Woe to Me If I Preach Not the Gospel

Epiphany I: Baptism of Christ

2011-01-10T07:01:00.004-05:00

This is my final homily as rector of St Anne's (Warsaw, IN). The next time I preach on a Sunday may not be until March 20. So there will probably not be any new entries on this sermon blog until that time.

There’s so much going on today—so many layers of meaning in the 90 minutes or so that we spend in here, and then whatever time we spend next door afterward—that I hardly know where to begin. So I think I’ll begin with Jesus. That’s usually a pretty safe choice for a preacher, but I actually do think that, by starting with Jesus, I’ll be able to tie everything else together in a way that might make sense to most of us.

Today we celebrate the debut of Jesus as a public figure. He’s a mature adult, and has lived his entire life to this point in obscurity as a carpenter in a backwater Galilean village. We know nothing about what went on in his mind and heart. We know nothing about what led him to the behavior we read about in the gospels. But whatever it was, Jesus evidently came to the conclusion that he had a vocation, a calling, and that this vocation came from God.

So he traveled down from Galilee to the Judean wilderness and the banks of the Jordan River—approximately the same distance as from Warsaw to the Illinois state line, only he walked the whole way—he traveled to the banks of the Jordan River where one of his own relatives, John, is drawing crowds and calling them to repent of their sins and be baptized by him in the river. Jesus joins that crowd, and takes his place in line, and when his turn comes, presents himself to John for baptism.

The irony, of course, is that, of everyone there on that occasion, Jesus is the only one who, strictly speaking, didn’t need to be baptized. So what does it means that Jesus was, in fact, baptized by John? The best clue we have toward an answer to that question can be found in what Jesus did immediately following his post-baptismal “retreat” in the desert: He recruited followers. He wandered the shore of the Sea of Galilee, he walked through the towns and villages of the region, picking up disciples, saying to people, “Follow me.” And the last thing he ever said to those disciples that scripture records for us was a command that they continue in that activity: “Go into all the world and make disciples…”.

That has been the Church’s mission ever since—making disciples of Jesus. The fact that you and I are here in this place at this time is only because Jesus, acting though his Body, the Church, has called us to be here. He has said to each of us as surely as he said to Peter and Andrew and James and John, “Follow me.” And by submitting to the baptism of John, Jesus shows us how to do precisely that. The one who calls us into discipleship also shows us, by his own example, how to be a disciple. In his baptism, Jesus accepted a vocation, a calling, and he becomes the model for anyone accepting a vocation, anyone responding to a call.

One of the layers of meaning in what we’re doing today, of course, is that this is the final time I stand in this spot to break open the word of God, and the final time I stand at this altar to preside at the Holy Mysteries of Our Lord’s Body and Blood—as the Rector of this parish, at any rate; I do hope there will be occasions when I am invited back here in the future. This is true, of course—and I hope you have no doubt about this—not because I take any pleasure in leaving you, but because I am persuaded that I am accepting a vocation, a call from the Lord, to become the Bishop of Springfield. When I was still a young child, I heard the voice of Jesus saying, “Follow me.” And when I was in high school, I finally said back to him, “I will follow wherever you lead me.” And that is precisely what I have endeavored to do over the last forty-some odd years. When Brenda and I came to Warsaw three-and-a-half years ago, it was because Jesus called us here. As we take our leave from you now, it is because Jesus calls us to Springfield. As the Roman centurion said to Jesus, “I am a man under authority.” I go where my orders send me.

One of the other layers of meaning this morning is that we’re baptizing two little ones—Parker and Emerson. The Feast of the Baptism of Christ is one of the four occasions for which we “save up” baptismal candidates during the year, and I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be baptizing on my last Sunday at St Anne’s. The vision of this quite wonderful font that we have here played a significant role in the discernment of my call to come to this parish, so this has just worked out so beautifully, as far as I’m concerned! As we bring these two precious children to the water, we do so with an awareness that we are, on their behalf, accepting a vocation, a divine calling. We are, on their behalf, saying Yes to Jesus, saying, “Yes, I will follow you wherever you lead.” It is an awareness of vocation that we will expect them to grow into as the years go by, and we are all promising to take a share in the responsibility of forming Parker and Emerson in that awareness. We welcome and receive them into the Body of Christ, and we will never stop inviting them to confess the faith of Christ crucified, to proclaim his resurrection, and to share with us in his eternal priesthood.

St Anne’s also has a vocation, also has a calling. It would be a huge mistake to think or feel that this parish is, from God’s point of view, simply “collateral damage” in the aftermath of my call to Springfield. I’ve personally always taken great comfort from the assurance given by St Paul in his letter to the Romans that “all things work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose.” The accent here is on “work together.” St Anne’s—both collectively and in its individual members—is called according to God’s purpose. There was a meaning and a purpose behind my call here in 2007. From the perspective of history, our time together, brief though it has been, will be known to mean something, to have served a worthy end that makes St Anne’s a sharper instrument in God’s tool kit. And my departure—at this time and for this purpose—will be seen to have meant something, to have served a worthy end. These meanings and these ends are not clear to us today, nor should we expect them to be. But in time, it will all become clear. The gift of faith that enables any of us to say Yes to God’s call assures us of that much.

So we bring Parker and Emerson to the font of new birth now. What a holy moment! What a Spirit-impregnated moment! God is about to act in their lives in a powerful way, a way that they cannot now understand, but, then, who among us can? For this moment at the font, the barrier between heaven and earth, between this world and world to come, between time and eternity—this barrier is breached. We catch a glimpse of the glory of God, and as we commend Parker and Emerson to the holy vocation that is being laid upon them, we reconnect with our own. We reconnect with Jesus looking into our souls and saying, “Follow me,” and with our response, “Yes, I will follow you wherever you lead.” And Jesus himself, standing in the waters of the Jordan River, looking into the soul of John the Baptist, is himself the model that we pattern our response after, the Master showing those who would follow him how to be a disciple.

Praised be Jesus Christ. Amen.

Second Sunday after Christmas

2011-01-02T09:39:00.000-05:00

Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23

In the Prayer Book office of Compline, which is a prayer service for the late evening, just before bedtime, is a collect that, at various times, has meant a great deal to me:

Be present, O merciful God, and protect us through the hours of this night, that we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life may rest in your eternal changeless.

We who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life. Indeed, if the life stories of those of us who are assembled in this room this morning were told, what a collection of “changes and chances” it would make! Before a casual and unplanned conversation with Bishop Little at General Convention in 2006, the only thing I new about Warsaw, Indiana was that it was on the road between Fort Wayne and Valparaiso and that a priest named Michael Basden once served here because I met him in a Wisconsin bar in 1992! And before another casual and unplanned conversation with Bishop Little about a year ago, it never occurred to me to take very seriously being elected bishop of anywhere, except perhaps the planet Pluto.

Uncertainties, changes of plan, circumstances beyond our control—the very shape of our lives has been determined by such changes and chances. We all live, for example, with the nagging fear of sudden death—our own or that of somebody we love. Serious illness seems to be changing the plans of a friend or neighbor or family member every time we turn around. The great change that none of us can halt, of course, is that of aging, and we are brought up short by those moments when we are reminded that time indeed is marching on and taking us with it. In our social environmnet, one of the great “chances” of life is the reliability of our employment. Members of our own parish have faced unemployment over the past year, and others face the threat of it even now. Relationships change, sometimes gradually and sometimes suddenly. Old ones slip away and new ones are formed.

The members of the holy family—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—were certainly not exempt from the “changes and chances” of this life. Think about it: Joseph planned on marrying a nice hometown girl, who wouldn’t get pregnant until after the wedding, and raising a nice normal family in Nazareth. But angels kept talking to him in dreams, and it never worked out quite like he imagined.

Changes and chances.

Mary planned on making the trip up to Bethlehem with Joseph in order to be enrolled in the census that the emporer had ordered, and then returning to Nazareth in plenty of time to have her baby at home, attended by close members of her family. Instead, labor pains came just as they were getting to Bethlehem.

Changes and chances.

Joseph planned on being able to find a hotel room when they got there, but discovered that the Motel 6, in this case, did not leave the light on for them, and that he should have gone online and made a reservation before he left home.

Changes and chances.

After the baby was born, and they had done their civic duty, Joseph planned on taking his family home to Nazareth to set up housekeeping, but, no—another dream and another angel, and it was off to Egypt to escape the sword of King Herod’s soldiers.

Changes and chances.

While living in Egypt, they reflected on what they’d been told about just who this child of theirs was, and they thought that maybe Bethlehem, with all of its royal and messianic associations in the scriptures, would not, after all, be a bad place to raise Jesus to adulthood. But after Herod was dead, yet another dream carried the message that they were to go all the way back home to Nazareth. Of all the changes and chances of their lives, this is perhaps one that Joseph and Mary were tempted to resist, for Jesus’s sake. “Jesus of Bethlehem” had a certain attractive ring to it. It sounded like the kind of messiah that would do his parents proud. But God apparently didn’t have in mind anything like “Jesus of Lake Tippy” or “Jesus of Stone Camp.” He was thinking more in terms of “Jesus of Claypool” or “Jesus of Milford.” So it had to be Nazareth.

Changes and chances.

In each of these instances of change and chance, Mary and Joseph and Jesus were faced with uncertainty and fear. So much was completely out of their hands, out of their control. Yet, in each case, they behaved obediently. They acted not in fear, but in faith. And, in every instance, God also acted “in faith”; he kept faith with them. Mary said to the angel Gabriel, “Let it be to me according to your word” before knowing what Joseph’s reaction would be. Joseph went ahead and married a fiancée who was pregnant with a child not his own, not knowing the social consequences. In both instances, their acts of faithful obedience were rewarded.

Perhaps this is what gave them the courage to face giving birth in a cold, dark, and smelly stable. And even there, the sustaining and redeeming presence of God was manifest in the shepherds who showed up unannounced with a tall tale about angelic choirs in the heavens, and later on in the foriegn astrologers with their exotic gifts and their story about a star that led them from distant lands in the east. And without that encouragement, perhaps they wouldn’t have been able to face the prospect of fleeing to Egypt and finding a place to live and a way to make a living, and for how long, God only knew.

Through their faith and obedience, the Holy Family eventually made it home, quite some time—years, probably—later than they planned when they set out to sign the emporer’s register in Bethlehem. They had experienced more than their share of changes and chances, and it is precisely in these changes and chances—not in spite of them, but in them—that the redeeming grace of God was revealed. At every step of the way, what looked like defeat was turned into victory, and the loving purpose of God was made clear.

The same God who called the Holy Family to faithful obedience invites that response in us today. Our vocation, to be sure, may be more modest than that of the Holy Family. We may not have angels speaking to us in dreams. But the life of faith to which we are called, the obedience to which we are called, is no less holy. Our lives are filled with changes and chances, and in each of these uncertainties lies an opportunity to respond in faith and obedience and witness God’s redeeming grace present and active in our midst. Do we dare to take these opportunities? Do we dare to trust that the same God whose wisdom and power and redemptive purpose is revealed in the life of the Holy Family will reveal that same wisdom and power and redemptive purpose in the changes and chances of our lives too?

My prayer for you—individually and as the community of St Anne’s—is that you will have that trust, and I hope your prayer for me is that I will have that trust, and that, even as God, acting through the changes and chances of our lives, has called us to labor in different sections of the vineyard after next Sunday, we will nonetheless, acting in faithful obedience,witness a mighty work of the Holy Spirit in our midst during 2011. Amen.

First Sunday after Christmas

2010-12-26T14:35:00.000-05:00

John 1:1-18

Just a few days ago, we passed the shortest day of the earth’s annual trip around the sun. This is a dark time of year. For most of us, it’s dark when we get up in the morning and dark when we come home in the evening. And for that very reason, it’s also a time of year that is full of light. Whether we use candles, or oil lamps, or incandescent or flourescent bulbs, we go to great lengths to surround ourselves with light in the midst of the pervasive darkness. Most of the houses and lawns that have brightened our neighborhoods with their multi-colored lights will continue to do so for a few more days. The lights on our Christmas trees adorn our living rooms and dens. We are entranced, in an almost mystical way, by the power of light shining in the darkness.

When the ancient people of Israel escaped from slavery in Egypt, the Lord led them to their eventual homeland through an extended period of wandering in the desert. The Israelites were at that time a people who walked in darkness—figurative darkness all the time, literal darkness about half the time. During the hours of daylight, they were led by what the book of Exodus describes as a “pillar of cloud.” It must itself have been luminous, glowing like a winter fog across Indiana cornfields glows when you can tell it’s going to burn off in another hour or so. During the night time hours, the Israelites were led by a “pillar of fire.” This was surely a sight to behold! They began to associate light with the presence of God in their midst.

In due course, Moses, their leader, erected a special tent, called the Tent of Meeting. Within the tent there was a place called the Tabernacle, which means, literally, to “encamp,” to “pitch a tent” in a particular location. Moses alone would enter the Tent of Meeting and commune with God at the Tabernacle, receiving instruction and wisdom for his demanding leadership duties. When Moses emerged from the tent, his face glowed with the very glory of God, such that he actually had to wear a veil in order for his countrymen to be able to look on him. The tent itself was luminous with the glory of God—one might say that it “lit up like a Christmas tree.” It was experienced by Israel as the place where the Lord dwelt among them, the place where his glory abides.

You and I, in our natural human condition, are just as lost as the ancient Israelites. The universe is a dark place, an “old” place, terminally ill, in bondage to the power of sin and death. We are, in a profound spiritual sense, homeless within it. We are, in fact, homesick for Heaven, even though we’ve never been there. We are born refugees. We yearn longingly for a far country that we know is our true and lasting home, but we’ve forgotten where it is, or how to get there. We desperately need a light, a pillar of fire to illuminate the darkness, a luminescent tabernacle that glows with the glory of God.

Blessedly, there is just such a source of light available to us. St John tells us about it in his marvelous prologue to the Fourth Gospel. He tells us of the eternal Word of God, who was with God in the beginning, and who is, in fact, himself God. Of this Word, John says, “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” He is the “true light that enlightens every man.” And then, in that climactic fourteenth verse of the first chapter of John, we read that “the word became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.”

When John says that the Word “dwelt among us,” he uses the same Greek word which also translates the Hebrew for “tabernacle.” Jesus, the Word made flesh, is our tabernacle, the dwelling of God in our midst, the place where his glory abides. Jesus is, in effect, our ticket home. He knows the way, and if we hang out where he hangs out, we’ll eventually arrive at that far country that we long for with such intensity.

After his resurrection from the dead, of course, Jesus ascended, in thee words of the creeds, back to “the right hand of the Father.” But his presence with the Father does not mean he is absent from us. He has left us the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, a sacrament which nourishes and sustains his people with his very presence every time they gather to dine on his broken body and poured out blood. In fact, the place where we put the “sacred leftovers,” the consecrated bread and wine which is reserved for the communion of the sick, is, in fact, called the taberncle, and a lamp is perpetually lit near it, signifying the presense of God’s glory in our midst. This is the house of God, the place where his glory abides. Bending the knee before his tabernacle is an entirely fitting and proper act of reverence. We are as privileged as Moses, and if we realized just how privileged we are, I wonder how much more brightly our faces would glow

as we emerge from this Tent of Meeting back into the world.

Now, I could quit right here, because there’s unspeakable good news in what I’ve already said, more than ample reason to “make Eucharist,” which is to offer thanksgiving. But there’s more. There is, as they call it in Louisiana, lagniappe, something extra, an unexpected bonus. Out of this tabernacling in our midst, we not only see God in his glory, but we also see, in the light reflected from the face of Jesus, our own true selves. In Christ, we know ourselves more completely than we ever could before. We see ourselves to be simultaneously a people walking in darkness, miserable offenders, struggling under the grievous memory and intolerable burden of sin, and also as a people who have seen a great light, forever united to the One who has so mercifully “pitched his tent” among us by assuming our human flesh and human nature.

