12 August 2018 - Proper 14/12th Pentecost

Proper 14 / 12^th Pentecost  — 12 August 2018

Trinity – 7:45 & 10:00 am

1 Kings 19:4-8  |  Psalm 34:1-8  |  Ephesians 4:25-5:2  |  John 6:35, 41-51

Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”   [John 6:41]  

As you are probably aware, the Old Testament reading at the Sunday Eucharist is generally chosen because it bears some thematic relation to the Gospel reading.  (At least, with the Revised Common Lectionary, when you are following Track Two, as we are doing.  I would explain about Track One, but that would be boring.)  Today we hear a snippet from the Elijah saga, which is found in the 1^st (and a bit of the 2^nd) Book of Kings.  A wonderful story, Elijah.  And this really is just a snippet without any context, unless you already know the full story, which I’m sure some of you do.  Elijah is fleeing for his life into the desert, escaping Jezebel (the queen of the Israelite king Ahab), who is really really mad at him because he killed all her pagan priests at Mount Carmel (well…!), and he will encounter the Lord God at Mount Horeb.  But you already know that.  In this snippet the angel of the Lord is feeding Elijah for his wilderness journey.  And we read this today because in the Gospels we read a couple of weeks ago about Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand, and since then John’s Gospel has been following up with a long discourse about Jesus as the Bread of Life.  (And we still have a couple of weeks to go!)  And so today we are reminded that God feeds us, just as God fed Elijah in the wilderness.

And last week, as you recall, the Old Testament reading was about the Israelites in the Sinai desert, just liberated from their Egyptian slavery, receiving bread from heaven.  About which they said, “What’s this?”  Or, in Hebrew, “manna.”

So, for a few weeks this summer, we are reading from the 6^th chapter of St. John’s Gospel about Jesus as the Bread of Life, beginning with the story shared by all the Gospels about the feeding of the multitude, a sign of who Jesus really is.  And the related Hebrew stories of God feeding God’s people.

“God will provide.”  Right at the heart of our faith, we assume.  Or presume.  And it may well be presumptuous!  I often wonder if the God of popular culture isn’t very much like a vending machine:  If we insert the coins of faith and push the button, down will come the Snickers bar or the potato chips or the Diet Coke or new job or the peace of mind or the answers to our questions or whatever it is we want.  If you do right by God, God will do right by you.  A lot of that going around.

But what will God – the real God, the God of the Bible – actually provide?  You may recall the episode in the wilderness, when the Israelites come to Moses and whine (as they so often did), “Hey, back in Egypt, we could catch fish in the river for free and the gardens were full of veggies, but out here all we’ve got to eat is this whatsis!”  [I.e., manna.  Numbers 11:4-6]  Yes, God provided, but they didn’t like it.  God did not provide what the people thought they needed, certainly not what they wanted, but because it was God’s purpose to make of the Israelites a new people, living a new life in a new land, and the only way to get there from the fleshpots of Egypt was through the desert.  (This is not a particularly subtle story.)  

And today with Elijah, who is on the lam from the powers-that-be.  And he’s tired.  He’s sick of the whole business.  He has just killed 450 of the prophets of the pagan god Baal, and what thanks did he get?  (By the way, I would not draw any moral theology from the Mount Carmel episode!)  But the angel of the Lord comes and feeds and refreshes him, but not so that he can just go back home now, but so that he can go on more deeply into the wilderness (yep, same wilderness) to encounter God.  Where God commissions Elijah to go back and do some more mostly subversive stuff and get into trouble again.  God will provide.  Oh, good.

Jesus said, “I am the Bread of Life.”  It starts out, of course, as we heard a couple of weeks ago, with Jesus providing actual bread to a crowd of people who had followed him out into the boondocks.  And at the most basic level, they seem to have gotten it.  First, Jesus can feed us (literally), and second, that’s like what God did for our ancestors in the desert; so this Jesus must be the coming prophet who will liberate Israel and drive the Romans out so let’s make him king!  Jesus slips away, but they chase him down. But he tells them, “You didn’t really get it.  The real point is the nourishing of your hearts and souls and minds and lives, not just feeding your bellies.  If you want really to be fed, you must come to me and follow me and believe in me.”

