Sermons at St. Mark's Episcopal Church: Advent 2009-Pentecost 2010
August 29, 2010
Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C Track 1
Jeremiah 2: 4-13
Psalm 81: 1, 10-16
Hebrews 13: 1-8, 15-16
Luke 14: 7-14
The Reverend Robbin Clark
It’s a new academic year in Berkeley and things are buzzing again. The streets are full of folks checking out the town. I stopped into the new Trader Joe’s and it was awash in students. They were checking out the store, yes, but even more, they checking out ach other (and not just in “that” way). New room mates were finding out something of what their life together would be like by negotiating Saturday afternoon grocery purchases.
“Checking out, “orientation”, “having your antennae up”, “keeping your eyes peeled”, “noticing”, “taking it all in”, “doing a rekky”. However we describe the process, it’s what we do to get our bearings. We test our environment by watching all its elements to see how we may or may not fit in, and whether, in fact, we even want to. Sometimes, of course, we don’t have a lot of choice about that. We’ve landed somewhere and we need to make the best of it. Or maybe it’s a serious matter of staying out of trouble or danger in the strange situation. At a very basic level, it’s about avoiding shame or heartbreak or embarrassment. It’s even a way of judging who we ourselves are through people’s reaction to us.
In our Gospel today, Jesus and the other dinner guests are checking each other out. The people were watching this odd and intriguing preacher fellow closely. He was not one about whom people were neutral.
Now, here he was and they could see for themselves what all the fuss was about and make their own decision. We tend to be particularly keen in our observation and assessment of public figures or people we perceive have some power over us. New students size up their processors in terms, not only of, “how much can I learn from this person?” but also, “how much effort will be required?” New employees wonder how hard they’ll need to work and what they’ll get out of it.
If the folks at dinner with Jesus were looking for some clues about what he might ask of them, they were not disappointed. He is quite forthcoming with his advice, both for guests and hosts. It seems he has been noticing their interactions as much as they’ve been observing his. And his tips on appropriate behavior clearly stretch way beyond dinner party etiquette. This is made perfectly apparent when he grounds them in the twin statements, “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” And then, “you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
What he seems to be telling us is that, wherever we find ourselves in a particular situation (guest or host, most or least prominent, giver or receiver), how we should act is determined by a much grander context, in fact an ultimate one. Here again we encounter that juxtaposition of the particular and the universal that is at the very core of our faith. We look to the life of Jesus, what we might term “the human life of God”, to know the parameters of all life. We see in that life lived so long ago and in circumstances so different from our own all that we need to shape our lives today, in whatever context we find ourselves. This is why I think it is so important to have, amid all the good advice in both of our readings from Christian scripture today, the reference to the eternal.
The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews is summing up this epistle with yet another series of admonitions about how to behave in community as followers of Christ. Like St. Paul in his own letters to the various churches, he has lots of practical tips to offer. From them we can readily see that the issues of community life then are not so different from the issues of community life today – proper hospitality, the sanctity of intimate relationships, solidarity with and care for the poor and oppressed, respect for leadership, generosity instead of greed. The author grounds all of his advice in the truth and power of God in Christ and the promises made by Jesus, I will never leave you or forsake you.” And he underlines the fact that we can count on him in any and all circumstances by saying, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”
When I looked at this passage in Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase The Message, I was struck, as I have been with other passages, by the way he put it: “There should be a consistency that runs through us all. For Jesus doesn’t change – yesterday, today, tomorrow, he’s always totally himself.” What Jesus’ being “always totally himself” means for me is that he was always fully open and obedient to God. That’s the thread that runs through everything. It is what grounds and defines him and it is what is meant to ground and define us as well.
Paul writes, “It is no long I who live, but Christ in me,” and, “My life is hid with Christ in God.” This is the basis of his entire ministry. It is the point from which he can reach out to all and sundry. We hear him explain what others branded inconsistency of action by referring back to unity of purpose. He adapts to those he is with at the time to offer them a bridge to being in Christ. We see Jesus himself consistently meeting people where they are in their daily lives but seldom leaving them there. He always offers a way onto the journey of faith, the path of life. The particular things he offers and asks of people vary with their life circumstances. The intention and ultimate destination never change. They are the same, yesterday, today and forever.
What Jesus offers us is the opportunity to share the same intimacy that he has with God and to enjoy it forever. Our way there is to be open and obedient to God in the very way that he showed us in his own life among us. The building blocks of this manner of life are all the examples, stories and advice he gives us. We, like he was, should be always operating out of our most basic identity as beloved and precious children of God. That is who we have been forever and who we will continue to be forever, no matter what our circumstance and even (dare I say?), no matter what our failings.
God’s people have never managed to live fully into their true identity and glory. Just look at what Jeremiah had to say in our first reading. And why was all that good advice and admonition offered to those early Christians unless there was need for them to amend their behavior along those lines? We, especially as we move through transition times into new circumstances, need to discern how to adapt without losing our core consistency. A strongly rooted and nourished tree brings forth the most abundant fruit.
Here at worship is where we come to have our God-given identity affirmed and fed. We can come here with both confidence and humility, but never with arrogance. And we can welcome others here the same way. Humility, the word itself, comes from the Latin root humus, or earth/ground. It is not just being meek or lowly, but grounded. Our true humility springs from our being grounded in Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever. He is the touchstone of our consistency and the source of strength for our adaptability.
So let’s keep checking out our environment and adapting to new situations. Let’s keep our eyes peeled. Let’s notice everything and take it all in so we can get our bearings and thrive in each new circumstance. Let’s meet life as it unfolds. But let’s never forget who and whose we are and what our lives are ultimately about. Let us, like Jesus, be the same yesterday, today and forever. Let us be totally ourselves as God’s beloved children, open and obedient to our Creator. Let us have the true humility of honesty and confidence and generosity as those who count on our Lord as our helper, today, tomorrow and forever.
August 8, 2010
Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C Track 1
Isaiah 1: 1, 10-20
Psalm 20: 1-8, 23-24
Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16
Luke 12: 32-40
The Reverend Robbin Clark
What is our faith?
Is it the statements we recite after I say, “Let us stand and proclaim the faith of the church in the words of the Nicene Creed”? Well, that’s one element of it.
Is it the more expanded content we find in the Catechism at the back of the Prayer Book, entitled there An Outline of the Faith? Or maybe the sum of the Historical Documents of the Church that follow?
Is it all the carefully considered words of our liturgy?
Is it the whole text of scripture, which we affirm to be the Word of God and to contain “all things necessary to salvation”?
All of these things give vital content to our faith, but the real thing isn’t on any page. Our faith is all about the way we relate to God. It’s about the trust we place in God’s promises and how that trust is lived out in our lives.
The author of the Letter to the Hebrews gives us this working definition: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” And he goes on to cite several examples from the history of God’s people. Today’s examples are Abraham and Sarah. But he goes back much further than them to remind us that our fundamental understanding about the nature of the world – that it is God’s good creation, spoken into being before all time – is only revealed to us by faith.
Once we answer that most basic of all theological questions, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”, with the affirmation, “Because God willed it to be so,” we set ourselves on the journey of faith. And that journey always beckons us forward into God’s future for us.
As we see in our readings today, our journey of faith is a journey of conviction and hope, and it is also a journey of accountability. Abraham kept on following the promise by his obedience to God’s call, even as the going got rough and the odds of fulfillment got longer and longer. He gave up his home, his security and his status. Even when he and Sarah remained childless way beyond any expectation of progeny, much less descendents “as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore,” he pressed on in faith. He could have given up and gone back home, but doing so would have cut him off from the hope and conviction that burned in his heart and were more dear to him than any earthly reward. So he and the multitude God brought forth from him journeyed on, generation after generation, anticipating the fulfillment of the promise.
Centuries later, God’s people were still on the journey, God had continued to speak to them through leaders and prophets and through the holy Torah, the teaching of the Law. The one follower became a family, then twelve tribes and then a great nation. And all along the journey there were those who followed faithfully and those who rebelled and forsook the way of righteousness, Isaiah preached to corrupt kingdoms that had lost their integrity before God and would soon be carried into exile. Even their religious rituals had become hollow with hypocrisy. The words from the Lord that Isaiah conveys are laden with anger and disgust for that false religion, but they also contain a plea and a promise. Return! Get back on track! Clean up your act! It’s not too late to come home to the journey into the Kingdom. But you must choose and act. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword.” There must be congruity between word and deed. Rituals must accord with practice. As the psalmist puts it, “whomever offers me to the sacrifice of thanksgiving honors me, but to those who keep in my way will I show the salvation of God.”
By the time of Jesus, the political situation was vastly changed, but the message and the call lived on. The big difference was that the source of the fulfillment of the promise now walked among us to show us the way by word and example. Even as God had called Abraham and Isaiah into faithful following, Jesus called disciples and sent them forth to invite others into faith, right down to our own day. My own sometimes cynical heart lurches with hope and thanksgiving when I hear the words, “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” It’s almost too far-fetched to be believed. Yet it’s what I yearn for most, in and beyond this world. Can I have trust enough in the one who promises to follow in faith? Before each of our liturgies I pray, “Grant that what we say with our lips we may believe in our hearts and what we may believe in our hearts we may show faith in our lives.” It’s a prayer for congruence, for integrity between word and deed. It’s a prayer that treasure and heart will dwell together in service to God’s righteousness and grace. In truth, it is a prayer for real faith. It is a prayer that we will be sure enough in our hope to act upon it, even when the evidence is not before us and the messages of the world threaten to drown it out. Among the world religious, Christianity stands out for its emphasis on faith. Other traditions speak more of practice or observance, while we steadfastly affirm that we are saved by faith and not by works. Now, it is abundantly clear that we cannot “earn” our own way into heaven by ourselves: salvation is a gift from God and our trust in that promised gift opens our way to receiving it. Throughout the gospels, we see Jesus proclaiming both the gift and the responsibility of salvation. Like Isaiah, he had no patience with empty words and rituals. In fact, the one thing that made him really irate was religious hypocrisy. That should give us pause.
We who worship week after week are called to live the words we say, and this is no easy task. God wills to give us salvation, but how shall we open ourselves to receive it? Jesus’ first counsel is to be generous and get our priorities in order. I know I’m not the only one going through a major downsizing process right now. Sometimes it feels a lot like loss, but every now and then I sense an amazing freedom in it. I can understand why Jesus instructed his followers to travel light, to share what they had and not to be anxious about possessions. It’s much easier to trust without all that baggage.
Jesus’ second counsel is to be alert and ready at all times to welcome God into our lives and offer service. The appearance of the Almighty cannot be predicted any more than the intrusion of the thief, but our persistence in being attentive and generous can make Jesus’ return a lot more welcome. God cares little for “spit and polish”, but a great deal for everyday acts of faithfulness. So, where does this leave our faith/works distinction? It’s not that one is on the page or on our lips and the other is what we actually do. They can’t be separated like that. True trust in God must show itself in faithful action. The “blessed assurance” of which Susan will sing in a few moments must issue in behaviors of compassion, generosity and justice, or it will offend rather than please God. We would not be here if we did not yearn for what God has promised. Let us, by faith, set out for that place which God has promised, that “better country” we so desire. May our “assurance of things hoped for” be strong enough to make us “cease to do evil, learn to do good” day by day as faithful followers and servants of God, that the One who has called us will not be ashamed of us.
August 1, 2010
Tenth Sunday After Pentecost,, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C Track 1
Hosea 11:1-11
Psalm 107:1-9, 43
Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21
The Reverend Arthur Holder
When I was a child I saw a television show that has stuck with me across the years. In the opening scene a well-dressed man carrying a briefcase is running through a train station, obviously anxious to catch a train that is about to leave. He bumps into an old woman in rags who is selling pencils in the lobby, and she asks him if he wants to buy a pencil. But he shrugs her off without a word and jumps on the train.
Once on board the man takes a seat by the window and begins to read a newspaper, turning immediately to the stock market report. But soon the rumbling of the train and the clackety-clack of the wheels begins to lull him to sleep, and his head begins to nod. After a few moments, a hand touches him on the shoulder. Irritated at being awakened, the man holds out his ticket, thinking that the hand belongs to the conductor. But instead a deep voice says, “Mr. Brown, you’ll have to come with me now. It’s time for you to go.”
“I don’t get off until Springfield,” says Mr. Brown. “No,” says the voice, “I mean it’s time for you to go. This is the end of the road for you, I’m afraid.” Looking up, Mr. Brown sees that is talking not to the conductor but to a rather handsome young man with a distinctly other-worldly look. “Are you an angel?” he asks. “Something like that,” says the young man.” Now, you really must come with me.” “Well,” says Mr. Brown, “I had planned to live on a little while longer, but if it’s time, who am I to argue? To tell the truth, I was getting tired of this old rat race anyway. OK, let’s go.”
The next scene shows Mr. Brown and his escort walking around in the middle of a bunch of snowy white clouds. And then all of a sudden, out of the mists come four men carrying a kind of stretcher with a kind of throne on which is seated the life-size figure of a woman made completely of glass. Then from another direction come four more men carrying the immobile figure of a man made completely of gold.
Mr. Brown turns to his escort with a puzzled look and asks, “Who, or what, are they?” The answer comes: “Why, that is Mrs. Jenkins and Mr. Burrows. In the other life she devoted herself to collecting rare antique crystal, and he spent all of his time speculating in the gold market. So here they have become what they loved the most. It is our custom, you see.”
“What about me, then?” asks Mr. Brown. The escort smiles in reply: “We had to think about you for quite a while. It seems that you really loved nothing but money. So we decided to turn you into green paper. We are on our way to the transforming station right now.”
“But this is horrible!” says Mr. Brown. “I never thought heaven would be anything like this! Some angel you are!” “Oh my good man,” says the escort, “this isn’t heaven. This is hell! And I was an angel once—they called me Lucifer, the prince of light—but that was a long time ago.”
Holding his head in his hands, Mr. Brown begins to sob. “What a fool I’ve been, wasting my life on things that don’t really matter. And now it’s too late. But it may not be too late for my son. I must tell him before he ends up the same way as me. Let me go to him and tell him that he must love people so that when he comes to the other world he will be human. At least let me try!”
“I’m sorry, it’s too late for that now,” says Lucifer. “He can’t see or hear you now. Maybe if he had had your living example, there might have been some hope for him. But now, well, I expect you’ll see him here too in a few more years.” At that, Mr. Brown begins to shake his head in utter misery and cry, “No, no, no, no!”
Suddenly the scene shifts back to the train. The conductor is standing over Mr. Brown and shaking his shoulder. “It’s OK, sir. You must have fallen asleep and had a bad dream. Here we are in Springfield. I believe that’s your stop.”
In amazement Mr. Brown gets up and climbs off the train. Walking through the Springfield station, he is stopped by a beggar who asks him for a dime for a cup of coffee. Reaching into his pocket for his wallet, Mr. Brown says, “Sure, here’s a dollar. No, here’s five dollars. Listen, why don’t you just take the whole thing? I don’t need it. And thanks. Thank you very much!”
“We become what we love the most.” There was some pretty good theology in that old television show, I think. We really do become what we love the most, and it often takes a confrontation with the specter of death to convince us about what really matters in life. But we can go a bit deeper with the help of our scripture lessons this morning.
The prophet Hosea tells of God’s loving-kindness even in the face of Israel’s betrayal. Like a mother who teaches her children to walk or lifts them up in her arms to feed them, God cares tenderly for the people. But they have gone astray by sacrificing to the Baals and offering incense to idols. Their problem is a form of that misplaced allegiance we call “idolatry”—the worship of gods that are not truly God. Our word “worship” comes from the Middle English “worth-ship”; to worship something is quite literally to give it worth—to consider it of value. To worship an idol is to accord ultimate value to something that is not of ultimate significance.
