A: Proper 03 (RCL)

Matthew 6:24-34
Psalm 131

Brenda and I are in the stage of life when our own children are fully grown—hovering either side of the thirty-year milestone—but they haven’t yet produced any grandchildren for us. When we’re out at a restaurant and see a family with a baby in the next booth, we find ourselves paying perhaps a little more attention than we once would have. Sometimes we’ll play a silent game of peek-a-boo, and it’s especially gratifying if the baby starts to jump and giggle as a result of our interaction. But it’s even more endearing, and utterly sweet, when we see a baby fast asleep in its mother’s arms. The sight of a sleeping or nursing infant touches a nerve that connects directly to that place in our hearts where we look for peace and contentment and freedom from all stress and anxiety. It is this very image that the 131^st Psalm evokes for us:

O Lord, I am not proud; *
I have no haughty looks.
I do not occupy myself with great matters, *
or with things that are too hard for me.
But I still my soul and make it quiet,
like a child upon its mother’s breast; *
my soul is quieted within me.

Are we ever so fortunate at any later time in our lives? More than anything else, I think, we crave the sort of deep peace that transcends the ups and downs, the changes and chances, of this life. And the opposite of such peace—consuming anxiety—has our fast-paced and fast-changing society in a vice grip. We not only think that sleeping baby is adorable; envy that sleeping baby!

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus knows his hearers even then suffered from high anxiety. They worried about what they were going to eat—some of them, no doubt, whether they were going to eat or not; others about whether they would have mere food or cuisine. They worried about what they were going to wear; fashion trends, you know, and the desire to keep up with them, go back a long, long way in human civilization. They worried about their social standing, what their peers and neighbors would think of them, whether they would be invited to the coolest parties. And in this sea of anxiety, what do we get from Jesus? We get this: “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.”

Seek first the kingdom of God … and his righteousness … and all these things—food, clothing, material security, reputation—all these things shall be yours as well. So quit worrying, and let loose of your anxiety.

Easy for him to say, maybe. Harder for us to do. Most of the time, it feels like anxiety is not something we have a choice about. We’re the victims. It’s something that happens to us. So let’s do a little unpacking of what it might be like to “seek first the kingdom of God.” What does that mean, anyway? Over and over again in the gospels, but particularly in Matthew, Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven. Through parables and through direct teaching, he tells us how the Kingdom operates, what its core values are, what God’s vision is for His Kingdom. God has a mission in the world, which is that all people be reconciled to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. God’s mission is to redeem and restore the torn fabric of the universe, to lift the ancient curse that has kept all of creation captive to the power of sin and death. The economy of the Kingdom of God operates under some different rules than worldly economies—stewardship rather than ownership, for example; generosity and abundance rather than scarcity and fear, self-giving rather than self-indulging, the welfare of the whole rather than “I’ve got mine, you get lost.” When we seek first the Kingdom of God, we align ourselves in body and mind, in soul and spirit, in theory and in practice, with God’s redemptive mission. We commit ourselves to pursue lives of self-denial, integrity, and justice tempered with mercy.

But seeking the Kingdom of God doesn’t come easily or naturally. It’s not anybody’s default mode. It takes constant attention, and when that attention lapses, our actual default position is to “seek first” our own immediate welfare, whatever we perceive that welfare to be. Our default position is to make decisions according to what’s going to put the most money into our pockets, because we’re anxious about our material security. Our default position is to order our relationships with other people in whatever way will maximize our standing in the eyes of those whose opinions we care about the most, because we’re anxious about our reputations. Our default mode to is to make political decisions—to vote and to advocate—in ways that we think will advance our self-interests, or the interest of those whom we love and care about most directly, or are most like us, because we’re anxious about our place in a world that seems to be getting more chaotic and uncertain by the day. And what does all this get us? What does this default position accomplish? Anxiety, my sisters and brothers, simply breeds more anxiety. It compounds, like interest on a loan. When we seek first our own welfare, we only jeopardize that welfare even further. By investing in material security and social status, our exposure to loss leaves us wide open to fear, and fear lies at the root of a whole array of nasty and destructive behaviors.

But there is an alternative, of course. Jesus gives it to us. We have the option of “seek[ing] first” God’s kingdom, of putting God’s mission of redemption and restoration and reconciliation at the top of our list of priorities, making it the top window on our mental desktop. Now, without in any way devaluing the heroic witness of people like St Francis, who cast aside wealth and poverty to embrace a life of begging for the sake of the gospel, or soon-to-be St Teresa of Calcutta, who poured out her life among the wretched and the dying, “seeking first” God’s kingdom does not necessarily mean eating bland food and wearing drab clothes and not partying with your friends. It means God’s mission and vision and core values become our mission and vision and core values. It means the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness, become the hub of the wheel on which we organize our lives. Food, clothing, friends, 401Ks, new hair styles, NASCAR, soccer games, track meets, career plans, even our own families, not to mention the hundreds of other things that bring light and joy to our lives—these things occupy various points around the rim of that wheel. These are the things that Jesus says will be “[ours] as well” when we “seek first” God Kingdom.