Believe in Jesus.  I’m inclined to think that “believing in Jesus” may be one of the most misunderstood notions in the Bible.  “Believing in Jesus” is not the same thing as assenting to certain doctrines about Jesus.  I don’t mean that doctrines about Jesus aren’t important, or that what the Church teaches about Jesus isn’t true, or that we shouldn’t assent to it.  But when John or the other Gospels, or Paul in his letters, talks about “belief” or “faith,” they almost always use a Greek word that connotes not so much intellectual compliance but personal trust and commitment.  Believing in Jesus, faith in Jesus, is not as much a matter of the head as of the heart.  Now, granted, if you are going to commit yourself and put your trust in someone, you’d better run that past your brain at some point.  (You may have noticed that our world today is full of a whole lot of people who have obviously not done that.)  

When Jesus says, “Believe in me,” “Have faith in me,” he is saying, “Commit your life to the Kingdom of God which I am proclaiming and enacting among you.  Trust in me as the one who embodies God’s Reign.”  To believe that Jesus is the true bread which gives life to the world is to commit ourselves to his pattern of life as true human life, to commit ourselves to his values, to his cause, to his vision, as the values and cause and vision of God, to commit ourselves to Jesus precisely as the Way and the Truth and the Life.

A digression:  Many, though not all, of the theologians and scholars over the centuries have seen in the John 6 discourse on the Bread of Life a reference to the Eucharist, emerging particularly as the chapter goes on.  I myself think that multiple levels of meaning in St. John’s Gospel are just what the evangelist intends!  And that’s one of the levels of meaning.  But I’m not going there today.  Perhaps Marc will have something to say about that next Sunday.  (No pressure, Marc!)

God will provide.  And the real nourishment is Jesus.  But there’s nothing cheap or easy or simple about that.  We need to question any assumptions we may make that self-servingly try to turn God into the provider for our own wants.  When God is really providing for us, God does not leave us with our comfortable pots of stew in our old Egypts, but leads us out into the challenges and the mysteries and the dangers of the world’s desert.

24 June 2018 - 5th Pentecost - Proper 7

Proper 7  |  5^th Pentecost — 24 June 2018

St. Peter’s, Bettendorf — 9:00 am

[Track Two]  Job 38:1-11  |  Psalm 107:1-3,23-32   |   2 Corinthians 6:1-13  |   Mark 4:35-41

He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace!  Be still!”

I suspect that many of you have had the same experience that I have often had, watching television in the evening.  A program comes on – a situation comedy, or a police procedural, or Jimmy Kimmel after the evening news, or whatever it is – and I say, “Oh, this is a repeat, I’ve seen this one before.”  And I switch to another channel, or I turn the TV off and go do something else, or go to bed, or whatever. 

But occasionally I may say, “I’ve seen this one before, but it was good,” and so I watch it again.  And I enjoy it again, and maybe I see some things the second time through that I missed the first time and so I enjoy it even more.

It’s one of the hallmarks of great drama, or great literature, or great music, that they bear watching or reading or listening over and over again.  They never grow old.  The experience gets better and richer with each repetition.  We keep finding new things.

I’m afraid that some people – but none of us, surely! – take the attitude toward reading the Bible that some of us take toward watching TV – “Oh, I’ve already read this.  I know how it turns out.”  And they put it down and go do something else.

I’ve been reading the Bible for a long time.  Maybe longer than some of you.  Certainly not as long as others of you, but I’m not asking for birth certificates!  But one of the things that always catches me and often delights me and frequently challenges me is that I will be reading a passage of Scripture and I will say, “I never saw that before!  That never occurred to me!  Oh, now that makes more sense!  That gives me a new perspective!”

And God just chuckles.

I’ve been having that experience lately with the Gospel According to St. Mark.  I think we sometimes think of Mark’s Gospel as “the short and simple one.”  It is indeed the shortest, and it is the earliest of the four canonical gospels (Matthew and Luke both use Mark as one of their sources).  (Yes, they do.  There are still some folks who deny the priority of Mark, but there are also still some folks who believe the earth is flat.)  However, Mark’s Gospel is by no means simple.  It is not just a stringing together of Jesus stories, ending up in Jerusalem with the Passion narrative.  It is a very sophisticated literary composition, maybe even as sophisticated (though in a very different way) than the Gospel According to St. John.

