they may be, can still be ways that we satisfy our own perceived needs rather than commit ourselves to God's cause. When Jesus says, "Believe in me," I think he means, "Believe in the message I am telling you, believe in the word I speak to you as God's Word, believe in the Kingdom of God which I am proclaiming and enacting among you, believe in me as the one who embodies God's Reign." To believe that Jesus is the true bread which gives life to the world - not just that "Jesus is the True Bread," but that the bread which gives real life to the world is indeed precisely that which Jesus proclaims and enacts and embodies, the loving sovereignty of the living God — to believe that Jesus is the true bread which gives life to the world is to commit ourselves to his pattern of life as true human life, to commit ourselves to his values, to his cause, to his vision, as the values and cause and vision of God, to commit ourselves to him precisely as the Way and the Truth and the Life.

Specifically how does all this play out? Well, that's what we're given this life to work out. I don't think there are any cheap or easy answers. I certainly think we need to question all those assumptions which self-servingly try to turn God into the provider for our own perceived needs. I am convinced that when God is really providing for us, God is giving us what we really need in order to share with our Lord in giving life to the world.

Sermons -- 21 June 2009

2009-06-21T17:00:00.003-05:00

PROPER 7 | 3RD PENTECOST — 21 June 2009
Trinity, Iowa City — 7:45 & 11:00 am

[Track One] 1Sam 17:32-49 | Ps 9:9-20 | 2Cor 6:1-13 | Mark 4:35-41

“This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the Philistine army this very day to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the earth, so that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel.”

I’ve told this story before in other contexts — I don’t remember whether I’ve told it to you. Many years ago (!) I saw an advertisement in a church magazine from a publisher of Christian Education curriculum material. And in the ad there was a very cute little boy running and waving the paper he had colored, and shouting, “Mommy! Today in Sunday School we learned how to kill a giant with a slingshot!”

Well. The point of the advertisement, as I recall, is that this is not the approach this publisher takes in their Sunday School curriculum. (And I feel quite confident that this is not the approach that Meg and her staff take in our parish’s Christian Formation program!)

Nevertheless, here it is in the first reading from Scripture this morning. Actually, it gets even better. The Revised Common Lectionary gnomes apparently figured that this story had gone on long enough (you’ll note that we left out a bunch of verses at the beginning as it is!), but if it had gone on for a couple more verses we would have gotten: “So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and a stone, striking down the Philistine and killing him; there was no sword in David’s hand. Then David ran and stood over the Philistine; he grasped his [the Philistine’s] sword, drew it out of its sheath, and killed him; then he cut off his head with it. When the Philistines saw that their champion was dead, they fled.” [vv. 50-51]

As the Church Lady used to say, “Well, isn’t that special?”

I think most of you are aware — well, some of you are aware — and perhaps there are a few of you who even care! (and that’s okay!) — that for the past few years on Sundays we have been reading the Scripture lessons according to the Revised Common Lectionary, a plan or schedule of the Sunday readings over a three-year period which is widely used by many churches around the world, ecumenically, not just Anglicans. Generally speaking, it’s not very different from the previous three-year lectionary that has been in the Book of Common Prayer for the last thirty years and which was based more or less on the Roman lectionary. But one respect in which the Revised Common Lectionary is a bit different shows up in the “Green” half of the church year, from Trinity Sunday to Advent, when there is the option for the readings from the Hebrew Scriptures to follow stories in sequence. We call them “course readings.” We’ve been doing this all along with the Gospel readings — last year we read Matthew, this year we’re reading Mark, next year we’ll read Luke, and John is read in all three years, especially during Lent and Eastertide. We’ve also been doing it with the Epistle readings — we’re currently reading our way through Second Corinthians, which we will continue for a couple more weeks, and then we’ll read Ephesians for a while. This summer for the Old Testament reading we basically hear the King David saga. Last year it was the Patriarchal stories and the Moses saga from Genesis and Exodus; next year it will be the history of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah up until the exile to Babylonia; and later in the fall of these years we also get some further selections from the Prophets (from whom we hear a lot during the first half of the year) and from the Hebrew Wisdom literature (like Proverbs and Job).

Well, why do we do this? I think there has been a concern that we have been missing out on much of the story of God and God’s people in what we call the Old Testament. We’ve been reading from the Old Testament every Sunday for over thirty years, but they have been selections that are usually keyed to the Gospel reading and often lose their original context. Well, in itself that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and in fact Track Two of the Revised Common Lectionary still does that, like our previous lectionary and that of the Romans. But it is thought, and I think, that it is important on a regular basis that we actually get the story of the Chosen People straight, without any specific relation to the other readings of the day. And so today we get David killing Goliath and cutting off his head. (Well, it’s an important part of the story of God’s People! That is, it is our own story!)