When we make God’s Kingdom our priority, when we pray “thy kingdom come” in the Our Father, and mean it like we’ve never meant anything before, a subtle but remarkable change will occur within us. We will relax! More and more we will relax about all sorts of things. We will relax because we will have begun to understand the character of God’s provision for us, of God’s care for even the littlest details of our lives. The grip that anxiety has on us will be considerably looser. Best of all, we will begin to enjoy the sort of inner peace that we see in a baby asleep on its mother’s breast—completely trusting, grateful for today, and not worried about tomorrow—no pride, no arrogance, no anxiety, just trust in the presence of the Lord who cares even for the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. Praised be Jesus Christ. Amen.

Trinity Sunday

Today is Trinity Sunday. It's something of an anniversary for me, because it was on Trinity Sunday 1979, twenty-nine years ago, that I delivered my first official, public, Sunday sermon.
Those of you who are familiar with my biography will realize that 1979 was some years before I put on a black shirt and a white collar and was legitimately authorized to preach. Indeed, my first Sunday sermon was as a layperson. It all started one weekday afternoon in early May or late April of that year. At the time, I wore the hat of music director at St Timothy's Church in Salem, Oregon. I was meeting with the rector in his office, as was our custom every few weeks, to pick hymns and otherwise plan the upcoming Sunday liturgies. Father Rick just casually mentioned—half in jest, perhaps; I really don't know to this day whether he was serious—Father Rick mentioned that he didn't think he would give a sermon on Trinity Sunday. After all, what can one say in the face of so great and wondrous a mystery as the Holy Trinity? Well, as an amateur theologian and a strict constructionist of Prayer Book rubrics (even then), I objected. After all, how can one simply say nothing at all in the face of so great and wondrous a mystery as the Holy Trinity? “If you're not going to preach, I will!”, I said—half in jest, perhaps; I really don't know to this day whether I was serious.

I'm kind of fuzzy on just what happened next. But I do know that, come Trinity Sunday, I found myself in the pulpit of St Timothy's Episcopal Church! And, I have to say, I did a masterful job. I examined the theological implications of the doctrine of the Trinity with subtlety and refinement. I read from my own journal, and shared my own inner struggle in my relationship with the God who is one-in three and three-in-one. I quoted from well-known hymns and from the writings of the saints and doctors of the church. When I stepped down from the pulpit, and made my way back to the choir to lead the singing of the Nicene Creed, there was a holy hush over the congregation. “That went pretty well”, I thought to myself. “Maybe I should consider doing it professionally.”

My sense of accomplishment was short-lived, however, for as I was directing the choir during the singing of the Creed, I glanced at my watch, and did a double-take. To my horror, I saw that it was 10:55 in a 10 o’clock service, so it was about the time that communion should be winding down, and we were only at the Creed! Now, most Episcopalians are only too happy to have theological mysteries explained to them, but not if it means listening to a forty-five minute sermon at a Sunday Eucharist! I was mortified, and my fellow parishioners gave me a good-natured hard time for years to come.

I assure you that today I do not intend to be either as lengthy, or, probably, as profound, as I was on this day 29 years ago. So let me just cut right to the heart of the matter. It has often been said that Trinity Sunday is the only festival of the church year that celebrates a doctrine, rather than an event or a person. Don't you believe it! Trinity Sunday is not about celebrating a doctrine.

In a way, I wish it were. I'm personally quite fond of doctrine in general and the doctrine of the Trinity in particular. I enjoy trying to wrap my mind around it, and I believe it is absolutely essential to the well-being of the Church and to a right relationship with God. To my dying breath, I will struggle to confess and uphold the doctrine of the Holy and Undivided Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—as it is proclaimed in the scriptures, creeds, and liturgies of the historic Church. So passionately do I feel, and so resolutely am I convinced of the correctness of the traditional doctrine.

But I do not for one instant fool myself that either my passion or the correctness of my belief will deliver me from the power of sin and death and make me worthy to stand in the presence of the triune God! Only the triune God himself can do that. And it is this God, not the doctrine of him, whom we celebrate on Trinity Sunday. The Old and New Tstaments contain any number of commands pertaining to our relationship with God. We are told, among other things, to love him, obey him, serve and follow him, trust and put our faith in him, worship and adore him. But nowhere, as far as I can tell, are we commanded to understand God.

