The Divine "Ta-da!"

Sermon preached on Easter Dat at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene: Isaiah 25:6-9, John 20:1-18

Martin Luther is said to have always begun his Easter sermon with a joke, so here goes:

A pastor was telling the story of the resurrection to the second grade Sunday School class. He thought he’d done quite well when one of the boys asked a question. “What did Jesus say when he came out of the tomb?” “We don’t know what he said,” the pastor replied. A little girl’s hand shot up. “I bet I know what he said,” and she leapt to her feet. “Ta-da!”

If she hadn’t been a child, the pastor might have been put off that she was making fun of the resurrection, trivializing it. But isn’t, after all, the resurrection fun? It is, in many ways, God’s having fun with us.

It had all gotten so serious, deadly serious, and the last few days have been for us as well. We take Good Friday very seriously, as well we should. Not only did Jesus die a gruesome death, but we are implicated in it. We know that a part of us would have betrayed him, would have been in the crowd yelling “crucify.” This is serious and sobering.

Then just when we have done our worse, God undoes it, defies death and makes of all our seriousness a kind of joke. You couldn’t kill me and keep me dead. So Easter morning comes and our seriousness is turned into joy. Where there were tears there is now laughter. Good Friday was no laughing matter, but the resurrection may be the greatest joke ever pulled on humanity.

Mary Magdalene came to the tomb in all seriousness. With no doubt a heavy heart, she wanted to do for Jesus’ body what had not been done in the rush to get him buried. It had all turned out so wrong, but she could at least do this one last right thing before she picked up the pieces and got on with her life.

Then it got worse. The stone had been moved and the body was gone. She runs to tell the others and two of them run to see. They see an empty tomb but are nothing but perplexed and go back home, leaving Mary weeping.

Mary looks into the tomb again, hoping against hope. She sees two angels. She is so distraught that this sight does not seem to phase her! “Why are you weeping?” they ask, but she just turns to leave. There is a man outside, maybe he knows something. “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” She is so beside herself she doesn’t even think to herself, “How am I going to do that?”

Then comes the magic word that changes everything, “Mary!” It is Jesus and he says her name, and in that she recognizes him. And everything changes.

Life is very serious, these days more serious than others. The economy remains in the tank, more and more people out of work, and now a rash of violence seemingly fueled by the growing despair. It is a very serious, ugly time as we gather to celebrate Easter this year. What does the future hold? We do not know. It is hard to be anything but anxious about it.

And God comes into our seriousness, taking it seriously himself, but unable to contain himself in it. The tomb of our seriousness cannot hold him. And so we celebrate today as if we have been given the best news that there is. We celebrate in spite of what’s going on around us. For God has pulled a fast one on us and the magic word is our name.

Our name! God knows our name! Just when we thought we had been forgotten and all was pretty much lost. God comes through with our name. God remembers who we are. And doesn’t it make all the difference when somebody remembers who we are? It is just about the greatest sign of caring that there is.

It makes me think of Carl. Carl stops by here most days when the church is open. He gets a cup of coffee. That seems to be why he comes. He’s not easy to like. He doesn’t take care of himself. He doesn’t smell very good, most days. I’ll tell you what I think about Carl. I suppose it’s true that he comes here for a cup of coffee and to get warm. But I think he comes here because we know him and call him by name.

Carl’s been at the weekday Service a couple of times when I’ve been there but he’s never made it through. He leaves after a while, either to get that cup of coffee or just to go.

This past Wednesday, however, Carl stayed. He was still there at the Peace, and I said to him, “Peace be with you, Carl” and shook his hand. He smiled. It wasn’t a very pretty smile because his teeth are in pretty bad shape, but he smiled, and I don’t think he gets many of those.

He hung back when people came up around the Altar for the Communion part of the Service. I expected him to stay there and perhaps finally drift off. Yet when I started to hand out Communion, he strode forward, his head up, smiling again and he received Communion looking like I was giving him the greatest gift in the world.

And, of course, I was.

And there was resurrection.

Now I don’t want to deny that Carl remains in a pretty horrible way, and the gulf between us—between the have and the have-not—is huge. And it’s our responsibility to try to do something to make his life better.

But we have already had a glimpse of the resurrection together and that alone is a lot. It is, in fact, itself huge.

Carl’s life is no laughing matter. It is, in fact, about as bad as life can get. Yet even there God can do a new thing, with his name as the magic word. And a smile can come out of horror, and God makes a joke of our seriousness, and with a “Ta-da!” shows us again that life cannot stay dead. It will spring to life, like a plant that grows in the crack of a sidewalk or in the cleft of a rock on the side of a hill.

My sisters and brothers, today we celebrate the trump of our seriousness. Life wins in the end, life will win in the end. Death always loses. Even when all seems lost, nothing is. God loses nothing.

And we can be people of the resurrection, agents of the divine laughter, sayers of the magic word to one another, “You are Carl, child of God, and I will treat you like that even if every fiber of my being just wants you to go away.” I will treat you this way because God has promised that we can find resurrection together, and the smile will wipe away the tears.

Can there be any better news than this? No, my friends, there cannot be. We have done our worst and God has made a joke of it. Let us smile, if even through our tears, and join the song of Alleluia.

Let us spread the news of the divine “Ta-da!”

The Eucharist: A Personal Testimony

Sermon preached on Maundy Thursday at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene

For me personally this is the most powerful night of the Christian year. My spirituality, my life, is so bound up with the Eucharist that remembering its institution is a deeply moving thing.

Some of you may know the somewhat odd way I came to the Christian faith. I was baptized at six years old but was not raised in the Church. What activated my Christian faith was my participation in high school in the musical Godspell, in which I literally acted out the Gospel. I came to the musical largely ignorant of the story and came to be gripped by it.

But I had no idea what to do with that. Blessedly, my great aunt seized the day. It happened that she had become an Episcopalian some years before and was the only member of my extended family who was active in a church. She invited me to go with her. With a great deal of trepidation, I recall, I accepted.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to experience. I certainly had no idea what an Episcopalian was. I could barely say the word! It doesn’t exactly just roll off the tongue. And attending that church made my aunt strange in my family, a fact made clear to me by the way members of my family talked about it. It was as if she had decided to become some kind of freak.

