Sermon -- 30 April 2006

3 of Easter—30 April 2006
Trinity, Iowa City — 8:45
RCL: Acts 3:12-19 Ps 4 Luke 24:36b-48

In their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering. [Luke 24:41]

I remember when I was in Sunday School (yes, they had Sunday School when I was a boy!) they would upon occasion show us movies of Bible stories. (How many of you may remember before there were TiVOs or DVRs, or even VCRs? and we actually rented films and threaded them into projectors and set up a screen and turned the lights out! Remember that? Very retro! Very primitive! But in those days we thought it was a big deal!) These movies we saw in Sunday School were as I recall produced by a company aptly named Cathedral Films, and they were in black and white, and kind of low-budget, but all things considered they really weren’t too bad. (I liked them better than Cecil B. DeMille’s very high budget The Ten Commandments, which I think is perfectly dreadful. Or the more recent version they showed during Holy Week, which was much less pretentious than Charlton Heston and much more boring.)

I remember one particular episode from those old films of the life of Jesus, which must have been based on today’s Gospel, or maybe last Sunday’s, where the disciples were all gathered in the upper room after the resurrection, and the door was shut and locked, and the camera dollied in on the door, and all of a sudden the risen Jesus sort of materialized there in front of the door. It was all very impressive, and the disciples were properly awestruck. It was kind of like Marley’s Ghost stepping into Scrooge’s bedchamber.

What’s going on here, in these Gospel accounts?

The disciples have for some time—probably several years, at least some of them—been living fairly continually in close personal fellowship with Jesus of Nazareth. They have committed themselves—their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor (to borrow a later phrase)—to the cause of the Reign of God as Jesus has been proclaiming it. Jesus has become for them not only master and teacher, but dear friend in the deepest sense. Through their relationship with Jesus they have, in a way they never have before, known life, known love, known reality, known themselves, known God. They have come to realize—with that utter certainty that goes far beyond any clever proof written in a book, that utter certainty that comes out of the personal experience of living the reality over a long time—they have come to realize that their own very lives and the life of the world itself hangs upon this man, their friend and leader, Jesus of Nazareth, and what he is saying and doing.

And now they have seen Jesus come to a catastrophic end, while they themselves abandoned him out of panic and fear for their own skins. They have suffered the utter emptiness and desolation of those who have staked everything—not only their lives but even more precious, all their hopes and dreams and love—and they have lost. They are in chaos. The foundations of reality itself are crumbling. Either they are utterly insane, or the world is. There is no sense, no reason, no justice, anywhere; the words no longer have meaning; there is no meaning. “The stars are black and cold, as [they] stare into the void of a world that cannot hold.”

And then Jesus comes among them and says—as he has said so many times to them before: “Peace be with you.” And, says St. Luke, “they disbelieved for joy.” Not, they disbelieved for lack of convincing evidence. Not, they disbelieved in the absence of empirical verification. Not, they disbelieved because everybody knows that it’s a proven scientific fact that dead men don’t just saunter in, pick up a fish-stick, and say, “Peace!” They disbelieved for joy.

Once again, God was—they thought—too good to be true. This can’t be—it’s too much to hope for—I don’t deserve this—I’m just not worth it.

We can be faithless, and we are faithless, in many ways throughout our lives. But isn’t it true that at least one of the ways we are faithless, and thus cut ourselves off from the power of being really alive, is that we really just won’t believe that God cares that much about us? God’s love and grace are too good to be true—too much to hope for—not for me!—I don’t deserve it—I’m just not worth it!

“Well,” says Jesus, “I don’t know about that. Worth it by whose standards? I’m sure if you want to stay all hung up in preoccupation with your own worthiness and what you deserve, that you’ll manage to find some very good reasons to judge yourself unworthy and undeserving. Some folks do seem to get their religious jollies out of wallowing in their own unworthiness. As for me,” Jesus says, “I’m not really into that. Yes, your silliness, your stubbornness, your selfishness, your wickedness, they all pain me very much—because by hanging onto these things you are destroying yourself, and I love you and I don’t want you to destroy yourself. But ‘not worth it’?” Jesus says. “Ah, you are worth it to me!—and who can say me nay over who is or is not ‘worth it’? Whose world is this, anyway? Yes, you are worth it, you are infinitely worth it, I proclaim and decree that you are worth it. I understand that you should disbelieve for joy. Be filled with joy, and believe! It is I! I am no ghost! All that you staked on me—your hopes, your dreams, your love, your life—you haven’t lost at all! No, no, you’ve won! You’ve won for ever! For I love you,” Jesus says, “and that means that for you, nothing is ever too good to be true!”