Does that come as a relief to any of you? It certainly does to me! Most of the time, I enjoy trying to understand God, but I'm awfully glad my salvation doesn't depend on how well I do so, because I'm often not very successful! Among the varied gifts of the Holy Spirit is the inclination and ability to penetrate, to a point, the mystery of God's identity, and to articulate that mystery in fresh and compelling ways. Those who have this gift should indeed exercise it for the benefit of the rest of us. We can all enjoy God more as a result. But we will never solve the mystery, and, in the end, our job is to simply rest in the joy of his love for us and in what he has done to reconcile us to him.

Trinity Sunday is not about a doctrine. Trinity Sunday is about the triune God. Doctrines are for understanding. The holy and undivided Trinity is for worshiping and adoring and loving.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow,
Praise him, all creatures here below,
Praise him above, ye heavenly hosts,
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Amen.

Pentecost

Let’s take a trip back in time—way back. Beyond the founding of our country; beyond the Reformation and the Renaissance and Middle Ages; beyond the time of Christ and the Roman Empire; beyond the civilizations of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia; beyond the Bronze Age and into the Stone Age, the time of the cave men. Fred and Wilma Flintstone are standing outside the entrance of their cave one stormy evening, grunting in hushed tones about their neighbor, Barney Rubble, whom everyone suspects squirreled away a double share of meat from the wooly mammoth the clan had barbecued the night before.

All of a sudden, a lightning bolt falls from the sky and zaps Barney. Now, what are Fred and Wilma and their fellow cave-dwellers probably going to think? They’re probably going to think that Barney has been tried and found guilty by a higher power. If they live in a northern latitude, they might call that higher power Thor, or Odin. If they inhabit a more southerly area, they might call it Zeus or Ra. They know nothing, of course, about sub-atomic particles and magnetic fields and the meteorological conditions that are likely to produce lightning. All they see is that a man who has behaved badly has gotten zapped from on high. They put two and two together and come up with stone age theology.

Stone Age theology is simple: If there’s no other explanation for something that happens, then God did it. The God of Stone Age theology is a “god of the gaps.” This god fills in the “gaps” between our experience and what we understand about our experience. Fred and Wilma Flinstone’s grandparents may have thought that women had babies purely at the whim of the gods. But Fred and Wilma have discerned a connection between the birth of Pebbles and something that happened between them nine months earlier, so they no longer see any divine presence in the process. There’s no longer a “gap” that a “god” needs to fill. But lightning is another matter, as are earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and solar eclipses. So Fred and Wilma are a long way from becoming atheists, even though they’ve figured out where babies really come from.

Humankind may have come a long way since the Stone Age, but Stone Age theology, I’m afraid, is still quite popular. The problem is, there are a lot fewer “gaps” to fill now than there were then. Scientific research is already storming the gates of the inner workings of the brain and human consciousness. It’s been nearly 50 years since the first Soviet cosmonaut got into outer space and presumptuously declared that he didn’t see any evidence of God’s presence or activity while he was out there. Just a few years after that, the American psychologist B.F. Skinner popularlized the notion that human beings are just complicated bundles of electro-chemical reactions, that all human behavior can ultimately be explained physically, and that what we might call “soul” and “spirit” simply do not exist. If we understand God to be the “god of the gaps,” the force which explains the unexplainable, then God is being gradually squeezed out of a job, and we are being gradually squeezed into atheism. The more that science can explain, the less we need God for.

Today is Pentecost, the day on which we celebrate not just “spirit” in general, but God’s Holy Spirit, the one whose power is released in spectacular fashion upon the gathered church in Jersusalem fifty days after Jesus’ Resurrection and ten days after his Ascension back into Heaven. That’s the way the gift of the Holy Spirit is recorded and interpreted by St Luke in the Book of Acts. But in St John’s account, the gift of the Holy Spirit is identified with an earlier event, on the very evening of Easter Day, when the risen Christ appears to the apostles and breathes on them—as routine and unspectacular an act as can be imagined—he breathes on them as says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” So we have a dramatic and loud bestowal of the Holy Spirit in Acts, and a quiet and gentle bestowal of the Holy Spirit in John. What are we to make of this contrast?

St Paul addresses this very question in his first letter to the Christians in the Greek city of Corinth. He looks at it not from the perspective of the original outpouring of the Holy Spirit—whether according to John’s version or Luke’s version—but but from the viewpoint of the particular gifts which that Holy Spirit bestows on particular believers. The operative theology here is that the sacrament of baptism conveys not only new birth and the forgiveness of sins, but one or more spiritual gifts as well—gifts which are meant to be exercised, St Paul tells us, not for personal gain, but for the general edification of the church and her ministry in the world.

