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!

B: Lent IV (RCL) 22 March 2009

John 3:14-21

Numbers 21:4-9

I grew up in a tea-totaling environment, so I was never conditioned to hang out it bars. But when California banned smoking in all restaurants and bars, Brenda and I very often preferred to have dinner in the bar or lounge rather than the main dining area of a restaurant. A cocktail lounge is a very … what shall we say? … a very fluid place, is it not? It can be a place of relaxation and enjoyment and camaraderie with friends. And it can also be a place of mystery and … shall we say, mischief. After spending time in a bar, people often end up saying and doing things they later come to regret. And the consistent thing about such places is that the lights are always dim, sometimes so dim that you can barely see what you’re drinking or eating. I don’t know that we can exactly say why, but I don’t know of anybody, myself included, who would enjoy being in a lounge with the lights turned up to what we would consider normal in, say, an office, or a supermarket, or even a living room.

And I can’t help but be reminded of this whenever I read the nineteenth verse of the third chapter of St John’s gospel: “Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil.” I’m not saying that everything that goes on in a bar is evil, but a lot of evil things go on in bars, and it’s really no wonder at all that we like to keep the lights low in such places, because when the lights are low, we can’t quite see what’s going on, and that inability to see enables us to deceive ourselves about ourselves. Darkness can be downright addicting, because it’s a powerful anesthetic; it relieves the pain of what we might see if we looked at ourselves clearly, in the cold light of day. Unfortunately, addiction is a form of bondage, and our attachment to darkness can also prevent us from seeing and knowing our true selves, and from living the lives to which God called us when he made us.

Jesus addresses this precarious human condition in his well-known dialogue with the Jewish leader Nicodemus as recorded for us in the third chapter of St John’s gospel. Nicodemus comes to Jesus under the cover of darkness to pick his brain about some questions that were really bugging him. Jesus says, “You’ve got to be born again,” and Nicodemus says, “Well, how does that work, exactly?” and Jesus goes on about spirit and flesh and water and such things and finally arrives when we pick it up in this morning’s gospel reading:

As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

The antidote to what ails us as human beings is something Jesus calls Eternal Life.  Eternal Life is what can lead us out of the darkness to which we have become addicted. Eternal Life is what can free us from our fear of seeing ourselves clearly and knowing ourselves truly.  Jesus wants to give us Eternal Life, and he tells Nicodemus that we receive Eternal Life by looking at Jesus specifically as he is “lifted up.” And when he says “lifted up,” he means something very specific.

But before we can go there, we need to make sure we’re up to speed on the Old Testament reference Jesus makes when he says, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.”  Our first reading from the Book of Numbers told us the story. The ancient Hebrews had been freed from slavery in Egypt but were wandering in the Sinai desert for a generation under Moses’ leadership. Their camp was infested by poisonous snakes and people were getting bitten and dying. The Lord told Moses to make an image—a statue, in effect—of the sort of snake that was bothering them, and he told Moses to lift this faux-snake up where people could see it. Moses did just that, and, sure enough, when a snake-bitten person looked up at it, they were healed.  So what Jesus is telling Nicodemus, in effect, is that all human beings are snake-bit—snake-bit by the power of Sin and Death. This is why we like the lights turned low in bars; this is why we prefer darkness over light; this is why we are afraid to see ourselves and know ourselves as we really are. And what, then, do we need to do? We need to look up and live. We need to look on Jesus, lifted up for us as Moses’ serpent statue was lifted up for the people in the wilderness. And how is Jesus lifted up for us? He is lifted up on the cross. He is lifted up in his resurrection. He is lifted up in his ascension back to the right hand of the Father. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

Unfortunately, one inference many of us make when we encounter passages of scripture such as this is that “eternal life” is a possession that we own and have stashed away so we can forget about it until we need it. We think of Eternal Life the way we think of a coin collection, or a stamp collection, or a baseball card collection. It’s stuck away in a drawer. We know it’s there, and we’re glad it’s there, but we may go several days without thinking about it. We hope that it will increase in value, and that should the day come that we need to cash it in, we’ll be able to do so at a profit. Eternal Life isn’t something we need now, it’s something we’ll need later. So we have it now so we will have it later. Someone might ask us, “Are you saved? Do you have Eternal Life?” and we’ll want to say, “Why sure. I ‘looked up’ at Jesus, so I’m saved. I have Eternal Life. I don’t exactly need it yet, but I have it for when I do need it.”  

