B: Proper 9

Mark 6:1-6

As most of you know, it’s possible to have almost any manner of conversation with the person who cuts your hair. Some years ago, I had a barber who revealed, as he was snipping away at my locks, that he had, just a couple of weeks earlier, fallen asleep at the wheel while driving 75 miles per hour, and driven his car off the road. The car was totalled, he said, but neither he nor his wife nor either of his two children suffered as much as even a scratch. He attributed his good fortune to someone watching over him, “the man upstairs”, as he expressed it. (Why is it that people are so often afraid to just say “God”?) It was a dramatic and extraordinary escape from a brush with death, and it was easy for him to recognize and name, even if by euphemism, the hand of God in that moment of his life.

But I wonder—I don’t know, but I wonder—whether he would be equally ready to recognize God’s presence in, say, the voice of one of his children, or in the task of sweeping up hair from the floor around his work station, or in the long wait at a red light—in other words, in the ordinary routine of his daily life.

But, then again, I also wonder the same things about myself. We all, it seems, have a tendency to perceive that unless an experience is dramatic and extraordinary, it must not have anything to do with God. Old movies have reinforced this notion, with shafts of light appearing suddenly through the clouds and choirs of angelic voices singing in the background whenever the director wants to invoke the divine presence into the story. God is present only in the miraculous, and the ordinary is simply--well--just that: ordinary.

This was certainly the attitude of the residents of Jesus’ home town, Nazareth. He came back to town after having made something of a name for himself elsewhere. He had cast out demons and healed the sick and demonstrated his power over even the forces of nature. He even had a small band of followers as evidence that others really did take him seriously, followers who had heard him speak with the kind of authority that was the unmistakable mark of God’s presence. But to the Nazarenes, he was just Jesus from down the street, the carpenter who until recently had supported himself by making ploughs and yokes. What’s all this talk about him being the messiah, the savior of Israel? Why, we watched him grow up! His mother lives over on the next block, and he’s got relatives all over this town. We don’t understand why those out-of-towners are so impressed with him. He’s just an ordinary guy!

Now, it’s easy for us to read this story and feel smug and condescending toward those poor stubborn Nazarenes. Hindsight is always 20/20. But I suspect that many of us would have reacted in precisely the same way they did. A God who is present to us in the ordinary time and space of our lives is as threatening to us as Jesus the carpenter being the messiah was for the Nazarenes in Mark’s gospel. We all want God to be there—very few people, I believe, are actually attracted by atheism. We all want someone who will let us fall asleep at the wheel and walk away without a scratch. But we don’t want that God to be with us, to show himself to us, to speak to us, through the ordinary things and events of our lives. If God is with us in the ordinary, then, well, God is with us—all the time!

A sobering spiritual exercise is to climb into your bed at night, and before you drift off to sleep, review all the events of your day and then imagine Jesus by your side, hearing everything you say and watching everything you do. There is, to be sure, a large measure of comfort in that thought, but there’s also a large measure of shame. Most of us say we want an intimate relationship with God, but we want to be choosy about when and how that intimacy is expressed. If God is as close to us as the grass under our feet and the raindrops falling on our head, then we cannot escape his claim on the entirety of our lives, his gentle but persistent call to follow Jesus, to leave all else behind and follow him. And we’re afraid of what that might mean. We’re afraid of whatever it is that such a God—a God who is as close and familiar as the ordinary stuff of life—might ask us to be or do.

And so we put our spiritual blinders on. We choose not to see God who is right here with us, too close and familiar to be taken seriously. We even blind ourselves to the God who is present with us here in this beautiful place, at this time, as we do what we’re doing this morning. For most of us, the liturgy is so familiar, so routine, that we have a difficult time believing that God could actually speak to us in it or through it, just as those first century townspeople in Nazareth couldn’t believe that God could actually speak to them through someone as familiar and ordinary as Jesus. They wanted a messiah who would be larger than life, riding on a stallion and driving the Roman legions from the land of Israel. We want a God who will protect us from traffic accidents and violent crime and cancer, or whatever it is that we feel the need to be delivered from.Both we and the Nazarenes of old run the same terrible risk. In our stubborn refusal to accept God on his own terms, we run the risk of rejecting God altogether. And if we lose God, we lose ourselves.

What we need, my friends, is to listen less to the God of Hollywood, with his thunderbolts, angelic messengers, and heavenly choirs, and listen more to the scriptures and to the tradition of Christian teaching. The truth is that not only does God reveal himself in the familiar and the ordinary, but that is his preferred method! What is more routine and familiar than a human being, born of a woman, starting out as a child and growing to adulthood? Yet, that is precisely the form God chose to disclose himself fully and definitively to the human race. What could be more ordinary than a family, a community of people bound together by ties of common blood, common ancestry, shared heritage?

Yet, the family is one of the primary biblical images for the Church, those who have been adopted by God, made fellow-heirs of God with Christ. What could be more common and routine than taking a bath or eating and drinking? Yet, these are the means by which God unites us with himself and nourishes us with his own life, in the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist.

