Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene on the 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany, January 18, 2009: 1 Samuel 3:1-17; John 1:43-51
Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God.[1]
I find these words of Dr. King extraordinarily helpful at this time when we look forward in two days to the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States. I find them helpful because of what they say about the past. I find them helpful because of what they say about where we go from here.
“Those who are willing to be co-workers with God.” The concept of being co-workers with God may seem to err in making us too important. Wouldn’t it be better to say, “those who are willing to be obedient servants of God?” But Dr. King had a great deal of respect for the God-given human capacity to make choices and take particular actions out of God-given human freedom. And in that I think he was precisely right. God calls us to be co-workers.
The religious among us might say that nothing happens without God and that would be true. But the humanitarian among us might also say that nothing happens without human beings making a choice for good or for ill, and that would be true as well. The whole secret to life is learning day by day to work hand in hand with God so that together we might change the world for good.
In our first reading this morning, God calls the boy Samuel to be just such a co-worker. Samuel, we are told, does not know the Lord and so when God calls him he believes it is the one he does know, Eli, his earthly master. It is Eli who steers him in the right direction and tells him to say the only thing one can say when God calls, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”
Notice that then God calls Samuel to do God’s work for him. If God wanted to get a message to Eli, why didn’t he just speak to him directly? Because he needed a co-worker. It is God’s preferred way of acting in the world. Notice also that God even needed a co-worker in speaking to Samuel. It took Eli to discern that it was God calling the boy. God always needs one of our hands to work with him to accomplish the purposes of God.
What God asks of Samuel is very difficult. The message he has to deliver to Eli through Samuel is a hard one, even a harsh one. Eli’s priestly line will end. Eli’s sons are not God’s co-workers, they work their own works paying God never any mind at all. God will find someone different with whom to work. A new initiative from God begins with Samuel.
Then we have the somewhat different call of Nathanael in John’s Gospel. Nathanael jumps to a quick judgment. Nothing good can come out of Nazareth. Yet curiosity gets the best of him and he follows Philip to “come and see.” Jesus reaches out to him despite being fully aware of his skepticism. And Nathanael reaches back through his judgmentalism and professes new found belief. He becomes a co-worker of Jesus, what we would call a disciple.
That’s what disciples are. That’s what they are called to be: co-workers with God. And it takes all kinds, including those who “do not yet know the Lord,” and those who approach with extreme skepticism. Neither Samuel nor Nathanael were particularly well-qualified to be God’s co-worker, but they are called nevertheless. God calls them because he wants to call them, not because they are qualified.
That means each one of you is called to be a co-worker with God, and, among other things, that means, as Dr. King said, that the time is always ripe to do good.
Doing good sometimes means doing the hard thing, as Samuel had to do. Doing good sometimes means having to eat a little crow, like Nathanael did. Sometimes in order to do good we have to admit that we’ve been wrong. Sometimes it means that we have to tell people we love that they’ve been wrong. Sometimes we are called to do these things in word, sometimes in deed. But called to do we are.
I find it humbling to speak in the foreshadow of this great moment. I am not a veteran of the 1960’s civil rights movement. I, like Samuel, was just a boy. And I grew up in a racist world and still, of course, survive in part by the privilege given me simply because of the color of my skin. Some, if not most, of you are more qualified than I to speak in this moment.
I believe you are the heroes of this moment. How we have gotten here is by ordinary men and women, black and white, struggling to witness to and live out a different truth than what has prevailed in our culture—the truth of equality.
It is significant to me that since the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. there has been no one to fill his shoes. True, there have been some who wanted to do so and even perhaps thought that they were, but no one has ever regained that prophetic voice of Dr. King’s. If that is the case, then how have things changed?
Things have changed because folk like you were willing to be co-workers with God, acting against the demon of time, of what Dr. King called “social stagnation.”
I hope and pray that our new President has a clear sense of this, that he takes the oath of office standing on the shoulders of literally millions of people of good will and determination who chose against great odds to live out their God-given freedom and participate in a different way of being that pushed against the racism that is still so prevalent in our culture. It has been those millions who have gotten us from Dr. King to President Obama.
It is a great testimony to how God works, by choosing us to be his co-workers, asking us to love our neighbor as ourselves no matter who those neighbors are, and to respect the dignity of every human being no matter what the color of their skin or even the content of their character.
