28 April 2013 -- 5th Sunday of Easter

5^th Sunday of Easter — 28 April 2013

St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls – 9:15 am

Acts 11:1-18  |  Psalm 148  |  Revelation 21:1-6  |  John 13:31-35

"I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.”

Some preachers love to preach on the Book of Revelation.  They are not usually Episcopalians.  Other preachers never preach on the Book of Revelation.  There are lots of Episcopalians among them!  I don’t preach on the Book of Revelation very often myself!   But we’ve been hearing a few passages from Revelation in this Easter Season of Year C.  This is about the only time in three years that we read from Revelation at the Sunday Eucharist, and, I might note, we hear a rather narrow selection, mostly hymns of praise offered before the throne of God in heaven.  Which is fine, although as I expect many of you realize, that leaves out a whole lot of stuff, especially the violent and gory stuff.  Though we might keep in mind that the passages we do hear this Eastertide, and especially today, next Sunday, and the Sunday after, really are what this book is all about!  I don’t know whether others have talked about the Book of Revelation this season, but I thought I would say something about it!

A popular phrase these days—a devastatingly accusatory, condemnatory phrase—is “You just don’t get it!”  You young people – how many of you have ever thought in regard to your parents, and if you’re kind of sassy maybe even said out loud, “You just don’t get it!”  And parents – how many times have you told your kids, when they are resisting your parental wisdom, “You just don’t get it!”  The truth is, most of us, about a lot of things much of the time, and about a few things most of the time, “just don’t get it!”  High on the “just don’t get it” list, you will probably not be surprised to hear, is the Bible.  But we need to realize that those who “just don’t get” the Bible are not just “those other folks” of denominational traditions other than our own (I won’t name names!), but we also!  It doesn’t take a lot of study of Church history to realize that in regard to the Bible, much of the Church, throughout the centuries and around the world, “just didn’t get it.”  But that’s another very long sermon for another time.

The Book of the Revelation to John may well lead the whole Bible on the “just don’t get it” list.  And at this point perhaps you are saying to yourself, “Well, I guess I must be one of those who just don’t get it, because I have no idea what the Book of Revelation is all about!”  It’s okay, you are in good company!

Let’s admit that the Book of Revelation is hard for us.  In some respects it’s probably the hardest book in the Bible.  But actually, it isn’t so much that it’s hard (like a textbook in quantum physics is hard, especially if like me you don’t count physics and math among your strongest subjects) as that it’s alien.  It’s foreign to us.  (Actually, quantum physics is not only hard, it’s also alien!)  The rhetoric of the Revelation is very different from anything we normally encounter.  However, it was quite familiar to first-century Jews and to Jewish Christians and to the Gentile Christians who had a substantial exposure to the Old Testament and other Jewish religious literature.  The Book of Revelation is steeped in Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, Daniel, and all that gang, as well as a number of late second-temple Jewish writings that the rabbis excluded from the canonical Tanakh.  If we were Christians, particularly Jewish Christians, in Asia Minor in the last decade of the first century, John’s Revelation would probably be fairly clear to us.  But we aren’t, and so it isn’t.  The problem is not so much the text itself, but the fact that we are so far removed from its cultural context, by which I mean both its literary genre and its social and political historical setting. 

The Book of Revelation is an account of visionary experience, akin to the language of dreams.  Thus we are in a realm of highly symbolic discourse.  Part of our difficulty with this is that we are not familiar with the apocalyptic symbol system which the Revelation and other writings of this genre take for granted.  Another part of our difficulty is that our post-enlightenment, rationalist, technological, left-brained culture tends to have problems with symbolism or metaphor of any sort.  We just don’t get it. 