The very fact that we are at all able to live under Grace, the fact that we are able to pray, able to love, able to forgive—this is all made possible by the marvelous light of Christmas, the light of the incarnation, the light of the Word made flesh. So keep the lights turned on. It’s Christmas. The Lord has shone forth his glory. Come, let us adore him. Amen.

Christmas Eve

2010-12-25T09:34:00.000-05:00

How are you tonight? No…I mean, really. How are you tonight? Are you feeling a little under the weather, perhaps? There are a lot of bad bugs flying around this time of year. Or maybe you’re feeling pretty good, but you know that all is not right with your body, and you’re facing some pretty daunting physical health challenges. Perhaps you even know that you’re dying—not just in the abstract, but within a particular time frame. Are you lonely? Maybe you yearn for a certain person to be with you for Christmas, but you’re here, and they’re…wherever they are—not here. Are you afraid? Perhaps you live in dread of an e-Mail or a letter or a phone call or a knock on the door that will bring news you very much don’t want to hear. Are you wounded in your spirit? Has a loved one let you down, or outright betrayed you? Are there painful memories that seem to just always weigh you down emotionally, and you can’t ever really get past them? Are you angry? Maybe someone treated you unfairly or rudely and it just makes you boil. Are you upset with the policies of the government, or with those who are upset with the policies of the government? Are you bored? Are you uncomfortable being in church, and are here out of a sense of obligation—either generally or to a particular person? Are you cynical about what’s happening in this place at this hour? Do you wish you were somewhere else?

Well…I don’t mean to depress you. I’m just trying to encourage honesty, and the truth is that, amid the festivity of the season and the joy of this liturgical celebration of Christmas—all of which is completely well and good and meet and right and legitimate—even as we rejoice, we are, each one of us, broken people. We are broken in multiple ways, and when dried up Christmas trees litter the curbs—in a couple of days or a couple of weeks, depending on how one keeps the feast—when life gets back to normal, “normal” will include our brokenness, and we may even be a bit more acutely aware of it, just for having been through this season of mandatory joy.

My wife has a nine-year-old border collie, with whom she has formed a mutual admiration society. I would really rather not have a dog, but I have so far avoided giving Brenda an ultimatum—“It’s either the dog or me!—because…well, let’s just say, I’m smarter than that. So I somewhat reluctantly share my living space with a four-legged creature named Lucifer—which, as Brenda reminds me, means “light bearer.” Lucy, as Brenda calls her, is, like most of her kind, quite fond of raw meat. But she has a fear that outweighs even her appetite for a nice, fresh chicken thigh or a piece of beef heart. She suffers from a compelling and overpowering fear of abandonment. Lucy is certain that, if she lets Brenda out of the house—or, worse yet, both Brenda and me out of the house at the same time—there’s a high probability that we will not ever return. The mere sight of a suitcase sends her into a depressive tailspin. So Lucy can know that there’s fresh meat out in the yard, but unless Brenda goes out there and stays within sight of Lucy while Lucy eats it, she may not even go out the door. The dog has serious abandonment issues, and I suppose may need expensive therapy before she can get better. I don’t know.

Well, one feature of our individual and collective brokenness is that we, as a human race, also have serious abandonment issues. We are afraid that, not only are we miserable, but that God has abandoned us in our misery. We are afraid that God has given up on us. We are afraid that sickness and death are all there is, in the end. We are afraid that fear and anger have the final word. We are afraid that loneliness and boredom and cynicism have the last say in the matter.

Christmas is the therapy we need to deal with our abandonment issues. The birth of Christ, the incarnation of the Eternal Word of God in the infant whose parents were instructed to name him Jesus, is a sign of hope that God has not abandoned us in our state of misery. Because a young woman named Mary had the courage to say Yes to a very strange vocation, and give birth in the uncomfortable squalor of a barn, and set the baby down in a feeding trough, because an honorable man named Joseph had the courage to say Yes to the very strange vocation of raising as his own a child whom he did not father—because of all this, you and I have hope that God has not abandoned us in our misery, but is, in fact with us—that he is, in fact, one of us. Because of Christmas, God knows. God knows. Whatever we’re feeling, God knows—not just because He’s good, but because He’s been there.

Are you sick? God knows, and the birth of Christ makes it possible for you to share God’s eternal wellness and wholeness and health.

Are you lonely? God knows, and Jesus’ nativity makes it possible for you to participate in the very life of God, to share in the perfect community of the Holy Trinity,

Are you afraid? God knows, and Christ’s birth makes it possible for you to know the deathless love of God that banishes all fear.

Are you angry? God knows, and the birth of Jesus makes it possible for you to see God’s own vision of a world where justice reigns, where crime doesn’t pay, and all wrongs are put right.

Are you wounded in spirit? God knows, and what we celebrate at Christmas makes it possible for you to receive the consolation and love of one who is known as the Man of Sorrows, and is acquainted with every human grief.

Are you bored, cynical, unbelieving? God knows, and Christmas can be a sign to you of hope that there is an alternative way of looking at your own life and the whole human condition.

Are you dying? God knows, and the birth of Christ is a sign of God’s intent that death not have the last word, but that it be swallowed up in the victory of life.

Christ is born, the Word is made flesh, and God knows. Come, let us adore him. Amen.

Year A: Advent III

2010-12-12T10:59:00.001-05:00

Matthew 11:2-11

Isaiah 35:1-10

There was once a man—we’ll call him “Fred”—who lived in a cabin in the woods in a low-lying area. (Some of you, I’m sure, have heard this story, so just bear with me.) Fred was a very religious man: He prayed every day and never missed church on Sunday unless he was too sick to get out of bed.

One day it started to rain, and it rained all through the night, and all the next day, and all night again. The flood waters began to rise, and the message came over the radio that the entire area of the county in which Fred lived was to be evacuated. About that time, Fred was in prayer, and he had a deep sense of assurance from that Lord that the Lord would take care of him, that he would not come to any harm, and that God’s faithfulness would see him through this crisis.

Just then, a sheriff’s deputy knocked on the door. “Fred, come on, get in my car, I’ll take you to high ground.” But Fred replied, “No, you go on, the Lord will take care of me.” A few hours later, the entire first floor of Fred’s house was covered with six feet of water. So Fred went up to one of the upstairs bedrooms. When he looked out the window, he saw his cousin in a rowboat, rowing toward him as fast as he could. “Fred! Don’t worry! Get in the boat and I’ll take you to safety.” But Fred just smiled and said, “Why cousin, that’s awfully kind of you, but the Lord is going to take care of me.”

By daybreak the next morning, Fred’s bedroom was covered with six feet of water, so he climbed up onto the roof. About that time, a National Guard helicopter hovered overhead, and a rope ladder was lowered. Someone with a megaphone shouted, “Climb on to the ladder and we’ll pull you up.” But Fred just shook his head and shouted back, “No, thanks, the Lord will take care of me.”

A short while after that, Fred was covered with six feet of water, and he drowned.

When Fred arrived at the Pearly Gates, he was in something of a huff. Before St Peter could even say “Welcome to Heaven”, Fred blurted out, “The Lord said he would take care of me! How come I drowned?” Peter replied, “Well, Fred, we sent the sheriff with a car and your cousin with a rowboat and the National Guard with a helicopter. What more did you want?”

After pondering this, Fred probably went and looked up John the Baptist, because they had alot in common. They were both confused by a discrepancy between their expectations of what God would send, and what God actually sent. John the Baptist expected the Messiah to be an axe-wielding chaff-burning purveyor of divine wrath.

When Jesus arrived on the scene, John publicly announced his arrival. “Pay attention to this guy. He’s the one we’ve all been waiting for. He must increase and I must decrease.”

But Jesus never does live up to all of John’s expectations, so he begins to wonder, “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Jesus is not the one.” So, from prison, he sends his own disciples to put the question to Jesus directly. “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

John—and Fred, for that matter—is not unique, is he? We can all see something of ourselves in his moment of doubt. We are all prejudiced to one degree or another by what we expect God to do, or by what we expect God to say, or expect God to approve of, or condemn, or whatever. And our expectations then sometimes blind and deafen us to recognizing Jesus for who he is. It’s often difficult for us to really experience Jesus as the one who reveals—breaks open, manifests, shines the light on, announces, ushers in — the Kingdom of Heaven.

It reminds me of many of the stories I’ve heard over the years—the sort of story I always enjoy hearing—of how married couples “found” each other. What a mysterious process courtship is! Our “normal” expectation is that two people, when they meet, have at least an inkling of whether they’re attracted to one another, and they think, “Maybe this is the one”. And then a stressful experience of trial and error finally reveals whether “this one” is “the one”. But, as often as not, the story goes something more like this: “At first we were just friends. I didn’t think she was my type”, or “I didn’t think I had enough in common with him”, or however the failure to meet expectations in defined. “But as we worked together, or went to church together, or hung out in a group together, we found that we loved each other in a way that neither of us anticipated.” In the experience of relationship, the true identity of this person as “the one” was revealed.

Jesus’ identity as “the one we’ve all been waiting for” is authenticated in the same way. When the disciples of John the Baptist pose the question to Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”, he doesn’t answer them directly. He simply invites them to observe what was going on around him. “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. Tell John all this and let him draw his own conclusion.”

Jesus’s advice to John applies equally to us. We may not be able to observe and report all the same signs that John’s disciples were able to observe and report, but we’re not lacking for experiential data on which to base a conclusion about Jesus’s identity. St Anne’s church is our local manifestation of the presence of Jesus. What do we see?

We see a place where the revolutionary values of the kingdom of God are preached, and sometimes even practiced. We see a place where sin is forgiven, and people are supported in their desire to repent and sin no more. We see a place where fear and despair give way to trust and hope. We see a place where people give and receive love and spread it on one another’s sorrow like soothing ointment on open sores. We see a place which people support with hours of precious time and thousands of dollars of hard earned money. We’re not perfect—we announce the kingdom, we try to model it, but we’re still a mere shadow of the reality. Yet, the parish church, the body of Christ in a particular place, is by definition a place where the blind see, the lame walk, and the hopeless hope.

As we move into the heart of the Advent season, and the celebration of Christmas looms over the horizon, our invitation is to look around us at these signs and see Jesus for who he is: The hope of Israel, the desire of nations, the one we’ve all been waiting for—the sheriff in his car, Fred’s cousin in his rowboat, the National Guard in its helicopter. Our only alternative is to conclude that Jesus is not the “one who is to come”, and to continue to search for our Messiah among the false gods worshipped by our neighbors in this world: political or social or economic ideology, “good causes”, success, health, or status of race or class. These are false gods, who will desert us in our hour of need, and leave us hungering for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Is it not infinitely preferable to experience the hope, the peace, the purpose, and the joy of simply falling at the feet of Jesus?—the Jesus who opens our eyes and ears with his words, the Jesus who appeared in our own human flesh in a Bethlehem cattle stall, the Jesus who will come again to judge the living and the dead?

Come quickly, Lord Jesus. Amen.

A: Advent II

2010-12-07T11:05:00.000-05:00

Romans 15:4-13

Isaiah 11:1-10

Matthew 3:1-12

When the Roman Empire finally crumbled in the latter half of the fifth century, western Europe was plunged into an era which has been widely referred to as the Dark Ages. Life in the Dark Ages has been described with three brief adjectives: nasty, brutish, and short. We like to think that we have made a great deal of progress since the Dark Ages, but I wonder whether the essential core of human experience is really all that different. You don’t have to do anything more than pick up a newspaper to be reminded that life, for a great many people, is still nasty and brutish. Disease and depravity and disappointment abound, at home and abroad. And, although we’re living longer, life still seems short. The older I get, the shorter it seems. Way too short to fulfill all the hopes and dreams that the human spirit is capable of conceiving; way too short to repair all the regrets that human behavior is capable of producing. It’s called by many names: alienation, soul-sorrow, existential angst. The New Testament calls it the “power of sin and death.”

Whatever you call it, though, it’s a universal human experience. Our “default” condition, that which we naturally slip into in the absence of any other intention, is one of radical doubt and fear which is both personal and cosmic. We are doubtful and fearful about our own personal existence in particular, and the universe in general. We want to know—when all the dust settles, will there be justice on the earth? Will wickedness be punished and righteousness be rewarded?

Whether we’re aware of it or not, these are the really deep questions. They bother us. They are the ultimate source of that low-grade anxiety that every man, woman, and child carries around twenty-four hours a day. This anxiety has consequences. They’re all around us. Among them are depression, denial, dysfunction, destruction, death, and despair.

Let’s take those one at a time.

Depression

There seems to be a virtual epidemic of it. I wish I could go back in time about 25 years and buy stock in some of the pharmaceutical companies that have marketed anti-depressants. If I had, I would be taking more exotic vacations than has been my custom!

Denial

Our culture is descending more and more into godlessness—or, I should say, the denial of the true and living God who has revealed himself in history in exchange for a number of lesser gods who reveal themselves only in our desires and imaginations. This is a denial of reality itself.

Dysfunction

Only recently are social scientists beginning to document what Bible students and theologians could have told them decades ago, and that is that no-fault divorce as an easy way out of marital and family dysfunction is inflicting incalculable damage on generations of the children of those families. But dysfunction is not limited to the domestic scene. Our political and social fabric is also unravelling before our eyes; Americans are more polarized than ever before.

Destruction

The century we left behind only a decade ago may indeed be remembered as the true “dark ages.” It was the most violent in the history of the human race.

There were more victims of war, political repression, and crime, both organized and casual, than at any other time. When art and literature depict the future, it is more often than not a grim, apocalyptic picture that is painted.

Death

The late Pope John Paul coined the phrase “culture of death” to describe the prevailing viewpoint in the western world. Life seems increasingly cheap, at both ends now, perhaps in the middle not too far from now. Whatever your politics are with respect to abortion or assisted suicide, the sheer number of abortions being performed, and an ever more casual attitude toward assisted suicide, have got to be alarming. We are indeed a culture of death.

Despair

Despair is loss of hope, and for this reason, is the ultimate sin, the summation of all the deadly sins. Despair is radical unfaith, throwing in the towel, surrendering to alienation, normalizing the sub-normal. Pride is the source of all sin, and despair is the culmination of all sin. What pride starts, despair finishes. And it’s all around us.

What then can we say in the face of all this anxiety? What can we say in the face of depression, denial, dysfunction, destruction, death, and despair? If we are stunned into silence in the face of so great a mystery, thank God that St Paul, at least, is not. Listen to his words, handed down to us through the fifteenth chapter of his epistle to the Romans:

“...whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that by steadfastness and encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope.”

That we might have hope. Hope is the opposite of despair. And what does Paul suggest is the medium of this hope? The encouragement of the scriptures, which were written in former days for our instruction. Before the most recent round of Prayer Book revision, the “hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” collect that most of us are familiar with, and which we used three Sundays ago, was appointed for today, the Second Sunday of Advent, and it was chosen specifically in the light of this epistle reading from Romans. The first step in combating the cosmic anxiety of this age is to hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the encouragement that is ours in the words of holy scripture.