I am so grateful to be alive in this moment and if I feel that way than I know some of you must be absolutely overwhelmed. My Lord, what a time, what a time. To see a piece of the dream realized, or, as I said right after the election, actually to see the arc of justice bend. It makes this act of thanksgiving that is ours to make every week all the sweeter today.
After this moment there will be work ahead, as our President-elect knows far too well. These are difficult and dangerous times. The world needs some steady hands, themselves committed to seize the moment to do good.
And a large part of the good left to be done is the work Martin Luther King left us to do—to eradicate racism and prejudice of every kind from our land, a task made all the more urgent, I believe, by this great moment. And just as much, that great task to which Dr. King had committed himself in the last months and days of his life—the eradication of poverty among all of God’s children. The twin devils of racism and poverty remain for us to diminish and defeat, and we are called to continue playing our decisive part as the ordinary people of God, to be God’s co-workers in this endeavor, to continue to change the world one small but courageous act at a time.
This is how we got from Martin to Barack and it is how ever greater freedom will continue to ring through this land and around the world.
Let us continue to be co-workers with God, for the time is always ripe to do good.
[1] The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., from his last Sunday sermon, March 31, 1968 at the National Cathedral, “Keeping Awake through a Great Revolution.”
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
A Promise Forever
Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, the 1st Sunday after the Epiphany, January 11, 2009: Mark 1:4-11
I dare say that a lot of people would agree with the statement that going to church is about learning how you get what you deserve. And then once you’ve learned that truth, you try very hard to be on the positive side of that deserving, so that when the time comes, God decides that he likes you enough to spend eternity with him.
It turns out, however, that none of that is true at all.
We are told that John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness talking not about himself but about one who was “more powerful than I who is coming after me.” “I have baptized you with water,” he says, “but [the one who is to come] will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
And sure enough, the Gospel writer Mark tells us, “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.”
Which is to say that Jesus came out of nowhere. Nazareth was the kind of town that most people of Jesus’ day would have never heard of. It wasn’t on anybody’s list of top ten places in the Middle East that you would like to see before you die. There’s no mention of it in the Old Testament, so there wasn’t any expectation that a future messiah would come from there, or anywhere else in the district called Galilee.
The Gospel writers Matthew and Luke at least have the good sense to tell birth stories about Jesus, about how he was born in Bethlehem, a place in the right part of the region, that everybody would have heard of, and about which there were plenty of expectations about a future ruler coming from there just like King David had centuries before.
But not Mark. It almost seems important to Mark that Jesus comes out of nowhere.
So the story is that this guy comes out of nowhere. He gets attracted like many others to John’s sort of exotic preaching and baptizing by the river Jordan, and he himself, again, like many others, presents himself to John for baptism. But when he is baptized he has this amazing experience. As Mark describes it
As he was coming out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.
Then, by the way, Mark tells us that he was immediately driven into the wilderness to face temptation.
Now isn’t that sort of backwards? Doesn’t it make more sense for Jesus to have gotten this great affirmation from God after he passed the test of the temptations? But that isn’t how the story goes.
The story is that this guy came out of nowhere and God called him his beloved. Now you will no doubt want to conjecture that he must have grown up being pretty much perfect for God to say he was well pleased with him. But that doesn’t seem to be important one way or the other for Mark. He doesn’t tell any stories about Jesus’ perfection, or anything else he has done to deserve God’s favor.
He just says that this guy came out of nowhere and God called him “beloved.”
Now that’s important for you and me. Why? Because John the Baptist tells us that Jesus will baptize people with the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that pronounces Jesus beloved and well pleasing to God. Jesus’ baptism is a baptism into God’s belovedness. And that is true whether we come from somewhere or from nowhere. And it is true whether we have successfully met our temptations or not. The Spirit of God is the Spirit of belovedness.
We are baptizing a toddler this morning. It is easy for us to get all sentimental when we baptize an infant or a young child. It is easy for me today because this one happens to be my grand niece. She’s so cute, adorable and innocent.
However, this will not always be the case. And we know that, of course. Babies become “terrible two’s” and eventually they grow up to be worse, teenagers. We know this but we’d rather not believe it today because she is so cute, after all.
It seems easy to say this morning that she is a fit receptacle for God’s own Spirit, and as a recipient of God’s Spirit she is being pronounced “beloved.” She’s so cute, who wouldn’t want to call her beloved today?
But we are not just saying this for today. What is happening today, we say, is forever. We will actually, literally say that in a few minutes.
You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.