And one of the reasons why it is important for us to know our story is so that we can understand our story — who we are as God’s People, where we came from, where we have been, how we got to where we are now, the stories we have heard and told along the way, what meanings they may have for us, and what God is continuing to call us to be and to do, especially through these stories.

So it’s a good thing, I think, that the Church is now encouraging us to actually read these stories which are in a sense the pre-history of Christ, to read them as stories and not just out-of-context snippets that are presumably somehow related to the Sunday Gospel reading (which is what we’ve been doing for the last thirty years!) The downside of this of course is that some of these stories are fairly long, as stories often are, and you’ll note that even today we omitted a chunk. Oh well. Take your bulletins home and get out your Bible and re-read each Sunday’s story and include a couple more chapters on each side! And experience them as the stories of God’s People — as our stories — but not as God’s News Bulletin downloaded from On High, because they’re not that. (The message of today’s first reading is not that God wants us to go and behead any giant Philistines we encounter! Not even with a slingshot!)

I think we understand that from the Scriptures we learn about God and who God is and what God desires for us. But remember that the foundation and the starting point is Jesus: We know God first of all as the Father of Jesus Christ. We often didn’t get that right before Jesus, which is one of the reasons why God became Incarnate in Christ. (Sadly, we haven’t always gotten it right even after Jesus, either, but that’s our own fault.) Let us pray that the more deeply we study the Gospels, and also the Epistles, the deeper will be our insight into God’s actions in the history and the stories and the poetry of the Hebrew Testament.

PROPER 7 | 3RD PENTECOST — 21 June 2009
Trinity, Iowa City — 8:45 am

2Cor 6:1-13 Ps 9:9-20 Mark 4:35-41

“Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”

Have you ever been in a situation where you were really afraid? Especially, really afraid for your life? I’m sure that some of you have been, and I don’t want to suggest anything that would diminish the profound reality of that experience for you. (Other than to say, I’m certainly glad you’re still here!) Military combat, or a terrible auto accident (or even a near-accident for a few terrifying moments), or — well, you have your own story and I won’t presume to try to tell it for you.

I’ve been lucky, I guess. The only really scary moment I can recall was when I was a small boy (small enough that I can’t clearly remember just when or where this was). My family was participating in a group picnic at what I remember as being a state or a county park (it wasn’t like City Park). I think maybe it was an office picnic for the company my father worked for, and so I didn’t know any of the people and they didn’t know me. (This makes me fairly certain it wasn’t a parish picnic.) Apparently the picnic was over and it was time to go home, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t know where my parents were. I didn’t see them anywhere. I ran all over the picnic ground, where all the families were packing up to leave, and I didn’t see my father or my mother anywhere. I was lost! I was afraid I would be left behind, and they would be able to find me, and I didn’t know how to get home! I had been abandoned! I was in a panic for what seemed like hours! Well, of course it was really only two or three minutes, I suppose, and then I saw my dad coming back from the parking lot to look for me. How relieved I was! I suppose they had gone to put away our picnic stuff and didn’t notice that I wasn’t tagging along. (And my mother needed to put my sister, who is several years younger than I am, probably a toddler at the time, in the car. Alas, no, we didn’t have infant car seats in those days, or even car seat belts.)

Hmm. Reminds me a little of the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple. (But Jesus wasn’t panicked, it was Mary and Joseph who were panicked.) “Oh — were you looking for me?” Jesus may have been the Incarnate God, but he must have been a handful for his mother. But I digress.

In the Gospel today, Jesus has been sitting in a boat just offshore a few yards, teaching the people in parables about the Kingdom of God. (You remember that we heard a couple of these stories in the Gospel last week.) And at the end of the day Jesus says, “Let’s go over across the lake.” It doesn’t say whose boat it was — since the disciples were with him, we can presume that it was Peter and Andrew’s boat, but it doesn’t say so. And “other boats were with him” but we never hear anything more about them. Presumably they included James and John’s boat, but it doesn’t say that either, and we don’t know what happened to them in the storm, but apparently everybody ended up safe over on the eastern shore, although it doesn’t say so! Mark tends to start stories with bits and pieces of details that he forgets to finish. He could have used an editor! Oh, that’s right — he had one. Matthew. But I digress. Again.

Telling parables of the Kingdom is apparently hard work, and Jesus falls asleep in the boat. Even when a storm comes up. The disciples — at least some of them, Peter and Andrew and James and John at least — were skilled and experienced fishermen, and we can fairly assume that this storm was a pretty serious business, as I’m told storms on the Sea of Galilee can be. So they are madly bailing out the boat and not making much headway, and they say, “Master, you’re not helping!” or words to that effect. So Jesus gets up and calms the wind and the sea. (I haven’t figured out yet whether Jesus said, “Peace! Be still!” or whether he said, “Oh, peace, just be still.”) And the disciples were filled with great awe and said to one another, “What was that all about?” or words to that effect.