But I’m here today to tell you that looking “up” at Jesus is not simply a one-time move, a mere glance. Rather, it is a matter of gazing at the “lifted up” Jesus and keeping our gaze fixed there until we are completely healed. And what makes this kind of challenging is that when we look up at Jesus, he looks back at us, and his gaze can be quite uncomfortable, because penetrating light emanates from his eyes. We don’t like being looked at by penetrating light. It’s like if somebody all of a sudden kicks up the lights in the cocktail lounge at 11 PM. We might see things we’d prefer not to see. We might feel just a little bit … judged. As Jesus tells Nicodemus,  

…this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. But he who does what is true comes to the light, that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been wrought in God.

You see, as long as we think of Eternal Life as a possession that we acquire and then hide away until we need it—that is, as we tend to think of it, when we die—then we are subject to what I might call photophobia—and I’m not talking about fear of having your picture taken(!) but fear of light. Jesus says, “… every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.” But when we keep our gaze fixed on Jesus, looking up and persisting in looking up at him “lifted up” for our salvation, then Eternal Life becomes a present reality of our experience, something that we live in and benefit from even now, and not merely a future hope. When we can make this sort of mental move, we then have the resources at our disposal to be able to live fully in the present and fully in freedom: Free from self-deception, free from fear, and free from anxiety. Somebody get the lights. Amen.

B: Lent III (3 March 2009)

Psalm 19:7-14

Exodus 26:1-17

About 35 years ago, American involvement in the Vietnam War came to an end, and the U.S. military stopped inducting draftees. Nonetheless, the Selective Service System remained in business, and the requirement that young men register for the draft when they turn 18 was never repealed. Apparently, however, there arose a popular misimpression to the contrary, and the government bureaucrats in charge of such things were alarmed at the level of noncompliance. So they resorted to desperate measures, and retained the services of an advertising agency. The resulting campaign was run for several years during the 1990s—on television, on radio, and in print. There were several different scenarios that set up the situation, but the punchline was always the same: “It’s not just a good idea, it’s the LAW.”

It’s the law.

Those words can evoke different responses in different people. In some, they call forth humble compliance, a submission to something larger than oneself, a realization that the rule of law is the very basis of civilized society. In others, the phrase stirs up a spirit of rebellious defiance, like a playground bully exclaiming, “Oh yeah? Well make me!”

But in either case, it does get our attention. Whether we comply with the law or defy the law, our behavior is nevertheless defined in terms of the law.

In today’s liturgy, we are confronted with the ultimate expression of the concept of law: the Ten Commandments. They have been around for more than 3,000 years, and constitute the bedrock of the Judaeo-Christian moral tradition. Within the culture of Anglican Christianity, the Decalogue, as the Ten Commandments are known, is particularly conspicuous and ingrained. When Archbishop Cranmer reworked the liturgy of the Eucharist for the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, he put the Ten Commandments at the very beginning of the service, and they have remained there—either prescribed or as an option—ever since. In many parish churches both in England and in older parts of America, they are engraved in stone or wood and displayed prominently on the east wall. One might argue, of course, that the Ten Commandments are honored more in the breach than in the observance—but either way, they are conspicuous.

The notion of law seems obvious enough. Every human society and community has it in one form or another. If we break the law, there is some adverse consequence, some kind of punishment, either now or later. If we keep the law, there is some sort of reward or other pleasant consequence (even if it’s just the avoidance of a negative one). But can it really be all that simplistic? I suspect we do well to disabuse ourselves of childish misconceptions

about law in general, and God’s law in particular. One of these misconceptions is that, by keeping God’s law faithfully, we can put God in our debt. By walking the straight and narrow, we can obligate God to bless us or favor us. By obeying God, we have earned our reward, and it is morally incumbent upon Him to produce it, to hand it over, as if it had been justly bought and paid for.

The fact is, though, every arrow we shoot toward the target of trying to earn God’s favor by keeping His law falls way short of the mark. The New Testament Greek word for “sin” is hamartia, and it literally means “falling short of the mark.” St Paul tells is in the epistle to the Romans that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” Some of our arrows, to be sure, get further on down toward the target than others, but they all fall short. So no amount of law keeping can ethically obligate God to even give us the time of day, let alone a heavenly reward.