© 2006 William S. J. Moorhead

Sermon -- 26 March 2006

4th Sunday in Lent — 26 March 2006
Trinity, Iowa City — 8:45 a.m.
RCL: [Num 21:4-9] Ps 107:1-3,17-22 Eph 2:1-10 John 3:14-21

And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.

There are certain classic forms for that important literary genre, the joke. For instance, there are the jokes that begin, “A guy walks into a bar…” Or sometimes it’s a panda that walks into the bar. Or maybe René Descartes.

Another classic form is the one that begins, “A man dies and goes to heaven, and St. Peter (or Jesus, or God) meets him at the pearly gates and says to him, ‘What have you done that entitles you to be admitted here?’” (Have I told you the one about the Baptist preacher and his wife, and the Lutheran pastor and his wife, and the Episcopal priest and his wife, who were all killed in an automobile accident together, and appeared at the pearly gates…?)

Well, anyway, this classic joke form depend upon a widely shared and commonly understood scenario of what our final judgment will be like. And in this scenario we appear before the divine tribunal, and our file is pulled and scrutinized, and all the wrong things we have done and right things we have failed to do are added up, and God says, “Hmmmm,” and depending on the tone of that “Hmmmm” we either get in or we don’t, we are either saved or damned. It’s a model rather like a human courtroom. Except that in a human courtroom we presumably have a defense attorney and can plead extenuating circumstances or something like that. But in our image of the last judgment — possibly influenced directly or indirectly by Michelangelo —we are guilty until proven innocent, the charges are inscrutable, and the sentence unappealable. It’s actually less like a court of law and more like an IRS audit.

Well, I don’t think the image of judgment in the Gospel is like that at all. St. John’s Gospel actually says quite a lot about judgment, and takes it very seriously, and so should we. I think it’s a real mistake to make a modernist sentimentalist assumption that God is a real weenie when it comes to judgment. But judgment is not the imposition upon us of a sentence by someone else (even by God) —where the issue might arise in our minds as to whether we were being dealt with fairly, where we might claim, “Yes, but, you don’t really understand!” On the contrary, judgment is the utterly clear, utterly transparent, utterly truthful disclosure and revelation of who we really are, what we have really made of ourselves. It really isn’t a matter of balancing our sins against what good we have done — in any case we are not saved by the good deeds we have done. What we have done matters, but it matters because what we do is what makes us who we are.

And so the Gospel today:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”

This is the judgment: face to face with the source and ground of the being of all that is, and seeing that That One is by very nature totally self-giving Love, who indeed so loves us that he came among us as one of us and shared our condition to its bitterest dregs in order to raise us to his condition in its utter glory — face to face with That Love, have we become persons who go to be embraced by That Love, or have we become persons who withdraw into our own sorry selves? (This is what “believing in the name of the only Son of God” is about — not subscribing to doctrinal propositions about Jesus, however important those may be in their place, but turning to the embracing arms of the Divine Love.) In the presence of the Light of the World, do we rejoice in that Light’s illumination, or do we flee to hide in the shadows? This is the judgment.

An image of judgment that I find appealing, in the genre of the “a man dies and goes to heaven” joke form (yes, I suppose I’m in danger of being judgmental myself here, except that I really don’t claim to know the outcome to this scenario and I really do believe in the power of God’s grace): Fred Phelps dies and goes to heaven (you remember ol’ Fred; he’s the preacher from Topeka who organizes his family and congregation to picket the funerals of people who die of AIDS, among other things. They picketed us here at Trinity a couple of years ago). So Fred appears before the pearly gates, and Jesus comes out to meet him, together with young Matthew Shepard. And Jesus says, “Fred! Welcome, brother! Come on in!” And Fred has to decide whether to go in. Or maybe Fred has already decided whether to go in. But I hope he still has one last chance to change his mind.

We are already being judged, by who we are becoming. And who we are becoming is a function of what we do. So the Lenten call to repentance (indeed, the call to repentance in every season) is critically important: we really do need to look at ourselves, be honest about what we have done and what we are doing, and understand who we are becoming. In some respects, at least, we’re going to realize that “this isn’t who I want to be!” So we had better do something about that, and turn around (which is what “repent” means) and become people who “do what is true” and therefore who in the judgment will “come to the light.”