But in any case, we need to understand that the symbolics of the Revelation are not cold hard ciphers, where this translates to this and that translates to that, and once you figure out the key the meaning is unambiguous.  On the contrary, the symbolic imagery is intended to be evocative, to call the reader or hearer into a dialogue with the text at an imaginative, creative, poetic level where mood is more important than concept, the affective more than the cognitive, and meaning is multivalent, multi-layered.  I am reminded somewhat of dream sequences in movies, which give important insights into what’s going on in the character development or the plot of the drama, but which are not meant to depict literal reality.  (An example that comes to mind is the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries, about an old professor reflecting back on this life.  I first saw it when I was a college student, pretty much into my head, and I didn’t get it at all.  Thirty years later I found the film a much more profoundly moving experience, and even more so two days ago when I watched it yet again.)  (While I was at it, thinking about the Book of Revelation and Ingmar Bergman, I also watched The Seventh Seal again, which explicitly draws on Revelation.  But that’s another path that I won’t go down right now!)  What I am suggesting is that the Revelation to John is the New Testament’s great final dream sequence. 

The other thing to keep in mind is what’s going on in the lives of these Christians in Asia Minor at the end of the first century of the Christian era.  What the Revelation is finally about is faith in the ultimate victory of the Rule of God despite the present tribulations and persecutions which the Christian community is suffering.  Some of the visionary imagery about the struggle against the godless Roman Empire is pretty wild and woolly stuff.   A lot of the imagery about pagan empires reflects similar concerns from about 250 years earlier in the Book of Daniel.  But the final assurance is that God, and God’s Son and Messiah the Lamb – will in the end triumph.  So hang on!  “The one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’”

And this is all still true.  This is all still valid for us.  The big difference, I think, is that we see the world – still God’s world, but God’s world as we see it and live in it – in a very different way, and with very different imagery.  For most Christians throughout history, and for many people still today, the world we live in was thought to be only a few thousand years old.  And thus the idea of this world coming to its final conclusion sometime soon was not all that far out.  And I suppose we do have to grant the possibility that God could end the world this afternoon.  But it does seem to me that this would be out of character for the God we have come to know.  God has been about the creation and sustaining of this universe for, at last count, 13.8-and-change billion years, which leads me to suspect that God works on a very long timeline!  So for us, to think and talk about the ultimate destiny of the world requires new and different imagery, which I’m not sure we have yet conceived. 

But the basic point of all this, and of the Book of the Revelation to John, is still true.  Ultimately the Rule of God will triumph, and we will share in that victory.  We do not know, we cannot know, exactly or even approximately what the new heaven and new earth will be like, and the question of “when” is effectively off the table.  But we are called to believe and trust that in the end God will indeed make all things new.

7 April 2013 -- 2nd of Easter

2ND SUNDAY OF EASTER  — 7 April 2013
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls – 9:15 am

Acts 5:27-32  |  Psalm 150  |  Revelation 1:4-8  |  John 20:19-31

“Have you believed because you have seen me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

   On this the second Sunday of Easter – does anyone else remember when we used to call it “Low Sunday,” allegedly because after the huge crowds in church on Easter Day, today got a much more modest attendance.  I’m glad to see that doesn’t apply to you in this parish!  Actually, it probably reflects the fact that the Sunday of the Resurrection was considered a ‘high holy day,” in comparison to which today, a week later, is relatively lower.  Don’t take notes.  It’s quite all right to completely forget this whole point.

   Anyway, on this the second Sunday of Easter in the Church –not only the Catholic tradition in the West but also the Orthodox Churches in the East – the Gospel reading every year has for a very very long time been the narrative of the encounter of St. Thomas with the risen Jesus.  Here’s where we get the whole bit about “doubting Thomas.”  I assume you have heard many many sermons that argue that this is not altogether fair to poor St. Thomas.  I have certainly preached them!  And sometimes the point has been that doubt, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing.  Which is true.

   Have you all seen the TV commercial sponsored by one of the cellphone companies, in which a man wearing a red-and-black-checked lumberjack shirt – I have one just like it -- and his apparently expectant wife – come into the cellphone store and he announces that he’ll believe anything – Bigfoot, ghosts, mermaids and mermen – but he won’t believe that this company has a good deal on cellphones.  His wife observes that the cellphone company should write a joke book.  Well, fortunately, St. Thomas was not anything like that guy.