In the letter to the Colossians, Paul exhorts us: “Seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.” Then he goes on to warn us against sexual immorality, anger, and greed (“which is idolatry”). Why does he identify greed with the worship of idols? Because our craving for wealth and worldly goods can lead us to treat the ephemeral as if it were eternal, the penultimate as if it were ultimate, the creature as if it were more valuable than the Creator. We don’t have to wait until we come to the point of death to get our priorities straight, for in baptism we have already been raised with Christ. “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”
In the gospel, Jesus refuses to act as judge between two brothers who are squabbling over their inheritance. “Beware of greed,” he says. Not “beware of possessions,” but “beware of greed over possessions.” People often misquote Paul to the effect that “money is the root of all evil,” but what he said was “the love of money is the root of all evil.” (1 Timothy 6:10)
So it is in the parable Jesus tells, where the man does not appear to have gained his riches dishonestly. His problem is not with the riches themselves, but with the selfishness that is so evident in his very self-absorbed language: “What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops? I will do this: I will pull down my barns and store my grain and my goods and say to my soul: relax, eat, drink, be merry.” But neither the goods nor the soul were his to keep, were they? “So it is,” says Jesus, “with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
It is all a matter of priorities: What comes first for us? What really matters to us? What is going to endure? The way we answer those questions will actually determine not only the fate of our soul, but our very identity. A wise saying attributed to the Buddha is this: “The mind is everything. What you think, you become.” The biblical perspective is similar: “The heart is everything; what you love, you become.”
Love money and the things that money can buy, and you will become a thing yourself. Love people, and you will become human. Love God, and you will become divine. May our loving God grant us grace to become what we were created to be: the very image and likeness of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be glory, honor, and praise now and to the ages of ages. Amen.
July 11, 2010
Seventh Sunday After Pentecost,, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Amos 7: 7-17
Psalm 82
Colossians 1: 1-14
Luke 10: 25-37
The Reverend Robbin Clark
It’s one thing to know what to do, and quite another thing to actually do it. Awareness doesn’t always line up with opportunity, will power or the courage of our convictions. In our collect today, we beseech God on both accounts, asking that we “may know and understand what things [we] ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them.”
Sometimes our struggle really is to know what to do in a given situation. This is especially true in our information age. A plethora of news and social media bring to our attention formerly untold situations around the globe and closer to home, and in detail that ranges from horrifying to stultifying. (Do we really need all those tweets and posts?) And even the important stuff can push us into paroxysms of guilt and frustration and eventually over into compassion fatigue and paralysis. We feel we know way too much about way too many things than we can actually do anything about. And to complicate matters, we know how to do way more things than we know whether to do. Insight does not always keep pace with information.
But this first part of the problem is not the chief concern of our readings today. Each of them deals with a leader trying to bring about right behavior in those for whom he feels some responsibility. I’m casting the net of definition intentionally wide here, so that we can all get caught in it. Responsible parents try to equip their children with the values and character that will help them make good decisions and act faithfully, honorably and generously as they mature and go out on their own. Fine teachers and mentors want more than to stuff their students’ heads with facts. They want to impart true wisdom and discernment, that the knowledge they share will be used aright. The best among bosses and managers are on the same kind of quest.
Amos, Paul and Jesus each have their own method of putting their message across in the stories we have just heard. And, though each of them, like we ourselves would, have employed a range of different approaches at different times, today’s vignettes illustrate three distinct choices.
Amos uses what we could call the “stick” approach. It’s about scaring people into change. He sees faithless and unrighteous behavior all around. The people God saved in Egypt and guided to the Promised Land have become a great nation, a “contender” on the international scene. And it has gone to their head. They have strayed from God’s ways and they will pay for it. Amos is here to denounce their bad behavior and to warn them of their impending destruction and exile. The king’s puppet “prophet” doesn’t want to hear it and banishes Amos from the royal sanctuary. No one loves a whistle-blower. The thing is, all that Amos predicted, did come to pass. Maybe it was only then that those who had heard God’s prophet’s warning “got” the message and saw what they should have done to change. And it’s an even bigger maybe that they remembered when things got back on track and kept those changes going.
Fear and threat can be quite effective at compelling behavior, but they don’t really help internalize motivation. Which is to say, they don’t help people grow up or mature to the point where they choose the good on their own. For that, a more positive approach is needed.
Paul gives us that in the introduction to his letter to the Colossians. In contrast to Amos’ “stick”, he offers the “carrot”. He is full of praise and affirmation for the “saints and faithful brothers and sisters in Christ in Colossae”. He has high hopes and expectations for them. They are always in his prayers. He reminds them of the great gift God has bestowed on them and is full of confidence that they will respond appropriately. He speaks as one “with” them, rather than Amos’ “over against” stance.
This approach is akin to the vision process we undertook last year using the appreciative inquiry method. Building on the good that is already present, we imagined what St. Mark’s would be like if those qualities become the pervasive norm. Now we are making a conscious effort to bring that vision into practice. It is a journey of invitation, unlike the treat or compulsion of the stick. It relies on people bringing their best selves forward and building each other up, and it is based on our already sharing the faith, hope and love that Paul emphasizes in writing to the Colossians. That is, it is grounded in the belief that we already know what we should be doing.
Jesus’ approach is along these lines, but he takes it a step further. He is the full living model of what he is teaching. And he also seeks to empower his questioner to learn and grow for himself. He does this by means of two skillful question and answer interchanges as well as by the story itself. The parable of the Good Samaritan, unique to Luke, has passed into our cultural consciousness and been enshrined in laws that protect those rendering emergency aid in the face of our litigious society. The phrase “good samaritan” has come to include anyone who does a spontaneous good deed, but the original example story packed a much stronger message. Samaritans were outcasts, foreigners deemed unrighteous unfaithful and unclean by the establishment. No one would expect any thing good from them. At the same time the priest and Levite were not necessarily villains. They probably thought they were being prudent and responsible. How often have we ourselves opted “not to interfere” as a bad situation unfolds before us?
But let’s go back to the reason for telling the story. From the start, we are tipped off that the lawyer’s question was not straightforward, but rather a test for Jesus. Jesus turns the question back and receives a fully satisfactory answer, which he commends. It could have ended there, but for the questioner’s ulterior motive. “Who is my neighbor”, he asks, and Jesus tells the story. At the end, he returns to the question, but with a twist. It’s no longer, “who is my neighbor?” but “which of the three was a neighbor?” Here Jesus shows his genius as a teacher. The lawyer again has the correct answer and is again encouraged to put it into practice. The growth comes in the switch from a self-justifying attempt to limit accountability to an open-ended call to show mercy.
We, with the ancient students of God’s holy Law and as sharers in the inheritance of the saints in light”, really do for the most part know what we ought to do. We are to love God with all we’ve got and our neighbor as our own self. It’s pretty darn difficult to figure out how we might go about that, given the complex situations we face, but our major hurdle is to make our actions conform to such knowledge as we attain. Sometimes a carrot and sometimes a stick can motivate us. But the only thing that can truly keep us motivated is the internalization of the example set by Jesus.
If we look at the story of the Good Samaritan, we can see behind it a bigger story. It’s the tale of a traveler from another country who finds the children of humanity broken and beaten up by life and the structures of society turning a blind eye. He binds us up and gives us into each other’s care, providing for that care out of his own resources and promising tocover whatever additional cost is incurred when he returns.
That promise offers us both grace and power to renew our efforts to live what we profess. God has taught us. God has shown us. God has given us resources and promised to make up the difference when we fall short. But it is up to us to act faithfully and show mercy. We know it. Blessed are we if we do it.
July 4, 2010
Sixth Sunday After Pentecost,, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
2 Kings 5: 1-14
Psalm 30
Galatians 6: 7-16
Luke 10: 1-11, 16-20
The Reverend Robbin Clark
William White, rector of Christ Church, Philadelphia and later the first Bishop of Pennsylvania and the first and fourth Presiding Bishop of our newly-formed Episcopal Church, was almost alone among the Church of England clergy in the American Colonies to side with the proponents of independence. It was not a decision he took lightly. He, along with his fellow priests, had taken a vow of allegiance to the English crown as a part of his ordination service. Yet he believed passionately in the cause of liberty and saw no way it could be achieved within terms of the colonial situation he saw around him. He longed for a cooperative way forward, but those in power across the sea seemed oblivious to the plight of the colonists. The taxes mounted and the church never deemed it worth sending a bishop to lead the faithful and provide confirmation and ordination without the expense and peril of the long sea voyage. His loyalties were in conflict, but William White was clear about what really mattered. On July 4, 1776 the Continental Congress, with White as its chaplain, signed and published the Declaration of Independence. That same day in London, King George made only a short entry in his diary. It read: “Nothing of importance happened today.”
Well, a lot has happened in the intervening 234 years. Since the conflicts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, mother and daughter countries have been staunch allies. As in any family, the relationship includes a complex mix of mutual envy and resentment, whether it’s about accents, economics… or bishops. Like William White, I truly hope we can find a way forward together, with mutual respect, affection and forbearance.
As a card-carrying anglophile myself, I am particularly delighted to welcome to St. Mark’s today the choir of Hertford College, Oxford and their Chaplain, Leanne Roberts. Whichever side of the “pond” you call home, I hope you will all take some time to get to know each other at coffee hour. Such personal encounters are the real adhesive of our Anglican Communion, and I count them among those things that really matter. Because we are together, no one could write of this July 4, “nothing of importance happened today.”
“What really matters” is a theme that pervades our readings today. And the answer is clear. God, and our relationship to God is what really matters. It matters more than power or success and even more than miracles of healing. When the seventy returned from their mission trip elated by their success in conquering demons, Jesus puts things in perspective for them by reminding them, “Nevertheless, do no rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” St. Paul, likewise, as he winds up a letter packed with assertions, exhortations and instructions for the Galatians returns to what really matters. “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything.”
The sharp-eyed among you may notice that I had to amend the first reading by half a verse to illustrate how Naaman’s physical healing by Elisha brought about his spiritual conversion as well. This is perhaps the most important of the many themes in this marvelous story. Beyond the lessons of reversal (did you notice how the wisdom figures are the servants and not the masters?) and humility/keeping it simple, not to mention God’s care for the outsider and the uselessness or even danger of dealings based on wealth, suspicion and power politics, we are reminded that the appropriate response to God’s self-revelation is worship and faithful service. It was not only Naaman’s flesh that was made new by submission to the living God, but even more importantly, his soul. He could well join the singer of the psalm in praising God’s mercy toward him and vowing to give thanks to God forever. His deepest healing was, in truth, of the whole structure of his relationships, beginning with a right relationship with his Creator. One hopes that the wisdom of the servants has now rubbed off on the master and that, even as he returns to his high position, he will do so with a new humility and consciousness. That’s what really matters.
So, how do we, in the position we ourselves occupy, show forth what really matters? Both Jesus and Paul provide instructions to disciples about life within the community and beyond its borders. Let’s take a moment to consider what they are and how to apply them.
Paul reminds us not only of our personal responsibility for the decisions we make (and that they have real and lasting consequences), but also of our interconnectedness. “All must carry their own loads,” but we are also to “bear one another’s burdens.” The truth of this juxtaposition is everywhere in evidence but it came home to me especially when I participated in a pilgrimage across northern Spain. There is a saying among those on the road to Santiago de Compostela, “Everyone must walk her own Camino.” Each individual’s journey and what it means is intensely personal. Yet it is inextricably linked with the journeys of all fellow pilgrims, past and present. I could not have done it without my own group or without the chance encounters I had along the way, or without the tradition itself that I was able to enter into and draw from. Because we are irrevocably linked together as the Body of Christ, it matters that we treat each other with gentleness as well as honesty. It matters that we be personally accountable and also that we pitch in for the common good. It matters that we have integrity and perseverance and we do not do thing for show or for self-aggrandizement. As Paul says, “as for those who follow this rule, peace be upon them, and mercy.”
But our lives are not lived solely within the community of faith. We are always to some extent “on mission” beyond its borders. We are sent to all those places where Jesus wants to be, sort of as letters of introduction. He tells us to travel light and to lead with peace. How hard it is not to take all our baggage with try to defend ourselves with it against the new or different. Think Naaman and his entourage. Jesus asks us to be as vulnerable as lambs in a pack of wolves but to have the courage of our convictions no matter what the response. We are to offer peace, share fellowship, bring healing and then move on and let God do the rest. What really matters is that we show forth our own trust in God and invite others into that same relationship. This is how we demonstrate the nearness of God’s reign. It’s how we show how well we understand what really matters.
And it’s plenty hard for individuals and close communities. Is it even possible for nations, or Communions? Only if it bubbles up from us. Only if we show ourselves as wise as the servants in Naaman’s story. Only if we address those in power with both humility and conviction. Only if we travel light, jettisoning all our own excess baggage, and if we lead with a word of peace.
Then all will know that the reign of God has indeed come near.
June 20, 2010
Fourth Sunday After Pentecost,, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
1 Kings 19: 1-15a
Psalm 42
Galatians 3: 23-29
Luke 8: 26-39
The Reverend Robbin Clark
Good morning. It is lovely to see you all and to be back among you after my travels. As most of you are aware, I’ve just returned from three weeks in the UK. I bring you greetings from some of our shared friends over there. Yit and Stephanie send their love from Scotland, where they have settled in well, including the addition of two darling kittens to their household. Ian and Kate and Lydia and Charlotte have finally put down permanent roots near where they had been renting in West Somerset and Kate is becoming quiet the rural expert with her gardens and the recent acquisition of five chickens. Between those two geographical extremes, Les Acklam and Tim Brown send their best from Lincoln and Cambridge respectively. In addition to these and other delightful visits over the first fortnight of my trip, I attended a week of continuing education in Salisbury, one of the places where our choir will be on tour next summer. The conference was about clergy leadership looked at from an organizational systems perspective. We examined how we could take an authentic leadership role in light of who we are as persons, the combined elements of our various overlapping contexts and the ultimate aims of the system within which we had been called to leadership.
As you can imagine, with all these recent experiences and inputs swirling around in my jet-lag-addled brain, not to mention rocketing through the 293 emails and foot-high stack of regular mail yesterday, I’ve found it a bit hard to integrate all these readings into a coherent message. They are pretty disparate, I must say. If we look beyond Elijah’s touchstone experience on the mount of God, we see references to a huge maelstrom of violence and political intrigue without and a paralyzing bout of depression and paranoia within. The psalm provides a very appropriate picture of his situation as well as pointing us toward a positive way forward.
Our Epistle shows us Paul winding up his great argument for justification by faith and offering his amazing proclamation of Christian liberty. He calls us to move beyond all the “custodial” restrictions of legal and societal structures. While those have had their place and use, the coming of Christ and the new life we share in him is of an entirely different order, one bound only by the centrality of our trust in and faithful following of Jesus.
Our gospel passage offers a dramatic exorcism and an equally striking pair of responses, one from the community and another from the healed man himself. The man, who calls himself “Legion”, taking his identity from the host of demons that possess him, has lived long in torment and isolation. His “home”, if you could call it that, has been with the dead, the unclean. The good people of the town had guarded and shackled him, perhaps for his own safety but likely even more for their sense of security. The demons themselves engage with Jesus and strike a bargain to transfer to a herd of pigs that they proceed to destroy. The people react with fear and press Jesus to leave. One wonders if that was more about trepidation that Jesus’ power would next be used to shake up their own lives, or anger at the economic losses to the swineherds. The glaring absence is of any joy or gladness about the healing of their once-tormented neighbor. Meanwhile, the man himself begs to become a follower of Jesus but is told to stay in this own context as a proclaimer of God’s saving deeds. He remains there and tells everyone how much Jesus has done for him.