Let me be more blunt, for the sake of clarity: Every Christian is a minister, and the ministry of every Christian flows from the spiritual gifts he or she was given in baptism. The list of spiritual gifts in I Corinthians 12 is not, I believe, meant to be be prescriptive and exhuastive, but, rather, descriptive and suggestive. But the ones he lists are these: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment, tongues, and interpretation of tongues. Some on this list—miracles and tongues, for instance—are obviously spectacular, and nobody would mistake them for ordinary human endowments. There is still a little bit of a “gap” here for a “god of the gaps” to sneak into and find gainful employment. But I’m sure that a research psychologist will sooner or later, if it hasn’t already happened, come up with a credible scientific explanation for the phenomenon of speaking in tongues and other forms of religious ecstasy.

Others on Paul’s list—wisdom, knowledge, faith, for example—seem more ordinary, more common to the rest of human experience. We don’t need any sort of god to explain them. We have a difficult time, in fact, identifying them as spiritual gifts at all. We are tempted to say, “I don’t have the spiritual gift of speed, I can just run fast.” “I don't have the spiritual gift of craftsmanship, I just know how to sew.” “I don’t have the spiritual gift of music, I just had a good piano teacher.” “I don’t have the spiritual gift of hospitality, I just like to cook and I’ve always been able to meet people well.” I could go on, but do you see my point? If we think of God only when we’re experiencing something spectacular or miraculous, we will, in fact, become functional atheists, because we will fail to see God present and active in the ordinary, the everyday, the mundane, the routine. And this blindness, this failure to see through the eyes of faith, in turn, leads to discouragement, despair, spiritual malaise, loss of faith.

I’ve got good news for you, though! There’s no need to be trapped in spiritual discouragement, because God is present and active in the ordinary and mundane every bit as much as he is in the spectacular and the miraculous. As far as I am concerned, the scientists can close all the gaps they want to, because the God I worship doesn’t need gaps to reveal himself in, he doesn’t need extraordinary occurrences in which to make himself known. He can make himself known in those ways, but he doesn’t need to. Even those abilities and talents which might appear quite natural and ordinary can be understood and appreciated as divine gifts of the Holy Spirit. If you are baptized, you are gifted. That gift may be lying dormant because of your lack of faith, or lack of instruction in Christian discipleship, or you may be exercising spiritual gifts without even knowing it. But the critical reality here is that every Christian possesses and is meant to exercise spiritual gifts.

St Paul takes great pains to point out that spiritual gifts are not to be exercised merely for the self aggrandizement of the one who possesses them. They are, rather, to be employed building up the body of Christ for its mission in the world. Spiritual gifts will never be recognized as such by the world, because they are only revealed and discerned within the context of the Christian community and Christian discipleship. When a soldier is fighting in the jungle, he wears green camoflage to help him blend into the scenery and not be recognized easily by the enemy. But when he returns to the base, and the background is made up of concrete and asphalt and brick, the soldier can be easily spotted and recognized. In the world, spiritual gifts are camoflaged. Wisdom and knowledge look competely natural. Tongues and prophecy look completely crazy. None are recognized as spiritual gifts. Only in the context of “homebase,” the community of believers, is the camoflage renedered ineffective and the spiritual gifts seen for what they are.

This is why it is critical to understand and live out the baptismal promise, taken from Acts 2:42, to “be faithful to the apostles’s teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers.” It is only in that context that we can discern and develop our spiritual gifts. And when we do so—that is, when the church operates the way God intends for the church to operate—we can be truly effective in the pursuit of our mission. The great metaphor than God reveals to us through St Paul is that of the church as a body—the body of Christ, to be specific. A well-functioning, healthy body is one coordinated system made up of many coordinated systems and sub-systems. When each system does its job, the whole body thrives. When one sub-system malfunctions, all the others suffer. The failure of Christians to be aware of, recognize, and develop their spiritual gifts within the structure and discipline of the church, is a major contributing factor, in my judgment, to our failure to prosecute our mission as vigorously and effectively as we know God wants us to. May God forgive us. It is a failure in faith, a failure in love.

But this Pentecost celebration offers us an opportunity to repent, to change our ways, to head a new direction. That god of the gaps is a mere idol. Put it away. Embrace the God who is already waiting on the top of the mountain, along with all his faithful people, when the scientist and the philosopher finally get there. Claim your gifts, and respond with your fellow Christians to the spiritual hunger of all people, and bring all to unity with God in Christ. Come, Holy Spirit, come. Alleluia and Amen.