© 2006 William S. J. Moorhead

Sermon - 5 March 2006

Lent 1 — 5 March 2006
Trinity, Muscatine — 8:00 & 10:00
Gen 9:8-17 Ps 25:3-8 1Peter 3:18-22 Mark 1:9-13

“I establish my covenant with you, that ... never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

I remember many years ago seeing an advertisement in some religious magazine for Sunday School curriculum, and in the ad this bright-eyed little boy was running up to his mommy with his crayoned pictures in hand, proudly announcing, “Today in Sunday School we learned how to kill a giant with a slingshot like David did!” I think the point that the curriculum publishers were trying to make in this advertisement was that this is not what we want to be up to in Sunday School, and they were reminding us that it is very naïve to think that “Bible Stories” in the raw automatically make a good syllabus for children’s religious education.

Another story which we seem to think is eminently suitable for children is Noah and the Ark. Clearly because of the animals. Children love animals. They’re so cute. Here, kids. Watch the Discovery Channel, it’s educational. See the zebra. See the zebra run. See the lion. See the lion chase the zebra. See the lion seize the zebra by the throat and throw it to the ground. Listen to the zebra squeal while the lion chews on its haunch. If it has animals, it must be okay for children, and so we tell them about Noah and sing about how Noah he builded, he builded him an arky, arky.

Somewhere along in here we lose sight of the fact that the story of Noah is one of the very darkest stories in the whole of the Bible. It is not rated G, or even PG. It’s basically a story about how the people whom God had created really ticked God off, so God wiped them all off the face of the earth, man woman and child, except for eight. (And if you read on in the story, it’s not in the least bit clear why those eight were really all that much better than anyone else.)

Now if you believe in the literal verbal inerrancy of the Bible, this story presents you with a problem. (Although if you believe in the literal verbal inerrancy of the Bible, understanding this story is the least of your problems — making any sense out of the Bible at all is a far greater difficulty.) (There are, of course, people who really do make very good sense out of the Bible even though they claim to take it all “literally”; but in actual practice they have to ignore or fudge a lot of passages in order to really carry it off.)

I believe in the divine inspiration of Scripture. But I think the God who inspires the Scriptures is a good bit more subtle, and certainly a much greater poet and storyteller, than some narrow and unimaginative folks seem to want to give their narrow and unimaginative God credit for. And in the case of the story of Noah, the inspiration, I think, was the spin which the Hebrews put on this old widespread middle-eastern reminiscence of a millennial flood in the Tigris-Euphrates valleys. (That’s Iraq, by the way.)

The overarching question which the people of Israel had to face, just as we have to face it, is: “Why is there so much evil in the world?” Not just the hurricanes and floods and earthquakes and disease and all that stuff, the so-called “natural evils”; that’s a problem, but not the hardest problem. But “Why are so many people so bad? Adults who do unspeakable things to little children. People who blow themselves up in an effort to blow up a bunch of their political adversaries with them. Why are even we so bad so often? What went wrong with the creation? And why doesn’t God do something about it?”

We’ve all had projects go wrong. What do we do when that happens? I grab the paper out of the printer, wad it up, and hurl it into, or at least at, the wastebasket. In a great outburst of frustration and rage, I punch out “Ctrl-Alt-Delete”! Reboot! Start over!

The people of Israel, remembering the old flood stories that everyone told back in Mesopotamia, saw God doing just that—writing off a bad job and cleaning the slate for a new start. But they saw that the real point of the story was not so much the flood itself (even though the part about the animals two-by-two may be fun to tell, especially to the children)—not the flood itself, but what happened after the flood, the part we hear about in the Old Testament Lesson today—the covenant that God made with Noah after the flood, God’s promise not to write the world off as a bad job, God’s promise not to give up on the creation and just pitch it into the trash can, God’s promise not to reboot the cosmic computer.

God’s plan is to redeem the world, to rescue it, to restore it, to heal us who have broken and disfigured and twisted ourselves so badly. God’s plan is to save the world, not to destroy it—and to save the world not just by patching it up on the outside with an assortment of chewing gum and baling wire, but to save the world by genuinely healing it, renewing it, recreating it from the inside, reclaiming us as God’s people in our freedom and not against our freedom, not coercing our obedience but winning our love, mending our brokenness and reconciling us to God’s own self in wholeness, in holiness. God’s plan of salvation is the long and hard way, but it’s the only real way. God doesn’t take cheap shortcuts.