Our lives may encounter great storms, too, even if we don’t go boating on the Sea of Galilee. Or even on the Coralville Reservoir. They may be physical storms — floods or tornadoes, just to name a couple of recent local instances. Or financial storms, or professional storms, or storms within our families, or storms within our own hearts (and sometimes, especially, all of the above). And we cry out in our hearts, or even aloud, “Lord, do you not care that we are perishing?” And maybe the storm abates — and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s still raging. Is Jesus still sleeping? I don’t have any quick or cheap responses to that.
Jesus asks his disciples in the boat, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” Not, I think, “Didn’t you believe that I would keep you safe from drowning?” but “Didn’t you have faith that as long as you are with me nothing else really matters?”

We look for answers, but I’m not so sure that God always gives us an answer, not the kind of answer we’re looking for. God is not a divine vending machine, into whom we deposit our spiritual coins and wait for the desired response to come down the chute. God is a divine companion and our final lover. What God says is, “I who made you am with you always. Therefore whatever befalls you in this life, nothing can harm you forever; and in the end I shall make all things new.”

Sermon -- 14 June 2009

2009-06-14T16:47:00.003-05:00

PROPER 6 / 2ND PENTECOST — 14 June 2009
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00 am

1 Sam 15:34-16:13 | Ps 30 | 2 Cor 5:6-17 | Mark 4:26-34

“With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?”

This may have occurred to you at some time, though I suspect most people (other people, not us, of course!) have never given it any thought and would find the idea quite surprising: Jesus was not particularly religious. Now, let me be clear: it is obvious from the Gospels that Jesus prayed; in fact, he prayed a lot. Apparently he often went off by himself, up a hill or whatever, and spent the whole night in prayer with his Father. Sometimes his followers would find him and interrupt him because there were people who wanted, for instance, healing and who needed his attention, and he always gave it. And obviously Jesus talked a lot about God. But most of what he said about God really wasn’t very what-we-would-call “religious.” One of the reasons why the Pharisees disliked Jesus so much was that he was clearly not as religious as they were. And that’s true!

In fact, the words that we translate into English as “religion” or “religious” occur very rarely in the New Testament, and not in a very positive sense. For example, in the Epistle of James he writes: “Religion [I’m actually tempted to suggest that James is putting quotes around the word: “Religion”] — “'Religion’ that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” [James 1:27] True “religion” has to do with love and justice and integrity.

Another place where the word “religion” occurs in the English bible is in the Acts of the Apostles, where Paul is preaching in Athens, and he says “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” [Acts 17:22] He says this with a straight face, but I suspect with his tongue in his cheek a bit. In this case the Greek word is not the same one James uses, but a word that can reasonably be translated “superstitious.” And Paul goes on to say, “I am here to tell you about the real God, the Lord of heaven and earth” — not, he implies, the deity of human religion.

Later on in Acts, Paul says in his self-defense before Agrippa and Festus: “I have belonged to the strictest sect of our religion and lived as a Pharisee.” [Acts 26:5] (The Greek is the same word that James used in his letter.)

And that’s pretty much about it for “religion” in the New Testament. The word never appears in the Gospels. The word only becomes common as denotative of Christianity later on, after the Church had spread out into the Empire and particularly after Latin become the dominant language of Western Christianity.

Jesus does not talk about “religion.” Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God. Typically he begins by saying something like “The Kingdom of God is like this:” and then he tells a story, or paints a little word-picture. (“Parable” has a fairly broad definition.) Jesus’ parables are not particularly “religious” — mostly they depict situations or activities from normal everyday life. But they are designed “to get you thinking,” to present “a different perspective” on some aspect of life that we thought we were very familiar with. They provide an insight into the Kingdom of God.

Okay, having tromped around on the meaning of “religion” for a few minutes, now let’s tromp around on the meaning of “Kingdom,” specifically when we are talking about the “Kingdom of God.” We have a tendency, especially given the fact that culturally if perhaps not ethnically we are to a fair extent British by history, to think of “kingdom” as a political or geographical entity, as in “the United Kingdom” (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland). A “kingdom” is a place, and that place is ruled by someone called a king. Or, in the case of Britain for the last 57 years, a queen. (Did you know that the longest-reigning monarchs of England have been queens? — Elizabeth I, Victoria, and Elizabeth II. At least until you get back to the Plantagenet kings Henry III and Edward III. But I digress.) But actually, it works the other way: The king comes first, and then his sovereignty, his reign, his rule, his kingship, may be referred to as his “kingdom.” In the Biblical languages, beginning with the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and continuing in the related language Aramaic that Jesus actually spoke, and true also in the Greek into which Jesus’ teachings were quickly translated, the words that we are likely to translate into English as “kingdom” actually have the sense of “kingship,” or “kingly rule,” or “sovereign reign.” The sense is more personal and relational than geographic or political.