You have to admit that there’s an awful lot going on in these four passages, and it is in no way possible to massage them into one tidy message. At the same time, I see some commonalities. One is the contrast between violent turmoil and calm. Elijah, as the Lord’s prophet in a time of both religious and political apostasy and evil-doing, has been embroiled in all sorts of intrigue and danger. He has set himself over and against the faithless King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, a devotee to the pagan god Baal, blaming the country’s drought on their actions. He has bested the queen’s prophets in a contest of competing prayers for a sign from God and then slain them. Now he flees from her threat of revenge. In his terror, he asks to die and then slips into the dangerous combination of self-righteousness and self-pity and resentment. “I have been very zealous for the Lord”, he says, while everyone else has forsaken the covenant. He counts himself as the only faithful one and deeply resents the pressures he is under. The word of the Lord summons him to an encounter with God. All manner of natural violence and upheaval (wind, earthquake and fire) follow. And all of them were associated with God’s self-disclosure. But God wasn’t in those upheavals. Instead, God comes to Elijah in a “sound of sheer silence”, or, as we say in Hymn 653, “a still, small voice of calm”, and directs him toward the next phase of his ministry. One hopes that he could, at last, find peace.
I see the same transformation in Legion. After the violent tumult of the demons is over, he is found sitting quietly at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. There is something about resting in the peace of Jesus that frees us from the struggles of this world and from our inner turmoils. It gives us a new perspective and a new serenity. I wonder if it is too much of a stretch to suggest that Paul is pointing to something similar when he speaks of being clothed with Christ and, thus, being able to move beyond the polarities that so often set people against one another- polarities of gender, social position, or race/ethnicity/religion. And maybe Paul is saying that coming to this new place of faith and trust moves us beyond the need for laws, which imprison and guard in order to protect us from the worst in ourselves and in each other.
Of course, it’s not easy to arrive or to stay there. As fervently as we may desire to trust and follow Jesus and to rest in his peace, we are constantly beset by fears and by all the forces of the world that wreak violence and division. We worry and we try to escape or protect ourselves. Sometimes it’s pretty hard to hear the voice of God consoling and directing us amid all the external and internal roar; be it of earthquake, wind and fire or of all the laws and disciplinarians that shape and constrain us.
Tomorrow is the first day of summer, a season associated with rest, refreshment and renewal. With our liturgy today, we switch into a somewhat scaled back mode. My hope is that we can use this time to listen for the presence of God in our lives and grow into a fuller following of Christ.
While working with these readings, I couldn’t get John Greenleaf Whittier’s text (at Hymns 652 and 653) out of my mind. I offer it as a meditation on how we can open ourselves to receive Christ’s presence and move from tumult to calm in our own lives.
Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
forgive our foolish ways!
Re-clothe us in our rightful mind,
in purer lives thy service find,
in deeper reverence, praise.
In simple trust like theirs who heard,
beside the Syrian sea,
the gracious calling of the Lord,
let us, like them, without a word,
rise up and follow thee.
O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
O calm of hills above,
where Jesus knelt to share with thee
the silence of eternity
interpreted by love!
Drop thy still dews of quietness,
till all our strivings cease;
take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of thy peace.
Breathe through the heats of our desire
thy coolness and thy balm;
let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.
Words: John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)
Music: Rest
June 13, 2010
Third Sunday After Pentecost,, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
1 Kings 21:1-10, (11-14), 15-21a
Psalm 5:1-8
Galatians 2:15-21
Luke 7:36-8:3
The Reverend Arthur Holder
Several years ago, I attended a diocesan ordination service at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. It was an inspiring liturgy, but the service went a little long, and after a couple of hours, during the third communion hymn, my mind began to wander. So I took refuge in one of my favorite pastimes, which is trying to interpret the symbolism in a church’s stained glass windows.
From where I was sitting with the other clergy in the south transept, I couldn’t see very much. I couldn’t see the high altar, or the bishop, or any of the congregation beyond the third pew. And I couldn’t see very many of the windows, but directly across from me there was a window that caught my eye. So I began to puzzle over the symbolism, trying to figure out which female saint it depicted.
There were several clues, which fortunately I was able to interpret because as a medieval church historian I have studied Christian iconography for many years. The first clue was that the saint was a young woman with long flowing blonde hair, wearing a bright red cloak. The second clue was that she was carrying a large yellow jar filled with oil. And the third clue was that right next to her there were big red letters that spelled out the name M-A-R-Y M-A-G-D-A-L-E-N-E!
This window in Grace Cathedral shows three scenes supposedly from the life of Mary Magdalene, the famous New Testament saint. At the bottom (in reading stained glass windows you always need to start at the bottom) she kneels before Jesus as he sits at a table filled with food, and she anoints his feet with oil from the jar while she bathes his feet with her tears and dries them with her hair. (This is of course based on the story in our gospel reading for today.) In the middle scene, she is once again at the feet of Jesus, this time gazing intently at him as he teaches, while in the background another woman with a scowl on her face is carrying a platter of food. And in the scene at the top she is with Jesus in the garden beside the empty tomb on Easter morning, just at the moment when she recognizes him and reaches out to embrace him in joy.
Now the only problem with this traditional symbolism for Mary Magdalene is that the three scenes in that window actually come from gospel stories about three different women. The first person to see the risen Jesus on Easter was Mary Magdalene, all right, but the one who listened to Jesus’s teaching while her sister worked in the kitchen was Mary of Bethany, and the one who anointed Jesus’s feet and bathed them with her tears was the unnamed woman, identified only as a sinner of the city, who came to Jesus while he was dining at the home of Simon the Pharisee.
The conflation of these three different women into one Saint Mary Magdalene goes all the way back to Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century. Perhaps one reason for the confusion is that Luke’s gospel does indeed mention Mary Magdalene just two verses after this story about the woman who anointed Jesus’s feet. But we actually know very little about this woman with an alabaster jar of ointment. In fact, we may think we know more than we do!
Luke says she was “a sinner,” and generations of interpreters from antiquity to the present have assumed that means she was a prostitute—as though women can’t be guilty of any other kind of sin. For all we know, she could have been sick and therefore unclean, or she might have been employed in some trade that brought her in contact with unclean Gentiles. Whatever her sin was, it couldn’t have been too apparent just from looking at her because Simon the Pharisee thinks to himself that if Jesus were a prophet he should have been able to identify her as a sinner. (Note the irony here: Simon is thinking that the prophet Jesus should be able to know the woman is a sinner, while Jesus is reading Simon’s own thoughts so that he knows all about Simon!) Presumably the townsfolk knew her story (whatever it was), but Jesus would have had to be clairvoyant—or the Son of God.
When Simon complains that Jesus should not have let such a woman touch him, Jesus does what he does so often in these situations: he tells a story. Once there was a banker (says Jesus) to whom two debtors owed money. One of them owed the banker $1,000 and the other owed him $10,000. If the banker forgives both debts, which one is going to love him more? Simon has no trouble answering correctly: “Well, I suppose the one who owed the most will love the most.”
“Right,” says Jesus. “Now apply that to our situation here. Do you see this woman?” Simon thinks he sees her, but he doesn’t really. He looks at her and he sees only a sinner, someone unclean and unwelcome, an intruder in his house and an outcast from his community. But when Jesus looks at the woman, he sees someone full of love. And where does that love come from, if not from having been forgiven?
Notice that Jesus doesn’t say, “She has demonstrated love for me, so I have forgiven her.” What he says is: “Her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love.” There is no contradiction here of what Paul says in our reading from Galatians, no question of the woman earning forgiveness through her act of devotion. She is simply a joyful recipient of God’s unmerited grace.
The fourth century preacher Ephrem the Syrian captures her essence in a poetic sermon when he says: “The sinful woman rejoiced when she heard that [Jesus] . . . was feasting in Simon’s house . . . . She beheld the Sea of Grace, how it had forced itself into one place; and she resolved to go and drown all her wickedness in its billows.” She loves because she has been forgiven, and she rejoices to drown her sins in the Sea of Grace!
So what happens to Simon? Does he get the point of Jesus’s little parable? Does he apologize to Jesus for failing to show him the courtesy of washing his feet? Does he apologize to the woman for judging her on the basis of her sinful past instead of her forgiven present? Does he become a disciple who joins Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Susanna and the twelve men in following Jesus on the road? We will never know, because Luke doesn’t tell us. I think he wants us to realize that the question we need to ask is not “what did Simon do?” but “what are we going to do?”
Are we qualified to be disciples of Jesus? There are only two prerequisites: you have to be a sinner, and you have to know that you are a sinner. If you have sinned, you can be forgiven. If you are forgiven, you can love. If you love, you can follow. And if you follow, you have some good news to share.
So go and tell the people that whoever they are, wherever they are, no matter how far they may have fallen, God in Christ has come to them like a billowing Sea of Grace. And this is what God has to say to them and to us all: “Your sins are forgiven. You are loved beyond measure. You are precious in my sight. You are my daughter, my son, my friend, my beloved, my joy and my delight. Your faith has saved you; now go in peace. Your sins are forgiven; now go forth in love. Run to drown your sinful sorrows in the Sea of Grace.”
May 23, 2010
Pentecost (Whitsunday), Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Acts 2: 1-21
Psalm 104: 25-35, 37
Romans 8: 4-17
John 14: 8-17, 25-27
The Reverend Robbin Clark
“Hail thee, festival day!”
And welcome to all who have gathered to celebrate this third great festival of our faith. Pentecost bows only to Easter and Christmas in the liturgical calendar and shares with them the central focus of Christianity, which is life. Our God is the God of the living. God is the author of life, the only answer to the mother of all theological questions, “Why is there something instead of nothing?” Within the created order, God formed humanity in the divine image. In the life of Jesus, God offered the ultimate self-revelation.
At Christmas, we celebrate the human birth of Jesus. In many ways it’s the most intimate and appealing of our festivals because we are all suckers for a baby and can’t help feeling a sense of awe at the miracle of a new life. And we can relate to it because we each started out that way, and many of us have brought a new human life into the world.
But, as important as this natural birth is, it is only the first of the three births every one of us is offered. And it inaugurates the most basic of the three kinds of life to which ware called, our natural human life.
On Easter, the Queen of Feasts, we celebrate the gift of eternal life, opened to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus. This is harder to wrap our mind around than natural life, because death seems so final. We have at best, hints from the other side. There are those life-after-life reports to support the visions of the mystics and promises of the prophets. And above all, we have the assurances of our Lord himself. He offers “living water, welling up to eternal life.” He promises that, where he is there we will be also. Even as he was glorified by being lifted high upon the cross to draw all people to himself, we will be lifted to the nearer presence of God at the hour of our own death. Our life will be changed, not ended, and the day of our death will be our birthday into eternal life.
Today we celebrate the third kind of life we have in God, and that is our common life as the Body of Christ. Pentecost is often called the birthday of the Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery that has been brought into being by the gift of the Holy Spirit. This Advocate, this Spirit of truth, is the promised gift of Jesus. But the Spirit’s presence stretches back to the dawn of time, hovering over the chaos and animating all that was being created. It is the very breath of God, carrying forth the words of the prophets, conceiving the Word to be made flesh in the womb of Mary, blowing where it wills, even as the wind. Now, it rushes upon the disciples with fiery force, transforming them from a fear-ridden band of forlorn followers into astounded and astounding apostles and proclaimers of God’s great Good News in Christ.
It is this same Spirit that is given to each of us as we are born anew in baptism and made in heritors of God’s promises by divine grace and love. By water and the Spirit we are marked as Christ’s own forever and called to trust and follow him all our days. Today, it is our delight to assist at the birth of five new Christians, some quite close to the moment of their natural birth and one not so much. But that proximity doesn’t matter. What counts on their and our part (because everyone here will promise to do all in our power to help “raise” them in the Christian life) is how their lives will come to resemble the life of Christ.
This journey into Christ is one that we share with them, for no Christian is ever “done” living into the baptismal covenant. Doing so is always a work in progress. We know we can count on God to do God’s part, since God’s promises are faithful and true. But what about our promises? How are we to help one another and these new Christians to be faithful and true as well?
The baptismal covenant, which the rest of us will renew in a few moments as we join our promises to those being made by the candidates and sponsors, provides us with a blueprint for the Christian life. We are to faithfully and consistently participate in the life of the church, with its teaching, its prayer and its sacraments. We are to pursue righteousness, to notice when we have gone astray and to turn ourselves back toward God and God’s ways. We are to be living illustrations of the Good News of God in Christ, both in deeds of love and service and in efforts toward justice and peace. This is the life-long vocation of every one of us who has been through the waters of baptism and sealed by the Spirit. And it is to that same Spirit that we turn for help in the fulfilling our vocation.
Last week, amid all the musical splendor and auction excitement, we uttered what is for me one of the most heartfelt prayers among all of our Sunday collects. Set between the days of Ascension and Pentecost, it speaks to our situation as well, as people who are not always in touch with God’s power and presence in and among us. “Do not leave us comfortless,” we prayed, “but send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us.” Today we celebrate the answering of that prayer.
It is fitting in this season of commencements and in the academic milieu of Berkeley that the Spirit’s coming is couched in terms of education. Today’s collect affirms that it is the light of the Spirit that teaches the hearts of the faithful. And Jesus’ words of promise in the Gospel advise his followers that, “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.”
So what do we learn from and through the Spirit? We learn that we have something amazing to claim and to proclaim. As Paul reminds us in today’s Epistle, “all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” We are not slaves or objects before God but are joined to God as family, sharing fully in the divine inheritance, be that of suffering or of glory. And we learn that one of the first elements of our inheritance is that we have a story to tell. The Pentecost event shows us the gift of the Spirit as the power to proclaim God’s greatness and love, even across all the boundaries by which the world would divide us. Just as Jesus always meets people where they are, the Spirit-filled apostles were able to communicate with all manner of people in ways familiar and ‘native’ to each. We are called to the same by bridging gaps and breaking down walls. Remember, baptismal life is common life, life in community, open and inclusive. Only by living such a life can the church truly be the Body of Christ.
But maybe you identify more with the crowd than with the apostles. Maybe you’ve even had your moments of sneering and disdain for the Church. I comment to you the question on the lips of those who were amazed and the perplexed by it all, “what does this mean?” Probing for deeper meaning and significance, looking for the “question behind the question” or the “story behind the story” will inevitably engage the Spirit who is able to teach your heart and perhaps open the door to faith and following. And the quest for understanding has healed many a breach.
On this festival day, we hail not only the gift of the Spirit, but the gift of our common life, the life into which Elaine, Jackson, Wesley, Colin and Arthur are being born today. This life is the one that bridges the other two, natural and eternal. The Christ, we are forever brothers and sisters in God’s great family. May we continually open ourselves to be taught and live this truth.
May 9, 2010
Sixth Sunday of Easter, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Acts 16: 9-15
Psalm 67
Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5
John 5:1-9
The Reverend Robbin Clark
“Where there is no vision, the people perish”
Well, this Eastertide, we are in no danger of that. Our readings from the Book of Acts have been punctuated by visions vouchsafed to Peter or Paul to move them forward in their ministries. And the Book of Revelation is one long series of visions experienced by the exiled John on Patmos. It’s a kaleidoscope of often-obscure images and symbols. John sets forth both the justice and the mercy of God and he points to the promise of eternal bliss that awaits those who call upon the Lord.
The focus of our blessed face-to-face encounter with God is the heavenly city, the new Jerusalem, site of the celestial throne of God and the Lamb. The worship is sublime, a spectacle of white-robed saints and angels singing praises to God. The city itself is portrayed as a bride, all beauty and joy and splendor.