Where I've Been

For the two or three of you that look at this site...I doing an extemporaneous "teaching sermon" series through I Peter during the Easter season. The sermons are not scripted in my customary manner, so I've got nothing to share on this venue. I do own a digital voice recorder that I have used successfully in the past, but I'm running into technical difficulties. It may be that I will be able to post an MP3 version of a sermon or two before Pentecost. We'll see.

In any case, I''ll be back on Pentecost and beyond.

Say...if you're reading this, shoot me a comment. Is there anyone who actually reads my sermons?

Easter 2008

Forty-some odd days ago, on Ash Wednesday, I solemnly invited you, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent. Our Lenten observance in now ended. Time has passed. Maybe quickly, maybe slowly, but it has passed. Lent has passed, and Easter is here.

Lent has passed.

Words like “pass” and “passing” and “passage” are rich with meaning, because they refer to things that we do all the time. They talk about movement, progress (or regress, as the case may be), growth (or decay, as the case may be), but in any case, change.

“Teacher, can I have a hall pass to go to the bathroom?”

“Psst! Kevin has cooties; pass in on.”

“Do you think you'll pass the test next week?”

“Hello? I'd like to book passage on your next Caribbean cruise.”

“Thank-you for offering, but I think I'll pass.”

“I was so excited I almost passed out!”

“Aunt Susie passed away last week.”

And then there are those events that we refer to as “rites of passage”, events which may not be terribly important in and of themselves, but which signify turning points, movement from one stage or state of life to another—first pair of shoes, first haircut, first day of school, that first party sometime during late elementary school when both boys and girls are invited, the first date, getting a driver's license, graduating from high school, the first full-time job, turning thirty, turning forty, retirement, and several others in between.

Each of these events is in some way bittersweet: they look forward to a somehow changed future; but the future is, by definition, unknown, and therefore threatening. Such moments also mean that you can't ever go back to the way things were. Once you're forty, you can't ever be thirty-nine again!

And so times like these, while promising, are also anxiety-producing. And this is precisely the reason that we tend to mark them, to celebrate them in some special way, formal or informal. By clothing these watershed moments in special rites and ceremonies, even if it's just putting on funny hats and singing silly songs, we intend to conduct that person safely through the threatening event, to provide him or her with safe ... passage from the known into the unknown.

This past Lent—this Lent that has now passed—has been a rite of passage for me. It was my first Lent as part of this worshipping community of St Anne’s. And many members of this congregation have experienced “passages” during the seven months I have been here. There have been new jobs, new homes, new relationships, new illnesses, new hopes and new fears. Some, indeed, have “passed on”, “passed away.” The peculiar relationship a parish priest enjoys with his flock brings with it the high privilege of being present and presiding at this most important “rite of passage”.

This particular passage certainly towers in significance over all the other watershed moments in our lives. Death is the ultimate movement into the unknown, the mother of all human anxiety, the source of all fear. We may ignore it, we may delay it, but we cannot, in the end, avoid or defeat it. Death catches up with all of us. But even though death is a universal constant of human experience, we still fear it, because it remains a mystery. It remains the great unknown. We read stories about near-death experiences, with tunnels and warm, inviting lights, and gently beckoning voices and faces. These are fascinating, and reassuring in their own way. But this is not the same as being stone cold dead, with the molecules in the brain that are the electro-chemical data banks of personhood, identity, and a lifetime of memories, disintegrated into chaos. You don't go flatline on an EEG for 36 hours and then come back to tell your story to the National Inquirer.

That is, unless your name is Jesus!

Here it is folks! Here's the scandalous good news: Jesus was lowered into the very jaws of death, and by suffering death, caused death to choke on itself, the way a snake will sometimes swallow its own tail and literally consume itself. Death has never been the same since, and neither has human life. Jesus has become our safe passage into and through the jaws of death.

During the era of wagon train migration into the American west, the most indispensable member of the group was the guide, the one who knew the territory, who had passed that way before, and come back to tell about it. The guide knew where and how to cross the rivers, where the navigational landmarks were, and how to stay out of the way of hostile Indians. He provided the wagon train with safe passage through the unknown of the frontier, until it reached its destination.

This is the same job that Moses, following the guiding hand of the Lord himself, performed for the company of Israel on their passage out of slavery in Egypt, through the waters of the Red Sea and the dangers of the wilderness, and eventually to the destination of the Promised Land.
Jesus Christ is our safe passage through the Red Sea of life and the wilderness of death. He knows the territory. He's been there before, and, more importantly, come back to tell about it.

In the course of time, the events surrounding Israel's departure from Egypt were celebrated with a commemorative “rite of passage”—the Passover. Since the first Easter, Christians have interpreted this original Passover as the pre-figurement, the foreshadowing, of Jesus' passover —his safe passage—from death to life. And not only Jesus', but ours as well.