God has deemed it fitting and proper that the normal channel of his operation in our lives is the very structure of our lives. Our habits and preferences—the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the route we take to work or school, the music we hear, the books we read, the movies we enjoy—the very patterns of our coming and going, our working and playing—become the means by which God speaks to us.

This truth, of course, is applicable to all Christians—indeed to anyone who would seek and find God—but it is a particularly integral part of our own Anglican spiritual tradition. John Keble, the priest and poet of the last century, spoke of seeing God in the “trivial round, the common task.” This applies, of course, to the ordinary and familiar religious observances that we engage in as well, like the Sunday Eucharist. Let’s face it, nothing that you do fifty or sixty times a year can be an extraordinary, awe-inspiring, spine-tingling spiritual experience every time. It sometimes is, but that’s just gravy, a bonus. And on top of that, many of you, I’m sure, are faithful in your daily prayers, whether that takes the form of the Daily Office or something more uniquely personal. I’m sure that get’s pretty repetitive and boring as well. I know it does for me.

Is God present and working in the midst of all this religious ordinariness? You bet he is!—just as surely—no, more surely—than he was with my sleeping barber as he drove off the road. So I, for one—and I hope you will join me—intend to continue with my routine and ordinary religious practices, even when they’re dry and boring. And I’m also going to make an extra effort to keep my eyes wide open in the other ordinary aspects of my life, for there is where the God who made me and loves me and wants to make me like himself will show himself to me. There is where I will hear his voice calling me and inviting me to follow him. There is where I will find the only truly lasting peace and fulfillment.

Have a ordinary day!

Amen.

B: Proper 8

Mark 5:22-24, 35b-43

Many of us like to think of ourselves as independent and self-reliant, but in the complex economy of the industrialized world, we’re fooling ourselves if we think so. Every day, we trust ourselves to professionals to do things for us that, in simpler times, people may have done for themselves—barbers and bankers, mechanics and manicurists, physicians and farmers, attorneys and architects, gardeners and garbage collectors. We depend on them, we trust them to come through for us, to perform the service that they’re supposed to perform.

Sometimes relatively little is at stake—a bad haircut can eventually be fixed, because . . . hair grows. At other times, a great deal is at stake—I read some time ago about a kidney transplant patient who was all prepped and on the operating table, but when the surgical team opened the container that was supposed to have the donated kidney in it, there was a heart there instead! The man subsequently died waiting for a kidney. The professionals to whom he had entrusted himself manifestly did not “come through” for him.

Jairus was a synagogue official in one of the Galilean towns Jesus was ministering in. His young daughter, as St Mark’s gospel tells us the story, was gravely ill and at the point of death. Jesus had a reputation for healing the sick, so Jairus, as we might expect, made a beeline for Jesus. He didn’t seem to worry about what others might think about someone with his standing in the community requesting help from someone with such a sketchy reputation as Jesus. His only concern was that his daughter be healed. He had left his daughter’s bedside to seek Jesus out and entrust her fate to him. His only anxiety ...was whether Jesus would “come through” for him.

In his anxiety as he approaches Jesus, Jairus is a pretty good spokesman for each one of us. We all walked into this church today carrying a load of anxieties that we want to entrust to Jesus. We may lack the courage to do so completely, but we want to have the faith to turn everything over to him. And, along with Jairus, we want to know, Will he come through? Will he grant our request? Will he supply our need? We have faith, but at the same time, we want to hedge our bets. Something tells us we should not put quite all our eggs in the “Jesus basket” because, What if he does NOT come through? What if he’s not everything he’s cracked up to be? What if we picked the wrong horse?

People who invest in speculative markets often protect themselves by purchasing option contracts in the opposite direction of their principal investment. I might have excellent reason to believe—to have faith!—that the market price of Indiana corn in September will be much higher than it is today, so I might place an order for a ton of corn to be delivered in September, but at today’s low price, and in the expectation of selling it for a profit three months from now. At the same time, I might also spend a small amount on an option contract to sell a ton of corn in September at today’s price, so that if I turn out to be wrong about the corn market, I can minimize my losses.

We do the same thing with God. We have genuine faith, but it’s not complete faith. We hedge our bets. What if we’re wrong? So we reserve an option. We hold back a piece of ourselves—a corner of the heart, a section of the will, a territory within the mind. You know . . . just in case.

When the messengers from Jairus’s home come to tell him that he may as well not trouble Jesus any more, because the little girl has died, Jesus’ response is to ignore them. He simply tells Jairus, “Do not fear, only believe.” Do not fear, only believe. Jesus discerns that Jairus may have hedged his bet, and is now on the verge of exercising his option, of bailing out on Jesus and cutting his losses by entering into the grieving process for his daughter who has now been declared dead. Will he retreat to that corner of his heart which he had reserved for himself— “No Jesus allowed”? So Jesus tells him, “Don’t be afraid, just have faith.” “Have faith” may be a preferable translation to “believe,” because the issue is not whether Jairus had intellectual confidence in Jesus’s ability to heal his daughter; Jesus’s ability to heal had been pretty well established. His healings were both very public and very numerous. No, the issue was not Jairus’s confidence in Jesus’sability, but Jairus’s confidence in Jesus.