The Gospel reading today, Jesus calming the storm, is probably familiar to us all.  We’ve heard it or read it before, and Matthew and Luke both include it as part of the material they draw from Mark.  If you did art history in school, you may have seen the famous painting of this scene by the great seventeenth-century Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn, “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.”  

(You can look it up on the internet, but you can’t see the painting itself – the original was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum in Boston in 1990 and has never been found – one of the most infamous art thefts in history!  But I digress…)  And in fact many artists over the centuries, up to and including modern times, have painted this scene – some of them great, some of them not so much.

What makes this such a fascinating episode?  I suspect that many of us have found that this passage resonates in our own lives, as we reflect upon times in the past, or perhaps even in the present, in which our circumstances were very stormy.  We may have felt threatened, uncertain about the future or even whether there would be any future.  It may have seemed like God was asleep, or at least not paying attention, and in our prayer we cried, “Do you not care that we are perishing?”  And yet ultimately, with faith, the storms of life abated and we safely reached the shore.

This is a perfectly reasonable and appropriate way of relating to this story.  And it is an aspect of the power of the Scriptures that we are able to reach into them, back two or even three thousand years, and hear God’s Word for our own lives today.

But I don’t think this is primarily what Mark was thinking about as he compiled his Gospel.  We tend to hear the Jesus story in bits and pieces, because that’s how we hear it in church on Sunday mornings, that’s how we share them in Bible study groups, that’s how we read them in our own devotions.  But even though that may be how Mark’s community had received the Jesus tradition from the earliest followers, that isn’t how Mark, or any of the Evangelists, composed their written Gospels,

Mark’s Gospel was, and is, and all the Gospels were and are, continuous narratives.  I’m not questioning the basic historicity of the stories themselves, but Mark assembles them with his own narrative outline in mind.

You will recall that in Mark’s Gospel, following the appearance of John the Baptist and the baptism of Jesus, Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee, announcing God’s kingdom and healing the sick.  This results in initial conflicts with the religious establishment, principally the Pharisees and scribes; and Jesus continues to teach the crowd with a series of parables of the Kingdom.

(Incidentally, the word that Mark uses that we translate “the crowd” (“leaving the crowd behind”) is a different word from that which we usually render “the people.”  “The crowd” is not just “a lot of people,” it’s “the poor folks,” “the peasants,” “the nobodies,” “the mob,” “the masses.”  Mark is very consistent and very intentional about this.  But I digress again!)

But now today Jesus leaves the crowd behind, and he and his disciples get in a boat (presumably one of his disciples’ fishing-boat) and “go across to the other side.”  Okay, what’s that about?  Well, they have been in Galilee, on the west side of the Sea of Galilee (which actually is a freshwater lake, and isn’t very big, though it’s big enough for some pretty rough storms).  “The other side” is Gentile territory, at least mostly.  It was called the “Decapolis,” Greek for “The Ten Cities,” and was a league of ten more-or-less autonomous Greco-Roman cities, not under the direct rule either of Pontius Pilate (the Roman prefect of Judea) or of Herod Antipas (the tetrarch of Galilee and Perea).  So what is Jesus up to?  In fact, as Mark continues the story, having confronted the Jewish establishment in Galilee, Jesus is now going over to the east bank to make an initial confrontation of the imperial Roman establishment.

Not an uneventful journey, as we hear.  And this is not just a garden-variety lake storm.  In the imagery of the Hebrew Scriptures, storms at sea are signs of the chaos that resists the rule of God.  The creation story at the beginning of Genesis tells of God imposing order on the formless void.  In the psalms there are repeated references to the ancient monsters that inhabit the sea.  The first reading this morning from Job speaks of the power of God to rule the sea, and in Psalm 107 today we give thanks to the Lord for delivering from the perilous storm those who went down to the sea in ships.  And so now when Jesus awakes (“Awake, O Lord!  Why are you sleeping?” – Psalm 44:23, and numerous other verses in the Hebrew Scriptures), Jesus rebukes the wind and commands the sea to be quiet.  I think it is not coincidental that in Greek these are exactly the same words that Jesus used at the beginning of his ministry to exorcise a demon in the synagogue at Capernaum [Mark 1:35].  And so also at this turning point in his mission, Jesus must once again confront the demonic powers.