In the Gospel today, this First Sunday in Lent, we hear about Jesus coming out of the privacy of his youth and young adulthood in Galilee to receive the baptism of John, and to begin his public work and ministry. And the first thing he does is to go away into the desert for a while. Jesus understands (as we often do not!) that in order to figure out what you’re doing, you sometimes have to get away from it for a bit. So Jesus goes into retreat for forty days, and for forty days he keeps his mouth shut—in silence, and in fasting—a sort of Messianic vision quest—and he works out in prayer with his Father the direction of his ministry for the redemption and reconciliation of the world.

This year, reading from St. Mark, we don’t hear the details of the devil’s temptations that Matthew and Luke recount in other years, but we know the story: Satan tries to sidetrack Jesus into a scenario for “saving” the world based upon the fallen world’s notions of power. And Jesus rejects that. For Jesus knows that God’s plan of salvation is not the way of power but the way of love, not the way of conquest but the way of suffering, not the way of the scepter but the way of the cross. The Christian life—life in Christ—is a call to share in that plan of salvation. As members of the Body of Jesus Christ, baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, we are called into a mission, to share in God’s plan to reconcile and heal and restore and re-create this broken world — not by power but by love, not by control but (when need be) by suffering. We are not only the recipients but also the instruments of God’s plan of salvation through Jesus Christ, to draw the whole creation into an eternal community of love and joy. This Lent is an opportunity for us to be renewed in our own vision quest, in our life in Christ and in his mission of establishing in this our world the beachhead of the Reign of God.


© 2006 William S. J. Moorhead

Sermon -- 26 February 2006

Last Sunday after Epiphany—26 February 2006
Trinity, Muscatine — 8:00 & 10:00
1Kings 19:9-18 Ps 27:5-11 2Cor 1:18-22 Mark 9:2-9

“This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

A verse from a very popular (at least at one time!) old-time hymn, by John Greenleaf Whittier:

[f#] “Breathe through the heats of our desire
thy coolness and thy balm;
let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
speak through the earthquake, wind and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.” [#652, st 5]

It’s all very interior and quiet and retiring and soothing, but I like it anyway, and it always comes to my mind when I hear the story of Elijah at Mount Horeb.

How do we hear the word of God? How does God reveal to us the divine will, the divine self?

In the Old Testament reading today, we hear about Elijah. Elijah was the first great prophet of the Israelite kingdoms, in the 9th century B.C. Elijah’s ministry consisted largely of bringing the word of the Lord against the kings of Israel, who were much prone to idolatry and trying to compromise the worship of the Lord God of Israel with the cult of the local pagan Canaanite nature deities, such as Baal and Ashérah. At this point in the story in the First Book of Kings, Elijah has just recently staged a confrontation between himself and King Ahab and Ahab’s queen, the Phoenician princess Jezebel. Ahab had pretty well sold out to Jezebel’s pagan religion. Perhaps you remember the story: Elijah got Ahab to bring the prophets of Baal up to Mount Carmel, on the Israelite coast, and they played “Whose God is Better,” and the Lord God of Israel won in a flash (as it were, if you recall!), and Elijah and the people killed all the prophets of Baal (no politically correct religious tolerance here!), and Ahab ran home and whined about it to Jezebel, and Jezebel was really miffed off, and she sent a message to Elijah which said in essence, “You’re a dead man,” and Elijah figured that it was probably time to go on vacation—far far away. So he fled to the Sinai desert, southwest of Judah, to Mount Horeb (or Sinai), the mountain of God, where God had given the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Law (the Torah) to Moses. And Elijah found a cave and holed up in it. Then the Old Testament reading for today: The word of the Lord comes to Elijah, saying, “Elijah, whatcha doing?” And Elijah starts in whining about how much he’s done for God and see what thanks he gets. “Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire [(1) Mount Horeb is a volcano, though I think it’s mostly dormant now; and (2) all of this power-of-nature, volcanoes and wind and lightning and rain and all that stuff, was what Baal was supposed to be the god of; notice that although the Lord in fact is the one who controls them, it is not in them that the Lord is to be found, but rather:]; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.” [Which is closer to what the Hebrew means than “a still small voice.”] Out of which a voice comes to Elijah again, “I said, Elijah, whatcha doing?” And Elijah starts in to whine again about Ain’t It Awful, and the Lord says, “Yes, yes, I know; but go back to Israel, I’ve got some stuff I want you to do for me,” mostly by way of organizing a resistance movement against Ahab and Jezebel. Note both that the word of the Lord comes out of the silence, and also that it sends Elijah back into the world to work for the furtherance of the purposes of the Reign of God.