So, as I said, it was with some trepidation that I agreed to go with her one day. I immediately liked the pageantry. After all, I had just been more or less converted to the story because of a dramatization of it. It seemed that in this service the drama continued (and there were even costumes!).

But the main thing for me, the turning point from curiosity to being drawn into something came when it was time to receive communion. I hesitated, not sure if I should go up. My aunt insisted, said, “You are welcome.” So I went, my senses on high alert. We knelt, she told me to hold out my hands. The wafer was pressed into them and I ate. I could smell the wine as it came closer to me and I somewhat awkwardly drank.

I walked away knowing I had somehow been in touch with God. This was the missing part. I said that I had no idea what to do with my new Christian faith. This was it. This was the thing to do.

I attended sporadically with my aunt until I went away to college. I was drawn enough that I sought out the Episcopal Church in my college town—doing the opposite thing than most of my peers were doing, starting to go to church rather than stopping. I experienced again being thought of as freakish.

I became an every Sunday church-goer. The transition to being away at college was hard for me. I was desperately homesick and actually went through the process of transferring to somewhere closer. But that community grabbed me, became my family away from home, and it was because of them that I ended up staying where I was.

It was then that I experienced another important part of the Eucharist, how it is more than a personal experience of God. It binds me to a community. It is something that is always done “together.” It makes a “we” into which I am constantly drawn, a community created by the love of Jesus, renewed in this Sacrament.

Since those days the Eucharist is what has kept me in the church and, indeed, has kept me alive. I literally don’t know what I would do without it. “My life” would not be “my life” anymore.

My experience at this Table continues to draw me to God in spite of those things in my live that have worked to draw me away. So I experience it as the forgiveness of sin.

My experience at this Table keeps me connected to a community so that I have been unable to let go at those times when I have felt hurt by the church. I experience it as continuing to form a mystical bond with others that cannot be broken.

My experience at this Table has kept me struggling with my bi-polar illness and in this way it has kept me alive. I experience it as providing strength for living in difficult times. I experience it as freedom from whatever threatens to bind me.

This is my testimony. This thing we do has continued to draw me to God, has kept me in community, and kept me free and alive.

I wish I could say why or how. That remains a mystery to me, but I think that is how it should be. This thing we do is a wonderful and sacred mystery. When we do it, Jesus is here, that is all I know. Of course, Jesus is here, everywhere, always, but it is here that I feel that consistently in ways I rarely feel anywhere else.

Let us tonight celebrate the love that is the gift of this Eucharist, which binds us together and will not let us go. This is our freedom and our very life. Thank you, Jesus, for giving it to us.

A Life Wthout Fear; A Life Forgven

Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene on the 5th Sunday in Lent: John 12:20-33

One of our RAIHN guests last week was someone who liked to ask questions. She had a lot of them. “Who is Jesus for you?” she asked. To be perfectly honest at the time I only wanted to go to bed. I didn’t answer her very well. It was a serious question that deserved a serious answer. She got a few mutterings was all, something about which I am a little ashamed.

The next morning she caught me again in the kitchen just as the water was boiling for my first cup of coffee. “Do you believe Jesus died for our sins?” I asked myself, should I give her the short answer or the long answer? I chose the short one. “Yes,” I said. She seemed satisfied by that and we went about our business.

But that question nagged me all week long, not helped by the fact that I had to talk about salvation to the Lent class on Thursday. Do I believe Jesus died for our sins? Yes, of course. But there is a long answer that gets at questions like “why?” and “how?” that are very important. The death and resurrection of Jesus is at the heart of our faith, so we better be able to talk about it. What does it mean?

There is an answer to the question that most everybody knows. It goes something like this:

God created the world and all was well. The first human beings lived in paradise until the day they broke the one commandment God had given them. That disobedience changed everything. We call it “the Fall.” God was very angry and threw them out of paradise. Their descendents kept on being disobedient and God kept on being angry.

God was in a quandary. Part of him wanted to be merciful, but he could not deny that he was also just, and the continued sin was an affront to his very honor. And the problem was that human beings could never make up for what they had done. They just didn’t have it in them. And yet they had to do something.

So God decided to send his Son into the world as a human being. As a human being he could pay the price of sin, but since he was also God, that payment would be eternal. It would be enough to appease God’s anger. So Jesus died for our sins, took upon himself the price that we couldn’t pay and God wiped the slate clean. Now if any human being agrees to have their sins covered by the blood of Jesus, they are saved.[1]

That way of telling the story has dominated in the church for almost 1,000 years. It is so dominate that most Christians cannot imagine there is any other way of telling the story. And yet, for the first 1,000 years of the church’s life there was a different way of telling the story, and even in the Bible itself there are different ways of telling the story.

In this morning’s Gospel reading, for instance, Jesus talks about his death, what it means for him. He uses a kind of parable:

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

For those first thousand years of the church’s life, Jesus’ death and resurrection were primarily about death, not about sin. Jesus died and then rose victorious from the grave. He beat death. And since death was beaten, sin was beaten too, but it was his victory over death that was of primary significance.

That means the main story line is not “Jesus died for our sins,” but “Jesus died to destroy the power of death.” After Jesus’ death and resurrection, humankind could live as if death were not. They needn’t be afraid of death any longer.

It is the fear of death that is at the heart of sin. So, one of the fruits given birth by Jesus’ death is indeed forgiveness. If we needn’t be afraid of death, then we can experience ourselves as forgiven. And we can be empowered to live a life without sin.

We continue to be afraid and so we also continue to sin. But we do see Jesus and we are drawn to him as he said we would be. And as we are drawn we are slowly transformed into his likeness, the likeness of one who lived as if he wasn’t afraid of death, and so lived without sin. That is what we are becoming.