And the issue is quite the same for us. Inadequate faith is much less a matter of the mind and much more a matter of the heart and will. We can be quite certain in our minds that Jesus is the Son of God, but if we do not demonstrate that conviction by yielding him the loyalty of our hearts and the obedience of our wills, if we hold ourselves back from total commitment to him, if we hedge our bets by buying options from other “gods,” then we cannot be said to have any meaningful belief, we cannot be said to have faith. Our relationship with God then becomes one-dimensional. We are forever making requests of God, always asking for something. Our prayer is constant petition, with occasional intercession, but precious little praise, adoration, confession, oblation, or thanksgiving. God, as far as we are concerned, is squeezed into the mold of service provider, one more “professional” on whom we must rely to do for us what we lack the time or know-how to do for ourselves. Our relationship with God is defined primarily by fear, suspicion, and anxiety, rather than faith and trust.

If the management of a company says they trust and respect their employees, but then enforce strict policies of punching time clocks and turning in detailed receipts for expenses and requiring notes from the doctor in order to justify sick time, their actions speak louder than their words. It is a relationship based on fear, not on faith. Jesus challenges Jairus to walk on higher ground. “Don’t be afraid, only have faith.” Do not merely believe that I can heal your daughter, believe in me. Some work environments are indeed not based on fear, but on faith. Loyalty and honesty are expected and assumed. Innovation and creativity are encouraged. Everyone’s input is valued. This is an environment of trust which is similar in character to the relationship God wants us to have with Him—a relationship defined not by fear but by faith. Faith in Christ means giving ourselves fully to him in heart, mind, and will; not holding anything back, not restricting him from any corner of our lives, hedging no bets, buying no options.

When people learn to descend from a cliff down the vertical face of a mountain by a process known a rapelling, the most challenging part of that process is learning to do something totally counter-intuitive, and that is to hold on to the rope, plant your feet, and lean back into the abyss, away from the solid and comforting nearness of the rock. It feels like the utterly wrong thing to do, but it is in fact the only right thing to do if you want to get down safely off the mountain. When we can exercise that sort of unreserved trust in God, even when it is counterintuitive, when Jesus’s challenge to Jairus becomes his challenge to us, and our relationship with God is defined not by fear but by faith, then we can rest in the confidence that God’s love is larger than anything that might “happen” to us.

Jairus’s daughter, as we know from reading on in Mark’s account, was restored to life and health by Jesus’s touch and words. During his earthly ministry, Jesus healed a great many people that way. And in every age of the church since then, Jesus has continued to heal miraculously in response to the prayers of his people. Not every request for healing is granted, and this side of eternity, we will never know the ins and outs of this mystery, but God does heal. Yet, even if Jairus’s daughter had not been raised back to life, it would not therefore be a sign that God loved her or Jairus any less.

When faith replaces fear, the details matter less, because God’s love completely overshadows them. Sometimes God loves us out of trouble and adversity; sometimes He loves us in them and through them. As St Paul tells us in his epistle to the Romans, words which are echoed in the burial liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, “None of us has life in himself, and none becomes his own master when he dies. For if we live, we are alive in the Lord, and if we die, we die in the Lord. So then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s possession.” This is the basis for a life of faith, a life free of fear, a life of complete self-offering to a God who already offers Himself completely for us. Amen.

B: Proper 6

There’s a movie that was hugely popular about 25 years ago called Chariots of Fire. Some of you, know doubt, remember it. For me, the most memorable part of the movie was the opening scene, which took place at the funeral of the main character (the rest of the film was then, of course, a flashback). And what I remember most vividly about that scene was a particularly stirring hymn that they sang at the funeral, a hymn that, in its day, was known by just about every Englishman, and it’s from this hymn that the title line of the movie comes from—“bring me my … chariot of fire.” It is a setting of a short poem by William Blake, which you may be familiar with, and which I will shortly read to you.

But first, two bits of information: the poem was written during the Industrial Revolution in England, so the expression “dark satanic mills” refers to the factories which employed thousands of workers in sweaty and back-breaking labor. And, it is based on the legend—interesting but not really based on anything resembling historical fact—that the young man Jesus, before he began his public ministry, travelled to England with his uncle, who was involved in the tin trade. So, with those two observations in mind, here is Jerusalem, by William Blake:

And did those feet in ancient times Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy lamb of God In England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the countenance divine Shine forth upon those clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here among those dark satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold, Bring me my arrows of desire. Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold, Bring me my chariot of fire. I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land.

“Till we have built Jerusalem...” Jerusalem, of course, is a sort of biblical code word for the perfect society, the kingdom of God come in all its fullness, where the lion lies down with the lamb and children play with snakes and nobody goes hungry or poorly housed or is treated unjustly or has any reason to weep. William Blake looked at the “dark satanic mills” and vowed to labor without ceasing until “Jerusalem”—the perfect society of his dreams—was built in his country.