Second story today: the Gospel reading. Another mountain, this one the mountain of the Transfiguration, as we call it. Jesus takes Peter and James and John up the mountain to pray, and there the three disciples have an impressive and powerful vision of Jesus, shining with the glory of God and consulting with Moses and Elijah—those two great Israelite veterans of mountaintop meetings with God, the paradigmatic representatives of the Law and the Prophets, summing up in themselves the whole of the Israelite religious heritage, conferring with Jesus in whom the Old Covenant is fulfilled. Simon Peter doesn’t get the point. He never does. Peter wants to build shrines, booths like the ones they built every autumn at Sukkoth, the Feast of Tabernacles, to celebrate the spiritual “good old days” when Israel was sojourning in tents in the wilderness and receiving the Law. Peter is having a wonderful religious experience, and he doesn’t want to let go of it. (I suppose in some ways like being there while God put on a fireworks display at Mount Horeb). But the experience passes; there is a cloud (itself a manifestation of the presence of God), and a voice (perhaps still and small, perhaps not; it doesn’t say!): “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” And Peter and James and John look around, and Moses and Elijah are gone, and the cloud is gone, and nobody’s there with them but Jesus, and Jesus says, “Come on, let’s go back down; and let’s not say anything about this for the time being, okay?”

God continues to speak to us in many ways. Occasionally God speaks to us in flashy, exciting, dramatic ways. But usually not. In fact, on the whole, the dramatic stuff, the “religious experience,” needs to be viewed with a bit of skepticism. Not that God doesn’t use these things; God does, especially to get our attention, or to give us a little reassurance from time to time. But I think that God’s self-disclosure to us comes more often out of silence than out of power, in the midst of the ordinary when the visions have passed and the clouds of glory have cleared away. The definitive word of God has, after all, already been spoken, in Jesus, who is God’s Word made flesh. Listen to him, God says. Listen to Jesus. Only Jesus. He is enough.
And when we listen to God in Jesus, we find (like Peter and James and John, and like Elijah in the desert) that God does not let us linger on our own religious experience, but is sending us back into the world to help build God’s own dominion there.


© 2006 William S. J. Moorhead

Sermon (Evensong) -- 5 February 2006

5th Sunday after the Epiphany — 5 February 2006
Trinity, Iowa City — Evensong — 5:00 p.m.
Fifth Evening: Pss 27, 28, 29 Gen 24:50-67 2Tim 2:14-21

The Super Bowl has started! Why are you here?

The Scripture readings this evening sort of come out of nowhere, at least the New Testament reading (and also the Gospel reading at Matins this morning). Well, actually, not “nowhere,” there is a certain coherence to the system, but explaining it would take a lot more time than it’s worth. The Old Testament Lesson, as I mentioned last fall, continues the same course reading we are in during the week, which currently has us in the middle of the patriarchal saga from Genesis. But if you haven’t been keeping up, then this reading from Genesis may seem a lot like when you tune across one of those drama series that has an ongoing story arc, or, heaven forfend, an episode of a soap opera, and you say, “What’s going on here? Who are these people? (And why do I care?)” Laban? Bethúel?

(When I was in seminary we had a homiletics exercise in which we were assigned a Bible verse and had to write a sermon on that text right there on the spot. Obviously luck played a role in this project! After all, one might have drawn “My brother Esau is a hairy man, but I am a smooth man,” a verse which shows up a little later in this patriarchal saga. Life, you know, is rather like opening a tin of sardines.)

(Is there any score in the football game yet?) (Any good commercials yet?)

(I remember the old days at Diocesan Convention in Des Moines when Father Bob would be sitting there in the Saturday afternoon session, his face rapt with attention. Of course he had a transistor radio earpiece in his ear and he was listening to the Hawkeye game.)