And if we were to continue today’s reading, we would see that when Jesus lands in the Decapolis, he immediately encounters the Gerasene demoniac.  (Gerasa was one of the cities of the Decapolis.)  You remember this guy.  He hangs out in the cemeteries – places that were unclean according to the Jewish Law – and is possessed by demons whose name is “Legion.”  A Legion of course is a division of Roman soldiers.  That’s the only sense in which this Latin loan-word was ever used; Mark is not being subtle here.  In fact, throughout this next story Mark uses a number of unsubtle and subversive words.  Jesus is confronting the powers of domination and driving them into the sea – oh, there’s wonderful subtext in that story!  Alas, you will not hear that story next Sunday, for reasons known only to the Lectionary Gnomes, although we will hear Luke’s version of it at this time next year.  Next Sunday you will hear how Jesus goes back across to Galilee (without incident), heals a woman with a socially isolating disorder and raises a young girl from death.  (Still confronting the powers of domination, but that’s for Rev. Elaine to talk about next week!)

So yes, we pray that God will deliver us at the end if with faith we persevere through this life’s tempests.  “While the nearer waters roll, While the tempest still is high:  Hide me, O my Savior, hide, Till the storm of life is past, Safe into the haven guide, O receive my soul at last!”  (Charles Wesley.  Hymn #699, “Jesus Lover of My Soul.”  The Communion Hymn today!)

But the Gospel today, like the whole of the Gospel, is about more than just that.  It is part of the epic story of liberation from the powers of domination into the freedom and wholeness of the Kingdom of God.  And if we think that liberation from the powers of domination into the freedom and wholeness of the Kingdom of God was just back then and isn’t something we need to be about now, circumspice.  Look around!

10 May 2018 - Ascension Day

Ascension Day  — 10 May 2018

Trinity – 12:15 pm

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

“Repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”  [Luke 24:47-48]

[[I’m going to make an assumption – I don’t doubt a reasonable assumption for some of you, but perhaps not for some others of you, and if that’s so I apologize, it’s okay, I’m not criticizing! – an assumption that you who are attending this Ascension Day service in the middle of lunch hour have attended Ascension Day services before, and thus you have previously heard Luke the Evangelist’s narratives of the ascension of the Risen Jesus to heaven.  Both of them, from the Acts of the Apostles and from his Gospel.  And you have previously noted that they are not quite the same story, at least in terms of their chronology.  There is no reasonable doubt that the Gospel and the Book of Acts were written by the same author, but, as Lauren pointed out in her sermon last Sunday, we have no indication of how much time elapsed between the writing of the Gospel and the writing of Acts.  Did Luke finish the Gospel, roll up the scroll of the manuscript, say “Well, the first half is done!” and open a fresh scroll to begin Volume Two?  Or was there a lapse of time – maybe a little, maybe a number of years – between the composition of the Gospel and the composition of the Book of Acts?  We don’t know.  One thing we can say is that although they are by the same author, there are distinct differences in literary genre.  The first book uses the genre of “gospel” invented by St. Mark, one of St. Luke’s major sources, and the second book is in the genre, more or less, of Hellenistic historiography.  That, and the possible lapse of some time during which St. Luke may have done further reflection and perhaps received additional reminiscences from the early Christian community, might explain the differences.  The bottom line is, it doesn’t really matter.]]