In particular, the lectionary readings appointed for the season of Advent are especially helpful. We hear in them an invitation to abundant hope. Even passages like today’s gospel, which sound somewhat harsh on first hearing, are filled with hope if we read between the lines. Yes, John the Baptist is speaking words of judgement, words of warning. But in words of warning, there is marvelous hope. There is yet room for repentance, room to change behavior. When the “low fuel” signal comes on in my car, that’s a word of warning, an invitation to repentance. I know that I’ve got only about fifty miles before I run out of gas, and that I can’t just keep on driving indefinitely. I’ve got to change my behavior or suffer the consequences. I am grateful for that warning. Before such technology, I did run out of gas from time to time. Since then, I don’t. It’s a source of encouragement, a reason for hope!

St Paul concludes this selection from Romans with words of blessing:

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the holy spirit you may abound in hope.

It’s important to remember the distinction between wishing and hoping. When I wish for something, it may be pure fantasy, highly unlikely if not impossible. For example, I wish that I might win the lottery, but I don’t hope that I do, because it’s highly unlikely that I will. Hope, on the other hand, is grounded in a solid foundation. I hope that I will get through the rest of this sermon, and the rest of this liturgy, without any major mishaps. I don’t know that I will, because any number of things could happen at any moment. But I hope that I will, and my hope is founded on such things as prior experience in similar situations, and a conviction that God is glorified when he is worshiped decently and in order.

Well, all of our hope as Christians is founded on the amazing historical reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from from the dead. From that fact flows all of our hope—hope that all the private wounds of my inmost spirit will be healed, hope that sins which I have confessed and repented of are forgiven and put away as far as the east is from the west, hope that relationships in my life which have been marred and soured by failure on my part and the part of others will be restored and strengthened, hope that the physical and emotional ailments which can be so discouraging and crippling are not the last word in our lives and in God’s plans for us, hope that the poor will not remain poor forever, hope that violence and war will themselves be put to death, hope that injustice and fear and oppression and hatred will be banished from the universe.

The scriptures, once again, give us a glimpse, a sneak preview, of this glorious vision in the wonderful scene described by the prophet Isaiah:

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed together; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The sucking child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the the adder’s den.

Try finding that on the Nature Channel!

The hope that is ours, the encouragement that is ours, on this Second Sunday of Advent, calls us to live in the light of God’s truth, to agree with God rather than our own limited experience and intuition, to choose courage and responsibility rather than denial and dysfunction, to choose peace over violence and destruction, to choose life over the culture of death, to choose faith over doubt and despair. Having received in our hearts a down payment on Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom, we are able to lead lives filled with purpose, peace, and joy.

Come, Lord Jesus. Amen.

A: Advent I

2010-12-01T11:01:00.002-05:00

Matthew 24:37-44

Isaiah 2:1-15

Romans 13:8-14

Having raised three children into adulthood, I’ve had many occasions on which to reflect, over the past several years, on the differences between the environment in which they were raised and the environment in which I was raised. In many respects, my children and I were raised in very different worlds. But there is one experience, at least, which they and I share. We’ve all had some version of the following conversation—I with my parents, my children with me: “Why do you want to do that?” “Because all the other kids are.” “Well, if all the other kids were jumping off a cliff, would you want to do that too?” And the conversation usually breaks down at about that point with a sigh and rolled eyes. Peer pressure wasn’t new yesterday and it won’t be old tomorrow. It’s part of growing up, a universal experience that young people have to deal with.

But what we may be less aware of is that peer pressure is not just for young people anymore. All of us—whether we’re seven or seventy-seven, or any other age—we all experience a tremendous amount of sometimes subtle but always present pressure from our peers in the culture around us. Pressure from our cultural surroundings is intense, virtually irresistible at times. I was raised in a Christian subculture that was opposed to social dancing. (If you’ve ever seen me on a dance floor, this fact becomes painfully obvious.) When I was in first grade, my teacher decided that, on the last day of school, we’d have a dance. She told us to bring our favorite records. When I conveyed this request to my mother, she had a fit! She instructed me to tell my teacher that dancing was “against my religion.” My mother and I experienced peer pressure from our culture. I can’t say I was crushed by having to be a wallflower at my first dance. But I didn’t quite get it either. Dancing seemed pretty normal to me—people did it on TV all the time. Later, when I was in high school, I was a little more wistful about it. I was aware that being the kind of Christian that my parents had raised me to be placed me outside the norm of the larger culture. What was normal for most people was not normal for me.

We all want to be normal. We want to fit in. We don’t want to call attention to ourselves by being odd or quirky. And most Christians like to think that it’s possible to be a Christian and still “go with the flow,” to be a Christian and still be quite “normal.” Episcopalians, in particular, seem to be invested in not calling attention to ourselves by our religiosity. We don’t want our piety or our prayer or our religious language to cause us to stand out in a crowd. We want to practice Christian religion in the most “normal” way possible, along with being “normal” voters and drivers and homeowners and parents and grandparents and patriotic citizens.

We have much in common with some of our prehistoric ancestors, those who were around in what Jesus refers to as “the days of Noah.” Now, when you read the book of Genesis, it’s quite clear that the reason God destroyed the earth with a flood in “the days of Noah” was because of rampant violence and evil in human society. But Jesus, curiously, doesn’t mention anything about that violence and evil. When Jesus talks about the “days of Noah,” he mentions eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage—all pretty normal, boringly normal, stuff. It was, in fact, their attachment to those and other perfectly normal activities that caused them to be blindsided by divine judgement when it arrived in the form of a flood.

I fear that we in our society are also allowing ourselves to be set up to be blindsided by divine judgement. We want to eat and drink and marry and give in marriage, and go to school, and travel, and work, and make friends, and save for and enjoy a comfortable retirement, and have some fun along the way, and—some of us, at least—to even be a little religious along the way, as long as we don’t make too big a deal out of it. Until relatively recent years, our society has fostered the notion that being a good Christian is really just an extension of being a good citizen—live by the golden rule and attend the church of your choice on Sunday. All very normal. Until it starts to rain and the flood waters rise and we realize, too late, that we should have been paying more attention to that kooky fellow named Noah (nothing normal about him) who spent so much time building a boat in his backyard.

However, it’s not only our attachment to the normal that will blind us to the impending judgement of God, but also our seemingly endless capacity to normalize that which is really ab-normal or sub normal. There are several examples I could point to, but one in particular impresses me just because of the work that I do. I would suspect that, forty or fifty years ago, an unmarried couple who were living together, but wanted to do the right thing, and get properly married, would probably expect that the priest whom they hoped would officiate at their wedding would require them to first move to separate addresses, and probably also ask them to plan a low-key and informal wedding. There was an element of appropriate shame involved in the whole process. Thirty or forty years ago, the same couple would at least try to conceal the fact that they share sleeping quarters, and if they couldn’t conceal it, to at least smile shyly and act duly apologetic and embarrassed. Nowadays, and for the last 25 years or so, the same couple wouldn’t even think to either conceal what they’d been doing or be embarrassed about it in the least. It strikes them as eminently normal, simply the way things are done—and they’re right, it is the way things are done. You meet somebody, sleep together, live together, and then, if everything works out, you get married. You may even have a child or two first!

We have indeed normalized the sub-normal, in this and in so many other ways. And in our attachment to the normal—whether it’s true normality or false normality—the last thing we want to hear is the message of Advent, which is a message of consequences, a message of responsibility, a message of judgement. It’s a message that confronts us, of course, all throughout the year, but in Advent it takes on a tone of urgency. Jesus says, “Watch, therefore, for you do not know on what day your lord is coming.” Right there is a challenge to the normal. It’s not normal to be always watchful, always vigilant, always aware that cataclysmic radical change may arrive at any moment.

But that’s the attitude that Jesus urges us to have. And if we’re looking for comfort on this first Sunday of Advent, we won’t find it from St Paul. His message is just as pointed at Jesus’:

“...you know what hour it is, how it is full time for you now to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed; the night is far gone, the day is at hand. Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light...”.

Advent is God’s alarm clock waking us from our complacent attachment to the normal. It’s time to wake up and smell the coming of Christ! It’s time to get up, and lay aside what’s normal and make a radical decision, a radical commitment to Christ, lest we find ourselves in the position of those who lived in the days of Noah, but also died in the days of Noah, because they weren’t on the ark when the rains came. It’s time for us normal Episcopalians to start doing and saying things that risk getting the attention of those around us, things that might relegate us to the margins of our culture, for the sake of Christ and the gospel of Christ. We need to learn from the experience of some of our Christian brethren in other traditions—traditions we may have looked down on as marginal or fanatical or a little odd—but traditions which have maintained a healthy critical distance from the prevailing secular culture. We may not agree with them in the details—I, for one, don’t think the dance floor is the beginning of the road to Hell—but they have learned a point of view, a habit of the heart, that we would do well to imitate. Dancing may not damn us, but an attachment to being “normal” just might.

Jesus says that when he comes again in power and great glory to judge the world, people will be found doing normal things. Two men will be working in the field, two women will be grinding at the mill. We might add signs of normality that are more appropriate to our experience: two men on the same factory floor, or on the same putting green; two women working in the same office, or taking their children to the same park. At first glance, one is indistinguishable from the other. But Jesus says, at the moment of his coming, they will look very different indeed. One will be revealed as among those who have been co-opted, seduced, by normality, who have persistently excluded God from their lives, and will therefore be allowed to reap the fruit, the natural consequences, of those choices. The final portion of the Godless is to be without God. The other will be revealed as part of the community of the redeemed, the company of those who have yielded their hearts and lives to the Lord of history. They will enjoy the vision of universal justice and peace which Isaiah, the prophet of the Advent, writes about so movingly: “...they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Are we willing to risk being a little bit “different,” a little bit “abnormal” now, for the sake of being numbered among those who are “taken” rather than “left” on that great day? Now is the hour of decision, the crisis is now. Jesus wants to do business in your heart, in my heart, today. But he can’t do the work he wants to do if we don’t let loose of being normal. Are we ready to give it up? The phone’s for you. It’s Jesus. He’s on hold, waiting for your answer. What’s it going to be?

Come, Lord Jesus. Amen.

C: Christ the King

2010-11-21T10:19:00.000-05:00

Colossians 1:11-2

Luke 23:35-43

Jeremiah 23:1-6

As many of you know, my father was born and raised in Brazil. He immigrated to this country when he was in his twenties, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen when he was about forty. Being Brazilian, of course, he knew nothing about that quintessential American pastime—baseball. I, on the other hand, was raised in the suburbs of Chicago, so, despite my Brazilian ancestry, I was keenly interested in baseball. When my dad, being the dutiful father that he was, took me to my first big league ball game, he brought along a news magazine to keep him occupied! There’s a certain subtlety and relaxed sophistication to the game of baseball that causes those who are not brought up on it to find it boring. When you’re raised on soccer, a baseball game must seem like nothing’s going on most of the time. That isn’t true, of course, but it seems that way. Until you reach a certain threshold of knowledge and experience, baseball can be both confusing and dull. But when you cross that threshold, a baseball game becomes a work of performance art, always a potential masterpiece in the making, a thing of beauty and a source of joy.

I cannot help but reflect that there is a similar dynamic at work in the liturgy of the church, the worship of Almighty God. There are those who attend church—certainly the majority of our “Christmas and Easter” friends, but even many who attend more frequently—for whom the liturgy is like a baseball game for my Brazilian father fifty years ago. There are those for whom being in church is something to be endured—patiently much of the time, but often with a good bit of fidgeting and even resentment. Their minds are not challenged by the mystery of the gospel, their hearts are not uplifted in praise to the God of all creation, and their wills are not moved to obedience and sacrifice in the cause of Christ. Our response to being present at Christian worship is commensurate with our experience of the living God. Experience shapes perception

Imagine for a moment that you work for the newspaper, The Daily Planet, and one of your colleagues is a reporter named Clark Kent. You’re likely to think of him as a nice enough guy, a good reporter, good-looking, perhaps, and a decent human being. But if I were to suggest that you should be in awe of Clark Kent, respectfully silent in his presence, because he’s faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, you would think I’d gone round the bend. And your opinion of my suggestion would be based on your experience of Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter.

Two of our readings from scripture today lead us to perceive our Lord Jesus in the same light in which a reporter for The Daily Planet might perceive Clark Kent. Jeremiah describes a wise and righteous king whom the Lord will raise up to rule over his people. The church has always understood this passage to be a foreshadowing of the coming of Christ. But the king that Jeremiah describes is not a conquering hero, not overflowing with machismo, not enthroned in royal splendor. Rather, this righteous king rules over his people with the gentle care of a shepherd. Talk about a mild-mannered profession! A shepherd-king is not likely to evoke a sense of awe and wonder.

The reading from Luke’s gospel is even less flattering. Jesus hangs on the cross, in abject weakness. The guards and the soldiers and the temple authorities are mocking his claim to kingship as he hangs there bleeding to death. Every indication is that they will indeed have the last laugh. This scene is poignant, and it may evoke pity. But taken by itself, it does not present us with a picture of the kind of king we would want to pay homage to. Experience shapes perception, and the experience of a mild-mannered shepherd king, and a young man dying in weakness on a cross, does not lead us to a perception of Jesus Christ as a king worthy of our adoration and worship. We are like the foreigner who finds baseball confusing and dull. We have not crossed the necessary threshold of knowledge and experience.

The epistle reading appointed for this last Sunday of the Christian year comes at the mystery of the kingship of Christ from an entirely different direction. Listen to the words of St Paul to the Colossians:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent.

This is no docile shepherd, no dying figure on a cross. This is the Lord of the universe, the be-all and end-all of everything that is. This is Ultimate Reality.

So why aren’t we shaking in our boots?

We remain unmoved because it seems so far away. If the portrait of Christ painted in the letter to the Colossians were the only one I had, my attachment and devotion to him would be about as profound as that which I feel toward the manufacturer of my iPhone. It is intricately designed, with a great deal of sophistication that is beyond my comprehension. But one of these days it will break or wear out, and be beyond repair. It will then be unceremoniously thrown away, and the person or persons who made it will neither mourn nor even know of the demise of their handiwork. If our perception of Christ is like our perception of a cell phone maker, it is no wonder that our minds and hearts and wills are left cold and unmoved by worship. We have not yet experienced an object of worship that is worthy of free-flowing praise and adoration. It is only when we combine the images of Jeremiah’s shepherd-king, and Luke’s dying savior, with Paul’s pre-eminent cosmic Lord of all creation, that we begin to get a clue. It is when we bring those visions into coherence and focus that we leap over that threshold of perception that moves us from boredom and confusion into wonder and awe.

And the clue that makes this movement possible is this: it is precisely through—not in spite of, but through—his suffering servanthood that the cosmic Christ demonstrates his worthiness of our praise and adoration and thanks. This is the mind-bending, heart-warming, action-inducing paradox of the gospel. This is the mystery which, if embraced, will make regular worshipers out of Christmas and Easter churchgoers, and devoted followers of Christ out of complacent pew-warmers. There is no illustration that can do justice to this paradoxical mystery of divine kingship revealed through suffering servanthood. But there are any number of telltale traces in our experience; it’s as if Christ our servant-king has left markers all over the place which, if we will observe them, will lead us to him. In the early 1980s, when Great Britain mounted a successful military campaign to oust Argentine forces from the Falkland islands, many were impressed that the Queen’s own blood was on the line, in the person of her son, Prince Andrew, who was the pilot of a Royal Navy helicopter. More recently, one of the Queen’s grandsons was for a brief while in harm’s way as a member of the British military in Afghanistan. The sight of royalty putting its own neck on the block is ennobling, and stirs the spirit. It is a marker that points us to Christ the king who was obedient unto death, even death on a cross.