That’s a very long answer to the question, “Do you believe Jesus died for our sins?” How could I have answered that and been true to what I actually believe about the death and resurrection of Jesus? Maybe two (albeit compound) sentences.

I believe that Jesus freely gave himself up to death and destroyed it once and for all. That means you and I don’t have to be afraid of death and part of that not-being-afraid is knowing ourselves to be forgiven.

I hope you can see what a different way of telling the story that is from the crucifixion as satisfying the vengeance of an angry God. Now I will concede the point that you can find pieces of Scripture that seem to support that way of telling the story, but it cannot be denied that the alternative way I just told it also has its support in Scripture as well as the thinking of the early church.

We’ve just got to decide which lens to use to read the story. I chose to use the “victory over death” lens rather than the “satisfying the vengeance of God” lens.

The good news in the “victory over death” way of telling the story is that I do not need to be afraid of death and the more unafraid I am the less I need to abuse others (i.e., sin) and the more I can lead a life of forgiveness.

Let us allow ourselves to be drawn into the arms of Jesus who offers us a life without fear, a life forgiven.

[1] Thanks to James Alison, On Being Liked (Crossroad, 2003), pp. 18-19.

eing Honest with God about Your Life

Sermon preached at St. Stephen' Church on the 4th Sunday in Lent: Numbers 21:4-9, Ephesians 2:1-10, John 3:14-21

We were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. Ephesians 2:3

But those who do what is true come to the light. John 3:21

My question this morning is: How honest can you be about your life before God?

It may seem the easiest of the questions. “Absolutely, totally honest” is the obvious answer. It wouldn’t do any good not to be. God is, after all, the one to whom “all hearts are open, all desires known, and from [whom] no secrets are hid,” in the words of the familiar prayer.

Yet we all play games with God, and we all play games with ourselves. “Denial,” as they say, “is not just a river in Egypt.” It is how we get by a great deal of the time.

How honest can you be about your life?

For my money, honesty about my life is what the second question of our baptismal covenant is about:

Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?

In traditional Christian language, being honest about my life with God means being honest about sin. It means being able to repent. It means continuing to live into my salvation. Sin, repentance, salvation: three words that will turn off the minds of most Episcopalians almost as quick as words like stewardship and evangelism.

They are words about “the bad news,” and we would much rather spend our time thinking about the good news and using words like grace, faith, and love. Fair enough. Me too. When I hear Paul refer to us as naturally “children of wrath,” something in my brain starts protesting. “Oh, Paul, give it a rest, most of us aren’t that bad.”

So why talk about sin?

Barbara Brown Taylor asks that question, and gives the following answer,

The only reason I can think of is because we believe that God means to redeem the world through us. We have been chosen, in the language of Genesis, not only to be blessed but also to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. Our participation in that high calling requires us to understand God’s grace as something more than the infinite remission of our sins. If we want to take part in the divine work of redemption, then we will also understand God’s grace as the gift of regeneration—the very real possibility of new life right here on earth—complete with new vision, new values, and new behavior. (Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation, p. 5)

Of course, the language of sin has been abused by many in the Christian community. It is language that has been used to exclude and control and abuse. It is language that has been primarily about inducing guilt and controlling behavior. This is why many of us hear the word “sin,” and start thinking about where we might go for lunch after Church.

But the language of sin, rightly and necessarily used, has never been primarily about guilt. It is primarily, as Barbara Brown Taylor suggests, about salvation, about transformation and liberation. It is about getting to really good news. As Taylor also says, quite wonderfully provocatively, “Sin is our only hope.”[1]

How can this be? She puts it this way,

Sin is our only hope, because the recognition that something is wrong is the first step toward setting it right again.[2]

Pretty obvious, right? But also, frequently, not pretty at all. Recognizing and naming that something is wrong in my life is not a particularly easy thing to do. It sometimes takes time. It’s often a messy business, because there are few neat and clean answers. It’s rarely as simple as, “I stole something from the grocery store and that was wrong.” What is wrong in our life is often all tangled up in what is right, and untangling the skein is tricky and risky business. And, what’s more, my tangled life is different from yours. What’s wrong for you, in some situations, might be right for me, and vica versa.

It’s complicated enough for one to throw up your hands and say, “Why does it matter anyway? God loves us. Grace is real. If it turns out something was wrong in the end, I’ll say I’m sorry, and that will take care of it.”

And it’s true. It probably will. But, you will have missed a chance to change the world, to participate in God’s work of transformation. And that, too, is sin. “What we have done, and what we have left undone,” the General Confession says.

We are all of us asked to become children of light. In the words of this morning’s Gospel, we are all asked continually to bring our lives into the light, unafraid of what will be exposed. There’s nothing that can be exposed that God cannot deal with, nor that you cannot change with the grace of God being your helper. It is God’s desire that we not remain children of wrath, but are always becoming children of light.

I say “we” quite deliberately here because sin, from the Bible’s point of view, is more a communal problem than an individual one. That is not how we tend to think of it, but it is how the Bible thinks of it. Sin is a communal problem. It is why we Anglicans have always been comfortable with the General Confession we use in the liturgy. “We confess that we have sinned against you . . . by what we have done and by what we have left undone.” When we say this confession we are standing before God on behalf of the whole human family, and confessing our participation in the larger problem that is sin.

Which is not to say, of course, that each one of us as individuals does not have to take responsibility for our own behavior. We do. But it is to say that most of our behavior that is sinful in the eyes of God is our participation in a much bigger problem.

That bigger problem is the alienation, degradation, violence, slavery, complacency, greed, and prejudice that drives so much of human interaction.

The answer to that bigger problem does lie on an individual level, however. The answer to the problem is human beings, you and I, naming the sin and choosing not to participate in it. That’s what repentance is, choosing not to participate in it, turning to a different way.

Just like sin is not primarily about guilt, repentance is not about punishment. It is about acceptance and change. It is about recognizing one path and choosing a different one. It is about a child of wrath becoming a child of light.

Can you be honest with God about your life? The answer is yes, of course. And the reason is that God does not want to be just wrathful in his relationship with you or anyone else. God wants to love. God wants to transform, liberate, and heal.