You are God’s beloved forever, we say, knowing full well that, like the rest of us, she is going to do things in the future that will make it dubious that she is deserving of that title.
And it doesn’t matter, we are saying today. Because it is not, in truth, about deserving or not deserving anything. It is not about whether we’ve been good enough to deserve God liking us or not.
It is about being beloved.
It is not true, at least with God, that you get what you deserve. Quite, in fact, the opposite. It is news so good that it is just about unbelievable, and I would be the first to admit that the church doesn’t always talk that way. We’re afraid that we might go out of business if we didn’t have to keep telling people to behave themselves so that they can go to heaven.
But we should not be primarily in the business of teaching people to be good. We should be, we are, in the business of telling people that they are beloved.
God dared to do this with Jesus before he knew whether Jesus could pass the temptation test or not. If we actually believe that everything we are saying as part of this baptism this morning is true, then we believe God does the same thing with each one of us. When it comes to human beings, God is the great risk taker.
Which is crazy, if you think about it. God, after all, is pretty smart, smart enough to know that this child will disappoint him. That, however, will not make her special. It will simply make her like the rest of us.
Which means that we have to trust at least as much as God does. We have to believe that making her beloved will help make her good, and not the other way around.
The church is not in the business of helping make people good enough that God will love them. We are in the business of announcing that people are already beloved by God, and helping to make and keep them so confident in that reality, that they seek to do good.
I hope you can hear how amazing that news is, and how counter it is to most of our natural inclinations to think about life, much less church. And I’m here to tell you today that it gets better than that. Because even after those moments when I do not seek to do good, when sometimes I do precisely the opposite, when I betray my belovedness, I always get a second chance. All I have to do is make the slightest turn towards God and say, “I’m not doing so well, but I want to do better.” And God says, OK. You’ll never stop being my beloved.
Little Teagan, welcome to belovedness. And not the kind of belovedness that is dependent on how good you are, but the kind of belovedness that is a promise forever.
I dare say that a lot of people would agree with the statement that going to church is about learning how you get what you deserve. And then once you’ve learned that truth, you try very hard to be on the positive side of that deserving, so that when the time comes, God decides that he likes you enough to spend eternity with him.
It turns out, however, that none of that is true at all.
We are told that John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness talking not about himself but about one who was “more powerful than I who is coming after me.” “I have baptized you with water,” he says, “but [the one who is to come] will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
And sure enough, the Gospel writer Mark tells us, “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.”
Which is to say that Jesus came out of nowhere. Nazareth was the kind of town that most people of Jesus’ day would have never heard of. It wasn’t on anybody’s list of top ten places in the Middle East that you would like to see before you die. There’s no mention of it in the Old Testament, so there wasn’t any expectation that a future messiah would come from there, or anywhere else in the district called Galilee.
The Gospel writers Matthew and Luke at least have the good sense to tell birth stories about Jesus, about how he was born in Bethlehem, a place in the right part of the region, that everybody would have heard of, and about which there were plenty of expectations about a future ruler coming from there just like King David had centuries before.
But not Mark. It almost seems important to Mark that Jesus comes out of nowhere.
So the story is that this guy comes out of nowhere. He gets attracted like many others to John’s sort of exotic preaching and baptizing by the river Jordan, and he himself, again, like many others, presents himself to John for baptism. But when he is baptized he has this amazing experience. As Mark describes it
As he was coming out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.
Then, by the way, Mark tells us that he was immediately driven into the wilderness to face temptation.
Now isn’t that sort of backwards? Doesn’t it make more sense for Jesus to have gotten this great affirmation from God after he passed the test of the temptations? But that isn’t how the story goes.
The story is that this guy came out of nowhere and God called him his beloved. Now you will no doubt want to conjecture that he must have grown up being pretty much perfect for God to say he was well pleased with him. But that doesn’t seem to be important one way or the other for Mark. He doesn’t tell any stories about Jesus’ perfection, or anything else he has done to deserve God’s favor.
He just says that this guy came out of nowhere and God called him “beloved.”
Now that’s important for you and me. Why? Because John the Baptist tells us that Jesus will baptize people with the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that pronounces Jesus beloved and well pleasing to God. Jesus’ baptism is a baptism into God’s belovedness. And that is true whether we come from somewhere or from nowhere. And it is true whether we have successfully met our temptations or not. The Spirit of God is the Spirit of belovedness.