Every Holy week, on Maundy Thursday, the Bishop of Rome, spiritual father to a billion Christians, humbles himself to wash the feet of twelve members of the congregation in St Peter’s Basilica. Of course, the pope is himself waited on hand and foot the rest of the year, but his actions on Maundy Thursday nevertheless are a marker that points us to Christ the King, in all things pre-eminent, in whom and through whom all things were created, but who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but humbled himself, taking the form of a servant. When we follow these and other markers that God, in his mercy, has left in our path, we come to know Christ the King. We cross that vital threshold of knowledge and experience that elevate us from grudging observers of worship to full-throated participants.

In time, my father learned the game of baseball. At the meal following his funeral, we all wore Cubs hats specifically in his honor, because he had become a true fan of both the Cubs and the game of baseball. And if my Brazilian father can become a baseball fan, that, to me, is a sign of abundant hope that, even as we are here today in the very courts of the Most High God, the scales can be lifted from our eyes and we can catch such of glimpse of his glory that our hearts will burn within us and our voices will shout with praise to Christ, who is our tender shepherd, and our crucified savior, and our heavenly king. All hail the power of Jesus’ name, who alone is worthy to be crowned with many crowns. Alleluia and Amen.

C: Proper 28

2010-11-14T09:00:00.002-05:00

Luke 21:5-19

II Thessalonians 3:6-13

I’m the oldest of seven siblings. The one who’s closest to me in age is my brother Phil. Phil is a prankster. He loves to play practical jokes. And he discovered very early that his older brother is a really easy mark. When I was in college, and he still in high school, Phil had me on the phone to an auto parts store inquiring about the price of a quart of “piston slap.” His biggest offense, for which it took me a long while to forgive him, was when he coaxed me to put my high school class ring into a length of pipe that he presented to me, on the pretense of “show[ing me] something,” and then going outside and tossing the ring around with a friend of his until it fell into a flower bed. I have to think it might still be in that flower bed, because we never found it.

It’s no fun to be tricked, no fun to be deceived, is it? I occasionally look at the comic strip Close to Home. Recently it depicted a drug store pharmacist holding up a bottle and saying to a customer, “The bad news is, it costs $700 and your insurance won’t cover it. The good news is, it will absolutely cure you of being gullible.” I have to admit, I had a moment or two of identifying with that poor customer! In the Great Litany, which we will pray at the beginning of Mass a couple of weeks from today, there’s a petition on behalf of “all such as have erred, and are deceived.” It’s not only not fun to be deceived, taken, swindled, conned, led down the primrose path; sometimes it can be dangerous, and downright deadly.

Today we are with Jesus in the last few days before his passion. He has entered Jerusalem in triumph, and now he’s with his disciples in the temple. A couple of years ago, I walked in that same area. There’s only one wall of that temple still standing, and that was impressive enough. But I did get to see a large scale model of the way in looked in Jesus’ day, and it was stunning. It had a ground footprint, and took up an amount of airspace, comparable to a major professional sports stadium today. It was massive. Somebody remarks to Jesus about how beautiful it is, and Jesus immediately predicts its destruction. So they ask, in effect, “When? How are we going to know that this is about to happen?” And Jesus says—and, again, I’m paraphrasing—“Watch out! People are going to try to con you. People are going to try to tell you that they speak for me, or are me. People are going to give you all kinds of ‘evidence’ and try to get you to go along with them. Don’t do it!”

Apparently, it didn’t take too long for people in the earliest Christian communities to illustrate exactly what Jesus was talking about. St Paul’s two letters to the Thessalonians are probably the earliest written documents in the New Testament; we’re talking barely twenty years after Jesus walked on the earth. Already there are those who are laboring under the impression—or not laboring, actually, which is the point—the impression that Jesus has already returned to this world and inaugurated God’s heavenly reign. So there’s no need to work. It’s time to just kick back and let God run the show. “Not so fast!” says Paul. “If you don’t work, you don’t eat. Got it?” He actually had to be a little stern with them. Some of the Thessalonian Christians had been deceived—led astray, hoodwinked—by false teaching. They had allowed to happen to them what Jesus warned against that day in the temple.

What makes this so difficult—at least for gullible people like me—is that it’s pretty darn easy to be deceived. I’m a terrible liar, and I’m terrible at spotting liars. How can I know that I’m not being taken for a ride—especially when it comes to what’s true about Ultimate Reality, about God? How do I avoid ending up like those poor Thessalonian slackers that St Paul was yelling at? I suspect that many of you have had moments when you’ve asked yourself the same question.

So what I need to do now, I’m afraid, is talk some serious theology with you. In his message to the Thessalonians, Paul tells them—commands them, actually; quite strong language—to “keep away from any brother or sister who is living in idleness, and not in accord with the tradition that you have received from us.”

Not in accord with the tradition that you have received from us.

Here’s the clue we’re looking for, I think; the cure for gullibility. Only it won’t cost us $700 a bottle. The word “tradition” might be a little scary at first. It might call to mind frozen attitudes, antiquated ideas and procedures, or something that is of human rather than divine origin. Some of us would walk over glass in bare feet before hearing ourselves labeled as “traditionalists”! So I offer you this image: Think of a relay race at a track meet. A team of runners participates in this event, but they don’t all run at the same time. At designated points during the race, one runner passes a baton to another runner on his or her team. In order to prepare for this exchange, the new runner starts out and picks up speed so that the handoff of the baton can take place without breaking stride. For a little while, both teammates are running side by side. Then, after passing the baton, the first runner drops away and the second runner continues the race.

The New Testament Greek word that gets translated as “tradition” literally means “handing along.” It refers to precisely what takes place in a relay race when the baton is passed. Possession of the baton is the outward sign, the guarantee, that the race is being run in an orderly fashion. The holder of the baton is the legitimate representative of his or her team. And you don’t get to hold the baton unless you hang out with the team, unless you participate in the community that is the team. If you don’t operate as part of the team, you’re not in the right place at the right time, and you miss the handoff of the baton.

My friends, the Catholic Church is the team. (Sadly, it’s still necessary to qualify a statement like that: I’m not speaking of the Roman Catholic Church, but the Catholic Church of the creeds, the body of which Christ is the Head and all baptized persons are the members, the visible body of which we, as Anglican Christians, are a part.) And the content of our faith—our tradition—is the baton. Possession of the baton is the outward sign that we’re running the race in an orderly fashion, that we have received the faith from the previous generation, and they from the one before theirs, and so on back to the generation of Paul and the Thessalonians.

And what is this “baton” that we have received, and which we will hopefully pass on, made up of? There are many ways we could answer that question, but here’s one that is probably as good as any other. Back in the 1886, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, meeting in Chicago, adopted a statement of principles on which this church would base its conversations with other Christian bodies. A couple of years later, this statement was adopted, with minor modifications, by the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops from around the world. It became known as the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, because it has these four points:

1. The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the revealed Word of God.

2. The Nicene Creed as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.

3. The sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, using the words and elements ordained by Christ himself.

4. The Historic Episcopate—that is, the line of succession of bishops, a visible sign of continuity that can be followed back to Christ and the apostles.

There is certainly more that we would want to say about the content of our faith, about the “baton” that we are presently holding as we run our leg of the journey, but these four points give us a base from which to operate in our relations with other Christians. I would suggest that they also give us a base from which to insulate ourselves from the danger of deception. If we don’t every stray too far from the scriptures, the creeds, the sacraments, and the ministers of the sacraments, it’s hard for me to imagine that we would fall victim to false teachers or false prophets or just garden variety sloppy theology.

The “baton” of sacred tradition has been handed off to us from previous generations. Some of us are just now getting up to speed to receive the baton. Some of us are in the midst of the race. Some of us are approaching the handoff point and are looking for the next runner. Together, we are all awaiting the appearing of our Savior, not resting from our labors until we hear him call our name, and greet his return, not with shame or fear, but with great joy. Praised be Jesus Christ. Amen.

All Saints (2010)

2010-11-09T17:01:00.000-05:00

I’ve always been particularly fond of the opening words of the Prayer Book collect for All Saints’ Day: “O God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord…” Knit together. It’s such a homely image; “homely” in a good way—comforting, familiar, “warm and fuzzy.” I don’t myself knit—hopefully you don’t find that too much of a shock!—but I’ve watched people knit—well, not “watched” actually, but been casually in their presence while they’re knitting—and I’ve always found the process rather amazing, almost magical. There’s a skein of yarn on the floor, with a line leading up to a person sitting in a chair wielding a pair of needles, usually looking quite relaxed and contented and able to carry on a more-than-decent conversation and possibly even follow the plot of a TV show at the same time. And then, pretty soon, I’m looking at a pair of baby booties, or a sweater, or a shawl, or some other product that has been “knit together.” It’s something tangible and coherent and useful. A ball of yarn is just a ball of yarn, but a sweater is … something.

So, according to the Prayer Book at least, God knits. God has knit together his elect, his chosen ones—and that would presumably include you and me—God has knit us together—we who are just a ball of yarn on the floor—God has knit us together in “one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of [his] Son Christ our Lord.” It’s important to keep two things firmly in mind here: First, the “one communion and fellowship” into which God has knit us includes both those whom we would call “living” and those whom we would call “dead.” The line in the creed about the “communion of saints” means, among other things, that the membrane separating this world from the world to come is an awfully thin one. Second, the phrase “mystical body” is biblical and theological code language for the Church. Through the waters of baptism, we, the living and the dead, have been knit together in the fellowship of the one holy catholic and apostolic church. We’re going to baptize a couple of little ones today, Isaiah and Mallory. Together, we are going to be God’s knitting needles, and take these two precious children from being part of a ball of yarn on the floor to being part of the one communion and fellowship that God is continuously knitting together. It’s an exciting moment when we stop and think about it!

I take the trouble to remind us of these facts because it is of the nature of our actual human experience in actual human life to make us forget them. Instead of feeling like we’ve been knit together into anything, we’re more likely to feel like we’re unraveling. Unexpected misfortune happens—our favorite restaurant or store closes, our favorite team loses, the elections don’t go the way we think they should, the stock market tanks, the real estate market capsizes, energy prices force us to change our lifestyles, seniors are forced to choose between the medicine they need and the food they need, we get an acid stomach when the first news we hear in the morning is of more casualties in Afghanistan, or floods and volcanic eruptions in Indonesia. The people in our life, from restaurant servers to spouses, let us down and fail to be what we need them to be. Too often, the people we need the most abandon us twice—first in their living and then in their dying. We experience loneliness and isolation and quiet desperation in abundance as we negotiate the hazards of life in this “broken and sinful world.”

In the end, we become depressed and cynical en route to terminal despair. This is the default condition of our society, my friends, and I’m not just talking about those who are on the margins—the poor, the homeless, those whose lives have been trashed by addiction. I’m talking about people who hold respectable jobs and live in respectable neighborhoods and who give every appearance of having their act together, of being on top of their lives. If 21 years of pastoral ministry have taught me anything, it’s not to automatically trust the façade. I’ve seen behind it too many times. Americans are endemically lonely. And it’s no wonder; we are the descendants of people who made some very risky individual decisions, leaving countries where their ancestors had lived for generations and heading into uncharted territory. Without a strong sense of individualism, they would never have made it. But there’s a cost. They passed on their individualistic DNA to us, and we’re lonely. Medieval Europeans knew something about being “knit together.” Theirs was a communitarian society, and in many ways it was a more natural fit with the Christian notion of being “knit together in one communion and fellowship” than ours is. So we’re lonely. And loneliness leads to cynicism, and cynicism leads to desperation and despair, and desperation and despair lead to violence and all sorts of other mayhem. So much of the world’s suffering is the result of violence, and so much violence is the result of desperation, and so much desperation flows from cynicism that is rooted in loneliness, a sense of being disconnected, unraveled, no longer knit together, no longer knit together in one anything, let alone one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And so we come back to the objective fact of our baptism, which Isaiah and Mallory remind us of in a very tangible way. They are signs to us of our connection, our being a part of something—not a skein of yarn on the floor, but a sweater, or a shawl, or at least a pair of baby booties. We have been knit together—knit together with Christ, and knit together with one another. We have been knit together with the communion of saints, the assembly of God’s holy ones, gathered around the heavenly throne waving palm branches and wearing white robes that have been washed in the blood of the Lamb of God. We are no longer lonely, because we are connected to the mystical body of Jesus Christ our Lord, the Church—the Church Militant feebly struggling on earth, the Church Expectant being led from glory to glory in Paradise, and the Church Triumphant in Heaven, those whose heroic witness to Christ we especially honor today. We are no longer lonely because we have been knit together into a fellowship of love and prayer. People may let us down, but we have been knit into Christ. Troubles may multiply, but we have been knit into Christ. We are part of the one communion and fellowship of all the saints, a fellowship of love and prayer that forms a support system in this world and a celestial cheering section in the next. This provides us with abundant hope in this world and unending joy in the world to come. All saints, all holy men and women of God, pray for us. Amen.

C: Proper 26

2010-10-31T09:30:00.001-04:00

Luke 19:1-10

I don’t know if you’ve even heard the expression “post-modern,” but it’s a term that has been cropping up more and more over the last several years. Those whose business it is to make wise and penetrating observations about the evolution of our culture have coined the phrase to describe the way people of certain generations tend to think. Post-modernism as a thought process is largely absent from what has been called the “World War II generation”—those who were children during the Great Depression. It begins to become visible among “Baby Boomers”—that is, my own generation, those born between 1946 and 1964. But in the succeeding generations—so-called “Generation X,” people who are now in their 30s—as well as what many refer to as “Millennials,” young people who are presently in their 20s—among these younger generations of adults, post-modernism is not only one visible thread in the fabric, it’s the dominant thread in the fabric.

Without taking the time to describe all the features of the post-modern way of thinking, let me just say this: People who are around my age and older are conditioned by a fairly large dose of scientific skepticism. Therefore we don’t naturally accept spiritual claims and spiritual assertions at face value. We tend to want to see some proof for what people say about spiritual reality. This is the “modern” way of thinking, and has been in vogue for about the past 300 years. The post-modern way of thinking, by contrast, is completely open to a wide range of notions and beliefs about spiritual reality. In fact, there seems to be no end to this openness. Post-modernism is accepting of just about any sort of spiritual claim, with the sole criterion of authenticity being that the person who makes the claim finds it useful or comforting or even perhaps just vaguely interesting.

So, the hallmark of the post-modern generations is a pervasive spiritual restlessness—a deep hunger for spiritual experience and a sense of purpose and direction in life, combined with a willingness to try just about anything. But at the same time, there seems to be a widespread difficulty in actually sticking with something for an extended period. All around us, there is this massive hunt for truth going on, but those who are chasing the truth seem to be alarmed by the possibility that they or anyone else might actually catch it! So often, the assumption seems to be that truth is by nature inherently difficult to find and hold onto.

But while the younger generations are spiritually restless, middle-aged and older Americans are, to a large extent, spiritually deaf and blind. We are heavily conditioned to value such things as personal independence and rugged individualism—the “I did it my way” philosophy of Frank Sinatra’s song. And, as I mentioned before, we are also conditioned to be “scientific” in our attitudes. It seems quite clear to us that any knowledge, any claim about truth—physical, emotional, or spiritual—any knowledge worth having results from, and only from, rigorous investigation. Maybe you’ve noticed how popular certain TV shows are that deal with crime scene investigation. The heroes of these shows are not street cops who rely on instincts and hunches based on years of experience, but, rather, science geeks who solve crimes in laboratories and surrounded by millions of dollars worth of scientific testing equipment. Truth that can be had too cheaply doesn’t interest them. Only if it’s a scientific smoking gun is it worth taking to court. Oddly, then, for different reasons, these shows appeal both to modernists and to post-modernists.