So the Kingdom of God is not some place, some other place, especially not some other place in some other time, a time yet to come. But, as Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is within you” (you plural) or “among you.” {Luke 17.21] Jesus told Pilate, “My kingship is not a merely worldly kingdom — it’s nothing at all like Caesar’s empire.” [John 18:36] The Kingdom of God is now; the Kingdom of God is here! All we have to do is to open our eyes to it, to open our hearts to it, to follow Jesus who leads us into it, here and now. Jesus did not say, “Come join my church” (although in due course that might be appropriate!). Jesus said, “Follow me!” Jesus still says “Follow me!” Follow me into God’s Kingship! This is what the Gospel, the Good News, really is: That the God who created us loves us and wants us to share God’s love with one another, and to share in the building and spreading of the Kingship of God throughout God’s World.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Jesus did not say “I have come that you may have religion, and have it abundantly.” Jesus said, “I have come that you may have life — life in God’s Kingship — and have it to the full.” [John 10:10b]

Sermon -- 17 May 2009

2009-05-18T08:09:00.002-05:00

6TH SUNDAY OF EASTER — 17 May 2009
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00 am

[BCP] Acts 11:19-30 Ps 33 1John 4:7-21 John 15:9-17

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

Jesus was raised from the dead and commissioned his followers to proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom of God in the power of the Holy Spirit, nineteen hundred and seventy-some years ago.

For pretty much all that time ever since, we’ve been fighting with each other about it.

I’m not picking on you! I’m picking on all of us! I’m picking on me! God knows I love religious battles as well as anyone, and probably better than most. Which is probably why our Lord frequently has to remind me, “I did NOT say: ‘I came that they may have RELIGION, and have it abundantly’!”

Or, as he also says to us all with similar frequency, and occasionally we may even hear him and pay attention: “What is it you don’t understand about: ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you’?”

In the Epistle today, from John’s First Letter, which is mostly about love, John begins, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” “Let us love one another, because love is from God; … for God is love.” What John is sharing with us in today’s Epistle, like what Jesus is sharing with us in the Gospel, is not just a set of moral rules but a vision of reality. A vision of reality. That which is the most real of everything, that which is the ground, the basis, the root, the foundation of all that is real, is Love love’s-self. God’s very nature is love. The most fundamental thing that we can say about God—even more fundamental than talking about God as omnipotent or omniscient or any of those other six-dollar philosophical words—is that God is loving, indeed, more profoundly and fundamentally, that God is love.

One of the most basic affirmations of the Christian faith. But one about which we need to be very careful. Because the truth of the matter is, our understanding of love is pretty shaky, and when we extend “love” as all too often we mean “love” and apply it to God, we end up with a shallow and sentimental deity very much in our own image. Quite the contrary, it is God who defines what love really is: obviously a reality too rich to define simply, but having to do with the mystery of creativity, indeed the very rationale of creation; the bestowing of authentic being upon another, the free sharing of life, a fundamental generosity that is not controlling or self-gratifying, but the kind of self-giving disclosed in Jesus. This is what love really is, and our loving is only truly loving to the extent that it reflects (in a finite way) the infinite divine loving of God. As St John says, “In this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” Or as Jesus himself says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends ….” “Love one another as I have loved you.”

Well, that’s all very inspirational, no doubt. But we easily overestimate how much interest God really has in being inspirational. “Inspiration” is often very much like “religion,” and “religion” is often what we substitute for holiness. But God tends to be disconcertingly concrete and practical. It is after all from St John—the one we like to think of as the “most spiritual” of the Gospel writers (and thus we can keep him safely enshrined on the “religion” shelf)—it is from St John that we hear, “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.… Those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.…Those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.” “Love one another as I have loved you.” That’s the practical definition of love for us, the pattern for our loving: if we want to see what love really is, we look at Jesus. His commandment to love is not just an order to be obeyed, but a disclosure of reality, and not just a disclosure but an invitation to share in that reality to its richest depths, to share in the very life of God. “I have said these things to you,” Jesus says, “so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”

As we move beyond thinking of Jesus’ commandment to love as a sort of religious inspiration, and start catching it as a vision of reality to be lived in, and to be shared with others, and to be enacted in the world (and feeling the exhilaration of the assurance of God’s trust in us), then perhaps our love will no longer be quite so hedged round and qualified. Perhaps our love will no longer be quite so conditional, not quite so sensible. Perhaps we will be less concerned to count love’s cost. We’ll start seeing more clearly, not only with the eyes of our minds but with the eyes of our hearts, that to love one another—to love one another by the measure of how Jesus has loved us—is what it is really to be alive. As the divine love reaches out beyond itself in creation in a free bestowal of being, so we turn outward beyond ourselves in respect, in concern, in compassion, in affirmation, in cherishing—to other persons and to the whole of God’s creation. We hear more clearly Jesus’ words today, “You did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.” “Love one another as I have loved you”—not just a commandment in the narrow sense, not just an inspirational motivation, and not just for ourselves, but a commission, a commission to bear to the world the vision of its own truest destiny.