   He was not the only one who was doubtful when told that Jesus had risen.  St. Matthew tells us that when the disciples met the risen Jesus in Galilee, “some doubted.”  [Mt 28:17]  In the well-known and well-beloved story about Cleopas and his companion – I suggest it’s his wife Mary – meeting but not recognizing the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus, they say that they had heard the story that Jesus’ tomb had been found empty, but they doubted. [Luke 24:22-24] After all, St. John’s Gospel says that Mary the wife of Cleopas was one of the women standing near the cross of Jesus.  She had seen Jesus die!  They didn’t know what this empty tomb business was all about, but they doubted.  So let’s give poor St. Thomas a break!  Lots of reasons for doubt going around.  People in the first century knew just as well as we do that dead people do not rise from their graves.  (Though north of the Wall in Westeros, all bets are off.)

   Incidentally, the discovery of the empty tomb does not in itself prove the resurrection of Jesus.  I think there are all sorts of reasons – historical, scriptural, theological, spiritual – for concluding that the gospel stories are basically sound and that the tomb was indeed found empty on Sunday morning, but that is important not so much for proving that the resurrection happened as for clarifying what happened.  We do need to understand that the resurrection of Jesus was not simply the resuscitation of his corpse, “back to life.”  The resurrection was not, and is not, “back.”  According to the gospels, the daughter of Jairus, and the son of the widow of Nain, and Lazarus were resuscitated.  What God did with Jesus was, is, at a wholly different order of reality. 

   (Don’t ask me about the Shroud of Turin.  I’m not going there.)

   And I think we can see that in the gospel story of St. Thomas today.  Note that the Gospel says that both on that first Sunday, and then a week later on this second Sunday, the doors were locked; but “Jesus came and stood among them.”  [John 20:19,26]  It does not say that Jesus walked through walls!

   (I have this immature and very silly image in my mind of the risen Jesus standing outside the door, wondering to himself, “Should I knock?  Or should I just walk through?”)

   (Another reflection, I hope not quite as immature and silly:  The other disciples are telling Thomas that they’ve seen the risen Lord.  Thomas says, “No!  I won’t buy that!  Bad enough that our hopes have been so cruelly dashed, I can’t risk the pain of some wild hoax!  Not unless I can touch his wounds!”  And then, in the event, does Thomas examine Jesus’ wrists and say, “Ooh!  Big nails they used!”  and poking Jesus in the side comment, “Ow!  That’s got to have hurt!”?  No!  In the event Thomas does not touch Jesus’ wounds, he falls and cries, “My Lord and my God!”  That, by the way, is not a statement of systematic Christological theology, although it may be relevant to that.  It’s a cry of faith and trust.  Thomas recognizes what has happened in that upper room:  at least for that moment and in that place, in the words of the Revelation and of Mr. Handel, “The kingdom of this world is become the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.”  [Rev. 11:15])

   Where is the risen Jesus between his appearances to his disciples?  A silly question, probably, but I suspect it has occurred to most of us at one time or another.  Hanging out inconspicuously in that little coffee shop across from the Pool of Siloam, maybe?  I don’t think so!  No, despite how the gospel writers, and especially St. Luke, address it narratively, the resurrection and the ascension are aspects of the same reality.  The risen Jesus is in heaven, which is to say with the Father, which is to say in the headquarters of the Kingdom of God.  Heaven, of course, is not “up there.”  It is not anywhere in this created universe; it is the greater reality within which this whole created universe has its present existence and its ultimate goal.  “My kingdom,” Jesus says, “is not of this world.”  It is the ultimate beyond, which in various ways and at various times breaks into our present world.  The signal instances of this breaking in from the ultimate beyond are, I think, the Incarnation and the Resurrection (which themselves may be aspects of the same reality). 

   We need to understand, in our heads and in our lives, that all this stuff we are celebrating, especially at this season, is not about “religion.”  Or even about “spirituality.”  (“I’m not religious, but I am spiritual.”  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.  How can I help?”)  “Religion” and “spirituality” can all too often be seen as just one of life’s compartments, just one pigeonhole among other pigeonholes in our desk:  job, family, recreation, politics, hobbies, religion, whatever, often isolated and not always related to each other.  The Gospel, the good news, which has been proclaimed to us and which we are to share with the world, is about God’s ultimate rule over the whole of existence, and how this rule, this “Kingdom” in human terms, has appeared and been especially enacted in our world by the creator God enfleshed in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of the Messiah Jesus of Nazareth.