Another misconception thinks in terms not of results, but of effort. This is certainly a more kindly view. It doesn’t matter that we hit the target, but only that we try really hard, give it our best effort, and get as close as we can. This inclines God to love us, or perhaps only like us, or at least think we’re cute. We could do worse, I suppose, than to be God’s affectionately smiled-at pets, mascots of the kingdom of Heaven. But such a view woefully underestimates the nature and purpose of human existence—we are created, after all, in the very image and likeness of God, to be His friends, not his pets. But more than that, the “A for effort” view of keeping the law betrays a paltry understanding of the purity of God’s holiness. It isn’t that God is arbitrarily mean or cosmically uptight. But by his very nature, in his essential being, God cannot indefinitely tolerate imperfection. He is patient and long-suffering and abounding in mercy. He accepts me, as the song says, “just as I am,” but he does not wish me to remain in that condition! He wants me to be able to hit the target every time, and not ever fall short. And he will not simply move the target in order to enable me to do so. That would not be fair, either to God or to me.

Now, from a negative perspective, there’s another misimpression of what it means to be law-abiding. The experience of many is that the law is a cruel joke, by which God amuses himself by watching us fail. “Oops! There they go again, those silly humans. Won’t they ever get it right?” Or, in a less cynical and more rational mode, the law is not really “from God” at all, but, rather, a projection onto God of the human need for security, for boundaries we can rely on. The courageous thing to do is to admit that all laws are man-made, and while many of them may indeed be good ideas, we are not ultimately accountable to any of them. No law is immune from the possibility that circumstances may justify an exception. The Ten Commandments are, in effect, ten “guidelines” which are good to check in with before making an ethical decision.

Now, I hope I don’t have to tell you that I believe all of these notions—that we can obligate God by keeping the law, that we can increase the chances of God liking us if we try really hard to keep the law, that the law is a cruel joke for God’s entertainment, and the that law is merely a human invention and projection—all of these notions are based on false suppositions. But they arise from an understandable desire to integrate our immediate experience with our search for ultimate meaning, to have our conception of what is ideal for us determined by our prior experience of what is real for us. And so there are fragments of truth and goodness in what is otherwise a nasty pile of selfishness and moral relativism.

The 19th Psalm, which is part of our prayer at this liturgy, expresses in beautiful poetry what I am trying to say through less than adequate prose:  “The law of the Lord is perfect...and revives the soul.” Far from being oppressive or authoritarian, far from being lifeless and technical, the Psalmist sees God’s law as life-giving, refreshing and reviving to the soul, like water flowing through a desert. He goes on to say that the “testimony  of the Lord...gives wisdom”—it gives us practical aid in coping with the bewildering complexities of human relationships. “The statutes”—what more legal-sounding word is there than “statutes”?!—the “statutes of the Lord and just and rejoice the heart.” There is something beautiful about justice, just as there is in an elegantly crafted geometric pattern. Both are a joy to behold. And it is only the law that allows us to see the beauty of justice, that allows our hearts to rejoice thereby.

The Psalmist continues, “The commandment of the Lord is clear and gives light to the eyes.” Eyes tell the story, don’t they? When someone’s heart and soul are whole and integrated, you can tell it in his or her eyes, and vice versa. It is the commandment of the Lord that reveals the integrity of the way we live, a revelation that is visible in our eyes.

According to the Psalmist, then, there is intrinsic good that is made evident in the law. The law refreshes and nourishes and strengthens. To be nourished and refreshed and strengthened are the fruits of a life lived close to the heart of God. In fact, “keeping the law” is a practical description of what it looks like when we align ourselves with the flow of God’s loving energy.  It’s not that the law is an end in itself. We don’t keep the law just for the sake of keeping the law. In fact, our aim shouldn’t be “keeping the law” at all, it should be singing in harmony with God, allowing our energy to flow in the same direction in which his is flowing, letting our hearts assume the shape of God’s heart.

And how do we know how well we are accomplishing these aims? By means of the law. The law is a measuring stick by which we can tell how we’re doing in the process of offering ourselves to God for the purpose of being blessed and broken and given for the life of the world. The law of the Lord is perfect and just and clear. It revives the soul and gives wisdom and joy and light.

Most of us have used a computer program. Even if there’s not an appliance in our home that we call a computer, if we drive a car that’s been built in the last fifteen years, or use a cell phone, or even a microwave, we are, in fact, using a computer. Now, for everything that we use each of these “computers” for, some programer had to sit down and write what they call “lines of code”—hundreds and thousands of individual commands that tell the computer how to do what we want it to do, breaking down complex tasks into simple “Yes/No” bits of information. Of course, when we use a computer, for instance, to support a graphics program capable of creating beautiful works of visual art, most of us are not thinking about lines of code. But the lines of code—prosaic and dull and technical as they are—the lines of code are essential to the creation of the poetic and artistic and transcendently beautiful output that eventually emerges from the color printer.