Anyway, Abraham’s son Isaac has grown up (we’ve already had Sarah laughing, and the Binding of Isaac, and several other wonderful chapters in this rich and complex ancestral saga), and it’s time to get him married. But Abraham does not want him to marry one of the local Canaanite girls, because he is very conscious of his vocation from the Lord God who had called him and his family out from Ur in Chaldea (in Mesopotamia) and then subsequently had called him further to leave Haran in northeastern Syria where they had settled and to move on south into Canaan, where he would become the father of many nations. So Abraham sends his chief of staff (possibly Eliezer of Damascus, of whom we heard briefly earlier in the story, although the story never actually names him) and tells him to go back to what had become the family home in the district of Haran, across the River Euphrates in northeastern Syria, and find a wife for Isaac among his kinsfolk there. And so Abraham’s servant does, and that’s what the first part of the 24th chapter of Genesis is all about. Eliezer (let’s go ahead and call him that) meets Rebekah at the well (wells are the venue for a lot of important meetings in the Bible, as well they might be, so to speak! if you lived in that part of the world) and he introduces himself, and Rebekah runs to get her brother Laban and her father Bethuel, who invite Eliezer to stay with them, and Eliezer tells them all the news of Abraham, whom they haven’t seen for lo these many years, and the bottom line, of course, is that Abraham is looking for a wife for his son Isaac. And that’s about where the reading this evening picks up.

And so Rebekah goes south with Eliezer and marries Isaac. She becomes the mother of Jacob and Esau, and the saga continues.

A couple of interesting things in this story. First, the fact that Abraham sends back to the old country (least the medium-old country, if not exactly the old old country) to get a wife for Isaac. Suggesting that when you have been called out into a new land (literally or figuratively) to do a new thing, it is important to keep in touch with your spiritual roots.

Second, when Abraham sends Eliezer back up to Haran, he makes rather a big deal of the fact that he is not to take Isaac along with him. There may be a temptation just to settle and stay in the old country. The vocation of Abraham and his descendants is to become a new nation. You must value that from which you came, but you must be committed to that to which you have been called. (And a generation later, when Jacob goes back himself to Haran to find a wife, he ends up getting stuck there for years -- his uncle Laban is pretty crafty -- and he finally has to sneak out in the middle of the night in order to go home to Canaan. But that's another story for another time.)

It has been pointed out that in a sense, Rebekah is the next generation’s parallel to Abraham himself. Just as Abraham left behind all his relatives to respond to God’s call to be the agent of God’s purpose (ultimately for the redemption and restoration of the whole human race), so also Rebekah leaves her home in faith to accept her role in this early, adventurous chapter of God’s universal drama of salvation.

The tension between tradition and new creation is not an easy one, as we have been discovering anew in the church in the last generation (not just the last couple of years). It’s not a new tension. I think it’s one of the things Jesus himself warns us about in the parable of the talents. We are called to be a new people, to share with God in building a new world. But we must also remember whence we came.



© 2006 William S. J. Moorhead

Ascension Day — 5 May 2005
Trinity, Iowa City — 7:00 pm

Acts 1:1-11 Psalm 47 or 93 Ephesians 1:15-23 Luke 24:44-53

"After his glorious resurrection he openly appeared to his disciples, and in their sight ascended into heaven, to prepare a place for us; that where he is, there we might also be, and reign with him in glory."

By special request of the Art Institute of Chicago, a return exhibition of the famous renaissance masterpiece, "L’ascensione di Christo," attributed to Fra Gulielmo il Insensato, known as the Maestro delle Punte. (The special request of the Art Institute was that this exhibition not be held in Chicago…)

(Those of you who haven’t been around Trinity for more than a few years are doubtless saying to yourselves, "What is he doing?" Those of you who have been around for a while are doubtless saying, "Did he just drag out that stupid ‘Toes’ picture again?")

Well, enough. At least for this year.

Sometimes the way the Church talks about the Ascension of Christ is criticized as reflecting a "three-story universe" — heaven up there, hell down there, earth here in the middle — and Jesus going up doo-doo-doo from the second story to the third story — a picture that modern people simply don’t and can’t believe in. Well of course we don’t see the world that way. Frankly, I’m not all that sure that ancient people took the "three-story universe" all that literally, either (although if you don’t have telescopes it actually makes pretty good sense). On the other hand, there are a lot of modern people who wouldn’t recognize a metaphor if it bit them on the toe. (So to speak!) (And as for irony, absolutely not a clue!) Our generation seems to have a terribly literalist mindset — a fruit of the scientific age, perhaps, but not to be blamed on science but on the bad teaching of science. (Hard science itself is perfectly at home with metaphor and irony. Just ask a physicist about the charm quark.)