24 March 2013 -- Palm Sunday

PALM SUNDAY — 24 March 2013
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls – 9:15 am

Luke 19:28-40  |  Psalm 118:1-2,19-29
Isaiah 50:4-9a  |  Psalm 31:9-16  |  Philippians 2:5-11  |  Luke 22:39-23:49

One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah?  Save yourself and us!”  But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?  And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.”  Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”  He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

   The story of the penitent thief is unique to St. Luke’s Gospel.  The other three Gospels do not mention it, although they do all record that Jesus was crucified with two other men.  That all four Gospels mention this is a pretty clear indication that the triple crucifixion at Golgotha that day comes from very early tradition, i.e., there’s no reason to think it didn’t actually happen that way.  But only St. Luke tells of the penitent thief.  Is it possible that Luke knew something, had access to a story, which the other evangelists did not?  Sure.  Is that likely?  Well….  Luke, like the other three evangelists, and also like Hellenistic historians generally, is certainly willing to tell a story to make a theological point.  So what’s up with this story?

   First of all, in this story, we have over the ages easily slipped into thinking that this is about a penitent thief (for whom we invented the name “Dismas” along about the fourth century) and his colleague, an impenitent thief.  Well, that’s not what the Gospel says, and certainly not what it means.  These two guys may well have been thieves, but that’s really incidental.  They weren’t being crucified for mere thievery.  The Romans couldn’t be bothered with petty crimes.  They would have left that up to the local Jewish authorities, who would indeed have dealt with them. Crucifixion was the penalty for political offenses, and was reserved – to the extent that the Romans were ever “reserved” about crucifying people – for major threats to the Pax Romanum when the Romans wanted to make a public point.  So it’s probably safe to assume that these two guys were anti-Roman revolutionaries.  Today we might call them terrorists.

   Matthew and Mark call them by a word that today we often translate as “bandit” [lêistês], although we should understand that as having clear political overtones.  Luke uses a simple Greek word [kakourgos] that means literally “evil-doer,” and today’s translation as “criminal” isn’t far off.  (St. John just calls them “the other two guys.”)  Now here’s a pure speculation, but maybe I’m right:  A little earlier in St. Mark’s version of the story, Mark writes, “Now a man called Barabbas was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection.”  Barabbas, of course, was released by Pilate at the instigation of the high priests’ claque, but it may be that the other rebels with him may have been these two guys who were now being crucified together with Jesus.  This leaves us with the picture of three Jewish insurgents being marched out to Golgotha for crucifixion, except that as a substitute for their leader Barabbas, instead we see the prophet Jesus of Nazareth.  That may be worth some meditation.

   Remember that these two guys aren’t just crooks.  If C-4 had been invented in those days, one can well imagine them strapping some around their waists and walking into the Roman barracks in the Antonia fortress.  But as it was, whatever they did, they got caught at it.  And I think the only thing they were really sorry about was that they got caught.  These two saw themselves as patriots, as Jewish freedom fighters.  Already full of years of anger about the oppression of their people, they are now enraged by their own failure.  Presumably they knew, or at least had some vague idea, of who this Jesus of Nazareth was.  They may even have hoped that he would be one of them, that if he was indeed the Messiah he would lead a popular uprising to restore the independence of Israel.  But obviously not.  “So, ‘Messiah,’ if that’s who say you are, wouldn’t now be a good time to get on with it, and save us in the process!”

   But, says St. Luke, the second guy has a deeper perception.  

   (Please forgive me for a brief digression here:  Luke is writing, probably, towards the end of the first century, well after the fall of Jerusalem to the Roman legions in 70.  He is also writing, probably, to a Gentile or predominantly Gentile Christian readership, likely in Greece or maybe even in Rome (including his dedicatee Theophilus).  The Jewish war of independence is many years past.  The Jews lost.  The Romans won.  Get over it.  Many of the political dimensions of the proclamation of the Kingdom of God that were still live issues when St. Mark’s Gospel was being written are now dead embers best not stirred up.  Therefore the two insurrectionists crucified with Jesus are now depoliticized as just “criminals,” “malefactors,” "evildoers," as indeed also is Barabbas in a brief earlier reference.  We might keep that in mind as we reflect on the man we call the “penitent thief.”  End of digression.)

