C: Christ the King

     Colossians 1:11-2

Luke 23:35-43

Jeremiah 23:1-6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why aren’t we shaking in our boots?

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

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

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

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

C: Proper 28

 Luke 21:5-19

II Thessalonians 3:6-13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Saints (2010)

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

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

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

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

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

C: Proper 26

Luke 19:1-10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C: Proper 25

Luke 18:9-14

Jeremiah 14:1-10, 19-22

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

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

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

Getting right with God. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C: Proper 24

II Timothy 3:14-4:5

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

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

All scripture is inspired by God.

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

All scripture is inspired by God.

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

All scripture is inspired by God.

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

All Scripture is inspired by God.

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

All scripture is inspired by God.

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

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

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

C: Proper 23

Luke 17:11-19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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