There was once a fellow named Zacchaeus who was neither a modernist nor a post-modernist, but whose attitude combined both perspectives. St Luke the Evangelist tells us about Zacchaeus, and mentions two very salient facts about him: a) he was a tax collector, and b) he was short, noticeably shorter than the average adult male of his day. The first of these meant that he was considered beneath contempt, a social outcast. The second guaranteed that he was the object of a lot of laughing behind his back. Somehow, Zacchaeus got word that Jesus was going to be visiting Jericho, the town where he lived. He was determined to meet Jesus. It was really, really important to him to meet Jesus. So he did what it took to make that happen. He was willing to risk turning himself into a spectacle, a laughingstock. He climbed up into a sycamore tree along the route he figured Jesus would take, and edged himself out onto the branch overlooking the roadway.

Zacchaeus didn’t have the confidence that Jesus would even give him the time of day, let alone stop for a chat. It was up to him to make the encounter happen, if it was to be at all. Very often, people take a similar attitude in their relationship with God and God’s love. If the encounter is going to happen, they figure it’s up to them to make it happen. We flit from spiritual fad to spiritual fad. We try a little bit of this and a little bit of that, hoping that we might stumble across God in the process, just based on mathematical odds, if not our own wisdom and skill. In the end, though, we are swallowed up either by false pride for having “found” God on our own, or by despair for having failed to do so.

Fortunately, Jesus’ interaction with Zacchaeus shows us a different path. Indeed, Jesus’ route through Jericho does take him right under Zacchaeus’ perch. At that point, though, everything takes an unexpected turn. It’s time to think outside the box, to draw outside the lines. Not only does Jesus stop and chat with Zacchaeus, he invites himself home with Zacchaeus. “Zacchaeus get yourself down from that tree; I’m comin’ to your house right now!” Zacchaeus had thought he was looking for Jesus. The stunning truth, however, is that it was Jesus who was doing the looking; Jesus was looking for Zacchaeus.

There is a tremendous lesson for us here, whatever generation we’re a member of. It demonstrates to us that God’s love, far from being merely passive and responsive, waiting for us to make the first move—it demonstrates to us that God’s love is proactive—seeking us and pursuing us and finding us. And God’s love is tireless; it even seeks out the “hard cases.” It’s easy to love cute little kids and sweet old ladies. But funny-looking tax collectors like Zacchaeus? Well, that’s a love worth sitting up and taking notice of.

We need to work a little bit to understand just how impressive it was that Jesus publicly announced his intent to invite himself over to dinner at Zacchaeus’ house. You see, Zacchaeus was not only a tax collector, and not only short, but he was also rich. And it would have been presumed that his gains were mostly ill-gotten. Now, Jesus has already established, earlier in Luke’s gospel, that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. But, what does Jesus say about Zacchaeus? What does he say for all to hear? “Today salvation has come to this house…” Wow! It sounds like a camel has just squeezed through the eye of a needle! It’s a veritable miracle, a miracle of God’s proactive love, love that doesn’t wait for us to seek it out, but, instead seeks us out, hunting us down relentlessly, and never giving up the chase.

What a blessing this is, my friends. God’s proactive love means that we can really rest spiritually. Of course, this is the complete opposite of the spiritual restlessness that consumes so many in the younger generations. It’s also the opposite of the spiritual blindness and deafness—a poisonous skepticism and callousness—that consumes so many in the older generations. When we come to terms with just how determined God is to love us, we begin to experience the truth of one of my favorite prayers from the Daily Office, from Morning Prayer on Thursdays, to be specific: “Heavenly Father, in you we live and move and have our being: We humbly pray you so to guide and govern us by your Holy Spirit, that in all the cares and occupations of our life, we may not forget you, but…” – and here’s the kicker – “…that we may not forget you, but remember that we are ever walking in your sight.” To be “ever walking in [God’s] sight”—this is both a comfort and a challenge—sometimes, we would rather not be walking in God’s sight, right?—but even as a challenge, it’s a powerful bit of evidence of Divine love, love in which Jesus seeks us out and invites himself into our hearts, even as he invited himself to Zacchaeus’ home, love that we don’t have to climb any trees to find, and which we can never outrun. Praised be Jesus Christ. Amen.

C: Proper 25

2010-10-30T13:55:00.000-04:00

Luke 18:9-14

Jeremiah 14:1-10, 19-22

John Donne was a distinguished priest of the Church of England in the seventeenth century. He finished his career as the dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. But John Donne is probably best known as one of the greatest poets ever to write in the English language. There is scarcely a high school literature student who has not run across the poem that talks about a church bell tolling to call the townspeople to a funeral, and contains the lines, “No man is an island, entire of itself ... ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

No one is an island, independent and self-sufficient. Even a professed hermit depends on other people to keep him supplied with food and water. We all live in a complex web of relationships. Some of our relationships are more important to us than others. These relationships that are important to us are the source of a great deal of anxiety over a lifetime. Will my parents be proud of my report card? Will the one I immediately fell in love with across a crowded room return my feelings? Will my children still love me in spite of all the mistakes I make as a parent? Will my grandchildren want to visit me? Will they want to go home?

Each of us wants to get these crucial relationships right. We always want to know where we stand with the important people in our lives. Most of all, the majority of us, whether or not we would actually name it and express it this way, want to know where we stand with God. We have an innate sense that that’s one relationship it would be a good idea for us to get right.

Getting right with God.

The New Testament’s word for “getting right with God” is ‘justification.’ We want to be justified, to stand in the right place, in our relationship with God. Now, in everyday talk, we usually use the word “justify” to mean “give a good reason for” or “make an excuse for”. As the word is used in the Bible, though, a more helpful image is that of a “justified” margin on a type-written page. All the characters line up with one another down one side of the page—they stand in the right place in relation to one another. So, the million dollar question is, How are we justified with God? What determines where we stand in our relationship with God, that most important of all relationships.

The conventional, off the street, wisdom is that this involves some form of stockpiling good deeds. One way of picturing it is that we have to accumulate a certain number of total “points” on some celestial scoring system. By this standard, the longer you live, the more opportunities you have to score points, so the better your chances are of justifying yourself with God. Pity those who die young!

Another way of looking at it is somewhat more sophisticated: it’s all relative. As long as your good deeds outweigh your bad deeds, whatever the absolute number of either of them is, then your right standing before God is assured. So if you can just be sure you keep a credit balance, you can sneak in quite a bit of sinning and still not have to worry. Just be sure you have a good accountant!

The Pharisee in Jesus’ parable is a shining example of this tally-sheet approach to justification. He was a member of a movement within Judaism that saw itself as an assembly of super-Jews. They were not only correct, they were excruciatingly correct—in their religious piety, in their social and civic duties, and in their personal discipline.

Whatever the law of Moses said, the Pharisees did that much and more. So the Pharisee, as Jesus tells the story, came into the temple to pray, much as you or I might come into a church to pray, during the week, when there’s not a public liturgy being celebrated. He’s careful to couch his prayer in terms of thanksgiving, but the tone of what he says is really self-congratulatory; he’s bragging in God’s presence. He’s upright in his dealings with his fellow human beings—he’s not an adulterer, not an extortionist, he gives everyone what is their just due. He’s also fastidious about his religious discipline—he fasts twice a week, and he tithes! Sounds like the kind of guy we could use more of, doesn’t it?

There was a made-for-TV movie in the mid-80s that, for a while, appeared in reruns every time you turned on the TV, in which Andy Griffith portrayed the decline and fall of an alcoholic, and everything his family went through during the process. What struck me was how his wife and grown children were all obsessed with pleasing him—whether by becoming like him, a drinking buddy, which is what one son did, or by becoming a hyper-achiever in the business world, which is what his oldest daughter did, or by just cleaning up the messes that he continually left in his wake, which was his wife’s job. They were all trying to “get right” with him, to justify themselves, to make sure where they stood.

This is where the illustration breaks down, of course, so please don’t think I’m suggesting that God is like an alcoholic! But in a twisted sort of way, the behavior of that tragically co-dependent family toward their alcoholic, and the behavior of many of us toward God, is curiously similar. It didn’t work for the movie family. Andy Griffith’s character died, and his family would spend the rest of their lives working through the consequences of their behavior. It didn’t work for the Pharisee either. In the end, as Jesus tells the story, his punctiliously correct behavior did not justify him. It did not determine where he stood with God.

Trying to get right with God through living virtuously has a reverse-image counterpart, like a photographic negative. This approach assumes that where we stand with God is determined by our sinfulness, by our weakness and inadequacy, by the great gulf that separates us from God’s holiness, God’s glory, God’s perfection. “I know I’ll never be good enough to deserve God’s favor; I know I’ll never be worthy of getting into heaven, so just leave me alone and let me at least enjoy my sins while I can!” This is a sort of pre-emptive strike—it looks like God is going to reject me, so I’ll just reject him first! It’s an effort to maintain some sense of control over our own destinies. “You can’t fire me; I quit!”

But the other character in Jesus’ parable, the tax-collector, reveals the error of such a way.

Now, we have to understand that a tax collector, in Jesus’ world, was an even more odious figure than an IRS auditor! First, he was a collaborator with a foreign military power that was occupying the country against the wishes of the populace. He was, by definition, a traitor to his homeland. Second, Roman tax collectors worked, as it were, “on commission”. They were responsible for turning over a certain amount of money to the authorities, and whatever they collected in excess of that amount was theirs to keep. So there was a tremendous temptation to resort to fraud, extortion, and plain old gouging in order to maximize their income. Jesus’ audience would have assumed that the tax collector in his story was guilty of all these crimes. He comes into the temple to pray, and dares not even lift his eyes toward heaven. He just strikes his breast and prays, “God, be merciful to me...a sinner.”

I’ve read that scientists who use animals as part of their research make a special point not to form any emotional bond with their subjects, for understandable reasons. Yet, I’ve also read that, even in the midst of an uncomfortable experiment, a dog, for instance, will affectionately lick the face of a researcher, and wag his tail. From the dog’s perspective, the researcher is guilty of a great crime. Yet, that guilt apparently does not determine where the researcher stands in the dog’s estimation! Neither did the tax collector’s sins determine where he stood in God’s estimation. Not only is he not summarily condemned by his sins, but, between the two men, it’s the tax collector who leaves the temple justified, right with God, and not the Pharisee.

How can this be? Our good works do not determine where we stand with God. Neither do our sins. So what does? How are we justified? How do we get right with God? This parable presents us with a conundrum. It turns our expectations upside down. So what’s going on here that we can’t see?

What’s going on here is grace. Grace—God’s loving inclination and movement toward us and for us. During the time of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, the kingdom of Judah, which was the remaining remnant of the nation of Israel, suffered from a prolonged drought. In the passage which we read in today’s liturgy, Jeremiah gives voice to the people’s anguish in their adversity. Yet, in the midst of that anguish, they neither blame God for punishing them unjustly—“Our iniquities testify against us, O Lord ... for our apostasies are many”—nor do they jump to the conclusion that God has abandoned them forever. They’re humble, they confess their offenses, they don’t try to justify themselves with a catalogue of their virtues or good deeds. But in the middle of their contrition, there is a statement of great faith: “Lord, you are in the midst of us, and we are called by your name; do not forsake us, O Lord our God.” They—or Jeremiah, at least—never lost faith in God’s grace, in God’s loving inclination and movement toward them and for them.

In his simple humility, the tax collector in the temple also gave evidence of an underlying faith in God’s grace. As human beings who live in relationship, we want to know where we stand with God. But as sinful human beings, under the power of pride, we want to control where we stand with God, to justify—or choose to not justify—ourselves in God’s sight. Only when we surrender that need to control where we stand, either through our virtues or through our offenses, is where we stand revealed to us. Grace reveals where we stand, grace reveals the basis of our justification, grace gets us right with God. We are ransomed by the blood of Christ, healed by the power of Christ, restored through the intercession of Christ, forgiven, died-for, raised-for, and lived-for, saved not through works, but by grace, through faith. Amen.

C: Proper 24

2010-10-30T13:53:00.001-04:00

II Timothy 3:14-4:5

Let’s talk about the Bible. You know, that’s something we don’t actually do it very much. We read it and study it, and, honestly, those are the best things we can do with it. But, once in a while, it’s a good thing to step back and ask ourselves some fundamental questions about our relationship with that collection of sacred writings that we call Holy Scripture.

In the second reading for the past several Sundays, we’ve been working our way through St Paul’s two letters to his younger protégé Timothy, a man who held the position that we would now call Bishop in the Christian community of the great ancient city of Ephesus. Paul writes to Timothy, “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

All scripture is inspired by God.

Some find this sort of affirmation kind of scary, and understandably so. To put it bluntly, St Paul’s words have been abused, abused in many ways. People have tried to make the Bible something it’s not—a textbook on science, or history, or psychology, or economics, or a manual for making moral and ethical decisions. It’s none of those things. To affirm the inspiration of scripture does not relieve us of the responsibility of using the brains God gave us, and the words of scripture are certainly complex and demanding enough that we have plenty of opportunity to engage those brains.

All scripture is inspired by God.

Of course, it’s also possible that we find these words scary because we perceive them as threatening—threatening to some of our habits of thinking and behaving that we have grown very attached to. We instinctively recoil at the idea of anything objective, anything outside ourselves, cramping our style, presuming to sit in judgment over us in some way. But scripture itself, if we pay attention to it, reminds us that we see the world through distorted eyes. Our vision is clouded. We can’t help it. We inherited the condition. We do well not to fully trust our own perceptions, and this is where the witness of scripture—a witness that is “inspired by God”—can be very helpful. Attending to scripture can protect us from a condition that Paul refers to in his letter to Timothy as “itching ears.” “Itching ears” might be described as a compulsive curiosity that can be relieved only by “scratching” with interesting and spicy bits of information, bits of information that simply confirm our prejudices. The sort of weird speculation we’ve seen over the last several months about the President’s birthplace or the President’s religion is an example, I think, of “itching ears.” And in the interest of giving offense in a bipartisan manner, so is the scandal-mongering that’s been going on trying to discredit a certain former governor and vice-presidential candidate. The speculation and the scandal-mongering do little more than confirm us in whatever prejudices we already incline toward. We have made ourselves—our whims, our desires, our perceptions—the sole measure of our experience. The more we scratch our itching ears, the less of the truth we are able to hear.

All scripture is inspired by God.

As I’ve said, this affirmation is subject to distortion. The Bible isn’t a science book or a history book, and needs to be interpreted properly. But it’s nonetheless our foundational document. For the Church, Holy Scripture functions in a way similar to the way the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and the Gettysburg Address function for our nation. It’s the lens through which we read our past, interpret our present, and anticipate our future. The Bible is not just a source we turn to when questions arise about what we believe or how we should behave, and it’s not the only source, but it is the first such source and the last such source, and the one to which we hold ourselves accountable as an authority. Being judged is never pleasant, but we do, collectively and individually, sit under the judgment of Scripture. It’s not an option that we can take or leave, or a cafeteria from which we can eat what appeals to us and ignore all the rest. It’s the word of God.

All Scripture is inspired by God.

Scripture certainly comforts us in our affliction. This is why St Paul includes "encourage" is his mandate for Timothy's ministry. Few among us have not heard the words of the 23^rd Psalm at a time of grief or loss and taken heart from them in some measure. How many brides and grooms choose to have Paul’s own ode to love from I Corinthians 13 read at their wedding liturgies precisely because it offers them encouragement right when they’re stepping into the abyss known as marriage. And scripture also, and rightly so, afflicts us in our comfort. This is why St Paul says that its good for “reproof” and “correction”, and urges Timothy to “convince, rebuke,” and “exhort,” in his ministry as a bishop, employing scripture as one of the useful tools in that ministry.