   “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?  And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.”  Thus says the second guy.  But let’s consider.  In the event, “fearing God’ is not really likely to have been at issue.  These guys ended up on Roman crosses precisely because they “feared God,” or at least that’s what they thought they were doing.  Their hero was Judas Maccabeus, after all.  They didn’t think their condemnation was at all just, nor did they deserve it.  They just had the bad luck to have been caught by the Romans.  The worst-case scenario for them would have been that God had abandoned them; they too like Jesus could have quoted the opening verse of Psalm 22.  “This man has done nothing wrong”?  According to whom?  In Luke’s account, after Jesus dies the Roman centurion says, “Certainly this man was innocent.”  No he wasn’t!  The sign over his head said “The King of the Jews,” and that was treason, and then some:  Jesus in fact is the King of the World, and Caesar wasn’t having any of that!  In St. Mark’s earlier version, you may remember, the centurion says, “Truly this man was God’s Son!”  (Or as John Wayne put it, “Truly this man was the Son o’ God!”)  That was not so much a Christological statement as it was the recognition that after all, this Jesus is Lord, and therefore Caesar isn’t.  A significantly gutsy remark in the mouth of a Roman centurion, even John Wayne!  But within a Roman context, Luke can’t exactly put it that way.  He has to appeal to the Roman sense of justice (never mind that “Roman justice” is part of the problem!).  But I think Luke hints at it pretty broadly when he has the second insurgent say.  “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”  He’s not, I think, being ironic.  This fellow actually does repent.  But his confession is not so much “I’ve been a bad guy,” but “I’ve been wrong about the Kingdom of God.  We thought we could restore God’s Kingdom to Israel by violence, but that was a huge mistake.  Now I finally see who God’s Anointed One really is – the one who brings good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, God’s justice to the oppressed.  [Luke 4:18-19; Isaiah 61:1-2]  I finally get it about your true Kingdom; Jesus, remember me when it comes!”  And Jesus replies, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  

   By the way, I don’t think Jesus means, “I’m going to take you to Heaven with me in a few minutes when we die.”  “Paradise” is a Greek (originally a Persian) word for “garden,” God’s garden, where God’s faithful people await the fullness of the Kingdom in the resurrection.  It seems to me that what Jesus is getting at here is to assure his fellow, “God’s Kingdom which I have proclaimed and enacted, and even in this very moment am proclaiming and enacting – this Kingdom is not just yet to come sometime in the future, but in an important sense is coming and is here right now, and you are with me beginning here and now sharing in and awaiting the fullness of the victory of this Kingdom, for which you have longed so fervently if not so wisely.”

   Many years ago, a colleague and friend of mine made this statement about Palm Sunday, and Holy Week, and it has always stuck with me: “It begins with a defeat that looks for all the world like a victory, [and] moves on to a victory that appears to everyone to be a defeat.”  St. Luke understood what was defeat and what was victory, and he shares this with us in the Palm Gospel and the Passion Gospel today.
 

24 February 2013 -- 2nd Sunday in Lent

2ND SUNDAY IN LENT — 24 February 2013
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls — 9:15 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 these army veterans 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, as it were a colony of Rome.

   Well, now, that was a fascinating excursus into ancient history!  (And now let’s move out of Sheldon Cooper mode…)  I think this underlies Paul’s remark to the Philippian Christians, “But our citizenship is in heaven.”  Now for the people of Philippi, “Roman 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.)  And we might note that it was not the Emperor’s intention in granting Roman citizenship to the veterans settled in Philippi that they should ever retire back to Rome – he really did not want them to do that! – but to bring Roman culture to northern Greece as Roman colonists.

   But Paul, who had founded the church at Philippi, is now reminding them, “our true citizenship is not from Rome but in heaven, and the savior whose visitation we await is not the Emperor [whose titles routinely included ‘Savior’ and ‘Lord’], but the true Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”  (We might recall that to say “Jesus is Lord” was not just a pious sentiment, it was treason.)  Our real identity, political or otherwise, is not defined from within this world, but is defined from beyond the limits of the merely human.  This present world is not our ultimate home, and we must beware lest we define ourselves too completely by it.  But we are here now, and we must take seriously our vocation and mandate to be colonists in this world – even subversive colonists – here and now of the life of the Kingdom of God from which we hold our true citizenship.  