We are baptizing a toddler this morning. It is easy for us to get all sentimental when we baptize an infant or a young child. It is easy for me today because this one happens to be my grand niece. She’s so cute, adorable and innocent.
However, this will not always be the case. And we know that, of course. Babies become “terrible two’s” and eventually they grow up to be worse, teenagers. We know this but we’d rather not believe it today because she is so cute, after all.
It seems easy to say this morning that she is a fit receptacle for God’s own Spirit, and as a recipient of God’s Spirit she is being pronounced “beloved.” She’s so cute, who wouldn’t want to call her beloved today?
But we are not just saying this for today. What is happening today, we say, is forever. We will actually, literally say that in a few minutes.
You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.
You are God’s beloved forever, we say, knowing full well that, like the rest of us, she is going to do things in the future that will make it dubious that she is deserving of that title.
And it doesn’t matter, we are saying today. Because it is not, in truth, about deserving or not deserving anything. It is not about whether we’ve been good enough to deserve God liking us or not.
It is about being beloved.
It is not true, at least with God, that you get what you deserve. Quite, in fact, the opposite. It is news so good that it is just about unbelievable, and I would be the first to admit that the church doesn’t always talk that way. We’re afraid that we might go out of business if we didn’t have to keep telling people to behave themselves so that they can go to heaven.
But we should not be primarily in the business of teaching people to be good. We should be, we are, in the business of telling people that they are beloved.
God dared to do this with Jesus before he knew whether Jesus could pass the temptation test or not. If we actually believe that everything we are saying as part of this baptism this morning is true, then we believe God does the same thing with each one of us. When it comes to human beings, God is the great risk taker.
Which is crazy, if you think about it. God, after all, is pretty smart, smart enough to know that this child will disappoint him. That, however, will not make her special. It will simply make her like the rest of us.
Which means that we have to trust at least as much as God does. We have to believe that making her beloved will help make her good, and not the other way around.
The church is not in the business of helping make people good enough that God will love them. We are in the business of announcing that people are already beloved by God, and helping to make and keep them so confident in that reality, that they seek to do good.
I hope you can hear how amazing that news is, and how counter it is to most of our natural inclinations to think about life, much less church. And I’m here to tell you today that it gets better than that. Because even after those moments when I do not seek to do good, when sometimes I do precisely the opposite, when I betray my belovedness, I always get a second chance. All I have to do is make the slightest turn towards God and say, “I’m not doing so well, but I want to do better.” And God says, OK. You’ll never stop being my beloved.
Little Teagan, welcome to belovedness. And not the kind of belovedness that is dependent on how good you are, but the kind of belovedness that is a promise forever.
We Look for the Resurrection of the Dead
Homily at the Dedication of the new Columbarium at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Saturday, January 10, 2009: Wisdom 3:1-5,9; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:1-2; John 14:1-6
We say every Sunday as we recite the Nicene Creed,
We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
The readings we have just heard take us through what we mean when we say these words.
First the Wisdom of Solomon tells us,
The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God…their hope is full of immortality…the faithful will abide with him in love…
We believe that James Chester, Elizabeth Logan and Rudy McClenney are in the hands of God. Whatever life after death looks like, this much we believe is true, “the faithful will abide with him in love.”
This is the same belief expressed in the 23rd psalm,
…and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
These words are made all the more poignant given that the remains of these three, and many more to come after them, are literally dwelling in the Lord’s house.
Then, in case we have gotten too sentimental about the “righteous” part of the description of those who abide with God for ever, the First Letter of John reminds us that it is God who has made these three, and us, righteous.
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.
So we might want to re-translate the Wisdom of Solomon to something like,
The souls of all those whom God has called his children are in the hand of God…
And there should be no doubt that these three, and each one of us, is a child of God independent of our deserving. That is simply what we are by God’s grace.
The Gospel reading holds up that marvelous image of the house with many dwelling places, or, as I like to say, the house where there’s a lot of room. How much room may have even surprised these three who have gone before us. I have no doubt that we will all be surprised at how large God’s house is and some of the tenants God has taken on.
And finally there are those simple, but very profound, words from Jesus, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” And the declaration, “no one comes to the Father except through me,” may sound exclusive until we remember the image Jesus has just used about the large house. The way, the truth, and the life of Jesus are characterized by grace and mercy. We do not have a Savior who seeks to exclude. Rather, as John says elsewhere in his Gospel,
God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
It is important this day that we remember these things, as we acknowledge this new resting place for the remains of our brothers and sisters who have gone and will go before us. This is a resting place for their mortal remains, but they are very much alive in God, and that, above all things, we must remember and continually celebrate.