Now we learn more about it, though not quite so much as if we had heard the eleven verses of detailed description that have been dropped out by the framers of the lectionary (and not unwisely, I’d say). They tell of the vastness and perfect symmetry of this jewel-encrusted enclave and give us that enduring image of the streets of heaven being paved with gold.
The thing that hits John right off the bat is that there is no temple there, no specialized place to encounter God in a veiled and, thus, protected way. This must have been particularly striking at a time when the Old Jerusalem Temple lay in ruins. And it had to call to mind Jesus’ sayings about rebuilding the Temple in three days, referring to his resurrection. The next thing we note is a series of juxtapositions with the original created world, the Garden of Eden. And it’s worth paying attention to the fact that the vision of the final consummation of all things is not another garden, but a city. What could be more convincing evidence that God has taken seriously the whole human endeavor, and especially the fact of community. Cities are places of profound interdependence. They can show forth the best and the worst of people in relationship to one another. Despite the idolatrous aspiration of Babel and all the problems of the ages, the city is to be where we dwell with God forever. But this city won’t ever need to shut its gates for safety. All will be welcome, and all the best of all the nations and rulers of the earth will be drawn there.
But getting back to Eden, we see that the very first fiat of creation, “Let there be light,” is no longer needed. The light of sun and moon have given way to the direct radiance of God. What does persist, however, is the river of the water of life, flowing from the throne of God and watering the trees of life on its banks, trees meant for nourishment and healing.
It’s good to take a moment to reflect on what this river is all about, since water turns up in all our readings today and in the anthem. And they are just a few of the myriad water references in scripture. Water is what we cannot live without. We can fast from food for weeks, but without water, we die in a few days. No one knows that better than the people of a desert land, so it’s no wonder that visions of safety and plenty and even survival are couched in terms of bubbling springs and flowing streams. It’s no wonder that Isaiah’s prophecy of salvation invites all who are thirsty to come and drink, or that Jesus offers the woman at the well “living water” to satisfy that thirst that no number of buckets from her well will slake. It’s no wonder that Paul would look for a prayer meeting beside the river in Philippi or that the stirring of the water in a city pool would be associated with healing. And it’s no wonder that our great sacrament of new birth and initiation into Christ’s body the Church is by water, invoking the Holy Trinity and trusting in the gift of the Spirit to strengthen us for ministry. Water is indeed what we cannot live without, on so many levels, so it is the perfect central feature of the holy city.
John’s vision of the New Jerusalem is an attempt to describe that which is essentially beyond all description. His mystical experience took him places his senses could not and even his creative mind couldn’t really wrap itself around what had happened, much less communicate it to others. But he does his best, using ideas and images we can relate to, but putting them together in a way to help us encounter the totally other for ourselves. It reminds me of a formative experience of mine from seminary days. As a student chaplain in a hospital, I worked with a young patient who had twice nearly died and twice had what has been termed a “life-after life” experience. It had transformed his life and faith and he was eager to share it with me. He would launch into description, then stop and try again, and then begin in a new way, then shake his head in exasperation. Finally he just threw up his hands and said, “It’s no use. I can’t tell you about it. You just don’t have the categories to understand.” I imagine John felt that way. They are both correct. We don’t have the categories. Not yet. We have art and poetry and music to help us toward what I’d have to term “apprehending” more than understanding, but for now we’ll still need to walk by faith and hope for occasional hints.
Peter and Paul’s visions in Acts are more like those hints. They are less wholesale mystical transports than divinely provided insights that point the direction ahead. In today’s case, Paul has a vision of a Macedonian asking his help. He and Timothy had not been having much luck where they were, so they sailed over and ended up preaching to some women gathered by a river. It’s the first leap of the gospel across to Europe from Asia Minor and it bears fruit right away in the person of Lydia, a well-off business woman. God moved her to listen and to act. She and her household were baptized and her home became the apostles’ headquarters there.
Lydia is an excellent example of that “good soil” that receives God’s word and bears abundant fruit. Such folk are amazing blessings to the church, and I’m so grateful that I’ve encountered several throughout my ministry, including right here at St. Mark’s. I don’t know that any of them would say they had a vision that spurred them to faithful action. Maybe they’ve been caught by beauty, or spurred by a sense of outrage at injustice. Maybe they’ve experienced unexpected healing or strength and want to give back. Maybe it just seems “right” to be generous and compassionate and to work for justice and peace.
Luckily, we have our gospel story to remind us that we don’t have to show a lot of initiative or achievement for Jesus to heal and save us. The man by the pool seems a bit of a weak character. Even Jesus, aware of his situation, is moved to ask if he really wants to be healed. His response is mainly an excuse and, even later in the story, he doesn’t seem to “get it” about how he might respond. But still, he was healed. God’s grace is for all sorts. That’s a big consolation when I reflect on ways I’ve failed to follow Jesus fully, or to do/be all that I could for God.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the relevance of vision for our current life at St. Mark’s. I don’t know of any wholesale mystical transports, but I’ve seen and heard of a lot of graced experiences and holy hints associated with our visioning process. God moved many to participate and gifted the committee with talent and commitment. Now comes the effort to bring the real lived experience of this parish in line with the vision. I urge you to emulate Lydia more than the man by pool and take an active role in bringing the vision to pass. I hope you will all participate in the vestry circles and give your best to the upbuilding of this part of the Body of Christ. To do so is the way of life.
April 25, 2010
Fourth Sunday of Easter, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Acts 9:36-43
Psalm 23
Revelation 7:9-17
John 10:22-30
The Reverend Arthur Holder
“Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by His blood, to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory and blessing. Blessing and honour, glory and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever. Amen.”
According to the Revelation of John, when we get to heaven we will spend all day singing these words from the final chorus of Handel’s Messiah. And since there is no night in heaven (Rev. 22:5), that means we will be singing eternally without end: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain.” So if we are going to be ready to take up our parts in the celestial choir, we should probably study up on what this song means.
The “Lamb that was slain” is Jesus, whose death on the cross during Passover season was interpreted by the early church as a sacrificial offering. “Behold the Lamb of God,” said John the Baptist, pointing to Jesus. “Behold him who takes away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29) Like the Passover lamb in the ancient ritual, Jesus was innocent and spotless. We are delivered from sin by the pouring out of his blood, just as the Hebrews were saved from death in Egypt because their doorposts were splattered with the blood of the Passover lamb.
Both the final chorus in Handel’s Messiah and the canticle (Dignus es, BCP p. 93) that we sang at the beginning of the liturgy today come from Revelation chapter 5. But our second lesson includes a reprise sung by angels and saints in chapter 7. While the white-robed choir is singing and waving their victory palm branches before God’s throne, one of the elders tells John the Divine (the author of the book) that these are they who have come out of the great ordeal. That is, they are the martyrs who have suffered for the sake of Christ and his gospel. “They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
Remember that the Book of Revelation was written at a time of terrible persecution. Christians were being burned alive, torn apart by lions in the arena, and crucified. People wanted to know: Where is Jesus now when we need him most? When is Jesus coming back? Who is Jesus for us when we are suffering? And the answer is: Jesus is the Lamb who was slain but raised again to life. And what will Jesus do for the victims of the earth? Soon and very soon, he will come again to feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty. He will provide shade from the burning heat, and he will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Then comes one of the most remarkable verses in the entire Bible: “For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd.” How can a lamb be a shepherd? That is like saying that the patient on the operating table will be your doctor, or the preschool child will be the principal of the school. Lambs are small and weak and helpless. Shepherds are strong and protective, and they carry knives and staffs to ward off enemies. As we have seen, in the Bible the lamb is a sacrificial victim. But the shepherd was the traditional symbol for a king. So how can Jesus the Good Shepherd also be Jesus the sacrificial lamb?
This is a paradox—an apparent contradiction of a sort quite common in Christian theology. In the second century, Melito of Sardis marveled that Christ could be both sheep and shepherd; at once slave and Son; a baby in Mary’s womb while clothed in divinity; on earth yet in heaven; a newborn infant but nonetheless eternal; poor yet infinitely rich; hungry but feeding the whole world; standing as a prisoner before Pilate while sitting at the right hand of God the Father; nailed on the tree of the cross yet still Lord of the universe.
But there are different ways of understanding such paradoxes, and in the case of the Lamb who is our Shepherd, it makes a tremendous difference how we read. Consider these options on a multiple-choice quiz:
- Christ appeared to be a Lamb, but is really a Shepherd.
- Christ was temporarily a Lamb, but later became a Shepherd.
- Christ is a Lamb to some people, but a Shepherd for others.
- Christ is a Lamb on the inside, but a Shepherd on the outside; or vice versa.
Which option did you choose? Well, I hope you said “None of the above,” because all of those are heresies! The church confesses that Christ is both divine and human, both Priest and Victim, both Shepherd and Lamb, all at once, indivisibly, until the end of time and forever.
The truth of the Christian paradox is that Jesus is the Lamb and the Shepherd in such a way that he redefines both terms. From now on, it isn’t either/or, not even both/and, but the two are simply one. This Lamb sits on the throne, and this Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
And the paradox is not just about Jesus; it applies to us as well. Like the martyrs, we too are supposed to wash our robes and make them white in the blood of the Lamb. Like Peter in the gospel we heard last week (John 21:15-19), we too are commanded to tend the flock of Christ and feed his sheep. Like the saints in Revelation chapter 14, we are to “follow the Lamb wherever he goes.” (Rev. 14:4)
In recent weeks, we have seen examples, both good and bad, of a church leader—a pastor or shepherd—trying to be a follower of the Lamb. In fact, the bad example and the good example come from the same person. I am thinking of Pope Benedict XVI and his response to the scandal of the sexual abuse of children by priests in his church. As shepherd of the flock, Benedict knows that he is also supposed to be a lamb. So at first he tried to present himself as a victim by blaming the media for reporting about the abuse. Whatever his motives may have been, the result was that he came across as a false shepherd who cared more for his own reputation than for the lives of the sheep.
But last week Pope Benedict was on the island of Malta where he met privately with eight men who had been victims of abuse by priests. He listened to their stories, and he cried with them, and he prayed with them, and he told them that he was deeply sorry for their suffering. Most importantly, he promised them that he would do whatever he could to make sure that nothing like that ever happened again. And within days the Vatican announced that bishops should report offending clergy to the police, and the Pope accepted the resignations of a bishop in Ireland who had covered up abuse, and a bishop in Austria who had committed such abuse himself.
Again, we don’t know the Pope’s inner motives, and we can certainly wish that he had taken decisive action long ago, without waiting for all the media pressure. But we can be glad whenever leaders in any church do the right thing, and we can recognize that true solidarity with the victims means honoring their experience of suffering by working for justice on their behalf.
You see, heaven is not just singing choruses from Handel’s Messiah into eternity. It is that, but not just that. Heaven is singing and praising God together, in company with all those other sheep. Heaven is living fully into the Christian paradox as we find it in that lovely prayer attributed to St. Francis: “For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” Does that make sense to us—not intellectually, maybe, but spiritually? If so, then maybe we are learning how to follow that suffering Servant who is also our resurrected Lord.
In her book Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris tells of a Benedictine sister keeping vigil at the bedside of her dying mother. The nun tries to comfort her mother by saying, “In heaven everyone we love is there.” “No,” her mother responded, “in heaven I will love everyone who’s there.”
Things will be different in heaven because we will be different. And we will be different because the Lamb at the center of the throne will be our Shepherd.
April 18, 2010
Third Sunday of Easter, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Acts 9: 1-20
Psalm 30
Revelation 5: 11-14
John 21: 1-19
The Reverend Robbin Clark
“Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.”
If Easter is about anything, it is about a new beginning, a fresh start. This season calls us to celebrate (to feast on, if you will) the triumph of life through love. Out of the despair of Good Friday comes the joy and victory of Easter. We know and affirm that theologically, even when we’re having a hard time getting there in our own heart, mind and spirit. We see it repeated all around us in the renewal cycles of nature and that also helps us deal with loss due to the non-renewable life cycle of creatures.
Our scriptures today are filled with stories of turn-arounds and fresh starts. First, we have the iconic story of Saul’s conversion from treat and murder-breathing enemy of Christ and his followers to their most eager and far-reaching apostle. Our psalm reminds us that healing and restoration did not begin with Jesus, but had been part of God’s dealing with us for as long as we have called upon divine aid. The exiled John on Patmos was gifted with transformative visions of the exaltation and worship in store for him, and for us, in our eternal reunion with God. And our Gospel gives us a two-fold story of abundance, presence, restoration and call.
Let’s look at how these stories play out and what we may be able to take from them. Saul/Paul’s conversion is one of the most dramatic in the Christian Canon. Some of us even wish something that flashy would happen to us to strengthen our faith. We speak of “being knocked of our horse” by an insight (though no horse is mentioned in any of the five accounts we have of this incident). The phrase “scales fell from my/his eyes” has passed into our lexicon as a metaphor for sudden awareness. Many have delved into a psychological analysis of Saul’s inner state, but the scripture itself tells us nothing of that.
What we do know is that an enemy is transformed into a brother. And we see that this change, this new beginning, does not happen in isolation. First, Saul, blinded by his vision (odd concept, that), is forced to rely on his travel companions to get him to town. I don’t imagine helplessness and vulnerability were big elements of his usual experience. He was organized, zealous and purposeful, qualities he did not lose in his post-conversion life. But for now, for three days (not a coincidence, I’d say) he is entombed in darkness and dependency.
Next, the nascent Christian community is brought into the picture in the person of Ananias, a disciple in Damascus. He also is given a vision, though not a blinding one. It’s puzzling enough, though, and Ananias doesn’t shrink from questioning the Lord’s directive. “Maybe you don’t know this guy,” he intimates, “he’s really bad news. You don’t want to be dealing with him.” But the Lord reiterates the request and assures Ananias, essentially, “Just do it, I have my reasons and I’ll handle him.”
What really impresses me about Ananias is not just that he does as he is commanded, but that, solely on the strength of God’s prompting, his initial greeting to Saul is, “Brother.” That’s powerful. How hard it is to transform fear and enmity into kinship!
Maybe you’ve tried it so you know how very difficult it can be. We don’t readily move past that “once-burned, twice cautious” response and let go of all the rationales and devices by which we demonize and then defend ourselves against the “other”. We’ve hung onto such responses as individuals, as a nation, as a church, not to mention on the basis of all those prejudicial categories we pray about every week on our prayer list. And as long as we continue to do it, we are falling short of our call to resurrection living. New life through love is as much about moving beyond our prejudice and fear as it is about overcoming grief and loss. Anaias sets the bar pretty high for us.
But Saul’s response is equally impressive. Sight restored, he submits to baptism and joins the very community he was on his way to exterminate. And you know that not all of them were going to be as magnanimous as Ananias. It takes a fair amount of courage to engage with folks who have every right to see you or who and what you represent as the oppressor, the enemy. You can take some pretty hard knocks. But you will be in good company. It has always been so for prophets and saints. It was certainly so for Jesus, and he keeps his promise to walk with us through it all, should we dare to go there.
Both this story and the Gospel make it clear that conversion is not just a one-time thing, and it is not confined to one’s initial turning to Christ. In fact, as St. Benedict discerned when he was promulgating his Rule for his monasteries, conversion of life is a daily quest for all who seek to walk in the way of Jesus and to live his resurrected life. We see this in the story of Peter’s encounter with the risen Lord back in Galilee. “I’m going fishing,” he says, and the others opt to go with him. Maybe it was a way to restore some normalcy to life after all that had gone on. Perhaps they thought that the wild ride with Jesus during the three years they were together had now come to an end, and they figured it was best just to pick up where they left off. It’s hard to tell, since we’re not given any more psychological data for them than we were for Saul. But we do know that plugging into concrete tasks, especially familiar ones, can stabilize us during a crisis or a loss.