Today I want to focus on what the Gospel records Jesus as saying to his disciples just before his ascension.  (I say “ascension” because that’s what we traditionally call it, and spatial imagery is pretty much unavoidable, as long as we understand that “heaven” in this context is not “up in the sky,” even though for the Greeks the word “ouranos,” “sky,” always also connoted the realm of the gods.  The point is how the Letter to the Ephesians puts it today, “[God] raised [Christ] from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.”  [Eph. 1:20-21]  As I said, spatial imagery is pretty much unavoidable!)\

Anyway, you recall that during Jesus’ earthly ministry, his disciples tagged along after him, very frequently not getting the point, but occasionally doing pretty well (remember when Jesus sent them out two by two and they were able to heal in Jesus’ name).  Well, now this is it.  Jesus says, “Now it’s your responsibility.  You can’t just stand around watching me do stuff anymore.  [Or, as the angel in Acts puts it, “Why are you guys standing around staring at the sky?”]  You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will now be my witnesses.  And (as St. Matthew’s community remembered it) I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

So Ascension Day is not “Goodbye, Jesus!”  Ascension Day is “It’s time to get on with it!”

30 March 2018 - Good Friday

Good Friday  — 30 March 2018

Trinity – 12:15 pm

Isaiah 52:13-53:12  |  Psalm 22  |  Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9  |  John 18:1-19:42

When Jesus had received the wine, he said, "It is finished." Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

“It is finished.” 

St. John’s Gospel is hard.  I don’t mean that it is too hard, that you should give up trying to read or understand it – very much the contrary!  But be aware that the evangelist, for all the relative simplicity of his common Greek, is a very sophisticated literary writer.  His words often have multiple meanings.  And the answer to the question, does he mean “A” or “B’? is likely to be “Yes.”

“It is finished.”  On the surface, what we may initially hear is:  “It’s all over.  It’s done.  That’s it.”  And that’s one of the meanings of the Greek word in the text.  But the phrase also means “It is completed.”  “It is done” as in “this project is now done.”  “It is accomplished.”  The underlying word also means “purpose,” as in “the purpose is fulfilled.”  Jesus is saying, “I have fulfilled the purpose for which I came, and now I can let go.”

(I might note that the same Greek word is used by St. Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” [Matt. 5:58]  That has given a lot of Christians palpitations, because we think that’s demand for a moral perfection in terms of keeping all the rules without fail, and I’m only human, give me a break!  That’s not the point.  “Be complete.”  “Be whole.”  “Be mature.”  “Fulfill God’s purpose for you.”  “Live in the image of the God who created you.”)

John’s Gospel goes on:  “Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.”  I suppose the first thing that comes to our minds may be a picture of Jesus dropping his head and “giving up the ghost,” as the King James Version says.  “Breathed his last,” the synoptic gospels say, translating a word that can mean “expired.”  Okay.  But I think John means more than that.  The Greek says “He inclined his head.”  (In fact, the Greek word, through Latin, is where our word “incline” comes from.)  Jesus doesn’t just drop his head, he points his head.  One inclines to, points to something or someone.  Who was there, in the Fourth Gospel?  His mother, and the other women, and the Beloved Disciple.  The last of his faithful community, and the beginnings of his church.  “He inclined his head and gave up…”  Stop there.  The word means more than just “give up.”  It means “give over” or “hand on.”  It can mean “entrust.”  The root word is one we often translate as “tradition.”

Okay.  “He inclined his head and gave up – or handed on – his spirit.”  Except that’s not exactly what the text says.  It says, “He handed on the spirit.”  What spirit?  His own spirit, his soul, his breath?  Surrendered back to God the Father?  Yes, perhaps.  Or The Spirit, the Holy Spirit, handed over to the Church, gathered at the foot of his Cross?  As he will three days later, to his disciples in hiding:  “As the Father has sent me, so I send you…Receive the Holy Spirit.” [John 20:21-22] 

The author of the Fourth Gospel wants us to understand that Jesus was not a tragic victim who was foolish enough to let himself get caught by the Jerusalem Establishment and the Roman Empire?  It is quite clear in John’s Gospel that Jesus is the protagonist in his own Passion.  This is God’s drama, God’s mission, for the reconciliation, the healing, the completion, the perfection, the finishing of the human world.  Jesus’ earthly mission, the first act, is complete, it is finished, almost.  In the second act that mission has been handed over to us, in the power of the Spirit, to continue.