All scripture is inspired by God.

Comforting us and afflicting us, I would suggest, are important functions of Scripture, but not its primary one. The primary purpose of Scripture is to enable us to see with God’s eyes, to see what God sees, in effect, and in a scaled-down way, to know what God knows. In the pages of the Bible, we know ourselves as we really are—as created in the image and likeness of God, as infinitely loved by God, and as fallen creatures with distorted perceptions, under the grip of Sin and Death. In the pages of the Bible, we know the world as it really is—the creation of an almighty and majestic God, and something that has been entrusted to human care as stewards, not something to merely exploit and destroy. In the pages of the Bible, we see an alternative to our own mercurial whims and prejudices—an anchor, a rock, an objective reference point.

It is our privilege, in our public worship and in our private study, to bathe ourselves in Scripture, to let its vocabulary and phraseology plant themselves in our hearts and imaginations, to become second nature to us. Doing so enables us to resist the allure of “itching ears,” and gives us the sort of quiet confidence that is not bigoted or pugnacious, but is not timid either, because it is rooted in the magnificent reality of God himself.

All scripture is inspired by God. As our collect four weeks from now will exhort us, let us “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it,” to our great good and God’s great glory. Amen.

C: Proper 23

2010-10-12T07:55:00.000-04:00

Luke 17:11-19

Those of you who have been at St Anne’s during the cycle of liturgies that lead up to, and include, Easter each year know that these are very rich and spiritually rewarding experiences. They are the very essence of what makes us who we are as the people of God, the people of the New Covenant between God and mankind. They are also very intense and demanding, particularly on those who plan and lead and assist with them. For me personally, I can tell you, while I remain excited about and committed to these complex services, they are a lot of work—work that can sometimes begin to feel like a chore, a burden, something to be endured until it’s over with. So every year, as the process of preparation for Holy Week picks up, I have found that it helps keep me focused, it helps keep my enthusiasm fresh, if I think of one person—there’s usually more than one, but one person, at least—who I know will be experiencing the liturgies of Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and the Easter Vigil, observed in all their symbolic richness, for the very first time. I discipline myself to look at my experience through the eyes of an “outsider,” and this renews and refreshes the experience for the benefit of my own soul.

But the liturgical observance of Holy Week is a relatively trivial concern when weighed against the fundamental and everyday experiences which are also vulnerable to going stale and flat and becoming more of a chore than a joy. Many of us have been blessed to have found daily work which we consider to be truly a vocation, a calling. Yet, even among those who are so blessed, there are days when our work feels like drudgery, and we’d rather be doing any number of other things. Many of us are or have been a partner in a marriage that was once fantastic, but later became just okay—still on solid ground—or so we hope—but kind of ho-hum, lacking the pizazz that it once had. Many of us are faithful in saying our prayers daily, and may have had profound experiences in the past of God’s presence and involvement in our lives, but lately our prayer life is kind of flat and uninspiring. Many of us are commendably regular in our attendance at public worship, and make an honest effort to participate in the liturgy with heart and mind and soul. Yet, when Sunday morning comes along, we find ourselves drawn in other directions. There was a mother once who knocked on her son’s bedroom door and said, “Son, it’s Sunday. Time to get up and go to church.” The son responded, “But I don’t want to go to church. I want to stay in bed.” The mother responded, “But you have to go to church. So get up and get dressed.” “But, Mom, why? Why do I have to get up and go to church?” “Well, son, I’ll give you two reasons. First, because I’m your mother, and I said so. Second, because you’re the rector and they’re paying you to be there.”

Prayer and worship had evidently become a little flat for that particular priest! But it can happen to any of us, and, as we have seen, in a number of different ways. And we are most vulnerable to this experience of life and work and marriage and prayer and worship feeling stale and dry and confining when we are focused inward, looking only at ourselves. And when this happens, when our gaze is inward, when our perception is limited to our own perspective, our own point of view, then it becomes alarmingly easy for us to stray from our faith and commitments in these areas. This is what lies underneath mid-life career crises and infidelity to marriage vows and the abandonment of worship and prayer.

When this happens to us as individuals, life becomes “all about me”—a syndrome we talked about last week. We descend into a psychology of victimhood, and obsess on how we are being ill-treated by the world. But it also happens to communities—nations, cities, corporations, and, of course, churches. When institutions and communities get stuck looking inward on themselves, seeing themselves and the world only from an “insider” point of view, they indulge in an inordinate focus on the past, and are easily consumed by survival anxiety. Group morale sags because there is very little sense of mission, and it becomes an inexorable downward spiral into oblivion.

What would happen, though, if we began to train ourselves to look at our experience, not through the weary and glazed-over eyes of an insider, but through the fresh and wondering eyes of a stranger, a foreigner? In St Luke’s gospel, we encounter a compelling example of seeing the familiar through the eyes of the unfamiliar. Jesus encountered ten men with the dreaded skin disease of leprosy. Lepers in that culture were complete pariahs, social outcasts. It was a terrible existence. Jesus, in his mercy, healed all ten men of their leprosy. Only one, however, returned to praise God and offer thanks. And this one, it turns out, was a foreigner, an outsider—a Samaritan. And if there was anything worse than just being a leper, it was to have been a Samaritan leper! Yet, this Samaritan, who had every reason to be suspicious of Jesus, a Jew, because of the tremendous ethnic hostility between the two groups—this Samaritan, an outsider, came and fell at Jesus’ feet and poured out gratitude from a heart that was now wonderfully appreciative of all things Jewish.

And what we see in the Samaritan leper, most of us have seen with our own eyes. We have all either known or at least heard about a naturalized American citizen who is more patriotic than most native-born Americans. Many of us have known people who come to faith in Christ as adults, and whose devotion and enthusiasm puts to shame many who have always known the Lord, who have never been unbelievers. And within the Christian family, when someone discovers a particular expression of the faith that makes him feel like he has found the home he never knew existed—well, there’s no zeal like that of a convert! I encountered the Anglican tradition as a young adult, and that describes my feelings. Now that I’ve been an Episcopalian for 35 years, I feel very much an insider—susceptible to jaded cynicism, so when I encounter someone who is eager to learn about our glorious Anglican inheritance, it lifts my spirits to see my “old” reality through that person’s “new” eyes.

This is a move we all need to make, time and time again. The Samaritan leper stands before us today as an invitation to see our old reality, not through our tired insiders’ eyes, but through his fresh outsiders’ eyes. He invites us to shift our attention outward, to involve ourselves authentically in the lives of those around us, to be consumed by the mission to which God has called us, both as individuals and as a community, to re-connect with our vocation with the same sense of wonder we felt when we first knew ourselves to be called to it, to not settle for an “okay” marriage but to insist on a superior one, to nurture our love affair with the Lord so that prayer is not simply a chore but the very air we breathe, and wild stallions couldn’t prevent us from worshiping at the Lord’s own altar with the Lord’s own people on the Lord’s own day. And in the process, we become more appreciative of the advantages and blessings that are ours. Among Anglicans who have had some sustained experience with the services of Morning and Evening Prayer, the words of the General Thanksgiving come to mind here: “We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life, but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.” As we view our experience through the eyes of the Samaritan leper and the stranger in our midst, our personal holiness is refined through the development of an “attitude of gratitude,” a habitual mindset of thanksgiving, and on that day when all secrets are revealed and the piercing eye of the Holy One looks into every human heart, our hearts will reflect back to him his own image, brought to perfection through His Son and our Savior, Jesus Christ. To him be all praise and glory. Amen.

C: Proper 23

2010-10-10T09:00:00.004-04:00

Luke 17:11-19

C: Proper 22

2010-10-05T15:32:00.002-04:00

Habakkuk 1:1-13; 2:1-4

Luke 17:5-10

Psalm 37:3-10

OK, I’ve got to level with you right at the beginning here. This gospel passage is not one of my favorites. I’m talking about the little mini-parable that Jesus tells about the landowner who has a field hand working beside him all day, working just as hard, doing the same stuff, and when quitting time rolls around, the boss puts his feet up and makes the field hand—now turned into a domestic servant—he makes his servant fix dinner and serve it to him, and only then can the servant sit down and have some for himself. The insufferable arrogance of that landowner! The obvious injustice of it all! And we’re supposed to see this guy as a symbol for God, and identify ourselves with the hard-working but exploited servant? Who would want to serve that kind of God, anyway? He certainly isn’t the kind of God that makes you proud to call Him your own!

I suspect that many of you have a reaction similar to my own, and in that—I hate to tell you—we’re being quite typical twenty-first century Americans. For us, the motto that gets us through life is, “It’s all about me.” When we go out to a restaurant, we expect top-notch attentive service, and if we’re working at a restaurant, we expect courteous customers who tip generously. When we buy something at a store, we expect to be able to return it for a full refund with no questions asked. As employees, we expect top pay with full benefits, flex-time, and a generous company contribution toward our retirement plan. As employers, we expect workers who don’t have a personal life, and preferably never have to go to the restroom during working hours.

Well, Jesus’ little illustration encourages us to realize that it’s not all about us. That’s a hard lesson for Americans to learn. Our British cousins perhaps have an easier time of it because, until rather recently, theirs was a rigidly class-oriented society. When the now-retired Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, was appointed to that position in 1990, he was considered a remarkable exception to the rule, because he had been born into a blue-collar working class family, and didn’t have the benefit of a prestigious private school education. The fact the he even was made a priest, let alone appointed bishop and then primate, was seen as evidence that he was one the very few who was able to transcend the class into which he was born. Even during his term as Archbishop, there were those who saw him as a sort of country bumpkin, and explained various things that he said or did with reference to his supposed poor breeding. The majority are taught to be content with their “place.” If you’re nobility, do not aspire to become royalty. If you’re a commoner, do not aspire to become a noble. If you’re a coal miner, learn to accept the fact that you will never have a country estate. This can be a tough lesson to learn, because we are all naturally self-centered, and want to think of ourselves as exceptional, in a good way.

Jesus’ disciples say to him, “Lord, increase our faith.” It’s no surprise, then, given how we’re conditioned, that, when we think of the notion of faith, we associate it with hoping that God will choose to act in accord with our own best interests, according to our own desires—our own desires for safety, for health, for love that is returned in equal or greater measure than we give it, and for material prosperity. There’s a prayer attributed to a certain British noble and wealthy landowner of the nineteenth century that beautifully capsulizes this attitude. It goes something along the lines of, “O God, I beseech thee of thy tender mercy on behalf of the counties of Essex and Lancashire, that is may please thee to spare them excesses of wind and rain, and also on behalf of certain estates in the county of Hertfordshire, that thou mayest establish such civil tranquility as shall issue in the prosperity of the region. In all other diverse parts of the country, thou mayest exercise thy divine providence according to thy holy will.” Well, it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out where this guy owns property, does it?! Seriously, though, the problem with identifying faith with God granting our wishes—aside from the fact that it buys into the “It’s all about me” syndrome—is that, when our wishes are not granted, it becomes a crisis of faith for us. Where is God? Why has He abandoned me? Why am I being punished? What did I do to deserve this? God must not love me. God must love my adversaries more than He loves me. Where is God? After all, it’s all about me, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

This is where it becomes wonderfully good news that grace abounds and that God is an opportunist. In that place of brokenness and self-pity, God comes to us and enables us to transcend our own egos. When that happens, we see faith in a whole new light. There’s a pop song from the early seventies with the repeated refrain, “If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.” Now, that can certainly be interpreted in a rather cynical and scandalous way, which I’m sure is what the author of the lyrics intended (!), so let me see if I can redeem it with a paraphrase: If faith doesn’t make what God is doing conform to what you want, then let what you want conform to what God is doing. Faith is not about God doing what we want; faith is about wanting what God does.

We have a fascinating reading today from the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk. Habakkuk starts out by complaining about how miserable life is, and why doesn’t the Lord do something?

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you "Violence!" and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrongs and look upon trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law is slacked and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous, so justice goes forth perverted.

But God replies, in effect, “I am doing something. You just don’t see it yet.”

Look among the nations, and see; wonder and be astounded. For I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told.

And not only that, but look at the instrument God has chosen to carry out His plan:

For lo, I am rousing the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, who march through the breadth of the earth, to seize habitations not their own. Dread and terrible are they; … They all come for violence; terror of them goes before them. They gather captives like sand. At kings they scoff, and of rulers they make sport. They laugh at every fortress, for they heap up earth and take it. Then they sweep by like the wind and go on, guilty men, whose own might is their god!

In other words, these Chaldeans are really nasty guys. And God has chosen them to be the means of accomplishing what He wants to accomplish with His chosen people of Israel. So, let’s see if we have this straight. We complain to God that life is miserable, and ask Him why He isn’t doing something about it. God replies that He is doing something. And we go, “Oh, by using the neighborhood bully, the Bad Boy on the block, our worst enemy? What are we not getting here?” And the answer is, Yup. But wait, there’s more! God is not only doing something we can’t see, and using the Chaldeans to do it, but He’s going to take His own sweet time! God says to Habakkuk:

Write the vision; make it plain upon tablets, so he may run who reads it. For still the vision awaits its time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. If it seem slow, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. Behold, he whose soul is not upright in him shall fail, but the righteous shall live by his faith.

There’s that word “faith” again. Faith in a God whose love will never let us go, faith in a God who redeems even the most distorted and twisted set of circumstances for His glory and our good, faith that God can use even our worst enemies to accomplish His purposes, faith in a God to whom one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day, faith in a God whose grace is ubiquitous and permeates every situation we might find ourselves in. When we place our faith in this God and what He is doing, rather than spinning our wheels waiting for Him to do what we want, we are on the path which leads to peace, to patience, to contentment in life, and to growth in holiness. And the best part is, it’s also the road to increased faith. Amen.

C: Proper 21

2010-09-26T11:14:00.001-04:00

Luke 16:19-31

Amos 6:1-7

I Timothy 6:11-19

Ever since I was a young adult, the concept of self-esteem has been repeatedly talked about and written about by talk-show psychologists and school teachers and even preachers. A healthy sense of self-esteem, we’re told, is grounded in an innate sense of one’s own essential “okay-ness”, in spite of the mistakes, poor choices, and bad luck that are part of everyone’s past by the time we reach adulthood. But human beings do not always look for self-esteem in such a healthy way. Some of us—and I use the first-person plural very loosely here, because I’m not talking about myself!—some of us identify our sense of “okay-ness” with our appearance, a face and body combination that’s guaranteed to turn heads. Others look to their own health and fitness to define their sense of well-being. Others attach their self-image to their intellectual and educational achievements—just look at the agony high school students go through every year taking tests and writing essays in order to get into a “name-brand” college or university. And many, of course, find that their regard for themselves rises and falls with their bank balance and their net worth.

The only problem with locating our self-worth in any of these places is: What happens if we lose them? What happens when all we do to maintain our looks just can’t keep up with the effects of aging? What happens when all we’ve done to keep our bodies in shape is laid waste by the onslaught of disease? What happens when a changing world renders our education obsolete? And what happens when an economy over which we have no control wrecks all the careful plans we’d made for the accumulation and preservation of wealth? What happens when we lose it all? Where is our self-esteem then?

That’s a profoundly important question, because if we really do look for our sense of worth in such things, our attitude toward them is going to be dominated, more than anything else, by fear. Every moment of our lives is going to be ruled by the terrifying prospect of losing whatever it is—looks, money, health, intelligence, social status—whatever it is that has become the perceived source of our self-esteem.