When we were touched by the waters of the baptismal font, we were united with him in his death, and united with him in his resurrection. His death became ours and our his. His life became ours and ours his. Death is swallowed up in victory. This is the simple but astonishing fact of Easter: Jesus went where we all have to go, but came back to provide us with safe passage through it.

Alleluia, Christ our passover is sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, alleluia!

Christ is risen. Alleluia and Amen.

Good Friday

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

One of the clearest memories of my childhood is of an occasion when my father was trying to teach me to swim. I was not quite eight years old and we were at a public pool. My father stood about five feet from the edge of the pool, held his arms out and said, “Jump to me. I’ll catch you.” I was scared. The water was up to his chest, which meant that it was well over my head, and I couldn’t swim. But I trusted him, I jumped, and he caught me.

I also trusted my father in several less dramatic and less conscious ways. I trusted that I would always have food in my stomach, a secure roof over my head, clothes on my back, that I would always be loved, and whenever I got myself into a jam, that he would be there for me to help me, and to make things alright. Few things are as beautiful to us as the trust of a child. Few things are as beautiful to us as an infant asleep on its mother’s breast, completely serene, completely content, completely trusting. And because of this, few experiences are as gut-wrenching, few experiences cause us as much grief and anger, as the betrayal of a child’s trust. We are revolted by the crimes of child abuse and incest, not only because of the acts themselves, but because the trust that children naturally place in parents and relatives is tragically betrayed.

Those of you who know me well have learned that I find in the game of baseball a veritable treasury of metaphors for life itself. Way back in 1919 the Chicago White Sox won the American League pennant, and were heavily favored to win the World Series as well. But they lost the World Series. Subsequently it was revealed that they lost on purpose, in order to keep an agreement some of the players had made with professional gamblers. It was fixed, and it became known as the “Black Sox” scandal. Several team members were eventually indicted and brought to trial. One afternoon when the day’s trial proceedings were over, one of the stars of the team, “Shoeless Joe Jackson,” was met on the courthouse steps by a group of young boys. These were boys for whom he had been a hero, boys who had placed their trust in him as an example of something they could aspire to. There were tears streaming down their faces as they pleaded with Shoeless Joe Jackson, “Say it ain’t so, say it ain’t so.”

But, of course, it was so. Their trust had been betrayed.

All of us have been on both ends of that transaction; we have all had our trust betrayed, and we have all betrayed trust that has been placed in us. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” We know very little about what might be called the “psychology” of Jesus. Several different theories have been advanced over the years, but whatever conclusion we come to, we’ve got to remember that it has been the faith of the Church for two thousand years that he was really a man, in every way human as we are, yet without sin. He wasn’t just God in disguise, pretending to be human. All week long, we’ve been reading the twenty-second Psalm, the first verse of which Jesus quoted in his cry from the cross as recorded by Matthew and Mark. When the human being Jesus of Nazareth spoke these words from the cross, it was because that’s precisely how he felt: forsaken, abandoned, his trust betrayed. He had in every way been faithful to his Father’s will. He had in every way been faithful to his mission. Indeed, as those who stood at the foot of the cross mocked him, “He trusted in God, that God would deliver him. Let God rescue him, if he delights in him!” But now he’s abandoned, and betrayed. “Jesus, old friend, you’ve been had! You’ve done everything right—you’ve gone by the game plan. And where has it gotten you? Your hands and your feet have been nailed to a piece of wood. Your life’s blood is oozing out of you, drop by individual drop. You’re not long for this world, Jesus—and Daddy isn’t going to come and make it all better, is he?”

Say it ain’t so . . . say it ain’t so.

We’ve all had our crosses to bear this year, even this Lent. Some of you have faced serious illness, in your life or in the life of someone close to you. Some of you have lost loved ones to death. Maybe it’s not been a good year financially for you, and you wonder how you’re going to make ends meet, and worry about how you’re going to fulfill the hopes and aspirations that you have for yourself and for your family. Perhaps you’ve struggled with depression, and just wonder how you’re going to get through the routine tasks of the day that lies ahead of you. Some of you have been betrayed by someone you love. Some of you are in turmoil over a relationship that has gone sour. Maybe you are paralyzed by fear and by a sense of the purposelessness of your own life.