14 February 2018 -- Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday  — 14 February 2018

Trinity – 12:15 PM

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

“Meménto, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverum revertéris.” (“Remember, humanchild, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”)

My text this noon comes not from one of the Scripture readings, but from the Liturgy itself, as we will see in just a few minutes at the Imposition of Ashes.  But of course that sentence itself comes from the Scripture, from the second creation story in the Book of Genesis [3:19].  We know that story, the first part of it at least, fairly well – the eating of the fruit from the forbidden tree, and God’s response to the man and the woman – because we hear it as the first reading in our Advent and Christmas services of Lessons and Carols.  But we don’t follow it through to the end, where God condemns the man to hard agricultural labor – “by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return” – and God expels them from the Garden.  And thus we are mortal.  We shall die.  (Just as God warned in the first place about the fruit of that tree.)  But we all know that.  We are mortal.  (Sometimes we try to find ways to deny it, but we know it.  We will die.)

(By the way, I trust that you understand that the Genesis creation stories are stories.  Brilliant stories.  Profound stories.  But not cosmological or anthropological history.  Those who insist that they are such are usually missing the point of the stories, much to God’s annoyance.)

And so we begin the Season of Lent with the Imposition of Ashes, “as a sign of our mortality and penitence.”

The thing is, isn’t this contrary to our Biblical doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul?

Well, actually, there is no Biblical doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul – at least not in the sense we are likely to mean it.  The ancient Israelites, like most peoples in the ancient world, thought that the shades of the dead descended into a dark realm of gloom that they called “Sheol” or “the Pit,” but that hardly qualified as “immortality.”  The best spin they could put on it was when they said of those who had died that they were “gathered to their people” or “slept with their ancestors.”  Many postexilic Jews apparently gave up even on that; what we see for example in the Book of Ecclesiastes and some of the later Psalms is an admission that when we die, “that’s all she wrote.”  This apparently was the attitude taken by the Sadducees at the time of Jesus.  But in later Hellenistic Judaism, especially from the time of the resistance and subsequent successful insurrection against the Greek/Syrian Empire, the hope that God would vindicate and raise his faithful servants from the dead at the end of the age became widespread among the Jewish people.  This was where the Pharisees were coming from.

And then of course for the first followers of Jesus, this hope became vividly explicit in the resurrection of their Lord.

But the resurrection of the dead is not the same thing, exactly, as the immortality of the soul.

[We do find in some strains of late Judaism a doctrine of immortality, for example in the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, so called, one of the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament.  Wisdom was written in Greek, probably about the time of Jesus himself, probably by a Jewish author in Alexandria who was influenced by Greek philosophy, for which the immortality of the human soul was pretty much a given.  (And that sneaked its way into subsequent Christian theology as well.)  But even the author of Wisdom did not go all the way with the Greeks on this:  for human beings, immortality is the fruit of virtue and faithfulness to the Lord, not inherent in human nature itself.]

In Christian theological terms, immortality is not a matter of nature but of grace.  Our bodies and our souls are not separate things.  We are psychosomatic unities.  Despite the language we sometimes use, we are not a duality of mortal bodies and immortal souls.  “Immortality of the soul” is not a default setting.  Eternal life is a gift from God.  And although we have no very good idea of exactly how this will work in the event, our faith and hope and trust is that in the end God will raise our whole selves to the fullness of God’s Kingdom. 

Which brings us back to what we are about today as we begin the season of Lent.  And so, if you will stand as you are able, let us continue with the service in the Prayer Book at the bottom of page 264.

24 December 2017 - 4th Sunday of Advent

4^th Sunday of Advent  — 24 December 2017

Trinity – 7:45, 9:00 & 11:00 am

2 Samuel 7:1-11,16  |  Psalm 89:1-4,19-26  |  Romans 16:25-27  |  Luke 1:26-38

“Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”  Luke 2:38

As we approach Christmas, we are surrounded by many familiar artistic images – from copies of great paintings to simple line drawings.  Perhaps the most common is the manger scene of the nativity of Jesus in Bethlehem.  Another common one is the three wise men.  Still another image common at this time is actually not of this time but of an event a day short of nine months ago (do the math), the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary.  In the Church Year we celebrate this event every March 25, but on this Fourth Sunday of Advent this year we also read this in the Gospel today. 