There will be a plaque on the wall which will list the names of those whose remains are at rest here. (I promise it won’t take as long to get the plaque up as it took to configure the columbarium itself!) The plaque will say at the top that simple statement from the Creed, “We look for the resurrection of the dead…”
That statement sums up all our faith, all our hope and all our love. And we stand here today with the conviction that we do none of these things in vain, for
The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God;
We will dwell in the house of the Lord forever;
We should be called children of God; and that is what we are; and
In my Father’s house there is a lot of room.
And these things are the way, the truth and the life that is our Savior Jesus Christ.
We say every Sunday as we recite the Nicene Creed,
We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
The readings we have just heard take us through what we mean when we say these words.
First the Wisdom of Solomon tells us,
The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God…their hope is full of immortality…the faithful will abide with him in love…
We believe that James Chester, Elizabeth Logan and Rudy McClenney are in the hands of God. Whatever life after death looks like, this much we believe is true, “the faithful will abide with him in love.”
This is the same belief expressed in the 23rd psalm,
…and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
These words are made all the more poignant given that the remains of these three, and many more to come after them, are literally dwelling in the Lord’s house.
Then, in case we have gotten too sentimental about the “righteous” part of the description of those who abide with God for ever, the First Letter of John reminds us that it is God who has made these three, and us, righteous.
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.
So we might want to re-translate the Wisdom of Solomon to something like,
The souls of all those whom God has called his children are in the hand of God…
And there should be no doubt that these three, and each one of us, is a child of God independent of our deserving. That is simply what we are by God’s grace.
The Gospel reading holds up that marvelous image of the house with many dwelling places, or, as I like to say, the house where there’s a lot of room. How much room may have even surprised these three who have gone before us. I have no doubt that we will all be surprised at how large God’s house is and some of the tenants God has taken on.
And finally there are those simple, but very profound, words from Jesus, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” And the declaration, “no one comes to the Father except through me,” may sound exclusive until we remember the image Jesus has just used about the large house. The way, the truth, and the life of Jesus are characterized by grace and mercy. We do not have a Savior who seeks to exclude. Rather, as John says elsewhere in his Gospel,
God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
It is important this day that we remember these things, as we acknowledge this new resting place for the remains of our brothers and sisters who have gone and will go before us. This is a resting place for their mortal remains, but they are very much alive in God, and that, above all things, we must remember and continually celebrate.
There will be a plaque on the wall which will list the names of those whose remains are at rest here. (I promise it won’t take as long to get the plaque up as it took to configure the columbarium itself!) The plaque will say at the top that simple statement from the Creed, “We look for the resurrection of the dead…”
That statement sums up all our faith, all our hope and all our love. And we stand here today with the conviction that we do none of these things in vain, for
The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God;
We will dwell in the house of the Lord forever;
We should be called children of God; and that is what we are; and
In my Father’s house there is a lot of room.
And these things are the way, the truth and the life that is our Savior Jesus Christ.
Monday, January 05, 2009
The Dignity of Human Nature, the Dignity of God
Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, New York on the Second Sunday after Christmas, January 4, 2009: Matthew 2:1-12
At the beginning of Service we prayed my favorite prayer from the Prayer Book:
O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ…
The “dignity of human nature” is something of central importance to us Episcopalians in our practice of the Christian faith. It is found in one of the questions of our Baptismal Covenant:
Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
Simply put, the good news is that God has not only created the dignity of human nature, God remains committed to it, so much so that he is willing to risk all to renew it, to restore it.
That it needs restoration is obvious. The dignity of human nature is under near constant attack all around us and sometimes even within us. There are forces at work in the world that work to rub people’s noses in their own dignity, in order to control it or even obliterate it. The sad and horrifying truth is that sometimes we are among those forces (see also that phrase from the contemporary General Confession, “the evil done on our behalf”).
It is why that article of the Baptismal Covenant is there at all. We need to commit ourselves to God’s project: the dignity of every human being.
The Prayer goes on to define this dignity in an astounding way: it is a sharing in the divine life itself. The miracle of Christmas is not only that God shared his life with us on earth, but that God intends us to share his life as well, and not just in heaven. The Prayer is careful not to say that. It does not say “that we may one day share the divine life.” There is no future tense. It is present. “That we may share..”[1]
This truth is sometimes daringly called “divinization.” One of Christianity’s great truths is that it is our destiny to become like God, that this destiny is in our very nature, since we are made in God’s image. That image has been, is being and will be restored!