We all have a “Jerusalem” that we would like to build. We all have some area of intense discomfort with things as they are, and are anxious to make the transition to things as they will be. We are all aware that the kingdom of God is here, but not yet completely here, and poems like Jerusalem make us want to join the struggle, and storm the gates of hell like the soldiers who invaded the beaches of Normandy on D-day.

The “Jerusalem” that we would like to build may be, as it was for Blake, one of social justice, changing the structures and fabric of our society to reflect God’s justice and compassion and love. The “Jerusalem” we would like to build may be one of restoring morality and virtue and moral fiber to our nation and our community, of strengthening families and developing character. Or, we may have a burning concern to build up the church, perhaps even a particular parish—perhaps even St Anne’s! I will admit that building St Anne’s has been the “Jerusalem” of my life for the past two years. Or, the Jerusalem that we seek to build may be entirely interior: a quest for knowledge, or skill, or spiritual growth. Indeed, when we pray “thy kingdom come”, the vision of the kingdom that each of us brings to that prayer varies greatly from person to person.

What these different visions have in common however, is the notion that we are key players in bringing the dream to reality, that God is depending on us to “make it happen”, and that the only reason mankind has not yet achieved the ideal society is that we haven’t yet all gotten together and coordinated our efforts and work hard enough. It seems like plain common sense. When president Kennedy, in his inaugural address in 1961, said that “God's work must truly be our own”, who would have been inclined to question him? Of course God’s work must be our work, and where can we sign up? The same thing goes for the expression, “God helps those who help themselves.” After all, it's even in the Bible, isn't it?

Or is it?

Actually, “God helps those who help themselves” may at times be a useful piece of advice, but it is nowhere to be found in Holy Scripture! And the idea that God’s work must truly be our own may find some support in the Bible, but not in the way President Kennedy was thinking. Through the parables of Jesus recorded for us today in Mark's gospel, God gives us a reality check. He lets us in on an important bit of information about his kingdom and when and how it will come into its fullness. A farmer goes out and plants his crops—preparing the ground, sowing the seed, giving it a little water.

Then he goes home and takes a nap! And it's not a fretful, anxiety-ridden sleep. He sleeps like a newborn baby. And he rises, and goes back to sleep, and rises, and goes back to sleep, and before he knows it, the seeds have sprouted, and grown, and the next thing the farmer does is harvest the crop. What he had thrown into the ground as dry, lifeless seeds has now become a lush, mature, edible, marketable crop. The farmer prepared, and the farmer planted, and the farmer tended, and the farmer harvested, but as to what took place in between those activities, and how it was accomplished and when it was accomplished, the farmer is completely in the dark. He does not make the crops grow.

And you and I do not make "Jerusalem" happen. God wants us to be available for him to work through us, but he does not depend on us. There is absolutely nothing we can do to either advance or hinder the progress of the kingdom of God. God is in charge of seeing that his kingdom comes, that “Jerusalem” happens. I admire William Blake's spirit and courage, and the music to which his poem has been set is uplifting and thrilling, and I love hearing it sung! But William Blake went to his grave without ever having built “Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land.” And you and I will go to our graves without ever having built “Jerusalem”, whether “Jerusalem” is a vision for peace and social justice, public and personal righteousness, church growth and evangelism, or personal spiritual development.

Some of us have the privilege of laying the foundation of some corner of God's kingdom, and some of us pound a few nails here or install some plumbing there, and other of us at times have the honor of opening the doors, but we are not the builders. God is the builder. The city gets built his way and in his time, and, although we all have jobs to do, the project belongs to God, and there's really nothing any one of us can do to either slow down the work or speed it up.

To the extent that we take responsibility for God’s work, we find ourselves engaged in maneuvering and manipulating, fretting and worrying. To the extent that we leave the building of God’s kingdom to God, and stick to our job of announcing it and living it and taking care of those relatively small tasks that are assigned to us, we exercise the eyes of faith that see the crop already in the seed, the fulfillment already in the promise. If we try to build Jerusalem, we find ourselves wrapped up in legalities and technicalities, and a bunch of anxiety. If we remember that that Jerusalem is the city of God, we give ourselves over to waiting and watching that will enable us to see it over the horizon and proclaim the good news with boldness. As long as we cling to the burden of making God’s kingdom happen, we are subject to doubt and anxiety. When we yield that burden back to God, we open ourselves to confidence and hope.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven.” Amen.

Pentecost

This is the Day of Pentecost. I’ll refer you to the Liturgical Notes in the service booklet for all the technical details, but simply reiterate here that it is one of the “Big Seven” in our liturgical calendar—those special occasions that are styled “Principal Feasts.” But even within that elite group of seven, there is a sort of unofficial hierarchy, in which Pentecost would occupy the top tier, along with Christmas and Easter. Historically, in the Church of England, you were considered in good standing if you received Holy Communion on at least those three occasions. But we have to admit, in terms of popular imagination, Pentecost is a shrinking violet in comparison with Christmas and Easter. It has nowhere near the emotional appeal, nowhere near the sentimental associations that those holidays have. Nobody tells stories about their memories of family gatherings on Pentecost. It’s not a time for exchanging gifts, I’d bet most of us here would be hard pressed to name our favorite Pentecost hymn, and, this year so far, I have yet to receive even one Pentecost card!