   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, as it turned out 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 but to God’s world.  In this 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 often about 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 a deeper reality to proclaim to this world.  If this 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 and to be colonists for God’s Kingdom?  Or are we Jerusalem?

   (These are the only options.)

10 February 2013 - Last Epiphany

LAST AFTER EPIPHANY — 10 February 2013
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls – 9:15 am

Exodus 34:29-35  |  Psalm 99  |  2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2  |  Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a]

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

   If you’re not already aware, and I’m sure most of you are, a reminder that for the last generation or so the Church has concluded the season following the Epiphany on the Sunday before Lent begins by reading in the Gospel the account of what we call the Transfiguration of Christ.  (We rotate through the three synoptic Gospels every three years; this year it’s the version from St. Luke.  St. Luke’s account is also used every year on August 6, when we celebrate the Transfiguration as a major Holy Day.)  Some of us recall further back than a generation, when we used to lead into Lent by observing three Sundays yclept Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima.  (Don’t ask.)

   In the Epiphany season we have been reflecting on various modes of the Manifestation of Christ – to the gentile Wise Men, at his Baptism, to the wedding guests at Cana – and we conclude with this one to Peter, James, and John, following which Jesus turns his face to Jerusalem, a journey that will take him to the Cross.  Appropriate as we move toward Lent.

   Actually, by strange coincidence, I was here on this Sunday three years ago, when we read this Gospel from Luke, and I preached on this same text, and I started from a point where I am going to start again today, although today I think I will then go in a somewhat different direction.  Luke of course got this story from St. Mark, as also does St. Matthew, but Luke adds a line, which I think is not really a new thought but just makes more explicit what was already implicit in Mark’s story, in which Moses and Elijah are seen talking with Jesus; and then Luke adds:  “They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.”  “Speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.”  Well, yes, that’s a reasonable enough translation, except that it kind of misses the point that I think Luke is trying to make.  In the Greek text they are speaking of Jesus’ exodus.  His Exodus.  And if that word rings a bell, maybe it’s because Luke is banging on it with a clapper!  It sure rang a bell for the first Christian communities, Jewish-Christian communities initially,  that heard and read it.

   “Exodus” is a loaded term.  The word itself literally means “the way out,” ex odos, “the going-out,” but it’s not very widely used in classical Greek and despite what the lexicons say, it doesn’t really have a generalized use in the New Testament either.  What it does mean in the context of the Greek scriptures is “The Exodus” of the People of Israel from slavery in Egypt.

   The early story of Israel begins of course with the patriarch Abraham, but the book of Genesis is basically a family saga.  The history of the Israelite nation begins in Egypt with their liberation from slavery under the leadership of Moses, with the reception of God’s Law at Sinai, and their entry into the Promised Land across the Jordan.  But, as the question goes, “So how did that work out for you?” and the honest answer is, “Not very well.”  There was something of a resurgence under King David, a Golden Age which gleamed more brightly in retrospect than in the events themselves.  Under David’s son Solomon, who is remembered for his wisdom as a denial of the historical fact that he was actually a fool, the nation of Israel began to fall apart, until finally there was a new enslavement, this time in Babylonia to the east.  The “anointed one” (the Messiah) who liberated Israel (more or less) this time was Cyrus, the King of Persia (of all people!).  Persian domination was replaced by the empire of Alexander, a Macedonian Greek, which then broke up and left Israel to be dominated in turn by the Ptolemaic Greek subempire in Egypt and then the Seleucid Greek subempire in Syria.  The next liberation came under Judah the Hammer, Judas Maccabeus, who led a successful war of independence and gave his people the feast of Hanukkah.  But once again, “How did that work out for you?”  And a century later, the Romans decided they needed a better buffer against the Parthian Empire to the east, and they took over Israel militarily.  Initially the Romans ruled through a puppet king named Herod, known as Herod the Great especially by himself, but later through a variety of other kinglets, tetrarchs, and direct Roman prefects and procurators.  The Jews didn’t like this very much, and the Romans didn’t like it that the Jews didn’t like it, and so the Romans finally lost patience and shut the whole nation down.