It either sounds blasphemous or some kind of creeping “new age-ism.” But Christians have been saying it from the beginning. Paul called it the process of “sanctification.”
Perhaps the most well-known early Christian who spoke plainly of this truth was St. Athanasius in the 4th century. He wrote
God became man so that man might become a god.[2]
It is almost shocking to hear. One suspects it would have come from one of those unorthodox folks the early church fathers fought against. But here it is from the lips of the one who is arguably “Mr. Orthodox” among the church fathers. I like to translate what he says this way:
God became a human being so that human beings might have the dignity of God.
What an astounding truth! What amazing good news! Not only for the whole world, but for each one of us personally! It is our destiny to be like God!
We are used to hearing something like, “God made us in his image and we fell from that image.” We Christians then hear something like, “Christ came to save us, to reconcile us to God.” But what we don’t hear is a much more plain, Christ has restored us to God’s image! Christ made it possible for us to live into that image once again. Baptism is the great sign of that image restored. It is the outward and visible sign of that inward and spiritual grace that is the restoration of the image of God in us.
Having had that great restoration, our lives are spent living into that new reality, the process Paul calls sanctification and what many in the early Church called “divinization.”
Awash in this incredible good news, we do have to pause and hear words from the Gospel reading this morning.
When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him.
The powers that be are often frightened by the dignity of human nature, especially the dignity of human nature that is outside their control. Even some of the best of people in positions of power throughout history have slipped on this point: the attempt to control human nature and human dignity.
Why is human dignity—such a wonderful thing—frightening to some? Because it is, like God, uncontrollable. True freedom is such an elusive thing even in a supposedly “free” society such as ours because the powers that be (and that includes us sometimes) instinctively do not trust it. We instinctively fear the chaos that might ensue if everyone were truly free to live into their God-given human dignity. So we create order to keep control of things.
Now order is not an entirely bad thing, nor is the order we call government. We need both, partly because we are not there yet. We have to learn how to live into our God-given dignity and freedom. Our own dignity, for instance, can never rob the dignity of others. We sometimes say, “No one is free until all are free.” The same is true of dignity. None are dignified until all are dignified.
That’s the simple test of whether we are living in freedom and dignity or what St. Paul calls “licentiousness” or “living in the flesh.” If our attempt at dignity robs someone else of dignity, than it is not dignity we are after but a putting of self above others, and that is not dignity, it is tyranny.
This can be one way of talking about how we as Christians are called to make moral decisions. Is my action a lifting up of my own dignity and that of others, all others? If so, than it is a truly moral act. It is an act that works with God’s project of sanctification, divinization, not against it.
But all this reaction of fear and attempts to control have as their backdrop the news that cannot be beaten. Our dignity as human beings is a gift from God. In spite of our not living up to it, it has been restored by God. And once we believe that is the truth, our life is a journey toward realizing that restoration.
Bit by bit we do it, symbolized by our reception of Communion. Yes, this is why in our tradition we do it all the time! Because the outward and visible signs of bread and wine effect an inward and spiritual grace of our union with God, the restoration of our dignity, the divinization of our lives. And it is the perfect symbol of this process, not only because we do it bit by bit, but because we do it together. No one receives any differently from anyone else. No matter how much social standing or power you do or do not have in this world, you still walk to this altar rail and hold out your hands and receive.
So let us pray again with gusto the good news of this day and all days:
O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ…
Let us believe with all our hearts and souls and minds and strength that God became a human being so that human beings might have the dignity of God.
[1] I realize this is the use of the subjunctive mood, but one of the purposes of that mood is to express possibility!
[2] De incarnation 54:3.
At the beginning of Service we prayed my favorite prayer from the Prayer Book:
O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ…
The “dignity of human nature” is something of central importance to us Episcopalians in our practice of the Christian faith. It is found in one of the questions of our Baptismal Covenant:
Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
Simply put, the good news is that God has not only created the dignity of human nature, God remains committed to it, so much so that he is willing to risk all to renew it, to restore it.
That it needs restoration is obvious. The dignity of human nature is under near constant attack all around us and sometimes even within us. There are forces at work in the world that work to rub people’s noses in their own dignity, in order to control it or even obliterate it. The sad and horrifying truth is that sometimes we are among those forces (see also that phrase from the contemporary General Confession, “the evil done on our behalf”).