No doubt, the main reason why Pentecost, as a feast day, has failed to occupy a very large place in our hearts is that the Holy Spirit, the One whom Pentecost celebrates, is one of the least understood aspects of our Christian belief system. Yahweh, the Lord, the God of the Old Testament, is at least somebody we’re familiar with. He’s a “character,” with a lot of outrageously memorable words and deeds to His credit. And in the New Testament, Jesus, of course, is human, so we can identify with him. He eats and sleeps and walks and talks just like we do. But the Holy Spirit is slippery, difficult to pin down. The Spirit therefore remains, for many, an abstraction, a concept . . . unless, that is, you are one of those who believe they have experienced the Holy Spirit in a dramatic and personal way.

Most of the time, such a powerful experience of the Holy Spirit comes by means of witnessing a healing miracle, or, better yet, being the subject of a healing miracle. When broken bones and damaged spinal cords heal in ways they’re not supposed to, when cancer cells voluntarily disappear, when nearsightedness corrects itself to 20/20 overnight, it’s suddenly a lot easier to talk about the Holy Spirit.

Or, much of the time, when someone testifies to a close encounter with the Holy Spirit, it is after receiving the gift of tongues—the ability to pray aloud in speech patterns that one has not learned and does not recognize, but which flood the soul with warmth and a conviction that one is in the very presence of God.

People who have had these sorts of experience sometimes—and I do stress sometimes, because it isn’t always the case—such people sometimes “major” in the Holy Spirit at the expense of a fully balanced Christian walk. Just as it is a mistake to overlook the Holy Spirit, it is equally wrong to dwell on the Holy Spirit, to the exclusion of the Father and the Son—or, for that matter, the church, the sacraments, the scriptures, or a disciplined life of prayer. But the more dangerous temptation that beckons those who have experienced the Holy Spirit in a powerful way is to become smug and superior, to scorn, belittle, intimidate, and become generally obnoxious toward those Christians who have not had such an experience. This can be as overt as a finger-pointing lecture, or as subtle as a condescending smile. Either way, the implication is that Christians who have not had some obvious powerful experience of the Holy Spirit are somehow inferior, second-class, or maybe not even authentically Christian.

So let’s get back to basics, and see if we can’t begin, at least, to clear up a misunderstanding or two. We are going to do some baptizing today. The discipline of our church recommends that baptisms be reserved for five specific occasions throughout the year, and the Day of Pentecost is one of those occasions. After we take these three young people into the water— “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” —we will anoint them with oil and sign them with the cross and say to them, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.” Then we will say a prayer over all of them together, and in this prayer we will thank God our Father
that He has bestowed on these newly-minted Christians the forgiveness of sins and the life of Christ’s resurrection by means of “water and the Holy Spirit.” We will then go on to ask God to “sustain them in [His] Holy Spirit.”

If we indeed believe as we pray, what this means is that these young people are about to be given the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of the Living God, who has already been working on their hearts in preparation for this day, will take up full-time permanent residence, and become a personal resource more valuable than any mentor or teacher they will ever have. But what’s even more remarkable is that, along with this gift of the Holy Spirit, they will also receive, through the sacrament of baptism, gifts from the Holy Spirit.

Some of these gifts may include items from the various list of spiritual gifts that were find enumerated in various passages of scripture. At the time of baptism, we don’t know who’s going to be getting what gifts. Nor are these exhaustive lists—the Holy Spirit is an abundant giver.

Moreover, the Holy Spirit is not for an elite minority within the church who have had some kind of dramatic experience. The Holy Spirit is for the whole church, and for all her members. If you are baptized, you have received the gift of the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t matter whether you feel it or not, you have it! The Holy Spirit dwells within your soul, ready to fill you with the life of God, ready to unleash His power within you as soon as you give the green light. Indeed, St Paul, when he writes to the Corinthians, says, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit...”. However, he doesn’t stop there. He qualifies his statement. The gift of the Holy Spirit is universal to all Christians, but there are strings attached. Along with this essential birthright comes an equally essential responsibility. “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” The gift of the Holy Spirit, and the gifts we receive from the Holy Spirit, are not personal playthings. They are to be employed to the glory of God and the building up of His church.

In the book of Acts we read of a fellow named Simon Magus. He was impressed with the power of the Holy Spirit, particularly as it operated in the gift of healing in the ministry of St Peter and other early apostles. Simon was a man of some means, and he offered Peter cold hard cash in exchange for the spiritual gift of healing. As we might say today, he was “clueless.” The Holy Spirit is not for sale to the highest bidder. No gift from the Holy Spirit is for our own selfish use. Rather, they are all for the building up of the whole people of God, for the strengthening of the church in her mission and ministry.