So familiar a story, from Like’s Gospel, from paintings medieval, renaissance, baroque, romantic, modern, that I suspect we have forgotten what a very strange story this is, and what (I think!) is its most important point.

(I’m going to put the issue of the historicity of this story aside; historicity is an issue, but not for today.  Perhaps some other time.)

For all its familiarity, we may not always completely notice that the angel, God’s messenger (that’s what angelos means), is not delivering a divine command.  Gabriel is not a bailiff from the heavenly courthouse with a summons.  God is asking for Mary’s cooperation.  It is God’s purpose for the redemption of fallen humankind to become incarnate, to become enfleshed as a human being in the human world.  But that requires a human consent, because that’s how God does things.  God is not a puppetmaster. 

Mary could have said no.  Do we take that seriously?  Mary could have said “No.”  Maybe Mary wasn’t the first young woman whom God asked!  Maybe Gabriel had gone to Amber (let the reader understand), and Amber said “WHAT?”  Mary could have said, “You’re kidding, right?  Are you crazy?”  Remember, in the context of turn-of-the-era Galilee, what God is asking this young woman is a Really Big Deal.  (In fact, in any context to be the mother of the Incarnate Word of God is a Really Big Deal.)  We can well understand it if Mary had said, as I myself often do, “Don’ wanna, don’ gotta, ain’ gonna.”

But Mary didn’t.  Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”  Mary was not only holy, she was gutsy.  And she was willing to share in God’s plan of peace, justice, and healing.  “My spirit rejoices in God my Savior,…for he has remembered his promise of mercy.”

You may recall the brief instance later in St. Luke’s Gospel in which Jesus is teaching, and “a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!’ But [Jesus] said, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!’”  [Luke 11:27-28]  Jesus is not changing the subject away from Mary his mother, but focusing our attention on the real reason Mary is blessed.  “Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.”

There are a lot of things to be learned from today’s Gospel reading.  One of the things that I’m not sure we always catch on to is what it says about who God is and how God deals with us and our world.  An important teaching in Christian (and other) theology is the doctrine of the Sovereignty of God.  And that’s true.  We believe that ultimately, God rules.  The problem with the way we often understand that, and I suggest we see it especially in the Calvinist tradition (although that’s unfair because we’re all guilty of it) is that we think that God is the Sovereign Ruler of the Universe in the way that we would be Sovereign if we were Ruler of the Universe.  We all too often are control freaks.  We would love to be puppetmasters.  But God is not us.  And God is not a control freak.  God is not a puppetmaster.

God is love.  I hope we realize that I don’t mean that God is a warm fuzzy feeling.  (Indeed, God is very often not warm and fuzzy!)  But God is self-giving.  That is the very nature of God.  God’s own internal being is self-giving, and that underlies what we articulate as the doctrine of the Trinity (but I’m not going there today).  Externally, God’s self-giving expresses itself in creation.  God created the universe out of love, and love respects the freedom and the autonomy of the beloved.  Love does not control.  The 17^th and 18^th century Deist philosophers were not completely wrong:  God created the universe with a structure of what we call scientific laws, and God doesn’t fiddle around with them.  God lets them be.  God does not manipulate the world.  The universe is what it is and does what it does. 

(We now know what the Deists did not, that the laws of the universe do include a certain amount of chaos.  But I think that’s just part of the autonomy with which God endowed the universe.  Some modern theologians have suggested that chaos theory is how God can sneak in “miracle,” but I’m not at all comfortable with that.  It sounds too much like a reversion to the “God of the gaps” which too many religious people have used to avoid taking science seriously.  But I am digressing…)

The big mistake the Deists made was they thought that the Great Clockmaker of the Universe had just wound up his Creation to set it running and then walked away from it and is no longer involved with it.  Au contraire, say I.  Yes, God does not manipulate the physical workings of the universe; God’s actions in the world are not expressions of what in St. Thomas Aquinas’ scholastic philosophy would be called “efficient causality.”  God works in the world, and specifically among human beings, not by manipulation but by grace; grace, God’s own loving self-communication.  Grace empowers, but does not manipulate.  (Modern neoscholastic theologians speak of grace as “quasi-formal causality,” and thirty years ago I understood what that meant, but now I’m an old guy, and I forget!)

