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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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