My friends, it is here, in our woundedness, that we get close to the heart of the mystery of the cross. It’s true, as Christians we have 20-20 hindsight—we know about Easter—we know about Reusrrection. And, From whatever information the gospel evangelists give us, Jesus did too. But at that moment on the cross, he was forsaken, he was abandoned, he wasn’t faking it. And in order to transcend his suffering at that moment, Jesus had to give up hope! I’d like to read to you a paragraph from a meditation by the late James Griffiss, who was a theologian and seminary professor:

How easy it is for us to be deceived about hope. What we want to believe is that God will work out everything for our good in the end. The way may be difficult; things may get bad at times, but in the end all will be well. And sometimes, indeed, it does happen that way, and we are deceived all the more. We even try to do it with Jesus himself. We interpret his death according to our own understanding and our own idols: God made it alright for him, so he will make it alright for us. And so we avoid the cross and what it says, for it is not too difficult to turn the cross into that which puts God to the test. “I am your son, your chosen one, surely you are not going to abandon me now.” We can imagine that Jesus might have said that, might perhaps have thought it, because we have said it so many times ourselves. ... The cross frees us from that temptation, and it is our only hope. ... The cross frees us from the sin of testing, because Jesus died there; it is the end. Nothing is left, nothing on which he or we can depend except the cross, and the cross offers us nothing, not even itself. It offers only the God who led Jesus there and who leads us there to be crucified with him.

These are hard words! If I understand what Father Griffiss is saying, it’s that before we can even think about attaining our heart’s desire, we must first give it up. Our job is simply to abdicate—to abdicate control over anything and everything that ... well, just anything and everything. Like Abraham was willing to sacrifice his only son Isaac on a wilderness altar, we must abandon our impulse to control or possess anything, even ourselves. Before we can be delivered from the suffering we face, we must abandon the right to find our own way out. Our only hope is to give up hope.

For me, the most beautiful image of this kind of abandonment is found in the first moments of a human being’s life outside the womb. A baby emerges From the security it has known for nine months, where it has been nourished, and given food and oxygen through the umbilical cord connection with its mother. And then, right when that child sees the light of day for the first time, the cord is snapped. And there’s an instant between the time that source of life is cut off, and the child draws its first breath, where life itself hangs in the balance.

I believe that, as baptized christians, we are called to live in that moment—hanging in the balance—where we give up the hope, give up the security of everything we have ever known, and face God’s unknown future, silent before the mystery, ready to be taught how to breathe. Our trust in God is well-placed—don’t think I’m telling you otherwise—but it has to be a mature trust, one born of suffering, free of any conditions or qualifications. It won’t do to tell God we trust him, so long as he will promise to do this or that. Our trust must be simple and unconditional.

The Jewish writer Elie Weisel tells the story of an event that took place in a Nazi concentration camp. The authorities decided to publicly execute two inmates, one an old man and one a teenage boy. In front of the entire camp population, these two prisoners were hanged. The old man died quickly and, so it seemed, relatively painlessly. The boy, however, stuggled, and took a long while to die. As he hung there, writhing at the end of a rope, someone cried out in anguish, “God, where are you?!” He might just as well have said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And in a moment of insight and illumination, another prisoner responded, pointing at the slowly dying form of the boy, and said, “There he is, there is God, hanging on that rope.”

Our God is, for our sake, a suffering God, a crucified God. That’s why we have crucifixes, so that in our suffering, we can see our crucified God, abandoned with us and for us. On this Good Friday I invite you, in the name of the church, to bring your woundedness, your betrayal and your betray-ing, and, with Jesus, give up hope. Come to the cross, be abandoned and forsaken with him, and him with you, that you may live.

Almighty God, whose most dear son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: mercifully grant that we, walkingn in the way of the cross, may find it none other that the way of life and peace, through the same, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Maundy Thursday 2008

Some twelve years ago, Brenda and I bought a house in Stockton, California, where we were living at the time. It was a grand old home, built in 1916, but it was definitely what you would call a “fixer upper.” It suffered from poor taste, compounded by years of neglect. But we looked at it, and we both liked it, and over the loud protests of our real estate agent, who thought we were nuts, we bought it. We had great plans. We worked like pack mules for about three months, and most of those plans were indeed turned into reality. We ripped out carpets and counters and refinished floors and laid ceramic tile and repainted walls and ceilings and repaired windows, and undertook several other smaller projects. We turned a dump into something livable.

But after we ran out of steam, and pretty much out of money as well, quite a bit yet remained undone. Quite a bit. And, to be honest with you, most of what still needed to be done, we just lived with, until we eventually sold the place and moved up the street five years later.

And so it seems to me that our not-quite fixed up old house is an apt sign of so much else in my life and in yours. We all have our inventory of “unfinished business.” We have unfinished business with things and we have unfinished business with people. We have loose ends in our responsibilities and loose ends in our relationships.