Sermon -- 3 May 2009

2009-05-03T18:26:00.003-05:00

4TH SUN. OF EASTER — 3 May 2009
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00 AM

Acts 4:(23-31)32-37 Ps 23 1 John 3:1-8 John 10:11-16

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”

The picture of Jesus as the Good Shepherd is one of the most common in Christian imagery. In one form or another it recurs throughout the gospels, and for that matter through the Hebrew scriptures as well. We may immediately think of the parable of the lost sheep (in Matthew and Luke). Jesus also picks up on themes that run throughout the Old Testament — as we heard in Psalm 23 today (“The Lord is my shepherd…”), or in Psalm 100 (“We are [God’s] people and the sheep of his pasture”), or in Psalm 80 (“Hear, O Shepherd of Israel, leading Joseph like a flock; shine forth, you that are enthroned upon the cherubim”). Recall that the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) were all shepherds, as was Moses after he fled from Pharaoh’s court in Egypt into the Sinai, as was David before he was anointed as Israel’s King (“I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep to be prince over my people Israel” 2 Sam 7:8).

In the 34th chapter of Ezekiel, a passage which Jesus pretty obviously has directly in mind in what he is saying in today’s Gospel, the prophet Ezekiel, speaking for God at the time of the conquest by the Babylonians, condemns the leadership of Judah for not caring for God’s flock but letting them be scattered, and God promises to be their true shepherd and to bring them home.

Most of us have little direct acquaintance with sheep or shepherding. (Are any of you still raising sheep? Or at least, was your family raising sheep on the farm when you grew up?) So for most of us, the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is a lot like the stained glass window over the high altar over at Trinity Church in Iowa City, which some of you have probably seen: Jesus in long white robes, with a neatly trimmed beard and long flowing locks of well-brushed, well-conditioned hair, cuddling a couple of soft curly lambs that at first glance look like poodle puppies.

Right. You get my point.

When the Bible talks about us as the sheep of God’s flock, about Jesus as our shepherd, there is nothing cute or romantic about it. We’re not being given a compliment here, folks! But what I hope is clear is that God loves us, God cares for us, God rescues us even at the cost of his life, and this is not because we deserve it or have earned it, but just because!

And we say that over and over, but even as we say it, we back away from it. Yes, God loves us — if.…

God cares for us — when.…

God rescues us, if we can demonstrate that we deserve it. When we can prove that we have earned it.

And that’s wrong. And we know that it’s wrong.

How many of you were raised Lutheran? Martin Luther knew this was wrong. Lutherans since Martin Luther, not so much. Anglicans, at least since Richard Hooker, not so much. Reformed, including John Calvin, not so much. Roman Catholics, not so much, especially if you went to parochial school.

Why do you suppose it is that no matter how much we say we understand, how much we think we understand, we so often just don’t get it? One of the things that I discovered when I had left parish ministry and went to work for the University — something I really hadn’t realized before, since I was ordained to the priesthood when I was still a young squirt and clueless about a lot of stuff — but something which I suspect most of you have known for a long long time — is that the world is full of folks who are really good, decent, caring people but who have long since been turned off by “The Church” or “The Christian Religion” because their experience has been that they’ve been repeatedly told that God will love them but only when they get all their ducks in a row, and sorry, they aren’t in a row yet, at least not good enough. Perhaps some of you have been there. If so, welcome back!

Let me be clear in a brief excursus: I am not suggesting that issues of sin and morality aren’t important. They are. In some instances they are far more important that we realize. (Although in some others, they are far less important. But I digress.) But there is a widespread notion, even within mainstream Christianity, that the big problem with sin is that it offends God. Now, I don’t believe that God is offended by our sins. But I do believe that God is deeply grieved by our sins. Because our sins damage and even destroy ourselves, and they damage and even destroy each other, and (as we are becoming increasingly aware) they damage and even destroy the world that God created for us to live in. God does not want us to destroy ourselves, because God loves us. God wants us to be whole, and not to be broken. And sin breaks us, and it breaks others, and it breaks the world. As Jesus says in the verse immediately before this morning’s Gospel reading: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” We live in a world, and in an age, when “religion” seems to some to be slowly, and not always so slowly, losing its grip, at least in Western society. I’m not at all sure this is a bad thing. History does not suggest that when “religion” has a grip on society it has very much to do with the Kingdom of God. I mean, let’s just look around at various parts of the world these days, including some aspects of our own society, and of alleged “Christianity.”