“Lines of code” describe, in effect, what it “looks like” to be able to create graphic art. It’s the same relationship between God’s law and human moral behavior, human integrity. The law describes what it looks like to be attuned to God’s love, God’s ways. We can’t keep it perfectly. Much of the time, we can’t even keep it well. But by the grace of Christ, we can, in time,  be transformed into people who keep it naturally, without even thinking about it, as part of our redeemed nature. Only then will the law become obsolete. Until then, it’s a good idea to keep the law. Amen.

B: Lent I (2009)

I Peter 3:18-22

          Genesis 9:8-17

            Mark 1:9-13

            Psalm 25:3-9

One of the many things I am grateful for about being the rector of St Anne’s Church is the church building itself.  It’s a beautiful place in which to worship and pray. And one of the features of this building that I am particularly fond of is the shape and configuration of the ceiling. Now, you may have thought I was going to mention the Holy Spirit window, or the baptismal font, or our wonderful acoustics.

But the ceiling?  What’s so special about the ceiling? Well, do you know what the technical architectural name is for the part of the building where the congregation normally gathers?  It’s called the “nave”, which is derived from the same root from which we get “navy”, which makes us think immediately of great sea-going ships. A traditional church building is symbolically conceived-of as an upside down ship. This makes the peak of the roof along the lengthwise axis the keel, and the floor we walk on would be the bottom side of the deck. If you just take your mental picture of a traditional church building and flip it over and set it in water, you can see that the notion makes a certain degree of sense. 

But why? Why think of a church as a ship, and this area as the “nave?” Well, there’s another layer of symbolism here. It goes back to Noah’s ark, which was a ship, of sorts, that accomplished a very specific purpose for those who were inside it.  Our OldTestament reading today is from the tail end of the story as told in the book a Genesis, where the Lord promises to never again destroy humankind by means of  water, and provides the rainbow as a sign of this unilateral and universal covenant that he was making. 

As Genesis recounts this familiar pre-historic legend, the Lord God was disgusted with the behavior of the human race and decided to wash them all away in a flood and get a fresh start.  One family, the family of Noah, was chosen by God to carry on the human species, and to assist with the preservation of all the various forms of animal life, after the destruction of the flood. The Lord told Noah to build a great ark, which he did. And while he was building it, he endured quite a bit of ridiculing and mocking on the part of his neighbors. They thought Noah had gone completely around the bend. Even if they’d received engraved invitations to join him and his family on the   ark before he shut the door, they would have howled in laughter as they refused. 

And then it rained .... and rained ... and rained and the water rose, and the scoffers had serious second thoughts about not having gotten into the ark before it  floated away and left them to drown. But let us not dwell on the fate of those whose ability to tread water was put to the test, because they are not the main event. The main event is the ark. The waters rise, and the ark floats, and those who are on the ark are saved. St Peter, in his first epistle, which we also hear on this First Sunday in Lent, picks up on this imagery of the rising waters carrying the ark and its occupants to safety, and connects it with the sacrament of baptism. Just as the eight people on the ark were saved, as it were, “through water”—that is, by means of the flood floating the ark to its eventual safe resting place, so we who believe in Christ are saved through the agency of water, the water of baptism. This is why the baptismal font is traditionally located near the entrance to the nave, the ark, and why it is customary to mark ourselves with baptismal water when we enter the church building, because it is “through water” that we were admitted to the fellowship of the Church, the Body of Christ. 

Noah’s ark, then, is a prefigurement of the Church.  Indeed, one of the names for the church, in Christian tradition, is the “ark of salvation.” The point Peter is trying to make is that those who are on the ark—Noah’s ark as a prefigurement, the church as the present reality—those whoare on the ark are utterly secure in their hope of salvation. The ark floats. Those who are in it, as long as they remain in it, cannot be harmed by the raging flood.

So the imagery of the church as an ark, which God saves, and, thereby, those who are on it, is incredibly rich. We can scarcely even mine the surface of it today, but let me try to briefly suggest three ways in which the Church is the ark which brings us to salvation.