It had been an unproductive night on the boat, but a stranger on shore offered a fishing tip that brought big results. The eye of love discerned it was no stranger, but the Lord. True to form, Peter leaps into action and comes to him and they all have breakfast. But Jesus has some unfinished business with Peter. His “Rock” had thrice denied him in his hour of trial. Now he presses him three times to affirm his love. And each time Peter does so, Jesus directs him to show it by nurturing his ‘flock’ of disciples. Then he warns Peter that it will not be easy and it will not be all about him or according to his wishes. As the Lord promised Ananias regarding Saul, “I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name,” Peter gets a clear message that resurrection living will be a challenge.
I suppose Jesus gave Peter a few moments to take it all in. But then, as if to emphasize the new beginning, the fresh start, he issues the same call as he had at the outset, “Follow me.”
“Follow me.” It’s the same invitation Jesus has for all of us, whether it knocks us blind or creeps up on us gradually and with great subtly. “Follow me” into a new life, one filled with new beginnings and fresh starts. “Follow me” to a place of turn-arounds and of reversals and restoration, where “weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.” “Follow me” into a daily quest for conversion of life. “Follow me” into the vulnerabilities and consolation of life in community. “Follow me” into challenge and feast. “Follow me” into resurrection living.
April 11, 2010
Second Sunday of Easter, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Acts 5:27-32
Psalm 118: 14-29
Revelation 1:4-8
John 20:19-31
The Reverend Ellen Ekstrom
It’s low Sunday, but spirits are high – Jesus is risen and we are glad indeed. And here we are again to hear more of this marvelous story. Here’s a recap:
“. . . and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and the all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary, the mother of James, and the other women with them who told all this to the Apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. . .”
No idle tale, is it? And now the story continues from last week’s Easter gospel; it doesn’t end with a shadow on the beach, or a close up of a shroud in a grave as Hollywood gives us; the news spreads, the imperial government and its Temple collaborators get nervous, the excitement and joy builds. The story continues in the Book of Acts, Paul’s letters, the anonymous writings of first century Christians and not-so-anonymous persons, and in the lives of everyone who has heard the Good News and proclaimed it. The story has an epilogue, and we are it.
We are those who have not seen and yet, have come to believe. Jesus’ blessing on those who come to faith without the necessity of sight or touch is not a chiding of Thomas for his lack of faith at that moment, but an affirmation of the generations who have relied on the Word and Thomas’ actions for their faith.
Thomas is called the Doubter. He was bold to have stood before his friends and fellow disciples to say, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Where did this come from? Was it that Thomas still didn’t get it, or was it grief, fear or shame taking up space in his heart and mind? His teacher and leader had been executed as a criminal, after all; perhaps he didn’t want to believe for fear of what it meant – crucifixion. Or, it was grief at the loss of someone he loved taking hold and putting him into denial. Perhaps all of the above. We don’t know why Thomas wasn’t with the others when Jesus first appeared to them – there’s no clue – but it begs the imagination, doesn’t it? He might have been going out for food for the rest, but what if he engaged in the work Jesus called him to, in full sight of Jesus' persecutors. Imagine Thomas saying, "Yes, you killed him! But it doesn't kill the message or the meaning! Here I am, doing exactly what he was doing! What are you going to do about it?"
But he is called Doubting Thomas and that nickname has become an appellation for those of us who steadfastly refuse to believe or take at face value what we cannot see.
Haven’t we all at one time, questioned what we’ve been taught or told, or seen, especially when the hour and the day are dark and feel without promise? When those moments come, God puts into play or reveals something that turns one from being faithless to faithful, something like the Resurrection. Remember Paul’s words to the Hebrews: “now faith is a well-grounded assurance of that for which we hope, and a conviction of the reality of things which we do not see.”
Faith requires that we who have not seen, believe. Belief that the Kingdom is here and now, belief that God is always with us.
God came to us in the form and blessing of Jesus. So many prophets came before Jesus claiming to be the Christ but they slipped away into obscurity, suffered ignominious deaths like Jesus. What made him so different?
He was who he said he was. He did what he said he was going to do. The resurrection of Christ gave new life to humanity, to those who believed. What was promised by Jesus in his teaching was and is being lived out. The apostles, the first followers of Jesus, proclaimed the good news of the Kingdom - what Jesus promised in his teachings and ministry was made true. The followers of Jesus live out the new commandment - that they love one another as Jesus loved them, and in attending to the needs of one another, what Jesus commanded was made tangible and real.
The apostles became the leaders of the movement and strived to live as they were taught, showing that “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a great family of different people, living together, loving one another and all living in equality.” What Jesus demonstrated in his ministry was kept alive by the faith, belief and right action.
And this is where we come in.
We are now the disciples, called to keep the Good News in play, to keep the Word in our hearts and minds, and to keep it alive. How you and I do this depends on the gifts God has given each one of us, and how the Spirit moves within us.
We’re always looking for new ways to proclaim the Gospel, to tell the story, to keep it fresh and alive. Jesus walks with us every step of the way - sometimes we have to open our hearts and minds a bit wider to see him, get past our own wounds so that we can see his. No, we haven’t seen the five wounds except in artwork and in scripture, but we know they are real. Every time we say ‘peace be with you,’ Christ says it to us. And when I send you out at the end of the service to go in peace to love and serve the Lord, I mean it. Again, how you follow through is dependent on what you called to do.
It’s time for us to pick up our pens and continue the story. What will you write on the page? Perhaps it will be to say that you and I can see Jesus working in our lives and we are continually blessed by that grace - sight unseen.
Let’s show the world in thought, word and deed, that Christ is our Lord and our God – show the world that we believe.
April 4, 2010
Easter, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Isaiah 65: 17-25
Psalm 118: 1-2, 14-24
Acts 10: 34-43
Luke 24: 1-12
The Reverend Robbin Clark
Alleluia! Happy Easter!
These words of triumph trip joyfully off the tongue today. And well they should, for it is our great feast. But Easter greetings are not limited to the church. Christians and non-Christians alike greet one another this way. They keep the rituals of Spring with new outfits and family gatherings. There are bonnets and brunches and Easter egg hunts. There are flowers galore, not to mention all those jelly beans and chocolate rabbits.
In fact, it almost seems wrong to keep Easter in weather like this. It’s not warm enough. It’s not dry enough. It’s not bright enough. Creation isn’t cooperating, and what’s with that? I’ll tell you what. This just in: Resurrection is profoundly unnatural. It flies in the face of all we know about the created order. And, despite all appearances, Easter is not a fertility rite or a festival of Spring. All the loveliest features of Spring, all the flowers and bunnies and chicks, all the pastel outfits and pastel eggs in the world do not make it Easter. No more than the chill and darkness of mid-winter make it Christmas. Maybe we’d find season and celebration easier to tease apart if we lived south of the equator where Christmas is a mid-summer event and Easter comes amid preparations for winter.
So, if Spring doesn’t make it Easter, what does? It’s Easter when the church says it’s time to proclaim the Resurrection once more after the Lenten journey. Today Christians all over the world are exclaiming the “Alleluia”, buried for those forty days. In addition to that glad shout and “Happy Easter!”, we exchange the greeting “Christ is risen! The Lord is risen, indeed!” or, in the ancient tongue, “Christos anesti! Alethia anesti!”
I can say that this year, but it’s a rarity that Eastern and Western Christians mark our greatest common feast on the same day. Most years our observances are separated by one up to four weeks, all because we’ve never been able to agree on what combination of calendrical circumstances make it Easter. So saying the church’s proclamation makes it Easter doesn’t pin it down that well. The problems started in the second century and aren’t done yet. First was the question of whether to follow the Jewish calendar and fix Easter on fourteen Nisan, the day of the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb. That lost out to the sense that Easter really needed to be the celebrated on a Sunday, the first day of the week, and that has held constant since. But which Sunday? The Council of Nicaea separated the calculation of Easter from the Jewish calendar and eventually got us to the formula we now use: the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox (or autumnal, if you’re south of the equator, but that naturally emerged later). However, many Christians in the East still felt that Easter had to follow Passover, and that distinction still leads to different dates most years.
Meanwhile the Celtic church developed a different calculation from the Roman Church and needed the Synod of Whitby to sort that out. And then there was the shift from Julian to Gregorian calendars. As recently as 1997, the World Council of Churches tried to get everyone to agree. They offered a new formula that was to take effect in 2001, but it still hasn’t been implemented. So, I guess it’s Easter when one’s own particular church says it’s Easter.
Ah, but exactly when? We have the date, but what about the moment? The other day, someone asked a group of us for advice on a dilemma confronting him. Having given up chocolate for Lent and now having been invited to a dinner party Saturday evening, if the dessert was chocolate, could he eat it? Does Easter start with sundown Saturday or at midnight or at sunrise Sunday? We have no way of knowing when during that span Jesus was raised. I always count Easter form its proclamation at the Great Vigil, which is one reason I insist on a great party right after it. Remember, in this season we are compelled to feast!
In Jerusalem, the moment of Easter is when the new fire is carried from the Holy Sepulcher by the ecclesiastical patriarchs of the Greek, Syrian and Armenian churches. An almost carnival frenzy builds among the devout, both residents and pilgrims from around the world, as they await the fire and then try to light their own candles from it. Last year Israeli police estimated the crowd at 40,000. You can check it out on You-Tube. I actually think that would be my preferred method of participation.
So, if it isn’t Spring that makes it Easter and the churches can’t seem to come to consensus on either the day or the moment that it becomes Easter, maybe we should turn to another source. Maybe we should take our cue from on high and ask, when is it Easter for God?
Ok, that is a bit of a trick question. Ever since that first momentous morning, it has always been Easter for God. The raising of Jesus inaugurated the new creation, one not bound by the cycles of nature or institutional fiat. God’s Easter births us into God’s eternal presence. Even as we continue to live in the world around us, we can know ourselves not to be bound by it. Even now, we have one foot in the new heavens and new earth envisioned by Isaiah. We are close enough to touch that place where there is no more pain and sorrow; no cutting off of life; no war and conquest; no violence and oppression; no natural or societal enmities; no hurt or destruction. Peter had the same kind of vision – no more partiality or exclusion; an abundance of healing and forgiveness; great new beginnings out of seeming dead ends and best of all, God’s own intimate presence with us forever.
So, perhaps the most important turning of the question of “what makes it Easter?” is not by reference to the seasons or the natural world, and is not determined by communal or institutional practices. Perhaps the most important question, given that God is always offering new life, is: what makes it Easter for each one of us? How does that all-important transformation from death to life become real for us?
I think it needs to happen both communally and personally. As a person whose life is closely entwined with the liturgical seasons, I know that something inside me lifts and lightens when Easter is proclaimed. My context shifts and I begin to shift with it. That’s one of the reasons we need to keep strengthening anti-discrimination legislation. Changed context changes hearts. But our internal rhythms aren’t necessarily those of a law or a community or a calendar. Joy and hope rise at their own pace after being “killed” by pain, fear, anger, depression or grief. The moment they do, it is Easter. The women who came to the tomb that first Easter morning were terrified and perplexed. And, nobody believed them. Peter had to check it out for himself. Sometimes transformation takes a while. He went home amazed. And, for him, the amazement didn’t stop. He went from one transformative experience to another as he dove deeper into the widening circles of God’s love. Every encounter with the risen Lord opened him up further.
This is the way it is meant to be for us. We entered Lent with a story of transformation and we exit it the same way. Jesus transfigured on the mountain top becomes Jesus raised form the dead. Glory leads on to glory. Our task as Christians is the grow into the likeness of Christ, and this means letting God transform even our darkest moments with the light of divine love. Easter is the perfect time to celebrate and enter into that love, to offer our whole selves to be lifted and lightened, and to be transformed.
What makes it Easter? The power of God’s love makes it Easter, and that love knows no season. It is unceasing. What makes it Easter for us? Our turning toward that love, like a flower to the sun or a slender green shoot poking from the earth. Our trusting in that power to hold and guide us and lead us to eternal blessed ness. Our letting our lives be so transformed by Christ that we dedicate ourselves to healing and transforming the world.
May this season live in you and be a very happy Easter indeed.
April 2, 2010
Good Friday,, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Tom Poynor, Canterbury Chaplain
All of the strife of the day, three hours of physical torture on the cross, seventeen hours of betrayal, isolation, mockery, contempt, beatings and heartbreak and now the silence.
Those followers bold enough to stay with Jesus and those who watched as secret friends complete the bare minimum of burial rites and head home for the Sabbath.
Darkness and silence.
In C.S. Lewis’ novel “Till we have faces” the main character asks<
“Why must holy places be dark places?”
Indeed this holy space is dark. John’s gospel dwelling so much on the interplay of dark and light puts us in darkness from the beginning of the passion account. When Jesus is arrested we are told lanterns were needed to discover the one called the light of the world, the legal proceedings take place at night and when Mary of Magdala returns to the tomb early on the first day of the week it is still dark.
We are involved in a three day liturgical pilgrimage, and we have the grace to know where it ends - yet in this time we are invited to enter the dark, the cloud of unknowing and ask
“why must holy places be dark places?
There is not, nor will there ever be a satisfactory answer to the problem of pain and suffering. There are many small answers that work circumstantially but never one answer that will work all the time. One can try and put a redemptive spin on hurt and mumble with a wincing smile that whatever doesn’t kill me can only make me stronger. Small comfort.
John’s gospel presents us with a Jesus in complete control of his surroundings, ordering all things and yet to those on the ground it still must only seem senseless tragedy.
How can we stare at the cross and not be reminded of the people in Haiti, in Chile, in Darfur, in Palestine, in Afghanistan, in Richmond, CA, in Greensboro, AL, in Berkeley who are seemingly permanently affixed on the cross?
They come to the tomb while it is still dark.
Who do you know on the cross? When have you been on the cross? How many times have you been on the cross? Are you on the cross now?
I once spent a year there. I could not go to sleep at night because of the awful loneliness in my soul. When I did sleep it was too short and when I awoke the loneliness was still there.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”
I could barely eat and lost almost 40 pounds
“I can count all my bones.”
1700 years ago a believer told us “What is not assumed on the cross is not healed.” The only consolation I took was knowing that my sorrow was there on the cross.
I once read of an 87 year old woman who faced uncertain and exhausting medical tests. She experienced a vision: Walking through the hills of Galilee she found Jesus teaching a crowd. Intending to just listen on the fringe, Jesus looked at her directly and said “What do you want?” The woman replied, “Could you send someone to come help me stand up after the tests, because I can’t manage alone?” Jesus thought for a minute and said, “How would it be if I came?”
The only answer God gives us in dealing with pain is the message of the incarnate Word who dies on the cross, who says “How would it be if I came?” The only way I could trust in my valley of despair was to know that Jesus walked this path as well.
On Easter we will not recognize the risen One until we see the wounds…we are reminded indeed that Jesus did experience this full life. My namesake Thomas wanted to touch those wounds, but we are never told that he actually did. I think all he needed was to know that Jesus could say, “I know how you feel, my heart broke too” and mean it.
And still for many in this world the hurt is too great and the wounds are all that are seen.
Why must holy places be dark places?
Although the darkness seems to be about mortality, I contend today is about natality.
This dark place is holy because it is the place of birth.
In writing about the horrors of the Nazis Hannah Arendt confronted natality. Arendt wrote “every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only “message” which the end can ever produce.”