This is ultimately what that very strange story from Numbers is all about, Moses lifting up a bronze snake in the wilderness to heal the people of their snake-bites. One of the messages there is that it is only when we lift up the “snakes” in our lives, that we can be healed from their venomous effect. Hauling those things that are wrong in our lives—our sins—into the light of God’s love, is the only way for anything ever to be different.

Sin is our only hope, when it is named and offered to God. And we need not be afraid, because God does not want our guilt. God wants our liberation. And that is why we can be honest with God about our life, our whole life.

[1] Ibid., the title of chapter two.
[2] Ibid, p. 59.

The Ten Commandments

Sermon preached on the 3rd Sunday in Lent at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene: Exodus 20:1-7

Our first reading this morning was the Ten Commandments. I want to walk through them this morning and seek some relevance for our life today. Can these ancient commandments still speak to us?

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.

This first commandment may be the simplest: no other Gods but God, and not just any God, but the God of liberation.

The commandments are really how to live as a liberated people. They are not how the people are to be liberated; that has already occurred. It is how they are to react to their liberation and remain liberated.

And first things first: the God who liberated you is the only God. There may be things that we are tempted to treat as gods, but they are not to get in the way of our relationship with God. Relationship with God always comes first.

As I said, it may be the simplest commandment, but it is also perhaps the one we are most tempted to break. The things that compete with God for our attention and our loyalty are legion. We are tempted to put anything and everything between us and God, and God demands that we do not do that.

Why is this so important? Because it is the only way we stay liberated. We can only trust God absolutely with our freedom; anything and everybody else can take that freedom away, even those we love if we put them before God.

So the first commandment is how we stay a free people.

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who keep my commandments.

The second commandment is the longest of the commandments, which means, if nothing else, that God takes this one really, really seriously. God is touchy about this one. Breaking it is clearly how easiest to get on the wrong side of God.

No idols. It is perhaps something we are not very tempted to do and it was clearly something ancient Israel was very tempted to do, so maybe it isn’t very relevant today.

Except there are other things that we worship. For us it is mostly people, people we “idolize.” The commandment suggests that idolizing another person is not a very good idea and it makes God very, very mad.

And the thing about idols is they always disappoint. They are, after all, human. They, like us, are incapable of not screwing up. They are not worthy of our ultimate trust because nothing is worthy of our ultimate trust except God.

We need to respect, appreciate, even honor other people, but never idolize them.

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

We usually think of this as the commandment not to swear. Don’t use God’s (or Jesus’) name as a curse word. And sure, that’s right. But it’s way, way bigger than that. Misusing God’s name is perhaps the biggest temptation for religious people.

We throw God’s name around as if it were candy on Halloween. God has done this, God has done that. It’s as if we controlled what God does. This is the restraint commandment, I would call it. Be restrained in your use of God’s name. Be shy about attributing this or that to God.

Thank God for blessings, pray to God for relief from suffering and temptation. Tell God you’re sorry when you get something wrong, praise God for being God. But don’t go walking around as if God were your best friend who told you everything he ever did. God is not your best friend. He is God. Protect his mystery.

If you are tempted to tell somebody that God did something, just shut up. If you must say something, thank God you’re alive and leave it at that. It’s enough said.

Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

This is the other long commandment which again is a signal of how important God thinks it is. It’s really quite simple. Everybody and everything deserves a break. Rest is not only a means for our refreshment, it is the primary way we honor God.

Why is that so? It is because it is a sign of trust. It’s a time of letting go of our own productivity as a sign of our dependence on God.

Near my neighborhood there is an orthodox synagogue and so on Friday evening and Saturday you can see orthodox Jews walking to synagogue. They take sabbath very, very seriously. I envy them; we all should.

This is probably the commandment we break the most. We just cannot let go. It’s bred in us that we are what we do. What this commandment is trying to do is to protect us from that. Once a week we are to be reminded that we are simply who we are.

Honor your father and mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

Interestingly enough, this is the only commandment that comes with a promise. People have wondered why—with no particularly good answer—almost since it was first uttered.

I think it has something to do with relationship, not only with one’s parents but with one’s self. I will lead a troubled life if I cannot accept who I am and where I came from, the good and the bad of it.

My parents are not perfect; they have their flaws, which, of course, are most obvious to me. Yet I am commanded to respect them, for they gave me life. Hopefully I will love them, too, but that is not the commandment. The commandment seems to know that love is sometimes hard even for our parents. But respect is the bottom line.

You shall not murder.

The commandments now get short and to the point. These things are necessary if you are to live as a liberated people—if everyone is to live as a liberated people.

Taking another person’s life is wrong, period. They, too, are created in the image of God and are worthy of life.

You shall not commit adultery.

Those of us who have made a vow to another person are asked to consider that vow to be sacred. We are asked to be faithful, and that means, among other things, to be sexually exclusive.

Which is to say that relationships under vow should not be entered into lightly. It is serious business. It is about more than feeling love for another person, wanting to be with them. It is about establishing a sacred loyalty that is absolute.

You shall not steal.

The commandments recognize the right to personal property and command its absolute respect. What is not mine is not mine and it needs to stay not mine.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

This commandment is meant to protect people from false accusations that can deprive them of their freedom and livelihood. One of the bedrocks of a free and fair society is that people will tell the truth in a court of law. If that is not the case, then chaos ensues.

Sometimes this commandment is shortened to just, “You shall not lie.” That’s fair. All lying is bearing false witness, either about another person or about one’s self.

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Why is envy such a bad thing? I think it is mostly because it is sort of the opposite of gratitude. If I am envious of my neighbor’s house, I am not being grateful for my own. I can easily start to live in an “If only…” fantasy world that is destructive of my own sense of self-worth.

It is also a sign of what the Prayer Book calls an “intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts” (Litany of Penitence, p. 268). In other words I become obsessed with what I don’t have which either drives me into despair or into the kind of acquisitiveness that can actually destroy my life rather than enhance it. I become dependent on more and more things. This commandment has a lot to do with the commandment against idolatry.