First, the church is the place, and the only place, where we find the sacraments.  The sacrament of baptism unites us with the dying and rising of Christ and gives us new birth as children of God. The sacrament of Holy Communion, with a boost from Confirmation at some point along the way, supplies the nourishment we need to grow into “adult children” of God.  At various times, most of us find ourselves in positions where the working out of our salvation can be helped along by the sacraments of unction and reconciliation.  The majority of us are called to the sacrament of marriage, which is an abundant means of grace. And with a relative few of us, God chooses to use the sacrament of Ordination to complete the work of salvation. What a life-giving spring the sacraments are, and where else can they be found but in the Church?! 

Second, we find the word of God in the Church. Within the fellowship and worship and discipline of the church, the Word of God is proclaimed, taught, read, shared, and broken open. One can, of course, pick up a Bible and read it outside of any contact with the Church, but it is still because of the Church that that Bible is available in the first place, because the Bible is the church’s book. The Psalm for today’s Eucharist contains the petition, “Show me your ways, O Lord, and teach me your paths.  Lead me in our truth and teach me.” Just where can one be sure to find such leading and guiding? In what context does it normatively take place? Only in the church. St Mark’s gospel doesn’t tell us much today about Jesus’s forty-day sojourn facing temptation in the wilderness, but we know from Matthew that he persistently quoted scripture back to the tempter, to refute his temptations. Where did he learn the scriptures, apart from the “church” of the old covenant, the community of the synagogue and the temple?

And that leads me to my third and final point about how the Church serves as the “ark” of our salvation, which is Christian community. In these days of social fragmentation, with the breakdown of even the nuclear family, let alone the extended family, with the idea of neighborhood functionally non-existent, the hunger for community is stronger than ever. Community has always been at the heart of the Church’s ideal. We have never done it perfectly, and often done it poorly, but to an ever greater extent, it is now the only game in town. The community of the church is a place where we can know and be known, love and be loved, pray and be prayed for, rejoice with those who rejoice,  and weep with those who weep. We are united in the bond of baptism. That makes us family, that makes us community.  And through the sacraments and the word, we have the grace available to us to grow into that reality. 

The call to us this morning, just five days into Lent, is “all aboard!”, ... all aboard the ark of salvation. Don’t trust your ability to tread water, for you will surely drown in the flood. Don’t count on cutting a special deal with God to supply you with your own private life raft. Maybe he will; maybe he won’t. But the only certified method of flood survival is to get on the ark, the ark of salvation, the one holy catholic and apostolic church of Jesus Christ. Amen.

B: Last Sunday after Epiphany (2/22/09)

 Mark 9:2-9

Human beings have an ambivalent relationship with large quantities of water—that is, any amount larger than what a bathtub can hold. As Spring approaches the upper Midwest, with the ever-present threat of flooding, we are even more acutely aware of this ambivalence! Under the proper circumstances, we enjoy being on water and in water. 

But we also realize that it can cause great harm, and even kill us, quickly and without warning. So, in our more organized and safety-conscious swimming areas, we employ lifeguards. When we swim under a lifeguard's gaze, we expect and are reasonably confident that if we get in over our head, or get a cramp, and are thereby put at risk, the combination of the lifeguard's desire to help us, and his or her abilityto help us, and our willingness to cooperate in being helped, will result in our being rescued from the peril we find ourselves in. 

Desire + ability + cooperation = deliverance.

Or, to express it theologically, making God the lifeguard:  God's love + God's power + our faith = protection from whatever it is that might harm us.  God will keep me from getting the flu, or God will get me that job I need, and if he doesn't, it must be that my faith wasn't strong enough or I didn't pray the right way, or ... something. 

Don't we sometimes hang on to rather childish views of God?  We make him out to be something on the order of a Saturday morning cartoon super-hero, who, because he is all powerful and all-virtuous, will see that we really need to win the lottery, and that, after we take care of our need, we’ll put the money to really worthwhile uses—unlike all those others who merely want to win the lottery and would just use the money selfishly. After all, I love God, God loves me, and the Bible says that those who love God are destined to live with him in heavenly glory, and, well . . . let's just get on with it, Lord! Why mess around any longer with all these annoying details of life—like friends who disappoint us and family members who betray us and bodies that get old and fat and wrinkled and politicians than lie to us and thieves that rob us and interminable wars that drop bombs on homes and schools and wedding receptions. Let's just forget about this suffering business and get on to the main event. 