A few minutes ago, our Deacon read, from the thirteenth chapter of St John’s gospel, the scriptural warrant for what we’ll be doing immediately at the conclusion of this homily: “Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of the world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” That last phrase says so much more than its brevity suggests. Jesus loved “his own” to the end. Jesus loves us to the end. This is the pivotal sentence in John’s narrative of our Lord’s Passion, the hinge on which he makes the transition from the tumultuous events of that last week in Jerusalem, to the actual arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus. The words “to the end” therefore refer to everything that follows, culminating in his death. Jesus followed through on his plans. He brought them to completion. He attended to the details. He didn’t leave any unfinished business. In his submission to death on the cross, Jesus loved us “to the end.”

But, we might ask, to what “end” did Jesus love us? The word “end” is a rich word. It has more than one connotation, more than one shade of meaning. If Brenda and I were to have actually completed the unfinished projects in that home we bought twelve years ago, it would have represented the conclusion of our plans, and would have been the cause for some celebration. We could have said that we had reached the end of our project. But even in that case, achieving our goal would not have been, so to speak, an “end in itself.” Rather, the completion of our task list would have served a greater “end,” the end of heightening the beauty and utility and harmony of our home—and, thereby, the beauty, utility, and harmony of our lives. Similarly, if we take care of the unfinished business in our relationships and responsibilities, it is not merely to have them “done,” but is directed toward the end that lives be enhanced, wounds healed, wrongs righted, obligations fulfilled, justice served, and love manifested.

So what, once again, is the end to which Jesus loved us fully when he suffered and died for us? This is a profound question, and the clues which point us to an answer are contained
in the very actions which characterize the liturgy of the Church on Maundy Thursday. That strange word “maundy” comes from the Latin mandare, from which we get “mandate” and “command.” There are two mandates, two commands, from our Lord, which we fulfill tonight, and they are both ordered to the end that we, Jesus’s disciples, take on his character, that we become like him, that we are so formed in his spirit that we don’t have to stop and ask ourselves, “What would Jesus do?”, we just do it.

The first of these commands, these mandates that serve an “end,” is concerned that we be formed in an attitude of servanthood and humility. The ordained leaders of this community,
standing in the place of Jesus, will wash the feet of a representative group of individuals who stand in the place the twelve apostles whose feet Jesus washed. This re-enactment is a lesson to all of us. It requires humility from all of us. Deacon Marion and I will be humbled, because we will be on our knees in front of those whose feet we are washing. Those whose feet are being washed will be humbled, because we’re not used to having our shoes off in church. To those of us raised in western culture, at least, being barefoot is a sign of unsophistication and vulnerability. And those who simply sit and watch—and, one hopes, pray as well—those who are just ordinary members of the congregation are formed in humility by the mere fact that they are … just ordinary members of the congregation. How difficult it is, very often, to content ourselves with being ordinary, with not standing out from the crowd. But finding contentment in whatever state we find ourselves is a critical threshold in our progress toward humility. Thus, we all serve one another in this liturgy of footwashing—those who wash the feet, those whose feet are washed, and those who prayerfully observe the ceremony.

The second command which we observe tonight, as we encounter it in the first epistle to the Corinthians, is that to take bread and wine, and set them apart through prayer, and then consume them. On that night in the upper room, after he had given them a lesson in humility by washing their feet, and as they were sharing what may have been a Passover Seder, or may have been another sort of Jewish ritual meal, Jesus took the elements of that meal and re-invigorated them with a new level of meaning. This is what we call the Eucharist, the Mass, the Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper, the Divine Liturgy. In the Incarnation, God humbled himself to the point of sharing our human nature, but he did so with a particular end in mind, and that is that we should thereby share in his divinity, that we should become, as St Peter tells us in his second epistle, “partakers in the divine nature.” Even before he had completed his plans, before he had yet loved them “to the end,” Jesus connected those friends and followers who were with him then to the power which would be unleashed in the 48 to 72 hours that followed—the cosmic and redemptive power which would manifest itself in darkened skies at midday, and an earthquake, and the rending of the temple veil, the rolling away of a stone in front of a tomb.

Two thousand years later, you and I are still connected to the source of that power. When we take and bless and break and give the elements of the Eucharist, we are sharing in the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, as surely as a rapid transit train receives power from the third rail to which it is connected.

My friends, this liturgy, this “work” in which we are engaged, will not have a definite conclusion. We will simply finish when we’re finished, and then adjourn for another few hours before we return tomorrow night to continue the Triduum. But although there is no certain conclusion, there is a definite end to what we do here tonight. Our work will serve this end, our work will be accomplished, to the extent that we follow through on it, that we see to the details, that we do not leave any unfinished business before the altar of God, that we give ourselves to our work—heart, mind, and body. Amen.