Now, it must not be left unsaid, many gifts of the Spirit are woefully and tragically underutilized. If all Christians became aware of their gifts and began to exercise those gifts in a faithful manner, the impact on the church—and the church’s impact on the world—could scarcely be imagined. The situation as it actually exists in many Christian communities can be likened to that of a professional soccer match in South America, where 60,000 fans desperately in need of exercise are watching 22 athletes desperately in need of a rest! So as we baptize these young people, let our prayer be that they develop an early awareness of the gifts they receive in this sacrament, and that one of those gifts be faith sufficient to exercise the others.

The Holy Spirit is the birthright of all Christians; it is not just for a few, but for all. And exercising the gifts of the Holy Spirit is the responsibility of all Christians; again, not just the few, but all. Come, Holy Spirit, come. Fill the hearts of your faithful people and kindle in us the fire of your love. Alleluia and Amen.

B: Easter VI (2009)

John 15:9-17

As many of you know, I began my ordained ministry some twenty years ago as a chaplain and religion instructor at a parochial day school.  The curriculum that I used to teach the first through fourth graders included a unit on what are known—although I didn’t use this term with them—as the “three cardinal virtues”, referring, of course, to faith, hope, and love.  We had done very well with faith and hope, and so it was finally time to talk about love.  So I asked them, “What would you say love is—what would be a good definition for love.”  I received quite a variety of answers to this question, but the consistent thread that ran through every class was something like this: “Love is when you like someone a whole lot.”  In other words, to put it in more grownup language, love is a particularly intense feeling of affection. As long as the feeling lasts, love endures. When the feeling dies, love vanishes. 

Our Lord says, unmistakably, “Love one another.” I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of intimidated by this command. I don’t always feel very loving. I don’t always feel an intense affection for everyone I meet, even my brothers and sisters in Christ. As long as we understand love to be a feeling, we are only going to end up frustrated, angry, and guilty. Some psychologists, you know, tell us that the average person is emotionally capable of keeping track of only about a hundred relationships. That may seem like a large number, but when you stop to add up family members—aunts, uncles, cousins, what not—and then add neighbors, co-workers, and friends, you can reach a hundred very quickly. Heck, I have 166 “friends” just on Facebook, and that’s without really trying!

So you can see the bind that we’re in. Christians are exhorted to love each other. St Anne’s parish alone—which, we have to admit, does not include all the Christians in Warsaw—has something in the neighborhood of 250 active members. None of us, though, is capable of feeling intense affection for this many people in addition to all the others in our lives, so it’s humanly impossible to keep the command to love one another.  Nothing is more damaging to one’s self-esteem than to be constitutionally incapable of carrying out a clear divine command. 

So . . . perhaps my students at St Luke’s school were wrong.  Perhaps love is something other than “liking someone a whole lot.”  Perhaps the sort of Christian love that we are called to is something more akin to what we tend to call “giving to charity.”  If this is love, then we certainly have ample opportunity to express it.  Every day we’re flooded with charitable appeals, from the United Thank Offering box sitting on the kitchen counter to Episcopal Relief & Development, to the United Way, and hundreds of thousands of other worthy causes. 

Yet, love-as-charitable giving dooms us to frustration just as surely as does love-as-affection. The world is always and ever-increasingly needy.  The demand for “charity” is a bottomless pit. The earthquakes, the wars, the floods, the droughts, the famines—all create an endless cycle of need that we simply cannot keep up with.  If we cannot satisfy the commandment to love one another until we have satisfied these needs, then we are hopelessly guilty, hopelessly incapable of    meeting such a requirement. 

Indeed, what failures we are! We are not able to love one another as God commands us to. We can’t feel intensely affectionate toward more than a hundred people, and we can’t give enough to charity to take care of all the victims of this world. God must not like us very much. 

Well  . . .  if loving is just a more intense version of liking, then it must logically follow that God doesn’t love us either!  Now we’re really in a conflict, because the scriptures assure us time and time again that God does love us, completely and irrevocably.  I hope God also likes us—although I suspect that there are times, at least, that he doesn’t.  But that’s beside the point, because his love for us is declared and demonstrated in the strongest possible terms. The measure of God’s love is declared and demonstrated in the act of the son of God’s laying down his life for us, for his friends, for those whom he loves.  “No one has greater love than this,” says Jesus in the fifteenth chapter of St John’s gospel, “than to lay down one’s life for those one loves.”  And in the same breath, Jesus says, “This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you.” 

As I have loved you. 

How has Jesus loved us? As we saw two weeks ago, by laying down his life.  How, then, are we to love one another?  The same way: by laying down our lives. Christian love is not essentially about feeling, and it is not about giving to charity. Christian love is essentially about sacrifice, about laying down one’s life. In this time, and in this place, of course, it is extremely unlikely that any of us will be asked to spill our own blood for the sake of Christian love. But there are countless other opportunities for us to lay down our lives in ways that fall short of physical death. We lay down our lives when we yield a place of honor to someone who may be less deserving of it than we are. We lay down our lives when we perform a service but give up being recognized for what we’ve done.  We lay down our lives when we make an anonymous gift—and, I might add, we lay down our lives when we consent to graciously receive thanks and recognition for a gift or service when we really would rather remain anonymous. We lay down our lives when we devote time or attention or just a listening ear to someone who may not even be all that needy, but nevertheless asks this of us. We lay down our lives whenever we are generously willing to give the benefit of the doubt when it comes to assigning blame or responsibility.  We lay down our lives when we give up our right to be right, when we give up what is justly due us. We lay down our lives when we refuse to participate in petty quarrels and “turf” battles, especially within the church community. We lay down our lives when we give up the sublime and sweet pleasure of not being on speaking terms with, or feeling superior to, another member of the body of Christ. 