All the more reason why it is vital that we not just sigh and say, “Oh well.” Jesus calls us to proclaim his good news — the good news of God’s love, God’s love for humankind — including others who do not belong to our particular sheepfold — for whom the shepherd has laid down his life in order that we all may share his life.

Sermon -- 19 April 2009

2009-04-20T20:42:00.003-05:00

2ND OF EASTER — 19 April 2009
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00

Acts 3:12a, 13-15, 17-26 Ps 111 1John 5:1-6 John 20:19-31

Do not be faithless, but believing.

The Gospel on the Second Sunday of Easter is, every year, the account from St. John about Jesus’ appearances, first to the Ten (the Twelve, less Judas of course, and also with Thomas missing) on that first Sunday evening, and then a week later to the Eleven again, this time with Thomas present. Thomas, we are told, refused to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead until he saw Jesus with his own eyes and touched Jesus’ wounds with his own hands. And hence poor Tom has been nicknamed “Doubting Thomas” ever since. And we’ve been reading this Gospel passage on this Sunday in the year almost ever since; and it gives us good occasion to talk about faith and doubt.

Faith and doubt are often seen as opposites, as incompatible with each other. If you experience doubtfulness about something - especially something “religious,” something the Bible says, something the Church says - then you obviously “don’t have enough faith,” and folks use this as a club to beat you over the head with. Maybe you even use it on yourself as a club to beat yourself over the head with.

I don’t think God expects us to give our assent to things blindly and uncritically. God does not expect us to hang our brains on the hat rack when we walk into church (although, God knows, plenty of us do just that!). On the contrary, I think genuine faithfulness includes a readiness to use our minds rigorously, to think critically, to judge on the basis of credible evidence, though always in a spirit that humbly seeks truth, rather than one that proudly seeks power.

But back to our story. There’s nothing in the Gospels that suggests that Thomas was a skeptic by temperament. On the contrary, he was fervently devoted to Jesus. When Jesus starts up to Jerusalem the last time, even though the disciples warn him that the establishment has it in for him, it is Thomas who convinces the others, “Let us go with him too, and die there with him!” Thomas doesn’t have any trouble believing in Jesus; he just has trouble with pious platitudes and wishful thinking.

St. John’s Gospel, we might note, comes out of an early Christian community which (among other things) was trying to deal with people who tried to be more spiritual than God. (Later on some of this kind of super-spiritual religion would take forms which we would later refer to as “Gnosticism” - sort of the “New Age” of the second century - very lofty, anti-materialist, anti-worldly, esoteric stuff.) One of the things which the Fourth Gospel is at some considerable pains to defend is precisely that in Jesus “the Word became flesh, and pitched his tent right here among us.”

And so in John’s Gospel, when Thomas hears that the rest of the disciples have seen the risen Jesus, he says, “I don’t want to hear a bunch of inspirational stuff about the triumph of life over death, I don’t want a meaningful experience, I don’t want to be uplifted, I want to know the truth! I want to see his body, nail-holes and all!”

And note that Jesus really doesn’t seem to have any big problem with this. Look at the Gospel story again. That first Sunday night he appears to the Ten, and they’re all scared blue (fair enough!). (Incidentally, have you ever noticed in the accounts of the resurrection appearances, that people normally don’t recognize the risen Jesus when they see him? The women don’t, until Jesus speaks to them; nor Mary Magdalene; nor the disciples, in Jerusalem, on the road to Emmaus, or in Galilee; nor Paul on the Damascus Road. We don’t find him; he discloses himself to us.) (Anyway.) Jesus appears to the Ten, and says, “Peace. Don’t be afraid.” And he shows them his hands and his side. “Look, it’s me.” Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. It’s okay that they should first experience the reality of his body. And it’s okay for Thomas, too, a week later. “Come and look,” Jesus says. “Come and touch. It’s really me. I’m really here. Do not be faithless - be faithful.” (That’s what the Greek says. It isn’t really talking about “doubt” in an intellectual or conceptual sense at all - it’s talking about personal commitment, personal trust, personal relationship.)

Thomas believed, Thomas placed his faith, Thomas let Jesus disclose himself to him. Because he saw.

“Blessed are those who believe, even though they don’t see,” Jesus says. Well, yes. He’s talking about us. Because we’re not going to see Jesus the way Thomas did (well, probably not.). We’re not going to, not exactly that way. The folks for whom and among whom St John’s Gospel was written weren’t going to see Jesus exactly that way either. That’s why the Gospel was written (and it says so, right there): “These things are written down so that you may believe.” Thomas needed some evidence, and that was okay. We need evidence too, and it’s still okay, and we’ve got some. The real crunch comes when we do meet Jesus, when Jesus does disclose himself to us through the people around us; do we recognize him then? Do we commit ourselves then? Are we faithful, rather than faithless?