So there you are. I hope there were some fresh ways of looking at the commandments.

The last thing to be said about them is that we all break them and thanks be to God, we can “repent and return to the Lord” with the promise of forgiveness.

But nevertheless, these commandments are the simple ways in which we continue to live as a liberated people.

Come Join Us and Die

Sermon preached at the Church of S. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene on the Second Sunday in Lent: Mark 8:31-38

Our Gospel reading this morning occurs right in the middle of Mark’s Gospel and is in many ways its pivot point—the point around which everything in the Gospel turns.

It’s part of a larger story. Jesus and his disciples are on the way to Caesarea Phillipi, a town in the northernmost part of Galilee. While they’re walking along, Jesus asks them a question. “Who do people say that I am?” They give him several answers. He then asks them, more pointedly, “Who do you say that I am?”

It is Peter who speaks on behalf of all. “You are the Messiah.” Jesus’ response is not to deny it, but to order them not to tell anyone about it.

Then comes this morning’s reading. The answer to this question has been a critical moment. Jesus decides it’s time to start preparing the disciples for what he believes will take place. They are almost going to go to Jerusalem and they need to be ready for it.

He began teaching them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

Peter is indignant. This is not at all what he believes it means for Jesus to be the Messiah and he tells Jesus so in no uncertain terms. Jesus, however, comes right back at him, stronger, in extraordinarily harsh words,

Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.

And then he makes the nightmare worse.

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

It is the first mention of the cross in the Gospel, and it is meant not for Jesus alone, but for all his followers. The cross was a terrifying thing and those listening to Jesus would have reacted with fear and horror.

Imagine the stir I would cause if I hung a great banner from the tower out front: “Come join us and die.” You would have thought that I had gone stark raving mad. And people out there would be repelled and wonder if we had become some strange cult.

Yet Jesus said we had to take up our cross.

Then there is one last challenge.

Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

We decorate our churches with crosses, some of them simple, some with Jesus’ body on them, some empty and quite pretty. We wear crosses around our neck. We do so to identify ourselves as Christians, yet we do not think much that these crosses are for us as much as they are for Jesus.

What a terrifying thing to contemplate! What did Jesus mean when he said we had to die in order to follow him?

Well, he tries to teach the disciples again after they had journeyed back south deep into Galilee. Again they are on the road and he is teaching them

The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.

This time we are simply told that they do not understand what he is talking about and were afraid to ask him about it.

Afraid? Of course they were afraid! This was all taking a very strange turn.

Yet they did talk among themselves on the road. When they arrived at their destination, Capernaum, he asked them what they were talking about, for they seemed to have been arguing about something. Mark tells us

But they were silent, for they had argued with one another who was the greatest.

He knows what they were arguing about and the depth of their misunderstanding of what he is about. He tries to teach them what he means.

He sat down [Mark says], called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”[1]

They continue south, heading toward Jerusalem, which is making everyone afraid. Once again he takes the disciples aside and tries to explain what is going to happen to him using the same language as before. Their response is not recorded but Mark tells us right after he said these things, James and John approached him and asked if they could sit at his right hand and his left hand when he came into his kingdom.

They just don’t get it. He says to them,

You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”[2]

Mark gives us no indication that they understood, in fact, he implies that they remain blind, by telling one last healing story, the giving of sight to Bartimaeus. Jesus gives sight, but the disciples remain blind.

Then Palm Sunday happens and it is too late to understand anything because it is upon them.

Jesus has made it clear what it means that we have to die in order to follow him, what it means to “deny ourselves and take up our cross.” It means to live the life of a servant.

Now that would make a better banner, “Join us and be a servant.”

But the truth is that people do not want to be servants, even we in the church chafe under that bit, paying it lip service with our fingers crossed behind our backs. We will be a servant if it does not cost us anything. But Jesus says it will cost us; it will cost us everything.

It will cost us being in charge. It will cost us our reputation as a winner. It will cost us being surrounded by all the things that say to the world, “I have made it.” It will cost us that attitude that the world around us rewards: “I take care of myself first.”

The disciples of Jesus are called to be servants, which means that they will often look like people who are on the losing side of life.

Try as we may, there really isn’t any way to make the cross pretty. It is not a pretty thing. It is a symbol of death, Jesus’ death and ours, our death as people who’ve got it made, and our rebirth as servants of all.

“Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” the deacon says to send us out into the world at the end of the service. We hear the words so much we do not pay any attention to them, but they are strong words about setting our face to face the world—not as self-made men and women, but as servants.

If it is your practice to dip your finger in the holy water and make the sign of the cross as you leave the church (a practice I commend) take it as a sign of your acceptance of the death of which Jesus speaks and say to yourself, “I will take up my cross and be a servant.”

[1] The second passion announcement is Mark 9:30-37.
[2] The third passion announcement is Mark 10:32-45.

Absolutely Everybody

Sermon preached on the First Sunday in Lent at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene: Genesis 9:8-17, 1 Peter 3:18-22

It was just a few weeks after I had started in my last parish when the Sunday School year began and I offered to kick it off by telling the kids a story from the Bible. Unwisely, I did not plan ahead which story it would be. I thought I would see if the kids had a story they wanted me to tell. Pointing to a toy Noah’s Ark, one of the children said, “Tell us about the Ark!”

Well the Ark is cute and the rainbow is pretty, but the story itself is neither. I was, however, trapped. To make things worse I had just read a book with which I was very impressed that had argued for not keeping the hard stories of the Bible from our children. Tell them about Cain and Abel, the writer said. After all, what child with siblings has not contemplated murder?

So I told them the story about the flood.

When I had finished there was quiet for a moment and then a boy of about eight shot up his hand and asked, “Did God really kill absolutely everybody in the flood?” I swallowed hard and said, “Yes, the story is that the flood killed everybody except Noah and his family.” And I was going to add that the rainbow was the promise that God would never do such a thing again, when the boy interrupted me.