We’re all familiar with the character Ebenezer Scrooge. The very name “Scrooge” has become a synonym for a sort of miserly nastiness that nobody finds attractive. Yet, in the story, Scrooge is not really a mean person. He’s nasty, but not mean. Once Scrooge is actually confronted with the suffering of Tiny Tim and the rest of the Cratchitts—suffering which was well within his power to alleviate—his heart is genuinely moved with compassion, and he does the right thing. The hard part was getting him to that point, getting him to the point where he could look for a moment away from himself and at everything and everyone around him. This was exceedingly difficult, because Ebenezer Scrooge was consumed with fear. He was afraid of losing his fortune, and because his self-image was tied up with his fortune, if he lost his fortune, he lost himself. Scrooge placed his trust in a false hope—the hope of being able to hang onto his fortune. When our lives are dominated by fear, we become like Scrooge. We accumulate, we horde. We become miserly, reluctant to share what we have. We need to constantly reassure ourselves of our security, so we can’t take the risk of expending any of whatever it is that is precious to us because it tells us who we are, defines our identity, our self-esteem.

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is one that most of us heard in Sunday School before we were old enough to read. “There was a rich man,” Jesus says, “who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.” Now you and I may not be very impressed by the ability to wear purple clothing, but back then purple dye was obtained only from a very rare, and therefore expensive, shellfish. So this guy was rich. He lived not only comfortably, but ostentatiously. And just outside the front gate of his home was Lazarus—homeless, unemployed, and sick. Lazarus would have been grateful to make a meal out of the table scraps, the garbage from the rich man’s home, but the implication is that he didn’t even get that. Two men, one right under the other one’s nose, but unseen. Like Scrooge, the rich man in Jesus’ parable is consumed by fear, fear of losing that to which he had attached his self-esteem. He placed his trust in a false hope—the hope of finding eternal validation from his wealth. As long as he had purple and fine linen and feasted sumptuously, he knew who he was. Without those things, he was nobody. So he clung to them, fearfully, tenaciously.

As the veteran Episcopalians among us realize, as we move into the fall, we’re entering stewardship season, that time of year when, as a parish church, we ask one another to think and pray, and then go on record, confidentially, with what we believe the Lord is calling us to give to this community in the coming calendar year. As a priest, as I confessed last week, stewardship season makes me uncomfortable. To a certain extent, my discomfort is grounded in the knowledge that the whole thing makes some of you uncomfortable. And as the pastor of this congregation, I know that a good part of the discomfort my parishioners feel about stewardship happens only because I bring it up in the first place!

But my discomfort with this time of year operates on a deeper level as well. It has nothing to do with my being a priest, and everything to do with my being a baptized Christian who is a member of this particular parish community. The same issues that I and the vestry bring up to the larger congregation, I also bring up to myself. I wrestle with my own fears and frustrations about money, my own insecurities, my own self-esteem. We’re embarking on an uncomfortable season, because it makes us own up to just where it is that we get nourishment for our self-image, just what it is that, if we lose it, robs us of our personhood.

Lazarus and the rich man both died, and, in that event, both learned that neither one controlled his own future, his own destiny. The fate of each was in the hands of God. Within the fabric and structure of the way he has created the universe, God has ordained that there are consequences, both temporal and eternal, for our actions. Both Lazarus and the rich man found this out, only in very different ways. Lazarus dies, and is carried by angels to the bosom of Abraham. For a pious Jew, this was as good as it gets. The rich man died, and found himself in rather unpleasant circumstances. Now, the point of this parable is not to supply us with details about life in the hereafter, and it’s a mistake to get distracted in that direction. Rather, this is an invitation to concentrate our attention on the fact that God is vitally interested in where it is we look for our self-esteem. He wants us to find our self-esteem in him, is his love for us.

This is not an easy move to make. We are deeply conditioned to ground ourselves, to root ourselves, elsewhere than in the love of the one who made us and redeemed us. It’s a move that we can only make with the help of God’s own grace. But if we make the move, if we find our self-esteem in him, we will find ourselves truly free, free of fear, and free of false hope. If my esteem for myself is grounded in nothing other than God’s esteem for me, rather than in my bank balance or my looks or my health or whatever, then I am truly free from fear of loss. This is the kind of freedom from fear that Jesus, by means of this parable, invites us to experience.

As I reflect on my own life, and the false hopes that have tempted me over the years—a new pair of shoes, a new friend, a new job, a new car, a new house, even a new career—I realize that none of these has brought me anything near true peace and happiness. None of these has been an appropriate source for my self-esteem. Time and again I have returned, if not to the bosom of Abraham, then to Abraham’s God. Freedom from fear and freedom from false hope allows us to take a “liberal” attitude toward the wealth that God has blessed us with, whether that wealth is an abundance of money, an abundance of time, or an abundance of knowledge and skill. And I don’t mean “liberal” in any political or religious sense, but in the sense of an open, free-flowing generosity. Such liberality enables us to let go of potential earned income in order to take the time to spend with children or grandchildren, or to help an illiterate adult learn to read, and to count doing so a joy. Such liberality allows us to let go of having an impeccably clean house or an award-winning yard in order to spend time in a small study/prayer/sharing group of other Christians, thereby building up and strengthening the body of Christ, and to count doing so a joy. Such liberality allows us to give sacrificially of our monetary wealth to the ministry of our local parish and to the mission of the church throughout the world, and to count doing so a joy. Jesus wants to be the only source of self-esteem we’ll ever need, to cast out all our fear, and replace it with joy. Amen.

C: Proper 20

2010-09-19T10:00:00.000-04:00

Luke 16:1-13

There is officially no such liturgical season, but this is “Stewardship-tide”—the time of year when most churches are ramping up the process of making financial plans for the coming calendar year, encouraging their members to make an estimate of how much they intend to give. I don’t know if this was intentional on the part of those who assembled the lectionary—the table of scripture readings for Sunday services—but, as it turns out, the readings appointed for the early Fall indeed often lend themselves to stewardship sermons. At the very least it’s convenient for the clergy, who must not only responsibly interpret the word of God from the pulpit, but also lead people in making faithful stewardship decisions. In any case, I hope not to be utterly gratuitous in what I say on the subject today, but actually make a valid connection with the gospel reading that we’ve just heard.

If there’s any accurate generalization one could make about any sermon on the subject of money, it’s that it is bound to generate anxiety. For a first-time visitor to the parish, who just happens to show up when the sermon is about money, or to a relative newcomer, the anxiety takes the form of “Uh, oh, is this one of those kinds of churches, that are always harping on money?” [So, if you’re a visitor to St Anne’s today, please don’t form your opinion too quickly! We do talk about lots of other things.]

For the average “parishioner-in-the-pew,” stewardship anxiety is served with a generous garnish of guilt: “I’m giving all I can, but they say I should give 10%, and I’m certainly not doing that! Can’t squeeze blood from a turnip, you know.”

For the Finance Committee, and for members of the Vestry, the anxiety is of a different sort: “The diocesan assessment is going up, insurance costs are skyrocketing, the staff are all going to want cost-of-living raises, at least, and we’re already using our endowment income and dipping into reserves quite a bit for operating expenses. Something’s gotta give.”

And for the clergy—well, we also have our peculiar stewardship anxieties: “Why haven’t more of ‘them’ discovered the joy of tithing, the euphoria that results from faithful stewardship? Why don’t more of ‘them’ love Jesus more, why don’t they ‘get it’ when they say ‘All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee?’”

Well…there’s a certain cleansing effect from getting our anxieties out in the open, isn’t there? Yet, more basic than the different forms our anxieties about stewardship take, are the differences in our underlying perceptions of what stewardship is.

For starters, it’s certainly difficult to escape the impression that when we talk about financial stewardship, that’s just a euphemism for keeping the institution going—raising enough money, by any legal means, to pay the essential expenses of keeping the church up and running, providing “services” to its “clients.” When you turn in a pledge card, or drop an envelope into the offering plate, you’re just doing your part to ensure that when the time comes for your spouse’s funeral or your daughter’s wedding, or your grandchild’s baptism, St Anne’s and its clergy will be here to serve you on that occasion. There are differences in philosophy within this viewpoint: Some are only interested in giving enough to support a barebones budget that tries to cut corners whenever possible; others have a more generous vision of what the parish’s mission and ministry is. Either way, however, it’s institutional maintenance that we’re talking about.

Now, I have to say, there are important elements of truth in this perception. Among other things, the church is an institution, and being an institution carries with it certain inherent costs. Roofs leak and furnaces break down and carpets need to be cleaned. And if these costs are not met, the institution of the church is compromised, which compromises other aspects of what the church is.

There is also a way of understanding stewardship that comes at it from a distinctly spiritual direction. Stewardship is, quite simply, about pleasing God. When we give to the Church, we are actually giving to God; the church is only a conduit—a conduit, in fact, approved and sanctioned by God for such giving. Our giving has the effect of sustaining the institution, but that’s not the reason we give. Still less do we have any intention of controlling the institution through our giving.

So…seeing stewardship as a matter not of institutional maintenance, but of pleasing God, is surely a step higher up the ladder of spiritual maturity. But there is yet, to borrow a phrase from St Paul, there is yet “a more excellent way.” Christian stewardship, financial stewardship in particular, is one of the tools at God’s disposal by which he fosters our growth in holiness. Stewardship is one of the means at our disposal by which we can practice living in Heaven. Heaven is our destiny, as the community of those who have been redeemed for God by the death and resurrection of Christ. But it is, for us, a foreign tongue and an alien culture. Practicing stewardship helps us learn that language and adopt that culture. In the sixteenth chapter of St Luke’s gospel, Jesus tells his followers

He who is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and he who is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful in that which is another's, who will give you that which is your own?

The invitation to stewardship is an opportunity to practice for the greater responsibilities God wants to give us in His kingdom. God gives us a little, that we may develop the skills to be entrusted with responsibility over much. God entrusts us with what is not actually ours, that we may show ourselves worthy to be entrusted with that which is, in fact, ours.

Many of us have made promises to God about what we would do if we were to win big on the lottery. I know I have! We’ve told God that, if we win the lottery, we’ll give huge amounts to the church and to all sorts of other good causes. Sometimes I wonder whether the fact that I haven’t yet won is a sign of something other than the astronomical odds against anyone doing so. God certainly knows me better than I know myself, and perhaps that’s why I haven’t won the lottery! (Of course, another reason is that I don’t actually buy tickets, but that’s another matter!) God knows that we need to master addition and subtraction before we study calculus. We have to learn to be faithful in little things—like the paycheck we get once a week or twice a month or whenever it is. Like the savings that we’ve accumulated. Like our time, our talents, and our abilities. Like our families and our job. Do we see these as “ours,” as things that we’re free to dispose of as we please? Or do we see them as “on loan” from a God who will one day demand an accounting?

By the way, do you know where the word “steward” comes from? The first syllable is from the word “sty,” as in “pig sty.” The second syllable, then, is “ward,” or “warden.” So, a steward is a “sty-warden,” a “warden of the sty”—the one entrusted with the responsibility of taking care of the pig sty and its inhabitants! Of course, the word has picked up a few more connotations over the centuries, but realizing its humble origins helps put our invitation to stewardship in a proper perspective. When the day comes for all stewards to render an accounting for all that has been entrusted to them, will you and I be found to have been honest and faithful in our stewardship? Will we be ready to live in Heaven? Will we speak the language and know the culture? That is the question of the day. Amen.

C: Proper 19

2010-09-12T09:00:00.002-04:00

Luke 15:1-10

Exodus 32:1, 7-14

I Timothy 1:12-17

As the economy has tanked over the last couple of years, a lot of good people have had to make some awfully difficult business decisions. Nothing personal, you know, but we have to lay a bunch of you off, or lay all of you off, or close the plant, or move the plant to another state or another country where the labor is cheaper. Sorry about that, but there’s nothing we can do. You understand, don’t you? It’s just a business decision.

Various versions of this story have played themselves out all over the country, especially in parts of Indiana that are very close to us here in Warsaw. Indeed, it seems that Indiana has heard more than its fair share of such news. The phrase “business decision” may or may not be invoked, but the underlying assumption is the same—the assumption that the financial best interest of a corporation—otherwise known as the bottom line—must take precedence over the welfare of employees, customers, or whomever.

Now, I realize that very often such an action truly is necessary for the survival of the company. Nonetheless, “business decision” is an interesting expression. It’s supposed to remove the moral stigma that would otherwise be attached to any action that causes large-scale economic or social or emotional dislocation. I mean, if you deliberately set out to throw someone into bankruptcy, or put unbearable stress on a marriage, or cause feelings of depression and despair—why, that’s morally inexcusable. But if it’s a “business decision”, that’s a different story. If an attempt to improve operating efficiency, or show some more black ink on the quarterly report, has the same negative effects as I’ve just mentioned, then it’s, well, a business decision.

This sort of moral irony has a pervasive influence on the way we as a society think and act. Almost on a daily basis, it influences the decisions made by legislators and government officials on the way public revenues are going to be allocated. It even influences—and I’m sure this comes as no shock to anyone—our relationships as members of Christ’s Holy Catholic Church. For several years prior to entering seminary, I was closely involved with the preparation of adults and young people for the sacraments of baptism and confirmation. We chose to follow an unusually intense and fairly long process modeled after the catechumenate of the ancient church; in fact, it was very much like Focus on Faith, which many at St Anne’s remember very fondly.
We had a team of between three and five lay catechists, and each candidate was linked with a sponsor who also attended the instruction sessions. We met as a group two hours a week for the better part of nine months. During Lent, the candidates were prayed for by name at each Sunday liturgy. Yet, the parish in which we were doing this was slightly smaller than St Anne’s, so in any given year, it was very typical for us to have only two or three candidates in the process.

On more than one occasion it was suggested to us—and on more than one occasion we on the catechetical team suspected ourselves—that this was a terribly inefficient way of meeting our objectives. To put it in business terms, it was a terribly labor intensive process, wasteful of the human resources that are so precious to any parish church, large of small. A good “business decision” would have been to find a different way of doing things.

In a somewhat obscure novel from many decades ago, called The Keys of the Kingdom, the main character is a missionary priest who spends thirty years in China proclaiming the gospel, with only one solitary convert to Christ to show as the fruit of his long labor. His superiors in the order eventually—very belatedly by their own estimation—made the obvious “business decision” and recalled Father Chisholm back to the equivalent of a desk job at the home office. He and many of his peers considered his ministry to have been an abject failure. Yet, the reader of the novel learns that Father Chisholm has always been revered by God, and in the end acquires the respect and admiration of his peers as well.

And, the parish in Oregon which sent me to seminary continues to hang in there, going on nearly thirty years now, with the inefficient and wasteful process of the catechumenate. Most of us will go along with the severe but compelling logic of the business decision only so far, when something deep in our hearts rebels with a resounding “Yes, but ...”—or even a contemptuous “So what?” Several years ago I had the moving experience of touring a state of Wisconsin facility for the severely developmentally disabled, people who are physically, mentally, and emotionally completely helpless. The ratio of care-givers to care-receivers in that place was astonishingly low. Care and concern and affection were lavished on these people. About that same time, I became familiar with the work of the now-departed Roman Catholic scholar and spiritual director Henri Nouwen, who chose to leave the prestigious academic community of Harvard University and make his home in Canada, in a community dedicated to the same sort of developmentally disabled men and women whom I met in Wisconsin. Father Nouwen died while living in that community.

From the standpoint of the most efficient use of tax dollars, the kind of care given at Central Wisconsin Center is not a sound business decision—the patients could be kept alive in a sort of warehouse fashion for less money. From the standpoint of Father Nouwen’s “career path”, his departure from Harvard was not a sound business decision, for many reasons. Yet few of us, I would imagine, are inclined to stand up and cry “foul” at either of these examples of “wastefulness”. There is an impulse in the human soul that challenges the ethical supremacy of the business decision.