Sermon -- 5 April 2009

2009-04-06T16:21:00.004-05:00

PALM SUNDAY — 5 April 2009

St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:00

Mark 11:1-11a Isaiah 45:21-25 Pa 22:1-11 Phil 2:5-11 Mark 15:1-39

At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

I’m told there is a common nightmare — though I haven’t had it so much as a dream during sleep as rather that sudden bolt of fear while wide awake in the case itself: driving too fast in the rain and dark on a narrow highway, and coming suddenly to the crest of a hill, only to discover that there is no other side. The bitter and empty chill of the abyss.

One of the things we're all looking for, and may come to church to find, is some kind of peace, a sense of fulfillment, the assurance that the road does go on, a connection with other people and the universe, a sense of God's presence in our lives. That's okay! We have this longing for God (let’s name it as that, because that’s what it is, even when we don’t always recognize it as such), we have this longing for God because God built it into us; “we come that way.” And we do, at least from time to time, experience the presence of God with us. Different ones of us in different ways; sometimes in overwhelming ways, sometimes in quiet ways; sometimes in the great events of life, sometimes in the midst of the thoroughly ordinary. Sometimes we experience God's presence when we most need God.

And sometimes when we most need God we do not experience God's presence with us.

“Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Of all the words of Jesus, these from the cross are for many Christians the most troubling. If ever there was anyone who, we assume, always felt the presence of God, surely it was Jesus himself. Was not Jesus God’s own Son? Is not Jesus the Incarnation, the humanization, of God’s own Self — the Word become flesh and living among us? And yet Jesus cries, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

It's not enough to point out that what Jesus says is in fact a quotation of the first verse of the 22nd Psalm — a psalm which verse by verse foreshadows and resonates with the events of the crucifixion — a psalm which begins as a cry of distress but concludes thirty verses later in a song of faith and praise (though we didn’t read it that far this morning): “My soul shall live for him; my descendants shall serve him; they shall come and make known … the saving deeds that he has done.” Doubtless Jesus, steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures as he was, even in the depths of his agony, knew what psalm he was beginning to quote, and how that psalm ends. And yet there's more than that; that's too easy an answer. We must not so cheaply deny or so piously explain away Jesus’ experience of the absence of God. “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Oh, if only I were a better person, if only I had more faith, if only I prayed more, if only I read the Bible more, if only I were holier, then I would feel God’s presence all the time, I would know God is with me, I wouldn’t feel so cold and lonely and empty. Well, perhaps so. Or Not. It is especially to the holy that God risks stepping back into the shadows. It is the holy ones who really experience the Dark Night of the Soul. It turns out that one such was Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who even while feeling God’s absence still shared God’s love faithfully.

God is never really absent, of course; but we know that by faith, not by evidence, and it doesn’t warm the chill very much when we don’t feel God's presence. But God is not Mr. Fixit rushing in to repair all our problems. God is not a control freak who makes everything turn out all right all the time. God is not a vending machine dispensing heavenly consolation for those with the right spiritual coins. Those who claim that God is always right there for them haven’t been to the cross yet.

“But this isn’t what we were seeking. This doesn’t fulfill our longing. This isn’t the God we wanted.”

Jesus cries out in the words of the 22nd Psalm; the words of the same psalm, verse 8, are thrown back in his face: “He trusted in the Lord; let him deliver him; let him rescue him, if he delights in him.” But God didn't rescue Jesus. God let Jesus die. Oh, God raised him from death on the third day, but first God let him die. Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?

I don’t really know why Jesus experienced abandonment on the cross. I can talk about it, but I don’t really understand it. I do know this: Jesus shows us — in his life, in his teaching, in his death — Jesus shows us who God really is. Or, perhaps better, in Jesus, in his life, in his teaching, in his death, and, yes, indeed, in his resurrection, but only after “in his death,” God reveals who God really is.

For remember this: Given that this is what it takes to reconcile a broken humanity to its Creator, God did not find somebody else to do the job. “Love does not send others to suffer in its place. Love comes itself.”1 Whatever else we may want to say about the relationship between the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth and the divinity of God, that much is fundamental. And so we may even say: in Jesus on the cross, God tastes the bitterness of his own absence. And that says something about who God is, too.

God's presence with us is not a matter of our feeling; nor is it a matter of our deserving. Being better or holier may make us more keenly aware of God's presence, but on the other hand it may make us more keenly aware of God's absence. Our relationship with God is not, in the end, a matter of feeling anyway. It's a matter of decision, of response to a call. God calls us to faith, to commitment to the service of an eternal cause, a heavenly kingdom. But this is a call to a faith which trusts even when we do not feel God's presence; a faith which seeks not to use God to make us feel good but which seeks to be used by God to make the world holy; a faith which says Yes when everything around us and even within us cries No; a faith which seeks not to escape death but which trusts and knows that only through death can we be raised to true life.