“Wow!” he said. “Cool!”

That little bit of enthusiasm notwithstanding; the story of the flood is a difficult story: all those people dead. True they were supposedly evil, but I suspect some of them no more evil than most of us. However you rationalize it, the story is that, save for Noah’s family (which proves in the end to be just as dysfunctional as the average family), God killed absolutely everybody.

Now we can also rationalize it by saying that we don’t believe it actually ever happened. It’s a story from pre-history, a story that got told among a group of people for generations that said something truthful about the God with whom they were in relationship. But why did they have to tell it?

Well, probably because they needed to say that their God was Almighty and held the power of life and death, and was a moral God, utterly opposed to evil living. But they also needed to tell it with the ending that they gave it—that God would never do this again, not even threaten it, which made their God unique among the competing gods of the peoples around them. Their God was ultimately Almighty, but also ultimately merciful.

Still, there are all those dead people. It’s a story we could perhaps live without, despite the cute Noah’s Ark play sets.

I think the people of God have always struggled with this story. I suspect this was true right from the beginning, from the early telling of it. One of the reasons I suspect this is because in the rest of the Old Testament there are only two mentions of Noah and only one allusion to the Flood itself.[1] It was not a story that Israel liked remembering.

And then there is this strange reference to it in 1 Peter, our second reading this morning. It points out how troubling the story was to the early Christians. A question on their mind was just what happened to all those people. Were they simply lost, forever damned for their wickedness?

No Peter says, and he repeats what must have become common speculation about what happened to Jesus between his death and resurrection. He did not passively wait in death. On what we call Holy Saturday, in death, he brought the good news to the dead, including all those people who died in the flood.

What a strange story, although we reference it every time we say the Apostles’ Creed—“He descended to the dead” (or, as we used to say more graphically, “He descended into hell”). One could, however, argue that we could survive without this bit of fanciful imagining just as much as the Flood story itself.

But the image, I believe, is powerful and necessary if we are going to keep telling the Flood story. The image proclaims the very depths of the good news. Absolutely everybody is saved. Jesus left no one behind. Jesus leaves no one behind.

The image gets picked up in Eastern Orthodox icons of the resurrection. In them Jesus stands over the broken gates of hell and with his two hands he lifts up Adam and Eve from the dead. Absolutely everybody. It’s an incredibly powerful image.

Yes, the story was told by our ancestors in time before time that God once regretted his creation and wiped out absolutely everybody save for one family. But the story is also told that even they are not outside the reach of God’s amazing love.

Which means, my brothers and sisters, that the good news is for us, for all of us, for absolutely everybody. There is no place we can go, nothing we can do that can separate us from that love. If there ever was such a thing as hell, its gates are broken and the good news is the good news even there.

Peter says,

Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God.

Jesus has brought us to God. Jesus has brought absolutely everybody to God. He has literally gone to hell and back in order to do so.

It is that simple truth that we will celebrate at Easter, and it is that simple truth that Lent wishes to drive us into more deeply.

We have been brought home to God. Absolutely everybody has been brought home to God. How we would change if we actually believed it! How the world would change if it actually believed it!

[1] Isaiah 54:9 and Ezekiel 14:14 (the former being the allusion to the Flood).

In the Meantime: What Faith is for (Absalom Jones Sunday)

Sermon preached on February 8, 2009 at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene (5 Epiphany, Absalom Jones): Isaiah 40:12-31, Psalm 147:10-12

On January 1, 1808, St. Thomas’ African Episcopal Church held a Service to celebrate the abolition of the African slave trade. Their rector was the first African American to have been ordained an Episcopal priest, the Rev. Absalom Jones. In his sermon that day he said

The history of the world shows us that the deliverance of the children of Israel from their bondage is not the only instance in which it has pleased God to appear on behalf of oppressed and distressed nations as the deliverer of the innocent and of those who call upon his name. He is as unchangeable in his nature and character as he is in his wisdom and power. The great and blessed event, which we have this day met to celebrate, is a striking proof that the God of heaven and earth is the same yesterday, and today, and forever.

He went on to describe the miseries of the slave trade, speaking to the perpetrators of it, and concluding

Though you have been deaf to their cries and shrieks, they have been heard in heaven. The ears of Jehovah have been constantly opened to them. He has heard the prayers that have ascended from the hearts of his people; and he has, as in the case of his ancient and chosen people the Jews, come down to deliver our suffering countrymen from the hands of their oppressors.

Absalom Jones’ words come from an incredible faith in God, the God who is active in history, the God who cares in particular for the oppressed and acts on their behalf. This faith is echoed in both the Isaiah reading this morning and the psalm. From Isaiah

But those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

And from the psalm

[The Lord] heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. (Psalm 147:3)

We hear the words of Absalom Jones and these words from Scripture and we rightly say, “This is what faith is for!”

But there is one word contained in the Isaiah reading which should give us pause and cause us to wrestle. Particularly in the face of oppression it is a terrible word with which we must come to terms. That word is “wait.” “Those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength…”

If God hears the cries of the oppressed and the brokenhearted, why do they have to wait? The slave trade went on for more than a hundred years before it was abolished. Why did God wait? When it was abolished, slavery itself remained quite legal and it would take another 55 years and a civil war to end it. Why did the slaves have to wait?

This is a question as old as faith itself. And in the history of humanity wrestling with this question there has never been a satisfactory answer to it. And I can’t give you one today. Why do we have to wait? I simply do not know.

The question lies at the heart of the reading from Isaiah this morning. The people have been living in exile in Babylon for two generations. Memories of their homeland have begun to fade and a certain begrudging acceptance of life lived under the rule of the Empire had begun to set in. Those who were still keeping the memory of the God of Israel were asking the hard questions about God’s seeming absence and saying things like what Isaiah quotes, “My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God.”

God is indignant at this attitude. “Have you not known? Have you not heard?” Do you not remember the God who laid the foundations of the earth, before whom the inhabitants of the earth are but grasshoppers?