In truth, our faith is about this thing, this natality. John’s gospel throughout is about natality - about birth and new life. “You must be born of the water and the spirit to see the reign of God.”
In the church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Jesus was buried, in Jerusalem is found a stone called the omphalos or the navel of the world.
On the cross we are experiencing the birth pangs of a new humanity, the tomb where Jesus is laid will be the wellspring of this new life.
Many people on that Good Friday never saw the birth, all they saw was the death of a failure. As Macbeth says, “out, out brief candle, life is but a tale of sound and fury, told by an idiot signifying nothing.” Again and again I have conversations with students who struggle with a sense of meaning and purpose for their life. I too ask these questions of my own life. How do we hope in the future when our time seems to be one of such darkness?
One of the great voices of this post-modern age, Jacques Derrida has said we must hope without expectation. The only way hope may appear within our horizon is as the wholly other.
The wholly other has appeared on the cross. From the cross, the Word made flesh does not see betrayal, the Word sees only family. “Woman behold your son,” to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” The other desires union, through union with the other birth may happen.
On this tree, at the navel of the world on the last day of creation before the Sabbath humanity is recreated as a family. Eden is restored.
Natality happens.
Jesus fully empties himself, as the evangelist insists upon when noting the pouring forth of blood and water. At the base of the cross in the navel of the world life is restored and a new family is made. Our faith begins in the full giving of Jesus, the complete emptying of a human life.
The water and the spirit are the signs of new life and new birth in John’s gospel. In this passion account Jesus gives up his spirit and water pours forth.
We too are the nameless mother and disciple. We too must take the wholly other into the house of our soul. The only counter to the angst of our time we have is this story, the story of the wholly other who said, “how would it be if I came?” and at what seemed to be the darkest moment this other who was one of us began the restoration of humanity.
We do not do this just for the peace of our soul, though that is a necessary starting point, we do this because in this world on this day many people are waking up early while it is still dark. For many people it is perpetually Good Friday.
We must enter the dark and holy space, the fertile birthing ground of the world, and because through the darkness, through the emptying, through the pouring out of living waters we have become one with the wholly other. We may then proclaim with joy and hope – the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
April 1, 2010
Maundy Thursday., Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14
Psalm 116:1, 10-17
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
The Reverend Arthur Holder
What really happened on that first Maundy Thursday evening when Jesus had supper with his disciples? Of course we know the two main things that Jesus did: he told the disciples that the bread and wine were his body and blood, and he washed their feet. But we only know that because we have multiple reports.
What we call the “words of institution” of the Lord’s Supper are recorded in three of the gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and in Paul. But the footwashing story appears only in the Gospel of John. What’s up with that?
It’s not that John doesn’t know about the eucharist, because his gospel is full of references to the eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus. He assumes that his readers are familiar the story of the Lord’s Supper, but he wants to make sure they know the whole story—the real story—of what happened that night.
There is a line in one of T.S. Eliot’s poems where he says, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.”Those are the people that John wants to reach. We are the people that John wants to reach, not just in this chapter but throughout his gospel. The fourth gospel is for people who have had the basic experiences of the Christian life—conversion, baptism, eucharist—but may have missed the meaning.
So for John, the meaning of eucharist is that in this ritual ceremony we are invited into union with God. By eating the flesh of Jesus and drinking his blood, we receive his divine life into our human lives and thus participate in the mystery of Jesus’ own passing over into God. But communion isn’t some sort of magic potion; communion is about dying into a new way of life.
That’s why John’s Maundy Thursday story begins this way: “And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself.” The Word became flesh, and put on a towel. Then he began to wash their feet.
The experience of Maundy Thursday is eating, drinking, and being in the company of friends. But the meaning of Maundy Thursday is what it always means to be a disciple of Jesus: loving God by loving one another in God. “Where charity and love prevail, there God is ever found” (The Hymnal 581).
Earlier this week on the internet website Episcopal Café I noticed a devotional reading from a book on the spiritual life written by A. E. Whitham in 1938. Whitham imagined himself as a tourist on a visit to a heavenly museum where an attendant showed him some artifacts from the Savior’s life on earth:
I saw a widow’s mite and the feather of a little bird. I saw some swaddling clothes, a hammer, and three nails, and a few thorns. I saw a bit of a fishing-net and the broken oar of a boat. I saw a sponge that had once been dipped in vinegar, and a small piece of silver. But I cannot enumerate all I saw, nor describe all I felt.
Whilst I was turning over a common drinking cup which had a very honourable place, I whispered to the attendant, “Have you not got a towel and basin among your collection?” “No,” he said, “not here; you see they are in constant use.” Then I knew I was in Heaven, in the Holy City, and amid the redeemed society.
Knowing that He came from God and went to God . . . Jesus took a towel and basin.
This is the night to wash and be washed. This is the night to eat and be filled. Have the experience; don’t miss the meaning. Now is the time for us to pass over into God.
I am following the interpretation of L. William Countryman (The Mystical Way in the Fourth Gospel: Crossing Over into God [Fortress Press, 1987]), who says that the institution of the eucharist comes at the Last Supper in Matthew, Mark, and Luke because they put the events of the story in the order of Jesus’ life, but John treats the eucharist in chapters 6 and 7 because he tells the story in the order of our experience as Christian believers (conversion, baptism, eucharist, enlightenment, then union).
March 28, 2010
Sunday of the Passion (Palm Sunday), Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 31:9-16
Philippians 2:5-11
Luke 22:14 - 23:56
The Reverend Scott Sinclair
Then Jesus said, "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing."
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Do you think that serial killers truly realize the lifetime of suffering that they are causing to the families and friends of their victims? Do you think that people who steal your purse or wallet truly realize how much frustration and insecurity they are causing you? Do you think that we ourselves realize how much pain we cause when we make some cutting remark to an associate or neglect someone who loves us?
Strange to say, I believe that on the whole this ignorance of the suffering we cause is a blessing from God. If we truly knew the misery that we caused, we could not bear it, and instead of becoming better we would actually become worse. Do you disagree with me? Consider the following: How would your family or friends react if you told them straight out how many are their faults and how much harm they cause? Would your family and friends immediately reform, or would they become angry and defensive or worse, morose and depressed? And how do we respond when someone points out our faults and how they are hurting others? Do we immediately repent or do we become angry or depressed?
Of course, everyone NEEDS to begin to realize the suffering they cause. If we do not realize the harm that we are doing, we will not reform.
However, we can only helpfully face our individual and collective failings if two things happen. First, we have to realize that we are still loved. And second we have to be sure that we can become better. If we know that despite everything we are still loved and despite our past we can go on to something better, then we will have the strength to acknowledge the truth about our failings without becoming angry or depressed. We can go forward.
In his gospel and its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, Luke insists that here we have what the cross of Jesus reveals. The cross tells us that nothing we can ever do will keep God from loving us. God even forgives those who crucify Jesus--the Jesus who came to save his murderers. And the cross reveals who we can become through that unspeakable love--we can ultimately become like Jesus. In the Acts of the Apostles when an angry mob stones Stephen, the first Christian martyr, he imitates Jesus. He too prays for the forgiveness of his murderers.
Perhaps that message of divine love and the resulting human possibility is too much for us to bear all at once. We can only gradually realize God's love for us sinners and God's call for us to become like Jesus. It is an interesting scholarly fact that some ancient copies of Luke's Gospel omit Jesus' prayer that God forgive his murderers. Apparently many in the ancient church did not believe that God's love could extend so far. Perhaps we cannot believe it either.
But there is good news. God is greater than our lack of faith. God is greater than human sins. God is greater than the church. And the fact that we are ignorant does change the reality that God's love–shown on the cross–remains and through that love God in the fulness of time will make us like Jesus.
March 21, 2010
The Fifth Sunday in Lent, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Isaiah 43: 16-21
Psalm 126
Philippians 3: 4b-14
John 12: 1-8
The Reverend Robbin Clark
A dinner party. Jesus at table in the house of close friends. A home-cooked meal, lovingly prepared. It is an occasion of intimacy, but hardly one of innocence. All present are aware of the dark currents that swirl around this precious moment of peace. The authorities might even have thought of it as Jesus “returning to the scene of the crime”, as it were. For it was here in Bethany that Jesus had raised his friend Lazarus from the tomb where he had lain some four days. That miraculous sign of divine power in Jesus had riveted the attention of the people and brought forth Martha’s great confession of faith, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” No less did it focus the concerns of the religious authorities. This upstart was getting too popular. He was a clear threat to the status quo and, so they reasoned, to the survival of their whole system. He had to be done away with. So they started to plan his death.
Jesus had wisely slipped out of sight after the event and continued his ministry with his disciples out near the wilderness. But now, with the approach of the Passover festival, he is back in Bethany, just a stone’s throw from Jerusalem. Word will soon get out of his return and crowds will gather to attend him into the Holy City, waving branches and crying, “Hosanna!” But that is next week’s story, and we’ll leave it until then.
For today, we’ll stay in the moment of fellowship and the safe circle of friends. But even here, things are not so simple. The betrayer is even now among them. And Mary, the quiet one, the sister of Lazarus and Martha, startles the whole company with an extravagant act of devotion. It’s like a wordless echo of Martha’s confession of faith. Such costly anointing rituals were reserved for royalty. Or, to honor the dead. Judas feigns righteous indignation and tries to claim the high moral ground of concern for the poor. Jesus will have none of it. He knows well the dailiness and practicality of compassion. His heart has been moved by the needs of the crowds he has encountered throughout his ministry. He has fed them, taught them, healed them. He has looked hard into the eyes of individual supplicants and challenged and consoled them according to their deepest personal needs. He has no romantic illusions about the ongoing nitty-gritty problems of society and he has never stepped aside from dealing with them. But he knows just as well another dimension of human need – the need to give totally from the heart, the need to forsake all else to be true to the one great imperative grounded in God’s love. He has told of the merchant of fine pearls who sells everything to obtain the one pearl of great price. He has counseled the rich young man to divest himself of his many possessions (and, yes, to give the money to the poor) so that he can follow Jesus in the way of salvation. So he defends Mary’s act and uses it to reference the impending events of Holy Week. He sees no contradiction between Mary’s outpouring of love and perfume and less spectacular acts of mercy and generosity. The heart which is capable of one will certainly be open to the other.
The use of this Gospel on this Sunday, does more than set the stage for Palm Sunday, even though the event described takes place, according to John’s chronology, the very evening before. It is an example of how the ‘now’ both builds on the past and looks forward to the future. In this it connects with our other readings. All of them focus on finding God in the new, but count on past experience to understand how and where to look.
Both prophet and psalmist expound a future of hope. And both of them base it not so much on encouraging aspects of the present as on God’s history of bringing good things out of bad situations. Isaiah introduces his oracle of the Lord by reminding the people that the God who is ‘about to do a new thing’ is the very one who led them through the Red Sea to freedom from slavery in Egypt. It’s important for the exiles he is addressing in Babylon to recall that so they can trust God even when God acts in ways inexplicable and even ‘unacceptable’ to move forward the plan of salvation.
The idea of a foreign ruler as God’s instrument was unthinkable to them, but it was Cyrus, King of Persia, who restored them to their land. And perhaps this is referenced in the Psalm, one of those recited by pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem to celebrate the great festivals. Again and again, God had restored their fortunes, and God could be counted on the do so yet again in the future, even in the most shocking of ways- a crucified Messiah. God can and will transform the sowers’ tears into the reapers’ songs of joy. And the seed of today has to fall to the ground and ‘die’ to its present state in order to bring forth its intended fruit.
This image may help us work through Paul’s seeming rejection of his whole religious upbringing and heritage in light of Christ’s call to him. The fullness of the plant is already in the seed, but it cannot become apparent unless the hard shell of the seed is broken open and left behind. What Paul needed to break out of was his reliance on his own performance of the Law to set him right with God, and his insistence that his way was the only way. After his “breakthrough” experience on the Damascus road, all of his old imperatives were as so many empty husks to be discarded. All that mattered was his living relationship with the risen Christ. Here was the pearl of great price. Here was the way ahead that was worth forsaking all else to pursue. Here was the prize and adventure to be valued above everything. Like Mary unabashedly squandering the precious nard and making a spectacle of herself by wiping Jesus’ feet with her hair, Paul opens himself up to censure and ridicule and doesn’t mind a bit. Those are such a small price to pay for the great gift of saving relationship with God.
And notice this: the gift is the relationship, and the adventure of the journey itself is the prize. It’s not about a possession, but a process; not about earning but accepting. When God does new things in our lives, God often does them in very new and different ways. Like Paul, we press on and strain toward what lies ahead. We put our best efforts and abilities into opening ourselves up to God’s future for us.
Pressing on toward a new call is an idea that has special resonance, both for me and for this parish, as we move toward a time of transition. I’ll retire. You’ll seek a new rector. Neither of us has the luxury, no can we afford the false security, of resting on what has been. Both of us must discern between shell and seed and discover what to discard and what to nourish so that our faithfulness may flower in the changed circumstances ahead. Change is hard. It feels a lot like loss. But our God reminds us over and over to trust the divine presence in the new and different and to look for promise even in troubling times. As we face questions of how to move faithfully into God’s future for us, what husks must we shed so the flower may flourish? Can we hear and open our hearts to “the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus”, both in personal and parochial life? What will it look like if we do? Well, it may look a lot like dying at first. But soon God’s new doing will spring forth. Nothing can demonstrate this better than the walk we will soon take together during Holy Week. As Good Friday gives way to Easter, let us strain forward to embrace and live into the gift of new life with our whole hearts.
March 14, 2010
The Fourth Sunday in Lent, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Joshua 5:9-12
Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
The Reverend Ellen Ekstrom
Here we are at Joyful Sunday, Mothering Sunday, Refreshment Sunday, Rose Sunday – many names for a day whose readings give us much to rejoice about, especially our Gospel lesson: love, forgiveness and joy. The focus of the Gospel, however, is not a mother, but a father whose actions are contrary to his society’s traditions, as are the actions of his sons, and his response. Even the parable is revolutionary and disturbing for its time. Nor do I think the shock and awe of this story has worn off after so many centuries.
What would you do if you were sitting down to dinner with a few friends others thought unsavory or unsuitable - tax collectors, sinners, outcasts, to name a few - and the local authorities started to complain about your behavior, the people you associate with?
We know what Jesus would do – he would teach them, illustrate his actions, his message, and what the Kingdom of Heaven was all about, with a parable.
This story about the loving father taught the Pharisees and scribes that there was no either/or with God, nor with Jesus or the Good News he brought to us. Yet it was, and is still, difficult not to think in terms of black and white: good son or bad son, Pharisee or tax collector, saint or sinner. Fortunately, God doesn’t roll that way. In all of the lessons this morning, we hear how God works with, in and through us towards reconciliation and forgiveness, with love, and offers us new lives.
See what happens at the end of our story this morning.
A father responds with patience and love to both of his sons. He puts aside propriety and runs to greet his boy – patriarchs didn’t run in first century Judea; CEOs don’t run in the 21st century – Rather than wait at the house surrounded by family and servants, or with the Board of Directors in a conference room, and demand an explanation, and it darn well better be a pretty good explanation from the boy, the father welcomes his son home with an embrace. When his eldest son reacts negatively and with jealousy to the honor his brother receives, especially the party, and that fact that his brother is being treated as if he’s only been on a trip for the family business, the father goes out to him – again, patriarchs didn’t do that in first century Judea; do you think a CEO would go out to explain an interoffice memo to a line worker? – The father invites him to come in saying, “. . . you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” He also gives freely – to the youngest, he first gives an inheritance, then a robe, a ring and a party. To the eldest, he gives all that he has. No questions asked. No hesitation, no conditions.