We have the opportunity to lay down our lives, to love one another as Christ loved us, every hour of every day.  When we realize and claim God’s love for us, manifested in Christ laying down his life, we are empowered to lay down our lives and let the love of Christ flow freely through us. This habitual laying down of our lives in love, every day, day after day, eventually benefits us, as well as those who are the objects of our love.  It allows us to identify with Christ in his death, which is at the heart of the process of the salvation of our souls. It allows us to experience that peace which passes all understanding. 

It may even—within the economy of God’s love and even his liking of us—enable us to feel deep affection for those we lay down our lives for, perhaps even more than a hundred of them! And, we may even, on occasion, be permitted to see the results of the sacrificial love which we offer. 

But whether or not we are ever allowed these momentary glimpses, we can rest in the assurance that we are indeed able to keep the command that we love one another.  It doesn’t demand that we feel anything. It doesn’t demand that we fix anything. It does invite us to claim the faith and the courage, both of which God offers us in his word and in his sacraments, to lay down our lives as Christ laid down his life for us.  Walk in love, as Christ loved us, and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God.  Alleluia and Amen.

B: Easter IV (5/3/09)

John 10:11-18

Life is uncertain and unpredictable. No surprise there, right? The longer we live in this world, the more concretely we know that reality. So, as a way of coping, we instinctively learn to hedge our bets, to keep our options open for as long as we can. A big part of the economic mess our country is in—indeed, the economic mess the world is in—comes from people trying to do just that: hedge their bets and reserve their options. That’s where the expression “hedge fund” comes from, and it’s the principle that lies underneath those incomprehensible financial instruments known as “derivatives” that are the culprits in our financial crisis. And it’s not at all hard to understand what makes people do this sort of thing. There is a cacophony of competing voices out there giving us advice, presuming to give us the straight facts on this or that, trying to make us trust them. It’s intimidating. I had a salesperson from Embarq call me the other night—of course, while I was trying to hold the phone in one hand and a dinner plate in the other while a cat tried to give me a backrub—this person from Embarq wanted me to switch our long distance to their plan, which is quite a bit more expensive than the plan we’re on presently, but she offered a nice discount on what we’re paying for our internet connection. I couldn’t keep it straight in my head, and when she said, no, she couldn’t send me an email with the details, I politely declined to continue the conversation. I was reserving my options, hedging my bets. We do this when we can’t see clearly why we should listen to one particular voice above all others.

Today we have one more voice inviting us to pay attention. It’s the voice of Jesus, the voice of him who calls himself the Good Shepherd. Jesus is calling us—that is, the Good Shepherd is calling his sheep—and saying “Follow me. I’ll protect you. I know where the green grass and the cool waters are. You can eat and drink all you need. I’ll watch your back.” Unfortunately, his voice is just one sound among many in our cacophonous environment. Some of us have responsibilities of work—and sometimes the literal voice of a boss—to pay attention to. Most of us have family members who are telling us things or asking us things or otherwise demanding our attention. Many of us have a difficult time tearing ourselves away from Facebook or Yahoo News or our favorite blogs and websites. And if all we do is watch TV or listen to the radio or drive around town we are still assaulted by various forms of advertizing that says, “Buy this. Do that. Think this way.”

It is in such an environment that the voice of Jesus the Good Shepherd calls out to us. It’s confusing. It’s intimidating. So we hedge our bets; we reserve our options. We hold back on the strength of our commitment to him. We don’t ignore him. We don’t abandon him. We continue to follow him … but we do so at a safe distance. Like a savvy airline traveler, we know how far we are from the nearest exit row. In the back of our minds, we’ve planned our escape route, just in case we need to get away … to get away from it all … including the competing—indeed, the persistently competing—voice of the Good Shepherd. Our Christian faith, our Christian identity, our involvement with the church—these all make up one part of our lives, one part among many other parts, one good thing among a great many good things that we are involved in and weigh against one another.

But, what if we stop? What if we stop just for a moment? What if we stop and just listen, listen to Jesus? When we do so, we discover that there’s something just a little different about Jesus the Good Shepherd, something that distinguishes his voice from all the other competing voices, something that makes it stand out from all the rest, something that begins to make us feel safer and more secure about not hedging our bets with him, not needing to pay such close attention to keeping out options open. We discover one very important fact about the Good Shepherd, and it’s this: The Good Shepherd is willing to lay down his life for the sheep. In fact, the Good Shepherd has laid down his life for the sheep.