This powerful God says he does not grow faint or weary. When, however, we say, will he act?

The answer seems to be “in God’s good time,” a time which is not ours to know.

We are only told what to do in the meantime. Wait.

But what does it mean to wait? Does it mean just to sit back passively, literally, and wait? No it means first of all to remember. Remember the God who cares for you, who “gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.”

Remember. But that is not all. There is a second thing we must do while we wait. That second thing comes out of our remembering that we serve a God who sides with the oppressed. When that does not seem to be happening, we cry out. We pray, we lament, we complain, we cajole, we insist. We let God know that we want and need action, and there is an urgency to our prayer.

This is what it means to have faith in the meantime: to remember and to cry out, believing in the power of God to act.

Wednesday is the twentieth anniversary of the consecration of Bishop Barbara Harris, the first woman bishop in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. This too was a moment in which we could see the hand of God acting, but it was also a “how long” moment? Why the wait? But women like Bishop Harris, although I know they asked the question, “How long?” never stopped working for the day, believing with all their heart that it was the will of God.

That is faith, faith in the midst of the hard struggle of life. Stubborn faith, that may reluctantly wait, but does not take “no” as the answer.

Bishop Harris once said to a friend of mine at a moment when she was struggling in the ordination process, “Don’t forget that the power that brought you here is the power that will see you through.”

This is what faith is for—the meantime between the promise and its realization, the time of waiting, of remembering and crying out. It is stubborn belief in the power that will see you through.

Those of us who work for justice in the church and in the world have to have this kind of tough faith or we will not survive. We have to learn to wait on God while crying out, while striving for justice and peace among all people.

And those of us who simply live life, with its many trials and tribulations have to have this tough faith or we will not survive. We have to learn to wait on God while crying out for our own wholeness or that of ones we love.

Wait. That is the terrible cost of faith.

But oh the promise!

But those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

Let us join with our ancestor Absalom and be this people! Let us never stop crying out and working for what is right. For we serve a God who will act, who does side with the oppressed, who does not grow faint or weary.

Co-workers with God: How we Got from Martin to Barack

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Grand Babies for New Years!

The grand babies! Scott & Teagan

The Feast of God's Humanity...the Inclusive Gospel

Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, New York on the First Sunday after Christmas: Isaiah 61:10--62:4; Galatians 3:23-29, 4:4-7; John 1:1-18

“Christmas Day is the feast of God’s humanity.”[1] Thus says Dutch theologian Edward Schillebeeckx. This declaration comes to the fore in our readings this morning in all its radicalness.

I take Schillebeeckx’ declaration, as well as Christmas itself, to be a manifesto for our fundamental stance that Christianity is a religion of inclusion rather than exclusion. There is no purity code in Christianity; there is no clean and unclean. Christmas has erased all that.

Isaiah this morning proclaims newness for Zion, a newness so profound that a name change is necessary. It’s why I added the next verse to the official reading, because it is the verse that gives the new names. Zion is now to be called “Hephzibah” and “Beulah,” in English, “Delight” and “Married.”

Zion is now Beulahland, the state of being married to God. The relationship is sealed as permanent (the divorce rate in marriage with the divine is zero). The relationship excludes only any sense of desolation or forsakenness or impurity. God is now wedded to his people.

St. Paul speaks this morning of the implications of this wedding. All the old distinctions between us are gone. In Paul’s day these distinctions were predominantly male or female, slave or free, and Gentile or Jew. There is no theological or biblical reason why the erasure should be limited to these expressions, however. Paul clearly means to say that all distinctions are now simply gone in the eyes of God. So we rightly add such distinctions as black or white and gay or straight. None of this is to say that these distinctions do not exist or deny the reality that they shape our identity in some very fundamental ways. It is to say that they do not ultimately matter to God. God is on all sides of all distinctions.

Why? Paul goes on to say because all are equally adopted. There is no longer any distinction between godly or ungodly. All may pray as Jesus prayed, “Abba! Father!” And an important thing happens in Greek in verses six and seven of chapter four that we miss in English. Paul begins, “And because you are children…” the “you” being plural. This is how we are used to Paul speaking, to the broad audiences of his letters. But then he shifts to the personal: “So you are no longer a slave but a child.” The “you” is now singular. It had to have been a deliberate shift on his part. Paul is saying to whomever is listening, “You are a child,” and you and you and you, without distinction.

And then there is John’s magisterial poem about the incarnation, or, as he puts it, the Word becoming flesh and living among us. He says, “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” “Light” is an important image for John, contrasting with the darkness or night. Equally important, however, is the word “true,” contrasting to lies or falsehood. “You will know the truth,” he will later say, “and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31). (This is the motto, by the way, of the Anglican Communion[2]). So when John puts these two images—light and truth—together, you know something really important is going on.

There is “true light” as opposed to “the darkness of lies.” And what makes the light true? It enlightens everyone, he says. The light is true that enlightens everyone, without distinction. Then, like Paul, John uses the image of being a child. All are children of God, born of God. The only distinction left between persons is whether or not one knows, receives, and accepts this truth.

Again and again in these readings, the images are of inclusion, of the end of distinctions, and the universalizing of the delight of God. In becoming human, God has put an end to the ways in which we divide ourselves. Our divisions inevitably lead to systems of pure or impure, clean or unclean, worthy or unworthy. All these distinctions are swept aside in the humanity of God.

Christmas is the feast of God’s humanity. Christmas is the feast of God’s taking on all human flesh and thus making it a fit receptacle for divine delight and glory. All, all, and you and you and you, are included in this amazing explosion of holiness.

We have nothing of which to be ashamed when we preach and practice this gospel, this good news. It is not, as some say, our twisting the Bible to say what we want it to say. It is what the Bible says, clearly and plainly from Isaiah to Paul to John. All are included in the delight of God as adopted daughters and sons of the Most High.

If this were not true then Christmas would be nothing but an embarrassment, and I suppose in a way it is. Christmas is the feast of God lowering his standards to become flesh and blood and live among us, without distinction.