How many stories have you heard about conspicuous bravery in combat by men who are motivated not by the strategic objectives of their superiors, or even by the opportunity to save their own lives or the life of a colleague, but by the irresistible desire simply to recover the body of a fallen comrade? Such risk-taking is surely not a good business decision, but neither is it one with which many of us would care to argue. There are in the human psyche certain emotional and symbolic instincts which defy the absolute sovereignty of efficiency.

I would suggest to you this morning that these instincts are telltale signs of nothing less than the image of God present in human nature. Today’s liturgy proclaims to us that God does not always, if ever, make what we would recognize as a sound business decision. In effect, the scribes and Pharisees who complained about Jesus’ consorting with tax collectors and sinners were accusing him of making a poor business decision.
One would think that, from a P.R. standpoint, it would have been in Jesus’ best interest to cultivate a relationship with the religious establishment—you know, a weekly golf date with the High Priest or an occasional round of drinks for the Sanhedrin. He certainly did not help his prestige by socializing with those who collaborated with the Roman Empire or whose occupations were less than morally circumspect. But Jesus responds to this indictment with the parable of the shepherd who abandoned 99% of his capital assets in order to recover the 1% which was lost. And he didn’t leave the 99 in the safety of a sheepfold or a bank vault, but, the text says, in the wilderness, where they would be easy pickings for a hostile takeover by wolves or ... whatever. If there was ever a bad business decision, this was it!

Yet, Jesus suggests, such is the nature of God—to be wastefully labor intensive in pursuing each individual wayward human soul—in pursuit of your wayward human soul, and mine. Indeed, the image of Jesus the good shepherd, with sheep #100 lovingly carried on his shoulders, warms our hearts and fills us with gratitude, for we are that sheep. In our Old Testament lesson from Exodus, God, as chairman of the board, announces to Moses, as chief executive officer, a business decision he had made. There would be a corporate restructuring of the nation of Israel which would involve “out-placing”—perhaps with a few well-directed thunderbolts—the “human resources” of the company. Moses couldn’t argue with the logic of the decision as it was presented on paper—or, perhaps, carved in stone. Each of the twelve divisions of the company showed a disastrous bottom line on the quarterly report. In fact, there was strong evidence of a planned employee takeover with the intention of selling out to a competitor. Yet, as much as the move made sense, Moses didn’t like it. He felt like the plan betrayed the memory of the company’s founding fathers—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God wasn’t so sure, but purely out of his regard for his CEO, he abandoned the restructuring plan and called back the thunderbolts.

And when we hear the story once again of God changing his mind and sparing the people of Israel after the intercession of Moses, even though they had lapsed into infidelity and idolatry, our hearts are warmed and filled with gratitude, for we, too, are, as the hymn says, “prone to wander”. We, too, have lapsed into infidelity and idolatry and are the beneficiaries of God’s bad business decisions—his abundant, labor-intensive, inefficient, and wasteful grace shed abroad into our hearts even at this moment by the Holy Spirit.

As St Paul reminds the young bishop Timothy, and us, in today’s epistle: “The saying is sure, and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. ... [we have] received mercy that in [us] ... Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience for an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. To the king of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever.” Amen.

Year C: Proper 18

2010-09-05T09:00:00.002-04:00

Philemon 1-21

It hardly ever happens that we get to read nearly an entire book of the bible all in one sitting. But today we do that with St Paul’s letter to Philemon; only a couple of lines at the end dealing with incidental details are omitted from the reading.

So let’s set the stage. Paul is in prison as he writes this. It’s a pretty humane imprisonment as that sort of thing goes; his friends and other visitors apparently have generous access to him, and he’s allowed to have a secretary to write down what he dictates. One of these visitors is a fellow named Onesimus, which, in Greek, means “useful”; that’s an important fact to know because Paul plays a little word game with that name at a really key point in the letter. Paul is instrumental in leading Onesimus to Christ, and becomes the young man’s mentor and spiritual father. They are very close.

But there’s a problem. Onesimus, it turns out, is a runaway slave. And, to make matters worse, the master he ran away from is also a Christian, and somebody whom Paul knows fairly well from his missionary work prior to this particular imprisonment, a guy named Philemon. One of those uncomfortable “small world” moments. Of all the people for Onesimus to hook up with, he had to choose somebody who knew his boss!

So Paul wants to fix things. But before we dig in and begin to look at his strategy, which is very impressive, we have to do just a little bit of mental housekeeping, and at least be aware of, even if we don’t set them completely aside, the prejudices and assumptions we bring to this story. One important reality we need to realize that that, while slavery is always slavery—one human being claiming to own another human being—slavery in the ancient Mediterranean world was a much, much less brutal institution than it was in the American South prior to the Civil War, which is the mental model you and I are most likely to import into the mix between Paul and Onesimus and Philemon. Still, from the standpoint of pure justice, Onesimus was within his rights to run away. No human being has the right to own another human being. This may not have been as self-evident to Philemon as it is to us, or even as it was, I would suggest, to Paul. But it’s nonetheless true. From the standpoint, like I said, of pure justice, Onesimus didn’t do anything wrong.

So why didn’t Paul just give Onesimus a high-five and shoot an email off to Philemon, “You idiot! Christians can’t own slaves! What were you thinking?” Because, not only did he not do that, but he sent Onesimus back to Philemon with only this lousy letter for protection, all at some considerable risk, one might imagine, to Onesimus. I’d like to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation! What’s going on here?

I haven’t formally studied mathematics for 42 years—and counting! But one thing I do remember from studying math is that it usually not enough just to get the right answer. You’ve got to get the right answer for the right reason. That’s why teachers make you show your work, rather than just fill in the blank with the right answer. Well, that’s kind of what’s going on between Paul and Philemon. That “right answer,” of course, is for Onesimus to be free, to no longer be a slave. The “right answer” is for Philemon to permanently set Onesimus free—to do so openly and legally, as only he was able to do. Paul wants Onesimus to enjoy freedom that is not tainted by being technically illegal and underground. He wants Onesimus to be free openly, transparently, not in the shadows. Onesimus deserved that much as a human being created in the image of God. For Philemon to liberate Onesimus was most definitely the right answer. It would satisfy the obvious demands of justice—obvious to us, at any rate, though probably not so much to Philemon and his contemporaries.

But even that is not good enough for Paul. He doesn’t simply want Onesimus to be free. He doesn’t simply want Onesimus to be legally emancipated by Philemon just because it’s the right thing to do. He wants Onesimus’ freedom to flow naturally from both Onesimus and Philemon having a mutual epiphany, a simultaneous “Aha!” moment. He wants them both to understand that the entire foundation of their relationship is no longer determined by Roman law, or by Greek social custom, but by the new identities that have been given by having both been baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul wants them to know that their union in Christ trumps and transforms all other dimensions of their relationship.

But in order to bring them both to such a realization, especially Philemon, Paul has to persuade Onesimus to once again put himself in a very vulnerable position, putting his very freedom at risk. Paul wants Onesimus to return to Philemon and say, “I’m back. What’s next?” And he wants Philemon, in turn, to not merely come to his senses about the immorality of slavery, but to see Onesimus not as a slave, or even a former slave, but as a brother in Christ. “Perhaps this is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back for ever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother.” And he wants it to be Philemon’s idea, not a matter of bowing to pressure from his old friend Paul. He says, “I preferred to do nothing without your consent in order that your goodness might not be by compulsion but of your own free will.”

Now, chattel slavery is no longer an institution of our society. So we might be tempted to admire Paul’s rhetorical skill in this letter, but then cast it aside as not really relevant. We would be wrong to do so. While we may not deal with slavery in our experience, we do deal with issues of identity. Even more than he wanted freedom for Onesimus, Paul wanted Onesimus and Philemon both to set aside entirely their slave-master relationship. More than wanting it to be over, he wanted them to see it as meaningless, moot, yesterday’s news. Our society invites us to claim our identity—in effect, to name ourselves—in a multitude of ways. Young … old … fat … sick … successful … poor … gay … straight … American … disabled … educated … wealthy … depressed … beautiful … clever … illiterate … illegal … bright … addicted … and many, many more. We are every day sucked into defining ourselves, and therefore our relationship with others, whether we’re aware of it or not, according to these labels. Paul invited Onesimus and Philemon to cast aside “master” and “slave” as categories by which they understood themselves and their relationship to one another, and to adopt instead “brother in Christ.” He invites us, through this letter, to do the same. He invites us to set all those other identities down on the ground—not necessarily as garbage, but simply as no longer necessary, no longer relevant—and keep on moving. He invites us to see our relationships with one another not as people who agree on something, or who share the same political views or the same taste in fashion or music, or whatever, but as sisters and brothers in Christ, marked as Christ’s own forever and sealed with the Holy Spirit in the waters of new birth.

Do we know who we are? Are we ready to live like we know who we are? Amen.

C: Proper 17

2010-08-29T09:00:00.047-04:00

Sometime during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, I had a career as a Boy Scout. It lasted all of about one month. The brevity of my own time in scouting, however, is no reflection of my opinion of the organization. I have particular respect for Boy Scouts who make it to the rank of Eagle. Having served on an Eagle Scout board of review, I am very impressed with the strength of the requirements, and the strength of character needed in any young man who would attempt to meet them. It’s a demanding process that many begin and few finish. It’s not easy, but it is doable. It can’t be done absent-mindedly or half-heartedly, but it can be done. The required steps are clearly laid out in the Boy Scout manual. Boys who attain the rank of Eagle Scout do so as a direct result of their own initiative and dedication.

Many times, Christians think and act as though our standing before God, the process by which we achieve a right relationship with God, is the same sort of process as that by which a boy becomes an Eagle Scout. If a person can muster enough initiative and dedication, and follow the path of moral virtue that is clearly defined in places like the Ten Commandments, then he or she can earn God’s favor, can deserve, by right, to be accepted and approved by God. The problem is, the more “successful” we become at cultivating such moral virtues, at deserving such favor and approval, the more prideful we become. After all, look how much we’ve sacrificed and how much we’ve accomplished, to have reached such a point. And the more prideful we become, by definition, the more we are alienated from God. It’s an ironically treacherous cycle that feeds on itself and grows until it catches us in its trap. The more we “improve”, the more we appear to deserve God’s approval, and the less we think we need it! Here we are—just and charitable and prudent and wise, all as a result of our initiative and dedication. So who needs God now? What started out as growth toward God ends up in separation from God. We become like many religious people in Jesus’ time who were punctilious about observing every last detail of the law in an excruciatingly correct manner. Time and again he warns them of the danger of pride and arrogance and that their very ability to keep the law is itself a gift from God.

Perhaps Jesus was familiar with the story of a certain Rabbi Simeon, who had lived about a hundred years earlier. Rabbi Simeon was invited to a royal dinner party, and took the liberty of seating himself directly between the king and the queen, remarking that someone who had cultivated wisdom as much as he had deserved nothing less than to be seated among royalty! Wisdom may have been among Rabbi Simeon’s virtues, but humility was apparently not.

This may even be the background for the advice Jesus gives to his own disciples when they were invited to a dinner party given by a local dignitary. When you enter the dining room, take the least desirable position. Perhaps the host will then invite you to come at sit at the head table. But if you seat yourself at the head table, you run the risk of being embarrassed when you’re asked to make way for someone the host would rather have there. Now this advice that Jesus gives is neither particularly original—very similar versions are found in other literature of the time—nor is it particularly profound—its merit is rather obvious. But generation upon generation of men and women have found it extremely difficult to put into practice!

Humility does not come naturally or easily to most of us. It’s a virtue that is scorned by our peers as often as it is admired. We Americas in particular, with our heritage of self-reliant frontier individualism, are apt to get a lump in our throat when we hear Frank Sinatra sing I Did It My Way. This is the opposite of humility: arrogant pride, the rebellious assertion of one’s independence from God. Such pride is the root, the wellspring, of all other sin, because it cuts us off from God. Real virtue, however, is grounded not in pride, but in humility, the kind of humility that is the only possible result of walking closely with God.

If you drive by just about any school playground in America on a Saturday afternoon when the weather is mild, there’s a good chance that you’ll find young people there playing basketball. And at each of these informal games, there will be one or two players who stand out among their peers for their ability, who set the standard of play to which everyone else aspires. But if LeBron James and Kobe Bryant were to show up and offer to go two-on-two against whoever the local hotdog basketball players in that place are, what do you think is going to happen? In the presence of real basketball ability, any local schoolyard hotdog is going to be humbled.

Your Rector takes a certain amount of satisfaction in his accomplishments as a cook. I’ve dabbled with Chinese food for 25 years, and picked up some Louisiana cuisine about 20 years ago when we lived there. More recently I’ve been trying to learn Mexican cooking, and even venture a bit into barbecue. But if, say, Emeril Lagasse or Bobby Flay were to step out of the television set into my kitchen, I assure I would not be talking about my cooking ability. I would be humbled. In fact, the hotdog basketball player, and the amateur chef would all be the first to acknowledge their own insignificance in the presence of authentic excellence and greatness. They would attempt to focus attention away from themselves and onto the source of such greatness.

I would like to think that, having had chef Paul Prudhomme in my kitchen, I would want to have him back again and again, just to delight in the beauty of what he does with food. Having once witnessed and experienced cooking excellence, I would want to participate in it again and again. And while my attention is focused on the master chef, not thinking of myself at all, I would probably, in the process, become a pretty terrific cook!

When we walk closely with God we experience such authentic holiness that we can see clearly that we have none of our own. We’re humbled to the point where we can see how un-humble we are, how inadequate our humility is. But humility is a virtue that we can’t aim for directly. In fact, a humble person is never aware of his or her own humility, because to be aware of it is to lose it. Humility is the habit of looking to God alone as the source of our self-esteem.

So growth in humility cannot occur if we focus on growth in humility. We cannot aim for it and work toward it the way a Boy Scout aims at the rank of Eagle. Growth in humility is a side-effect, an indirect result, of our walking closely with God, of making him our focus, our delight, and our joy. If I want to become a good cook, my chances are much improved if I hang around a good cook, and simply take delight in that person’s mastery of the art. If I want to become humble, my chances are much improved if I stop thinking about becoming humble, and concentrate instead on enjoying and adoring and serving Christ, the model of humility. This is the way we derive our self-esteem from God, by hanging around him, in prayer, in the sacraments, and in the communal life of the church.
When a soldier displays heroism on the battlefield, the only thing going through his mind is the task at hand: accomplishing the military objective, and saving the lives of his comrades. The one thing he is not thinking about is receiving a medal for his valor.

If we follow this path of humility, if we reach the point where taking the least honorable seat at the dinner party becomes second nature to us, then we will eventually, in the ironic economy of the kingdom of God, be granted that which our arrogant pride would have sought but not found. We will be granted the respect and admiration of our peers. We will hear the voice of the host of the banquet saying to us, “Friend, come up higher.” And in the act of walking to the head table to accept the honor, we will, once again, be humbled. Amen.

St Mary the Virgin (8/15/10)

2010-08-15T09:01:00.002-04:00

Since the feast falls on a Sunday this year, we chose to avail ourselves of the Prayer Book rubrics that allow use of its collect and readings, without technically supplanting the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost. The principal liturgy was observed according to the customary of this parish for major feasts.

When the Virgin Mary made a journey to visit her cousin Elizabeth while both women were pregnant—Elizabeth with John the Baptist, and Mary, of course, with Our Lord—Mary is reported by St Luke’s gospel as having broken out into an extended canticle of praise, during which she exclaims, “All generations will call me blessed.”