Okay, why am I beating on this probably long-dead horse of literalism? Because I think the Ascension of Christ, and our own ultimate destiny to be with Christ where he is, presents us with the chronic tension in Christian thought and life between the transcendent and the here and now. Christianity in the past and yet in the present has often been so heavenly-minded that it’s been no earthly good; pie in the sky when you die by and by; the opiate of the masses. If our true citizenship and home are in heaven and we are but sojourners in this vale of tears, then we don’t have to and indeed should not take this life very seriously, which all too often has resulted in indifference to injustice and human suffering (especially injustice to other people and other people’s suffering). On the other hand, a Christianity which focuses too exclusively on the social gospel and worldly relevance with little reference to the ultimate runs the danger of ending up as little more than an ethical culture society with good music.

It seems to me that one reason why we may have this problem of oscillating back and forth between the eternal and the present moment, between heaven and earth, is that even though we know better consciously, subconsciously we are still clinging to too literal a picture of God’s relation to our world, in a sense too literal a picture of the Ascension of Christ. God is there somewhere, up there, or out there, or back there, and Christ has gone there to be at God’s right hand (we know that’s a metaphor!) (Don’t we?), and some day we will go there to be with God, but meanwhile we are here. And if God is there and we are here, then although we are in different places we are still within the same system, the same universe, and it makes sense that we would have to choose one place or the other to place our hearts, here or there, because in our universe you can only be in one place at a time.

On the other hand, if we have a much greater, less restrictive picture of the relation of heaven and earth — heaven, the immediate presence of God, which if it is anywhere at all must be neither here nor there but "everywhere." But note that we are immersed in metaphor here, because any "where" language places God within our universe of four dimensions. (Or actually I guess the string theorists say this universe exists in eleven dimensions, but seven of them are all curled up. Nobody knows exactly what that means, but it makes the math come out right.)

(A good working definition of "mystery," for both scientists and theologians: "Nobody knows exactly what it is, but it makes the math come out right.")

But God transcends all four (or all eleven) dimensions of our universe. Earth and heaven are not here and there, but here and (shall we say) even more deeply here. Or something. I can’t find my own words to say what I mean, so I’ll steal from Julian of Norwich, no mean wielder of metaphor herself: "He showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand.… I looked at it and thought: What can this be? And I was given this … answer: It is everything which is made." The whole of the created universe, the vast expanse of interstellar space, hundreds of billions of galaxies each with hundreds of billions of stars, are but as a hazelnut in the palm of God.

And the God who surrounds and fills all the dimensions of space and time of this universe (and of all others there may be), and sustains it in being lest it fall into nothing because (as Julian says) God loves it, this God has chosen to project the divine self into this universe, into our world, in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. And then in Christ’s Ascension not only to return to God’s self but to bring us along, ultimately to raise us to transcendence as well. Or perhaps to expand us to transcendence, even to explode us into eternity — to replace one spatial metaphor with other spatial metaphors!

What I’m fumbling for here is a conceptual framework that may make it easier for us to see and understand that ultimately we do not belong to this world, but that in no way means abandonment of this world or contempt for this world, but on the contrary is the ground and possibility of a deeper engagement with this world in service and mission. As Christians, as people of the Ascension, our home is not "there" but is more deeply here because we are not merely "here" but rooted in the very ground of "here." Not called out of this world, but sent into this world to transform the world and in Christ to bear the world all the way into eternity.

"You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth."

Sermon -- 1 November 1998

ALL SAINTS’ DAY — 1 November 1998
Grace, Cedar Rapids — 8:00 & 10:15

Ecclus 44:1-10,13-14 Ps 149 Rev 7:2-4,9-17 Matt 5:1-12

As he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; for it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”— 1 Peter 1:15-16

One of the items in the religious news this past month was the canonization — that is, the formal raising by the Pope to the status of official sainthood —of Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a Carmelite nun who is notable to the rest of the world because she was born a German Jew named Edith Stein: the first person of Jewish birth to be canonized a saint in the Roman Catholic Church in — well, maybe ever. There was a certain amount of fussing about this from some in the Jewish community because Edith, or Teresa Benedicta, died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and it’s not clear whether she died as a Christian martyr for standing up to the Nazis, or more simply (from a Nazi perspective) as a Jew. Since the Nazis were perfectly willing to murder people either for being real Christians (as opposed to accommodationists) or for being Jews, it may not matter that much; it seems to me that both the Christian and the Jewish communities can and should claim her. But it’s not my point to talk today about St. Edith, or St. Teresa Benedicta (I’m not quite sure which is proper; personally, I kinda like St. Edith), but to use this as an All Saints’ Day launching device to talk about being a saint. (By the way, the Romans may not have canonized a Jewish-born saint before, but we have: I refer of course to the Blessed Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky, a Lithuanian Jew who studied to be a rabbi but ended up emigrating to the United States and becoming an Episcopal priest instead, went to China as a missionary, translated the Bible and Prayer Book into Mandarin and became Bishop of Shanghai. We celebrate him on October 15. But I digress.