1 John Austin Baker, The Foolishness of God (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1970), pp. 407-8

Sermon -- 29 March 2009

2009-03-30T16:12:00.000-05:00

5TH IN LENT — 29 March 2009
St. Paul’s, Durant — 9:15 a.m.

Jer 31:31-34 Ps 51:1-13 Heb 5:5-10 John 12:20-33

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

The people of Jesus’ time, and for many generations before, had been waiting for deliverance. With great longing they yearned for the coming of the Messiah (the “Anointed One”), or The Prophet (like Moses, or Elijah returned), or the heavenly Son of Man. (The titles varied somewhat.) But they had their own ideas of how God ought to act, and what the Messiah, or Whoever, should do, and what deliverance and salvation meant. They assumed that they knew what the nature of reality was, and how the universe worked, and what they had a right to expect from God. Their ideas of deliverance were in terms of power, of glory in the sense of grandeur. They expected God to come and fix everything for them. They wanted the Messiah to come swooping in like Superman and make everything all right again. They wanted the Messiah to drive out the Roman occupation army and re-establish the kingdom of Israel like it had been in the good old days of David and Solomon. They thought that God’s Messiah would make them all righteous and prosperous and free, and so on and so on.
And how unlike all that Jesus is! “If you try to save your life you will lose it; you will only save your life if you lose it for my sake.” This saying recurs over and over in the Gospels—we heard it in Mark’s Gospel three Sundays ago—and it is right at the heart of Jesus’ teaching. Perhaps this above all is the scandal of Christ. And let’s be honest: If, upon reflection, in our heart of hearts, if we aren’t offended, scandalized, “tripped up” by Christ—at least sometimes—then we just aren’t paying serious attention. Jesus really means it when he says the first shall be last and the last first. In the Reign of God, everything really is (by our standards) topsy-turvy.

“Quit trying to accumulate things for yourselves,” Jesus says, “riches, or position, or security, or even honor, or even virtue. Stop trying to save your own lives! You can’t do it. If you want to live really, live fully, live eternally beginning right now, then you have to give your life away. Don’t try to run away from death—it is only through dying that you can begin to live. All those things in which you put your trust to find your security and happiness will betray you in the end and rob you of that which you seek.”

And that’s not what we were expecting! That isn’t what we had in mind at all! That’s an attack on everything we have ever held dear, all our traditional values! If these are God’s ways, they are strange indeed! Think about it! What an absurd Messiah! There he stands, not in Rome, the capital of the Empire, or in Alexandria, the Mediterranean world’s second city, but in the middle of Jerusalem, a backwater provincial not-much-more-than-a-county-seat-town, surrounded by a rag-tag mob of ne’er-do-wells who obviously have nothing better to do, proclaiming: “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
We thought we knew, in those days, how God ought to operate in God’s world. We still think we know how God ought to operate in the world. We think in terms like “merit” and “virtue” and “earning” and “deserving” and “worthiness” and “security” and “self-fulfillment” and “self-preservation.” We think that’s being Realistic. The scandal, the offense, of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that the Gospel claims that God does not operate in the world the way we think God ought to. The Gospel claims that what we assume is “realistic” isn’t realistic at all, isn’t real at all. God does not bring salvation and deliverance by power and the glory of grandeur, by lightning and thunder and armies of angels. God does not send us a king, as this world understands kings. God does not take us out of the world of pain and suffering and death—God leads us into pain and suffering and death, and through pain and suffering and death God brings us out into true and genuine life. God does not manipulate us, or compel us, or coerce us. God draws us—draws us by the divine love, draws us by the divine truth, draws us to the Cross.

And this is the mystery of the Cross, the mystery into which we enter more and more deeply as Holy Week approaches:

– The power and glory of God are known to us through suffering love;

– What our human lives are really all about is seen in the Crucified One;

– Only in letting go of everything can we really have anything at all;

– Love—unreserved, unconditional, unrestricted, unbounded love, love that holds back nothing, seeks nothing for itself, but gives all—this love is the most powerful reality, the only truly powerful reality, ultimately the only reality of all that is.

Only by being lifted up on the Cross does Jesus draw all of us to himself by his power and glory.

We heard Jeremiah speak today of a new covenant that God is making with us, written on our hearts. This new covenant is a covenant which calls us to die: to die to ourselves and our own ways, our self-assurance, our self-sufficiency, our false and illusory “realism,” our security, our “worthiness”—to die to all of this, so that we may be re-born, re-created, re-enlivened with the real life, the true life, the eternal life of the Crucified and Risen One.