Christmas is the feast of God’s humanity…and ours. To follow Isaiah, our identity as married to God, living in God’s delight. Or to follow Paul and John, our identity as God’s adopted children, living in the true light.

[1] God Among Us: the Gospel Proclaimed (Crossroad, 1983), p. 12.
[2] It is the inscription, in Greek, around the seal of the Anglican Communion.

A Pentecostal Christmas

Sermon preached on Chritmas Eve at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, New York: Luke 1:5--2:21

The one Christmas morning I remember as a child is the day I awoke to a “Mighty Mike.” It was one part redemption and one part hope.

The redemption part is that the Christmas before had been somewhat meager. You see, I had stumbled upon the Christmas cache in our basement and had discovered that one of my dreams was coming through, receiving a farm set with tractor and various machinery like a plow and a hay baler. The next thing I knew my mother was standing over me and I never saw that tractor again.

The next year all I wanted was a “Mighty Mike.” It was this vehicle you put together that the commercials said would travel through any terrain and climb anything you put in its way. When the ad came on television I could barely sit still with excitement.

The name didn’t hurt. I was anything but “mighty.” Not particularly athletic and certainly not among the popular in my class, I was what we called in those days a “book worm,” who largely kept to himself. So there was a bit of fantasy at play in owning a “Mighty Mike.”

When I saw Mighty Mike under the Christmas tree as a ran into the room I was overcome with joy. I saw it right away because it was one of the unwrapped presents, which meant Santa himself had delivered it! It may have been the single happiest moment in my young life.

It was short-lived, of course. Mighty Mike did not live up to what the commercials promised. They rarely do, do they. Thus my ecstasy was short-lived and my fantasy dimmed. Might Mike ended up being just an “Average Mike,” and so was I.

There is much ecstasy in the long story we have just heard. Everyone seems to break into song: Zechariah, once his tongue is loosened at his son’s naming; Mary, as she greets Elizabeth to share in the good news of their miraculous pregnancies; and angels fill the heavens with song as they announce the coming of Messiah to the lowly shepherds. There is joy everywhere. But is it the kind that will last?

Who is the main character in this play of joy? It is not Elizabeth or Zechariah, Mary or Joseph, Gabriel (although he gets two appearances) or even John or Jesus. It is, rather the Holy Spirit who is the main character, showing up again and again.

The angel says to Zechariah about his son-to-be,

Even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit.

And the same angel says to Mary,

The Holy Spirit will come upon you…

And when Mary arrives at her aunt’s home it is said

Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women…”

And once he indicates that Elizabeth is right and the boy is to be named John,

Then his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke this prophecy…

Everywhere the Holy Spirit shows up to direct the action. Only in the story of Jesus itself is there no mention of her presence, although anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear can see her handiwork by this time. Angel hosts do not burst from the heavens with song without the Holy Spirit present to conduct them. At this point in the story we know that when angels show up and people burst into song, the Holy Spirit is the director.

It is the Holy Spirit who is the bringer of miracle and ecstasy. It is the Holy Spirit who makes this cast of ordinary people into extraordinary bearers of good news. It is the Holy Spirit, who, in the words of our sister Mary, “casts down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly.”

As St. Luke tells his story this is a crucial detail. The Holy Spirit’s presence at the beginning of the story of Jesus will later be mirrored by the Holy Spirit’s presence at another birth, the birth of the church at the beginning of his second volume, the Acts of the Apostles. The first believers will be filled with this same Spirit and they will themselves say and do extraordinary things, so much so that they become known as “those people who turn the world upside down.”

This is the joy that lasts, the gift of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Jesus may be the one we are called to follow this night, but it is Elizabeth and Zechariah, Mary and Joseph who are our companions on the journey, ordinary people like us, called to say and do extraordinary things, to become mighty not in the things of this world, but in the glory of God which brings peace to all in whom God delights. And it is the Holy Spirit that makes all of us, indeed, delightful in God’s eyes and thus worthy recipients of his peace.

In short, this Christmas is a Pentecostal experience. Everywhere we look, the Holy Spirit is acting, making people pregnant with possibility, filling the hungry with good things, and liberating all whose lives she touches from fear.

It is the Holy Spirit that is the tender compassion of our God, dawning from the heavens to shine on us who live in darkness and the shadow of death.

It is the Holy Spirit who creates a community out of those gathered together in a barn, huddled before an ordinary but miraculous baby, who himself, filled with the same Spirit, will turn the world upside down.

And the good news for us this night, better than we could have ever expected, is that this same Spirit is God’s gift to us, better than any toy we might receive tomorrow, because this gift will last, will not disappoint, will never let us down, because this Spirit always lifts up, makes each one of us a delight, equally mighty in the eyes of God.

So when God says to us, “Merry Christmas,” and hands us our gift, it is not we who open this gift, but this gift that opens us, opens us to say and do extraordinary things with our ordinary lives, beginning with the way we say “peace be with you” tonight to friend and stranger alike, and then all approach this Table and hold out our hands to receive the miracle of God’s own life given for us now and forever.

It ought to be enough, it is enough, to make our Christmas merry no matter what tomorrow brings, or especially the next day and the next. God has gifted us, has indeed gifted the whole creation with Spirit-filled glory in spite of all signs to the contrary, come what may.

We are present tonight at what our Pentecostal brothers and sisters would call “a Holy Ghost Party,” and we are called, whatever the circumstances of our life, to dance and to sing with our brothers Zechariah and John and our sisters Elizabeth and Mary with Gabriel on the trumpet and the angels providing the song and the Holy Spirit conducting it all in grand gestures of glory.

Let me close with a favorite poem by a favorite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, in which he both acknowledges our sometimes dreary ordinariness, but calls us to see in the very air we breathe the glory of God and the activity of the Holy Spirit.

God’s Grandeur

THE world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade;
bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge
and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast
and with ah! bright wings.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods
With warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Merry Christmas, my friends and fellow receivers of the gift of the Holy Spirit. Let it open up our lives that we, too, might be people who turn this old world upside down.