This is how God responds to us. This demonstrates love and a willingness to forgive behavior that was unacceptable, and that God is willing to do the same. God is the father in this parable.
What I like about the story and you may agree with me here – or not – is that we have no ending. There’s no “and they all sat down to a fine meal and made merry and lived happily ever after.” It is left to us to decide what happens next, to think about what we’ve just heard and apply it to our own situations and lives – and isn’t that a way of God’s working in us? I would like to think that after the eldest brother got over the resentment and anger, he took a moment to reflect on the blessings in his life, on his family, and that he came around and welcomed his brother back and the relationship between them, and their father, was restored. Doesn’t this remind you of Joseph and his brothers, or Jacob and Esau? Or that fight you had with a parent, sibling, your lover? Your friend? After you came around, the initial moments of nervous conversation and confession were rough to the point of pain, but when you said, “I’m sorry, forgive me,” or you both said it at once, didn’t you just want to go out and celebrate?
Although the emphasis here is on love and reconciliation, there’s no denying that each of the players in this story is lost in some way. Both sons are lost - the youngest son for his bad choices and behavior, the elder son for his self-righteousness and anger, his jealousy. The father is lost by his society’s standards: he’s weak, a bit of a pushover, and he takes action out of love for his sons, rather than his standing in the community and as a patriarch. God is at work here and moves him towards forgiveness.
With this parable, Jesus takes us beyond a commentary on sin and righteousness to give us a sense of what it truly means to be in relationship to others and to the Lord. Yes, he socializes with tax collectors and sinners, but how glad will God be when those same people amend their lives because they have heard Jesus’ words and believed, they who were once lost, are now found? The dutiful son and the disobedient son, the Pharisee and the Savior, all are worthy of God’s love. The Kingdom of Heaven is like that!
We are all lost in some way - give us a garden to live in and we will disobey the simple rules on the gate and be evicted, offer us a covenant we’ll manage to break it, find a way to get out of it. Provide us with a Messiah – you know the rest.
But we are found, and that is more than enough reason to be joyful on this Sunday and every day. We are found, and it is through the prodigious, boundless, grace of God and love and the Good News of Jesus. And the parable we have just heard is not simply one of the best and well-crafted of stories, it is an illustration of what it means to be redeemed.
March 7, 2010
The Third Sunday in Lent, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Exodus 3: 1-15
Psalm 63: 1-8;
1 Corinthians 10: 1-13
Luke 13: 1-19
The Reverend Robbin Clark
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.
Good morning. I’m glad to be back after two Sundays elsewhere and I’m especially glad to welcome our visitors from Temple Sinai. Thank you, choir members and Cantor Keys, for the music and teaching you are sharing with us today. I am so looking forward to being able to join in our Lenten education program on the Psalms. Engaging together with these prayer texts we hold in common is an important way for us to stand side by side before God.
The scripture portions appointed for today certainly show the intertwining of our traditions. Two of the four of them are from the Hebrew Scriptures and the third asks the predominantly Gentile congregation in Corinth to identify with the people of God of much earlier time and casts back into that time the insights and experiences of he present.
This is no different from what we do every time we engage with scripture as the living Word of God. As our Episcopal Catechism reminds us, we call scripture the Word of God because “God inspired their human authors and because God still speaks to us through the Bible.” Each of our personal stories is grounded in the great story of God’s dealing with God’s people. And all the various stories offer points of identity and contrast that help us understand and guide our life today. I am constantly finding myself in those pages, as I imagine you do as well.
These particular portions of scripture come to us in the liturgical season of Lent. It is for us, as Christians, a time of penitence and preparation. We are called to examine our lives and deal with all the ways we have offended against God and our neighbor or have failed to live up to the potential and the ministry to which God as called us. So it is a time of deep honesty, of digging beneath the surface of our lives to look at what is really going on. As such, it is a time of spiritual energy and promises a “springtime of the soul”, as it has been called. The very word “lent” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for Spring, “lencten”, referring to the lengthening days of this season. It is a time of both repentance and renewal, and a time to reconnect with our potential.
Both of the New Testament passages put repentance at the center. Jesus is careful to dissociate personal wrongdoing from being the victim of human evil or natural disaster. He acknowledges that suffering happens for many reasons and we are not to judge others because of their misfortunes. At the same time, perhaps even because we never know what may befall us, we must each use every opportunity to repent and return to walking in the way of the Lord.
Paul takes a somewhat different line in writing to the ever-troublesome Corinthians. He’s had so many issues with their bad behavior- bickering and infighting with in the congregation, leadership disputes, arrogance and class distinctions, sexual immorality, idolatry and disrespect. So he spins a cautionary tale, telling them of the dire consequences that ensue when members of a covenant community transgress in such ways. I’m not much in agreement with his method or his interpretation, but he does drive home the point that, unlike the examples from the Gospel passage, our own bad behavior does indeed have its consequences, and we should not be in denial about that.
If we look beyond the finger-shaking, “let this be a lesson to you!” curmudgeon (and I’m afraid many of us were raised in this sort of way and even see God in that light), we see someone with a deep sense of the oneness of God throughout history. He looks at the Red Sea and sees a version of the waters of baptism, in that both lead to the birth of a new covenant community of God’s people. He looks at the God-given sustenance that strengthened and sustained the children of Israel in the wilderness and sees a version of the sacramental bread and wine that sustains Christian communities then and now. He affirms the universality of testing and trials and the fact that God’s love and faithfulness has and always will provide a way for us to endure whatever befalls us.
This is good news indeed for us who know all too well our own pain and failures. It is the comfort we need to be able to fully observe this soul-searching season of Lent. God has such great mercy and love toward us. God hates nothing and no one that God has created. God wills us to live into the fullness of our potential and does not lay impossible burdens upon us without providing ways to endure them. Nor does God rush to judgment.
Jesus illustrates this last point with the parable of the barren fig tree. What grower would not be frustrated with a non-producing tree? I know how close my Myer lemon tree pushed me to the brink! He wants to get rid of it, but the gardener intervenes, promising to work with it, digging around it and dumping manure on it. This is crucial. We know from our own experience that having the ground under our feet unsettled and going through a bunch of ...well, manure can shake us up and set us on new paths of potential.
This sets me to thinking about the connection between repentance and fruitfulness – the fulfillment of potential. All through the Gospel Jesus meets people right where they are. But he doesn’t leave them there. He encourages change and transformation. He unsettles them to open up their potential. He offers forgiveness, healing and teaching to help them get there. Their response of repentance and openness to growth is the gateway to their fruitfulness. It’s like the three classic movements of the penitential process: contrition, confession, amendment of life. First we recognize a problem and feel sorry; then we acknowledge it to ourselves and to God and even to another person; then we move forward in the resolve to live a changed life. Actually, this dynamic applies not just to Lent or penitence but to all the ways we respond to God’s call and claim upon us.
As an example, let’s look at the call of Moses that we’ve just heard read. Moses is tending sheep in the back beyond because he had to flee after killing an Egyptian who was mistreating a Hebrew slave. He notices the strange sight of a bush burning but not being consumed, so he stops to check it out. When he hears God’s voice, he hides his face and scrambles out of his sandals. Maybe he was expecting “smite”, but what he gets is a call to help God help the children of Israel. Like pretty much everyone else called by God, he demurs and tries to get out of it. But God persists and offers to be present with him in the ministry being laid upon him. So forth they go together to liberate the people, putting Moses on the journey to fulfill his and their potential.
That same journey continues today. It is the Lenten journey. It is the journey of God’s people to heal the world and to live into the precepts and stature of the One in whose image we are made. It is the journey of each one of us toward becoming the persons we were created to be, our very best selves.
Our journey is beset with trials, some of our own making and some not. It is marked by times of doubt and discouragement but also by times of repentance and renewal. It needs to be characterized by truthfulness and faithfulness and by both humility and courage. Above all, it needs to be grounded in trust and praise for God’s love, mercy and care. For “God is faithful and will not let us be tested beyond our strength” and is leading us into the promised place of bliss, the very heart of God.
February 21, 2010
The First Sunday in Lent, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Deut. 26:1-11
Ps. 91
Rom. 10:8b-13
Lk 4:11-13
The Reverend Owen Thomas
Almighty God, to all your people give your heavenly grace, and especially to this congregation here present, that with meek heart and due reverence, they may hear and receive your holy word, truly serving you in holiness and righteousness all the days of their life, through Jesus Christ our Lord, your Word incarnate.
From the Gospel for today: “And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit for forty days in the wilderness, tempted by the devil.”
Jesus is about the undergo a severe struggle, a struggle that we all experience in some degree
This is a struggle between two basic yearnings we all experience.
One of these is our yearning to be joined with others, included with them, accepted by them.
The other is our yearning to be distinct, unique, with an individual identity and integrity all our own.
Jesus has just experienced the fulfillment of this latter yearning big time.
At his baptism “The Holy Spirit descended upon him and a voice can from heaven: ‘You are my beloved Son.’”
Now the Spirit has led him into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil, to be tested about his first yearning, to be joined with others, his solidarity with us ordinary human beings.
First let’s get clear about the devil.
When we confront a biblical idea that doesn’t seem to have any place in the modern world, we have a choice.
We can accept the biblical idea literally and seriously and ignore the objections of scientists, or we can interpret it figuratively and still take it seriously, in scholar talk demythologize it.
That is, we can interpret the devil in this way as the focus of all the evil and destructive tendencies and forces that destroy individuals and societies, and which have been so horrendously manifest in the past century.
Let’s take the devil that way, and see how Jesus struggles with this focus.
Jesus is hungry and the Devil says to him: “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.
That is, “Since you are the beloved Son of God, why not exercise your new power?”
This would fulfill common hopes for an expected Messiah in a nation often plagued by droughts, floods, and hunger.
Jesus sighs and says, quoting Deuteronomy, “It is written, You shall not live by bread alone.”
That is, Jesus makes the hard decision not to turn away from his solidarity with us ordinary human beings who can’t turn stones into bread except in the usual hard way of smashing the stones to pieces, and adding water, fertilizer, see and so forth.
And the same for the other temptations that the Devil proposes.
“If you will worship me, you can have authority over all the kingdoms of the world.”
This was also a popular messianic hope for a nation that had long suffered under the heel of foreign rulers, namely, the hope for a Messiah who would lead the nation in victory against its enemies.
But Jesus again sees this as a temptation to deviate from his true calling.
And he responds, “You shall worship only the Lord your God.”
Finally, the most subtle temptation: The Devil says “You can throw yourself off this pinnacle of the Temple and God will have his angels bear you up.”
In other words, if you are the Son of God, God will certainly protect you and nothing can hurt you
But Jesus again sides with his other yearning which he is beginning to see as his true calling. Therefore, he will have to face whatever is in store for him.
And he responds, “You shall not tempt the Lord your God.”
In other words Jesus has learned that his true calling is to be the true manifestation of God in the world, in the real messy and dangerous life of a human being.
This means that Jesus Chooses to live the precarious day-to day dependence on God like all the rest of us, and in that life to show us what God is like.
As the Christ of St. John puts it, “The one who has seen me has seen the Father.”
This temptation of power follows Jesus throughout his ministry. Again and again he has to refuse the way of power.
His vocation is to be the servant of all, to be numbered among the transgressors, not among the rulers.
He doggedly and passionately will be one with us, God’s struggling and needy children.
When a well-meaning man calls him good, he responds,
“Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”(Mk 10:18)
No compliment will be allowed to pass if there is any risk of diverting attention from the God who is all in all, or of compromising Jesus’ solidarity with all of us who have failed in various ways to be good.
The point of Jesus’ life is to show us what God is like, to manifest God’s presence in our world and in our lives.
The presence of a God who loves us, and therefore will judge and save us.
However this is presence of God in the life of Jesus has always offended us and always will offend us.
Either because he is a humble artisan and not a king, or a general, or a famous philosopher, or a great scientist.
Or he offends us because he claims to do things which only God can do, such as forgiving sins, or healing the sick.
In any case he offends us.
My first theological mentor, who was also the mentor of our former rector George Tittman, put it this way some 65 years ago, as his mentor Soren Kierkegaard might have put it.
“The true God became incarnate in a true human being.
Behold where he stands—God incarnate.
There, do you not see him? He is God incarnate.
Which one? Surely not the one girt with a towel who is washing feet?
Why that man was born in a stable; there was no room for him at the inn.
Nor has there been any room for him in the world. He simply cannot be fitted into our way of doing things.
And tomorrow he will be put out of the way once and for all.
He is a blasphemer you know; he is a sinner, for he takes his meals with publicans; he converses with harlots; he touches lepers.
And you say he is God incarnate? Pah! Do not mock me.
I have better sense than that.
You see the servant form was no mere outer garment
And therefore God incarnate must suffer all things, endure all things, undergo all things.
It is less terrible to fall to the ground when the mountains tremble at the Voice of God, than it is to sit at table with him as an equal.
And yet it is God’s will precisely to have it so.
And to this table we are invited again this morning to dine with the one who is God with us, Emmanuel, who has come among us again.
That is my sermon on the Gospel for today.
Now some of you may have expected some guidance and suggestions about having a fruitful Lent, that is, instruction in the Christian life.
But a sermon is for the preaching of the Gospel, the good news of the love of God in Christ, as I have tried to do.
But so that those of you who were hoping for something different won’t go away disappointed, I will make some suggestions.
Lent is a good time to remind oneself of the Rule of Life which you hopefully accepted when you were confirmed or became an Episcopalian.
It is not a secret; it is right here in the Book of Common Prayer and it has five points.
First, attendance at the Eucharist in your local parish.
Second, daily morning or evening prayer or parts thereof as suggested on page 136f of the Prayer Book.
Third, daily appropriation of the Christian tradition, sometimes misleadingly called “spiritual reading,” either in the classics such as Augustine’s Confessions, Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress, or Pascal’s Pensees.
Or modern works such as Dietrich Bonhoefer’s Letters and Papers from Prison or Martin’s Smith’s A Season for the Spirit, which I read every Lent.
Fourth, assisting in some function in your local parish, suchn as education, music, altar guild, vestry and so forth.
And also some ministry in the larger community working for justice, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, or electoral politics.
And fifth, self-examination at least weekly before the Eucharist using one of the forms in the Prayer Book.
This is not very exciting stuff but it is the foundation of the Christian life, and without if, progress will probably not be made.
A friend has also suggested that Lent is a good time to assess our habits which have a way of becoming addictions which in turn tend to deaden one’s life, whereas the Christian gift if new life from God who is Life Itself.
Finally remember that Sundays are not part of Lent but always celebrations of the resurrection.
Otherwise, Lent would be 46 days long, which would be more rigorous than Jesus’ 40 days in the Wilderness.
Let us Pray: Almighty God, you are Life Itself, Grant us the gift of new life which you offer us in our Savior, Jesus Christ.
© copyright 2010 by The Rev. Owen Thomas
February 14, 2010
The Last Sunday after the Epiphany, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Exodus 34: 29-35
Psalm 99
2 Corinthians 3: 12-4:2
Luke 9: 28-36
The Reverend Robbin Clark
It was just over five weeks ago that we celebrated the Epiphany and began this season of manifestation. Then, we followed the shining of a bright star to greet the holy child, Jesus. Now, it is Jesus himself, grown to manhood and in the midst of his ministry who is doing the shining.
It’s a pivotal point for him. He has come upon the public scene and gathered a band of companion/followers. He has preached and taught and performed deeds of power – healings, exorcisms and calming stormy seas. He has multiplied loaves and fishes to feed the multitude that followed him about. He has just checked in with his disciples about whom they think he really is and heard Peter’s heartfelt confession of faith. On the strength of that, he has revealed to them something of the way ahead. He has predicted for the first time his own Passion, death and resurrection and warned them of the mortal dangers that await them as well.