   So that’s the backstory (and a bit of the frontstory) of what’s happening on the mountain of the Transfiguration in the Gospel today.  Jesus, in consultation with Moses and Elijah (the two great figures of Israelite history), is preparing to accomplish a new Exodus, a new Passover, at Jerusalem.  They appear in glory, what the Hebrew Scriptures call the shekinah, the Presence of the Lord God.  For Israel the Presence of the Lord was preeminently in the Temple in Jerusalem, where heaven and earth touch.  Yet we are now being shown that the Presence of the Lord is preeminently in Jesus.  One of the points Jesus will make after his procession into Jerusalem is to imply not too subtly that the Temple is now no longer the preeminent place of God’s presence, and indeed its days are numbered, as indeed they were.  (What Jesus is doing is not “cleansing the Temple” but proclaiming God’s judgment on the Temple.)    He himself is God’s Presence, he is Immanu-El, God with us.  And at Jerusalem he will indeed accomplish a new Exodus, a whole new liberation of the renewed People of God, far beyond what Moses did, or David, (or even Cyrus of all people!) or Judah the Maccabee.

   Because when Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God, he meant something very different from all those past attempts at liberation.  He did not mean a kingdom established by political or military power, winning victory by violence, as all these past attempts had been.  (And once more:  “How did that work out for you?”)  That was what many people who heard Jesus hoped he meant – apparently including Judas Iscariot, who when he realized that that wasn’t what Jesus was up to, he betrayed him.  Presumably the Jewish religious leaders thought and feared that Jesus intended a political revolution, and certainly that’s why the Roman prefect Pilate had him crucified.  But many claiming to be followers of Jesus thought, and even today still think, that the Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed and enacted had to do not with this world but with some otherworldly realm in the sweet by and by.  But very little that Jesus said has anything much to do with the sweet by and by.  Heaven is where God reigns, but God is not up in the sky, off in the future somewhere.  It was Jesus’ vocation to launch God’s sovereign rule on earth, but to win the victory in this new Exodus not with the power of violence but with the power of justice, of which the flip side is love.  And he does this as now God’s presence in the world.  His presence in his Body.   And his Body is …

27 January 2013 -- 3rd Sunday after Epiphany

3RD EPIPHANY — 27 January 2013
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls – 9:15 am

[Not preached, due to hazardous weather conditions that cancelled the service.  I  reserve the right to resurrect this sermon on this Sunday in 2016!]

Nehemiah 8:1-3,5-6,8-10  |  Psalm 19  |  1 Corinthians 12:12-31a  |  Luke 4:14-21

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. [1 Corinthians 12:27]

  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 at one time or another.  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 four?  (God knows there are times when four hands would come in handy!)  Why don’t we have eyes in the back of our heads?  (That might have a certain usefulness too, especially for parents!)  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.  (A few generations ago it was about sixteen; these days it’s closer to thirty!)  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 (unless, of course, you are the queen bee!).  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 recently we might think of “The Observers” on Fringe.  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” were simply “the masses.”  It’s not surprising that it was primarily the working people themselves who brought about the demise of Marxism, especially in Eastern Europe.  But there were also significant collectivist elements in Nazism, 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.  Extreme forms of libertarianism, a la Ayn Rand, would  be examples.

  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.  (My seminary professor told us that, and I’ve always remembered it.  So should you!  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.  We might note that this is part of what is involved in our being created in the image of God, the Triune God.

  And so our life in the Church is corporate; 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 Jesus 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.
 

6 January 2013 - The Epiphany

THE EPIPHANY — 6 January 2013
St. Luke’s, Cedar Falls – 9:15 am

Isaiah 60:1-6  |  Psalm 72:1-7,10-14  |  Ephesians 3:1-12  |  Matthew 2:1-12

“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.”