In the Episcopal Church people are commemorated in the liturgical calendar — the closest thing we have to a canonization process — because it seems like a good idea and the General Convention signs off on it. This is more or less the way the Church recognized “saints” for the first millenium — consensus and custom. Since the middle ages, and especially since the counter-reformation, the Roman Church has developed a rather elaborate process for declaring saints, that involves lots of investigation into the proposed saint’s virtue and orthodoxy, etc. In itself this is probably a good thing: I recall that 35 years ago there were people who wanted to canonize Jack Kennedy by acclamation; but it has subsequently turned out that the presidential adventures in the Lincoln Bedroom in those days make more recent escapades in the Oval Office pale by comparison. (I’m digressing again, aren’t I?)

Anyway, one of the criteria for canonization by Rome is that you have to have two authenticated miracles attributed to your intercession. (In the case of St. Edith I think there was only one, but she got credit for having been martyred by the Nazis, as well she should.) The theory here apparently is that it is evidence that you are really in heaven if your intercessions with God can produce a couple of miracles. This is a tricky thing to prove, since it’s not the kind of thing that is easily subject to double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials. In St. Edith’s case, the miracle was a little girl in Boston with a fatal liver condition who was healed following her parents’ appeal to the Blessed Teresa Benedicta for her prayers. (I’m not quite sure where the referral came from on that one; St. Edith is hardly a household name among Boston Irish Catholics.) This whole business makes me a little nervous. I certainly have no doubt that Teresa McCarthy, now a healthy teenager, was healed by God’s grace, and maybe Edith Stein had a hand in it, but I’m real uncomfortable with a God who says “Mr. & Mrs. McCarthy’s prayers aren’t good enough, but if they can get Edith Stein to sign off on it, I’ll heal their daughter.” Or all the “Venerables” and “Blesseds” praying up a storm in the heavenly courts for one more miracle so they can move up to Sainthood. Reminds me of bells tinkling and Clarence getting his wings. More seriously, it scares me to think that somewhere out there are other parents who also sought the intercessions of Blessed Teresa Benedicta and not necessarily in vain, but whose children died anyway; they’ve got to be really bummed out this month. Our Roman cousins, poor dears, they try hard and they mean well, but they really do still have a difficult time breaking the old superstitions, and I don’t think they have really yet gotten it right about “saints.”

Part of their problem, and our problem too, is that we see the saints as some sort of official religious churchy people. (And indeed, many of the “Official Saints” are just that, because those are the sort of people whom other official religious churchy people are likely to canonize!) And we aren’t official religious churchy people (well, I guess I am, though I try to be fairly sassy about it; thank God I don’t make my living doing it; you aren’t official religious churchy people) and so you say, well, I guess I can’t be a saint and there’s no real point in aspiring to sainthood. Even though we come in here once a year and sing a song of the saints of God who are all folk like me and I mean to be one too, but we don’t really believe it the other 364 days of the year. And so we settle for “okay.” But God calls us to be holy.

And of course the word “saint” means “holy” — it’s French (you knew that) and comes from the Latin sanctus. But that doesn’t help, because although we probably know that “holy” means something like “belonging to God,” we still have the notion that being holy really means being religious and churchy, and although we are religious and go to church and stuff like that, we do have real lives, after all! But being holy does not mean being religious. It means being holy, being God’s person, which is a very different thing indeed. It means being committed to the Reign of God right in your real life, right in your real world. Religion is meant to be an agency and instrument of the Kingdom of God, and sometimes it is, and often enough it is not, but in any case it is a derivative reality, not the Thing Itself. The Church, when she is being true to her vocation and identity, is the extension of the Incarnation, the Body of Christ continuing his mission of proclaiming and enacting God’s Reign in this world. But often enough we are not true, and never fully true. Our call to holiness, to saintliness, is our call to be fully true to God’s Reign and to the embodiment of God’s Reign in Jesus Christ: Jesus Christ not as an object of religion but as the Lord of the world.