That’s it. I can’t make it any plainer. And it makes all the difference in the world. No politician is willing to lay down his or her life for the people they call to follow them. General Motors desperately wants to sell you a car, and they may end up losing their corporate life, but, if so, it won’t be because they laid it down willingly. Only the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. And in so doing, he demonstrates the extent of his love for us.

And in demonstrating that love, Jesus the Good Shepherd earns our trust. We see in his wild, untamed, unqualified, unrestricted, self-giving love the authentication of his credentials as the only One worthy of being followed with abandon. When an out-of-uniform law enforcement officer tries to interact with us officially, the first thing we want to see is his or her badge. The badge authenticates their position, and is the basis for their asking us to do something that any stranger off the street would not legitimately ask of us. The nail marks in the hands of the risen Christ constitute his badge. They constitute the basis on which he makes requests of us that are quite extraordinary, quite unlike anything anyone else could ask and get away with it. The willingness of the Good Shepherd to lay down his life for the sheep provides us with the assurance we need to follow him completely—no reservation, no hesitation, no hedging of bets, no quick scan for the exit row. It’s not that Jesus is simply more important to us than anything or anyone else. It’s that he becomes the lens through which we look at anything and everything else. His voice isn’t simply the loudest among many; it’s the one for which we tune out all others, listening to him first, and then hearing the others in the light of what we have heard from him.

In the words of the old Victorian hymn: “Jesus calls us o’er the tumult of our life’s tempestuous sea. Day by day his clear voice soundeth, saying, “Christian, follow me.”

Alleluia and Amen. 

Easter 2009

There is no eyewitness account of the actual event we are gathered here to celebrate.  No human eye saw Jesus cast off his grave clothes and stand upright. Nobody saw how the stone that sealed his tomb got rolled away. No one saw Jesus walk out of the grave. What we do have are eyewitness accounts of Jesus already already risen from the dead.

First, of course, are the women, with Mary Magdalene in the lead.  Then, on the evening of that first Easter Sunday, the risen Christ appeared to his disciples, then to others, as many as 500, as St Paul tells us in his first letter to the Corinthians. Precisely because of what these people saw, and what they told others about what they saw, and for no other reason, you and I are assembled here at this moment doing what we’re doing. We may not be eye-witnesses, but we are ear-witnesses to the proclamation that Christ is risen from the dead.

That announcement has been handed down to us from generation to generation across nearly two thousand years of time.  We are here because of that announcement, and our lives are shaped by it.

Our Easter proclamation—Christ is risen: the Lord is risen indeed—enables us—indeed, compels us—to engage in and prosecute the mission of the church. In particular, it calls us to three specific activities, three distinctive actions which are the hallmark of the community which has been formed by the Easter announcement: “He is not here, he is risen.”  I speak of evangelizing, baptizing, and, to use a shamelessly manufactured word just so it will sound like the other two, eucharistizing.

First, the Easter message calls us to evangelize the world, starting with ourselves and our neighbors. In the 28th chapter of Matthew, in his final words on this earth, Jesus gives us our marching orders: “Go and make disciples of all nations.” Evangelism simply means “telling good news.” The good news, in this case, is that we don’t have to be at odds with God, we can have peace with God. We don’t have to be afraid of God or indifferent toward God, we can be friends with God. This happens through the forgiveness of our sins and a living personal relationship with the same Jesus Christ who rose from the dead sometime in the wee hours of that Sunday morning. If you don’t have that kind of relationship, then I’m here to evangelize you! Great news—God loves you and wants you to know him. Jesus wants to lift you by the hand, that you may live in the power of his resurrection and no longer fear death. What do you think? Would you like to respond to that good news?

Second, the Easter message calls us to baptize. Easter has always been the premier occasion for baptism, and if the reason is not apparent to you, please let me explain. In the person we know as Jesus, God the son took human flesh, lived and died as one of us, and then defeated death when he rose from the dead. When we are baptized, we are incorporated into his experience of dying and rising. We die and rise with him. Our own death is identified with his, and we are identified with his resurrection.  Those who are baptized into Christ, St Paul tells us, put on Christ, clothe themselves with Christ.  We thereafter belong to Christ, we are marked as his own forever. Our lives are hid with God in Christ.

Evangelize, baptize, and, finally, “eucharistize.”  The Easter announcement calls us to celebrate the Eucharist, the Mass, the Lord’s Supper, the Holy Communion. It compels us to honor the command of Christ on the night before he was betrayed to take, bless, break, and give, that we may receive his body and blood, given for the life of the world, that we may be his body, given for the life of the world. “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast.”  It is a feast that transcends time and space. In the liturgy of the Eucharist, we who are temporal participate in that which is eternal, earth is assumed into heaven, then becomes now and now becomes then, there becomes here and here becomes there, the notions of past, present, and future lose their meaning. In Holy Communion, we know death to be robbed of its sting because it becomes the gateway to eternal life.

We who are “ear-witnesses” have heard the announcement: Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death. We are drawn by that proclamation to evangelism—the telling and hearing of good news, to baptism—the identification of our lives with Christ’s dying and rising, and to the celebration of the Eucharist—the manifestation of the power of that resurrection until he comes again.

Christ is risen! Alleluia and Amen!