It is why that article of the Baptismal Covenant is there at all. We need to commit ourselves to God’s project: the dignity of every human being.
The Prayer goes on to define this dignity in an astounding way: it is a sharing in the divine life itself. The miracle of Christmas is not only that God shared his life with us on earth, but that God intends us to share his life as well, and not just in heaven. The Prayer is careful not to say that. It does not say “that we may one day share the divine life.” There is no future tense. It is present. “That we may share..”[1]
This truth is sometimes daringly called “divinization.” One of Christianity’s great truths is that it is our destiny to become like God, that this destiny is in our very nature, since we are made in God’s image. That image has been, is being and will be restored!
It either sounds blasphemous or some kind of creeping “new age-ism.” But Christians have been saying it from the beginning. Paul called it the process of “sanctification.”
Perhaps the most well-known early Christian who spoke plainly of this truth was St. Athanasius in the 4th century. He wrote
God became man so that man might become a god.[2]
It is almost shocking to hear. One suspects it would have come from one of those unorthodox folks the early church fathers fought against. But here it is from the lips of the one who is arguably “Mr. Orthodox” among the church fathers. I like to translate what he says this way:
God became a human being so that human beings might have the dignity of God.
What an astounding truth! What amazing good news! Not only for the whole world, but for each one of us personally! It is our destiny to be like God!
We are used to hearing something like, “God made us in his image and we fell from that image.” We Christians then hear something like, “Christ came to save us, to reconcile us to God.” But what we don’t hear is a much more plain, Christ has restored us to God’s image! Christ made it possible for us to live into that image once again. Baptism is the great sign of that image restored. It is the outward and visible sign of that inward and spiritual grace that is the restoration of the image of God in us.
Having had that great restoration, our lives are spent living into that new reality, the process Paul calls sanctification and what many in the early Church called “divinization.”
Awash in this incredible good news, we do have to pause and hear words from the Gospel reading this morning.
When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him.
The powers that be are often frightened by the dignity of human nature, especially the dignity of human nature that is outside their control. Even some of the best of people in positions of power throughout history have slipped on this point: the attempt to control human nature and human dignity.
Why is human dignity—such a wonderful thing—frightening to some? Because it is, like God, uncontrollable. True freedom is such an elusive thing even in a supposedly “free” society such as ours because the powers that be (and that includes us sometimes) instinctively do not trust it. We instinctively fear the chaos that might ensue if everyone were truly free to live into their God-given human dignity. So we create order to keep control of things.
Now order is not an entirely bad thing, nor is the order we call government. We need both, partly because we are not there yet. We have to learn how to live into our God-given dignity and freedom. Our own dignity, for instance, can never rob the dignity of others. We sometimes say, “No one is free until all are free.” The same is true of dignity. None are dignified until all are dignified.
That’s the simple test of whether we are living in freedom and dignity or what St. Paul calls “licentiousness” or “living in the flesh.” If our attempt at dignity robs someone else of dignity, than it is not dignity we are after but a putting of self above others, and that is not dignity, it is tyranny.
This can be one way of talking about how we as Christians are called to make moral decisions. Is my action a lifting up of my own dignity and that of others, all others? If so, than it is a truly moral act. It is an act that works with God’s project of sanctification, divinization, not against it.
But all this reaction of fear and attempts to control have as their backdrop the news that cannot be beaten. Our dignity as human beings is a gift from God. In spite of our not living up to it, it has been restored by God. And once we believe that is the truth, our life is a journey toward realizing that restoration.
Bit by bit we do it, symbolized by our reception of Communion. Yes, this is why in our tradition we do it all the time! Because the outward and visible signs of bread and wine effect an inward and spiritual grace of our union with God, the restoration of our dignity, the divinization of our lives. And it is the perfect symbol of this process, not only because we do it bit by bit, but because we do it together. No one receives any differently from anyone else. No matter how much social standing or power you do or do not have in this world, you still walk to this altar rail and hold out your hands and receive.
So let us pray again with gusto the good news of this day and all days:
O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ…
Let us believe with all our hearts and souls and minds and strength that God became a human being so that human beings might have the dignity of God.
[1] I realize this is the use of the subjunctive mood, but one of the purposes of that mood is to express possibility!
[2] De incarnation 54:3.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
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