Here’s the point (finally!):  The Gospel reading today is about God’s grace.  God created the universe as an expression and as the object of the divine love, and God created us to be God’s stewards of this little corner of the universe.  But, as we say in one of our Eucharistic Prayers, “We turned against you, and betrayed your trust, and we turned against one another.”  So what does God do about that?  Does God manipulate us all to better serve God’s will?  Does God attach puppet strings to us so God can control us?  Does God take us down to the basement and put us on the workbench and disassemble us and change out a few parts and tighten our screws?  Does God remotely access us to upgrade our system?  No.  God’s purpose is to come among us, as one of us, to share God’s life and God’s love, to show us God’s love, to invite us into God’s love, to pay the price of love.  And so God asks us.  That’s how God works.  God offers the divine presence.  God offers grace.  In an obscure corner of the world, God visits a young peasant woman, and presents the divine plan, the divine hope.  And she says Yes.  “Let it be with me according to your word.”

That’s who God is.  That’s how God is.

2 November 2017 -- All Souls' Day

All Souls’ Day  — 2 November 2017

Trinity – 12:15 pm

Wisdom 3:1-9  |  Psalm 116:10-17  |  1 Corinthians 15:50-58  |  John 5:24-27

The celebration of the Communion of Saints – living and departed – in one form or another, at one time of year or another, goes back a very long way in the history of the Church, back into the early days.  In the New Testament, and in the earliest days of the Church, the “saints” – that is, God’s holy ones, God’s holy people – meant all faithful Christians, including you and me.  But over the years the celebration came to focus on the extraordinary saints, the heroes of the faith, especially the martyrs.  But we ordinary folks, and particularly our departed family and friends, seemed to get left out.  Except that we didn’t, really, because it has been a custom among peoples all over the world to have some annual celebration or remembrance of our dead ancestors.  

The Church, of course, developed and scheduled Holy Days to compete with and to absorb pre-Christian festivals – a classic example being the setting of the observance of the birth of Jesus – about whose actual birthday we have absolutely no idea at all – at the time of the celebration of the winter solstice.  And of course All Saints’ Day came to be observed in the medieval Western Church – apparently originally in Ireland – at the season in which departed family were remembered.  (For example, Dia de los Muertos in Mexico and elsewhere in the Americas.)  This settled into a three-day sequence, centering on All Saints’ Day (November 1), preceded by All Hallows’ Eve (Hallowe’en) and followed by All Souls’ Day, focusing on those “ordinary folks” who we had forgotten were also saints.  

Meanwhile, under the influence of some of the less healthy aspects of the theology of St. Augustine, the concern grew that since human beings are all rotten to the core and on our way in handbaskets to hell, All Souls’ Day became a day of moaning and whining, with black as the liturgical color and the chanting of the funeral hymn Dies irae (“Day of wrath, O day of mourning”), perhaps especially known through musical compositions by Mozart and Verdi, though Gabriel Fauré declined to set that text in his Requiem Mass.  All of this degenerated into a system of attempts to pray or buy Grandma’s soul out of purgatory, resulting ultimately in the sale of papal indulgences, which finally led the German priest Martin Luther to say “Enough!” and to challenge the whole corrupt system, five hundred years ago this past Tuesday.

Protestantism on the whole dumped the All Souls’ Day business, considering it irretrievable.  Some Reformed churches dumped All Saints’ Day as well.  Anglicans, naturally, waffled, at least until modern times.  But folk religion is not always wrong, and our desire to remember and pray for our departed family and friends has a legitimate place in our spirituality and worship.  Not because they need us to cajole God to let them through the pearly gates, but because we love them and therefore we pray for them.  And they, being with God, pray for us.

And so we celebrate All Souls’ Day today, now as an extension, as it were, of All Saints’ Day, so we can focus in our prayers and remembrance upon our own saints, our parish, our friends, and our families.