   When I was a child, in the Christmas decorations in our house we made a Big Deal of the fact that the Wise Men did not show up at the manger until the Epiphany, the twelfth day after Christmas Day.  We still follow that in our home today, at least in some of our crèches.  We have a magnetic nativity set on the door of the kitchen refrigerator, and until today the wise men were around the corner on the side panel, still traversing afar.  Down at Trinity in Iowa City the other day, the wise men were still over on the window sills along the east aisle, although I assume that as of this morning they’ve gotten to the crèche in front of the altar.  I see you all follow the same custom.  My mother would have been pleased.

   Of course, if we were actually paying attention to the Gospel reading this morning – one which we have heard and read many many times – we know that the Wise Men did not show up at the manger at all.  They came to Joseph’s house, where in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus had presumably been born.

   And so I hope we have at some time noticed that for hundreds and hundreds of years we have relentlessly ignored the blatantly obvious fact that if we read the accounts of the birth of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel and in Luke’s Gospel, we see that there are obviously some major historical problems.  The stories don’t match up, and that’s only the start!  A lot has been written about this, including some work by very fine and faithful New Testament scholars, and wallowing around in the back of my mind is a paper of my own, which still hasn’t made it through my fingers to the keyboard and into a computer file.  One of these years.  I’ll let you know.  But I’m going to bracket all that and set it aside for right now, because that misses the point of St. Matthew’s story as well as the point of St. Luke’s quite different story.  (And clearly neither Matthew nor Luke knew each other’s stories.)  Suffice it for now to say that wondering about exactly what kind of astronomical phenomenon the Wise Men observed is a lot like wondering at just what mileage point on the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho the Good Samaritan found the man who had been beaten and robbed by bandits.  Not what the story is about! 

   And this story is so rich and wonderful, whatever its relation to what we might in our narrow-mindedness call “historical facts.”  (The story is historical, because it gives a true insight into a real historical situation; but to blither on down that road is for another time.)  The Christian community quickly built up images and legends that go beyond what is actually recounted in the Gospel story.  The wise men – magoi in Greek, in Anglicized Latin magi, by which Matthew presumably meant wizards or astrologers – quickly became kings in Christian tradition, for reasons that should be obvious to us today, starting off as we did with Isaiah 60:  “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn …. They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.”  And then we went on to Psalm 72:  “The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall pay tribute, and the kings of Arabia and Saba offer gifts.  All kings shall bow down before him, and all the nations do him service.”  Were these and similar verses from the Hebrew Scriptures  in the back of Matthew’s mind as he was writing?  Surely so!   As was Balaam’s oracle in the book of Numbers [24:17]:  “A star shall come forth out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel.”  (Thus any astronomical identification of the star of Bethlehem misses the point.)  In the story the wise men come seeking “the King of the Jews”; it’s worth noting and meditating upon that the only other time in the Gospels that Jesus is referred to by the title “the King of the Jews” is by Pilate and the Roman soldiers, mockingly,  at his crucifixion.  “The King of the Jews” was actually Herod’s title, one that had been given him by the Romans.

   So today wise men from the East come to worship the Messiah at his birth.  Foreigners, we note; but also we note, not Romans from the West.  They were from beyond the Empire.   They are the world.  The Epiphany is the celebration of the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, as the Prayer Book calls it, obscurely on page 31.  But this means that the Epiphany is not just the Adoration of the Magi, as every Renaissance artist worth his salt painted, but the taking of the Good News of Jesus to all the world.  Matthew himself makes this clear as he moves from the beginning of his Gospel with the visit of the magi to the conclusion of his story with Jesus’ words:  “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” [28:19]. 

   It is not enough that we worship, though that is where we start, as we remember especially today, for only from worship can true and faithful mission come.  We are called as the Body of Christ not only to adore our Lord, but to follow him, to let it be his life that lives in us, to accept his work as our work.  We are called not just to give Jesus presents, but to give him ourselves, that he may form us, change us, renew us, use us for his work of reconciling the world in love to God.  We come with the magi to worship him; but unlike the magi, it is not for us just to go home quietly by another road.  For us, for us who are called to be the truly wise men and women, it is to go out into the world and to be ourselves the epiphany, the showing-forth of Christ to the world.  The Feast of the Epiphany is not the end of the celebration of the Incarnation of God in Christ, but only the beginning.