About a year from now, the Winter Olympics will be held once again. I can’t say that I particularly enjoy participating in winter sports, but for some reason I really like watching the Winter Olympics. One of the sidebar human interest stories I like has to do with the participation of athletes from countries we don’t normally associate with winter sports.  Now, maybe they’ve tightened the rules so that this doesn’t happen anymore, but most of these winter athletes from climates where a cold front means  having to put on a sweater when the sun goes down are usually the entire “team” from their respective countries, and generally finish last or near last in their events. Some of them had never even competed prior to their appearance at the Olympics. All they've have to do was scrape together the finances for a round-trip ticket, and there they are, shoulder to shoulder with those who have dedicated major chunks of their lives to earning the right to appear on the same ice or ski slope or luge run.  They have sought to participate in the glory of Olympic competition with a minimum of personal investment. 

If you will make a leap with me from the Winter Olympics to an unidentified mountain in first century Palestine, I will suggest that the holy apostles Peter, James, and John have something in common with Sri Lankan speed skaters and Brazilian bobsledders, and with us... in those moments when we want God be a celestial lifeguard or superhero, and just get us out of all this trivial suffering and take us directly to the heavenly banquet, where, during the after-dinner awards presentation, we'll finally get that golden crown. Peter and James and John are on top of the mountain, and Jesus is mysteriously transfigured, revealing the very glory of heaven, and Moses and Elijah—two of the superheroes of Israel's history—show up as well, and, to top it all off, the voice of God himself booms from on high.  The poor disciples think, “Hey, we're rubbing elbows with some pretty impressive company; this calls for a celebration.  Jesus, how ‘bout we build monuments for you and your two guests, and maybe, down the road, we can charge admission, get a T-shirt concession, sell the movie rights—you know, this could really help out your cause.” 

They didn't get it. 

They didn't get it. Peter and James and John were like athletes from the land of sun competing in sports from the land of ice. They didn't quite understand what was going on, and what their place was in it.  Their befuddlement was not because Jesus hadn’t tried to clue them in to what was happening. Just before climbing the mountain, Jesus had said, point blank, “The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days, rise again.” 

And, of course, after they got down from the mountain, back into the real world, that's precisely what happened. Jesus was nailed to a cross by the bad guys and there was no lifeguard or superhero to rescue him. Daddy didn’t make it all better. And two of the three disciples who witnessed the Transfiguration abandoned him when he most needed a friend. 

But there on the mountaintop, with Jesus’ clothing shining more brightly than any cold water detergent with bleach could ever make it, the disciples thought, “This is it!  We've arrived!  The glory of God has been revealed and pretty soon it’ll flow down this mountain and fill the valley and everyone will see what we see and know what we know. The kingdom has come. All that talk about suffering and dying—well, I didn’t hear him say that, did you?” 

Are you blessed to find yourself on a mountaintop in your life today?  Take care that you don’t start thinking and acting like the kingdom has come for you, that you've arrived. 

In your journey through life, are you currently exploring the valley of the shadow of death, the valley of fear, the valley of anger, the valley of despair?  I will not trivialize your suffering by telling you to “cheer up, this too shall pass.” But I will suggest that your position in the valley is the best possible vantage point from which to perceive the meaning of the mountain. What Peter and James and John did not “get”, what you and I often don't “get” when we’re on top of the mountain, is that the glory of the mountaintop can only be understood in the light of...suffering. The splendor of Jesus’ transfiguration is empty apart from the agony of his death on the cross. So if you're in the valley, look up at the cross, and see that you're in good company.

And don't be envious of those who are on the mountaintop.  You, after all, can see what they can't. You can see that the light show up on that mountain is not the main event, the coming of the kingdom. It’s just a sneak preview. Only from your position close to the cross can you see that beyond and through the cross is glory and splendor that makes the light of the Transfiguration look like a forty watt bulb! 

If you're on the mountain, enjoy it! And take strength from the experience, because the valley still lies ahead of you.

At the winter olympics, there may yet be a Moroccan ski jumper or two, who only first saw a pair of skis last month, and who yet put on the uniform and march into the stadium for the opening ceremonies.  But in the kingdom of heaven, the only path to lasting glory leads through the valley of the cross.  There's no getting around it,  there's only getting through it.  The beginning of Lent closes in on us now, a season when, as a community, we walk that way more intentionally and more  intensely. We do so in the hope that we will thereby be enabled to grow beyond a childish conception of God as a lifeguard superhero who is there to “make it all better”, to a mature relationship with  a God who has became one of us, who suffered with us and for us, suffering which alone gives meaning to the glory which we also share with him. 

Amen.