As with most of the important moments in Luke’s gospel, this one is grounded in prayer. Jesus has invited his inner circle, Peter, James and John, to go with him up the mountain for a time of colloquy with God. There they have a remarkable experience. Commentators wrestle with ways to categorize it. Is it a mystical vision? Is it a displaced resurrection appearance? Which mountain were they on, anyway?
Clearly, the event is significant enough to be reported by Matthew, Mark and Luke. And each of them places it directly after Jesus’ first passion prediction. Their audiences would have readily made the connection with the story of Moses and his shining visage, which we have helpfully been given in our first reading today. But it’s not only about a changed appearance, a literal transfiguration. There is also the voice form the cloud.
In it we hear an echo of the voice from heaven at Jesus’ baptism at the very outset of his public ministry. In that moment, his identity as the Son of God was announced and affirmed. It’s not clear whether the voice was heard by others or whether it was just for him, but it must have been powerful support as he began his work. Now Peter has offered a similar affirmation of his identity and Jesus has opened up about some of the implications of his Messiahship. Luke does not include the exchange of rebukes between Jesus and Peter that we get in Matthew and Mark. But even so, the sobering words about what is to come make it a good time for some special encouragement. The voice this time reaffirms Jesus’ identity but adds an instruction to the three terrified disciples. “Listen to him!” they hear.
And we might add, “listen to this whole experience and use it to understand what God is doing in Jesus.” Having Jesus conversing with Moses and Elijah, the two persons most representative of the whole tradition of the Law and the Prophets, is a strong message of continuing. And Luke’s detail about the content of their conversation underscores the fact that the new “exodus”, that is, the departure Jesus was to accomplish at Jerusalem, was in line with and not counter to God’s ongoing activity and purpose with regard to God’s people.
At the same time, we get an equally strong message of innovation. In Jesus, God is going a new thing, and doing it without the necessary accompaniment of all that has gone before. After the cloud and the voice, Jesus is seen alone. He and the disciples return down the mountain in silence and resume the ministry. But something has changed. Soon they will set their faces toward Jerusalem and all that awaits them there.
And that’s what makes the transfiguration story such a perfect choice for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany. Soon, we too, in the rites of Ash Wednesday, will set our faces toward Jerusalem and our walk with Jesus through the event of his Passion. We, too, will have our forty days of self-examination and spiritual strengthening during Lent, just as Jesus had in the wilderness after his baptism.
From the mount of the Transfiguration, we are bidden to look both backward and forward. It is important to know ourselves grounded in the two great festivals and theological touchstones in incarnation and resurrection. Christmas and Easter celebrate the twin gifts of life and new life. In Christ we live with this double horizon. We can see death as the gate to everlasting life. We can embrace, even as we strain to rationally understand, the paradoxical reality of losing our life to gain it, of giving to receive, of serving to lead, of strength being made perfect in weakness.
In the same manner, perhaps, we can embrace our often-contradictory sense of God’s self-presentation to us – the hiddenness and the brightness, the gentleness and the fierceness, the unrelenting standards and the abundant forgiveness, the subtlety and the splendor.
The reality of God is all these things and more. We can never wrap our minds around God. That’s one of the reasons an encounter with God was, and can still feel, so terrifying. That is why the ancients believed that to see the face of God was to die. And even to be in the presence of one who had somehow survived such an encounter was pretty scary. Moses showed the after-effects of his time on the holy mountain with God by a radiantly shining face, striking fear in the hearts of the people. The veil enables them to bear to come near Moses without fearing they were getting dangerously close to God. I can fully appreciate their desire for a bit of a buffer between themselves and any kind of “bare copper contact” with God.
Do you remember singing at Christmas the phrase, hidden deep in “Hark, the herald angels sing,” that says, “veiled in flesh, the godhead see”? Well, there you have it. To graciously accommodate and help us to overcome our fears of getting close, God adopts a veil of flesh to come among us and be with us as one of us. Thus, Paul can extol our freedom to encounter God with unveiled faces. As Jesus affirms in the Gospel of John, “if you have seen me, you have seen the Father, for I am in the Father and the Father in me.” And he goes on to invite all of us into that close indwelling relationship.
Paul essentially does the same thing here. We, who see and experience God’s glory in Jesus through the working of the Spirit, are ourselves “being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” This, he says, is the very ground of our confidence and courage in ministry. This is our transfiguration and the bedrock of our freedom and our commitment to truth and openness before God.
The moment on the mount of transfiguration shows the three disciples the connection between their friend and teacher Jesus and the awesome bright presence of God, a connection they will not fully realize until after the resurrection. But we, as Easter people, can see it now and take strength from it for our Lenten observance. We can begin now to live transfigured lives. Jesus knew his identity in baptism and being tested, and took strength from its affirmation to fulfill his calling. May we live into our own baptismal identity as the Body of Christ and be together changed into his likeness from glory to glory.
© copyright 2010 by The Rev. Robbin Clark
February 7, 2010
The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Isaiah 6:1-8,(9-13)
Psalm 138
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 5:1-11
The Reverend Ellen Ekström
One of the few memories I have of my father is the morning he took me fishing. We sat on the end of the pier in Rodeo and he showed me how to bait the hook, cast the line – and wait. And wait. Oh, and wait some more. It was frustrating, just sitting there, though it was nice to watch the morning sun on the water, the barges coming in and out of the refinery wharf, the goats in the field across the road from the pier – wanted to keep those goats at a distance. So much preparation went into the adventure before we even left the apartment that I thought surely we would come home with something to eat. We did. My father stopped by the market and brought home a can of tuna.
Fishing is hard work, an art form, and one needs a lot of patience and perseverance to succeed, and for the people of living around Lake Gennesaret, the location of this morning’s Gospel, it was their whole economy. A day coming up empty was discouraging to say the very least. We’ve just heard that it was here Jesus asks Simon to take him out in the boat so that he could teach the crowds gathering at the shore. Then he asks Simon to go further out, into deeper water and drop the nets again. Simon knows Jesus – he came to Simon’s house and healed his Simon’s mother-in-law – Jesus can heal, can teach, preach, but can he fish? And yet he says, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing; yet, if you say so, I will let down the nets.”
Simon does what is asked of him, perhaps in the midst of doubt, for his experience is that the lake is empty, but the Lord provides with abundance and the catch pulled in begins to break the nets and a second boat is called for. Simon cries out, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” This response is not so much a confession of guilt, or moral failing, but an expression of awe in God’s presence and working and the grace offered without condition. Jesus reassures Simon, James and John not to fear, for they will be bringing in a different catch soon – men and women to new life, using as bait the good news of the Gospel in Christ.
The lessons we hear during Epiphany call us to rededicate ourselves to ministry – they focus on the actions of those who hear and respond to God’s call, and this is illustrated in the Gospel and in the Hebrew scripture this morning. The lessons speak to the reluctant evangelist in all of us. Standing at the shore and listening to Jesus’ message is one thing, but climbing into that boat and throwing the nets overboard and expecting a catch is another. Doubt of our abilities, lack of self-assurance, stint our efforts. Maybe it’s the need to keep the faith personal, or the fear that no one will hear us, or think we’re something we’re not, or just think we’re crazy. Sometimes, when we tell people we’re Christian, they take two steps backward and nod slowly. Or, it could be one simple thing - maybe we think we’re not up for the task or the challenge. Here’s where Isaiah and Simon are our instructors. Isaiah assumed he would perish gazing on the Lord, and voiced a profound sense of his own unworthiness in the presence of the Lord, and as a sinner, he expected to die. Once he has the assurance of God’s grace, he jumps at the chance offered, answers the Lord’s call. “Here am I! Send me!” He is prepared to deliver a disturbing, dark message to the people of Israel.
And then, there’s Simon. Simon is a flawed hero – he is a failure more times than not. He tries, he swings and misses, he fails and tries again, and again. He doesn’t get it at first, and he bolts at the worst of times – but he comes back. He’s pretty brave. He doesn’t let his shortcomings block God’s work, or muddy the Good News with his own interpretation. Despite all these flaws, Jesus loves him so much that he entrusts the church to his care, changes his name from Simon to Cephas – the rock. The foundation.
Do you and I have that courage? Are we brave enough to try and fail repeatedly until we get it right? Remember how it felt to say, “Here I am, Lord!” when you heard the call? Remember the elation, and then the dread? Wondering if you could follow through?
Let’s consider the invitation Jesus extends.
For Peter, it was walking away from everything he knew and loved, and the certainty of death. For we Christians today, I believe it is laid out in the New Commandment, to love one another as Christ loves us, in his instruction to the disciples that whenever we act in compassion towards another, we do the same for Christ, and in the baptismal covenant, five questions after the affirmation of God and Christ – Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers? Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord? Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ? Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
To each of these questions we are compelled to respond, “Yes, with your help, Lord! Here I am! Send me!” Easy enough to say, but sometimes a bit difficult to live into – no? Yes? But we are up for the challenge and equal to the task. We are asked to do something revolutionary for today’s society. We are asked to put God before all else, we are asked to love, we are asked to reach outside our comfort zones and what is safe, to make a lifelong commitment to love and service. What I have always loved about our community here at St. Mark’s is that we are truly blessed with a wealth of gifts that address each of the five questions in the Baptismal covenant. It is a living and continuing proof that each of us, with our unique gifts, and by the grace of God, continue to say “Send me!” when the call comes, and go willingly when Christ says, “Come, put down the nets.”
© 2010 by The Rev.Ellen Ekstrom
January 31, 2010
The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71:1-6
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4:21-30
The Reverend Arthur Holder
I have often heard preachers say (indeed, I have said it myself) that they had rather have a congregation disagree with a sermon than go to sleep in the middle of it. If people get mad, at least the preacher knows the message was received. Well, there is no doubt that Jesus got his message across to the people at his home synagogue in Nazareth because at the end of the service they tried to throw him over a cliff! (I hasten to add that reactions like that won’t be necessary today. A simple “Good sermon today” will do just fine!)
Last Sunday we heard the passage from Isaiah that Jesus took as the text of his sermon: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” And we heard how he began his sermon: “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” He was declaring that the jubilee year of God’s salvation had come and that he—Jesus himself—was the sure sign of the presence of God’s kingdom.
At first, the congregation there in Nazareth is deeply touched by the eloquence of his words and the power of his presentation. They marvel that such an accomplished orator should be one of their own, the son of Joseph the local carpenter. But soon they stop admiring his sermon style and begin to question the content. Perceiving this, Jesus says to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’”
This is still a popular saying, usually in the older translation: “Physician, heal thyself.” As we use it today, the proverb means something like, “Don’t try to tell me what to do until you are perfect yourself.” I remember preaching a sermon against capital punishment in the first parish I served after seminary. (This was in 1976, and in a diocese far, far away.) Afterwards one of the parishioners came up to me and said, “You have no right to criticize what I believe in, and what most good Americans believe in, as long as the Episcopal Church is ordaining lesbians.” I didn’t quite make the connection between capital punishment and ordaining lesbians, but I got the point. He could have been saying, “Physician, heal thyself,” or in the words of another familiar proverb, “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
But as Jesus quoted the proverb that he imagined the people of Nazareth would quote against him, it seems to have meant something more like, “Charity begins at home.” If you really are a doctor, then heal your own household first before you start making house calls on the neighbors. The emphasis is not on the perfection of the physician but on the proximity of the patients. Jesus knows what the folks at Nazareth are thinking: “Let’s see you do here, in your own hometown, some of those miracles you have been doing over at Capernaum.”
Jesus responds by noting that prophets are seldom appreciated by those who know them best. “No prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” He doesn’t appeal to the example of Jeremiah, but he could have reminded them that Jeremiah was called to be a “prophet to the nations” even though he was only a youth (as we heard in today’s Old Testament reading). But the rest of Jeremiah’s story is relevant here too.
Jeremiah prophesied six hundred years before Jesus, at the beginning of Babylon’s rise to power as the strongest nation in the Middle East. The armies of King Nebuchadnezzar were conquering country after country, and they were headed for Jerusalem. What were the Jews going to do? Most of the leaders urged the king of Judah to defend the city at all costs, even entering into an alliance with Egypt if necessary. But Jeremiah had another idea—or rather he had a revelation from God. According to Jeremiah, the Babylonian armies had been sent by the Lord to punish the Jewish people for their sins. Resistance was hopeless, so they should lay down their arms, surrender to the enemy, and go willingly into exile in Babylon.
As you might imagine, Jeremiah was accused of treason as a false prophet. He was arrested and thrown into a cistern. The king personally cut up on the scroll on which Jeremiah’s prophecies were written and threw them into the fire. Eventually the prophet was kidnapped and taken into Egypt, where tradition says he was murdered by his own countrymen. So that is the kind of precedent Jesus has in mind when he says “No prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”
Jeremiah got in trouble for seeing God at work among the Gentiles, and he wasn’t the only prophet to do so. Remember, says Jesus, how when God sent Elijah to feed a poor starving widow and her son, it was a widow way over in Sidon—a Gentile, not a Jew. And when Elisha healed a leper, it wasn’t a Jewish leper but Naaman the Syrian (another Gentile). So God has a history of ministering to (and through) outsiders and foreigners.
That doesn’t go over very well with the homefolks. In a few minutes they have Jesus out of town and on the brink of a cliff. This time no one dares to throw him over, so he is able to pass through the crowd and walk away. But it won’t be the last time he encounters a hostile crowd. The pattern will be repeated again and again throughout his ministry: Jesus preaches to crowds who admire him at first but later reject him when they find out that his gospel is good news for “those other people” too: for sinners as well as the pious, for Gentiles and Samaritans as well as Jews, for poor people as well as rich people, for prostitutes and tax collectors as well as scribes and Pharisees. Eventually, those same crowds will collaborate with the Roman authorities in putting him to death.
The people of Nazareth were anxious to receive God’s healing love. So are we, and that is good. Where they went wrong, and where we go wrong, is to suppose that God has only a limited amount of love to go around, so that if someone else gets more then there is less for us. “Charity begins at home,” we say, by which we mean: “Start here with me.” But what Jesus was saying, and what the people of Nazareth didn’t want to hear any more than we do, was that God’s charity does not begin at home.
God’s charity begins wherever someone is hurting. Right now, charity begins in Haiti. Charity begins in Darfur. Charity begins in East Oakland and Richmond. Charity begins in a hundred thousand places where people need God’s help, including right here at St. Mark’s. Not because this is home, but because people here are hurting too. Charity begins where God’s compassion meets human pain.
We don’t hear much about this kind of charity any more, which I think is a shame. Modern English versions of 1 Corinthians 13 have St. Paul talk about the depth and the power of “love,” but in the King James Version it was “charity,” which came from the Latin caritas as a translation of the Greek agape. I know why the change was made, because nowadays we usually think of charity as a tax-deductible donation to some worthy cause. But the word “love” is so overused these days that it has lost much of its force. The verb in “I love pancakes” is not really the same as the one in “God loves the poor.”
So just for today, let’s go back to the old version and remember that the love St. Paul commends to us is not about liking someone because they are attractive or fun to be around, or because they look like us, or can make us feel good about ourselves. Christian love is always self-emptying and other-directed because it doesn’t come from us. Christian love is charity, which begins and ends in the heart of God. And that is why “charity never fails.” (1 Cor. 13:8)
© copyright 2010 by The Rev.Arthur Holder
January 24, 2010
The Third Sunday after the Epiphany, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Nehemiah 8: 1-3, 5-6, 8-10
1 Corinthians 12: 12-31a
Luke 4: 14-21
The Reverend Robbin Clark
Today. “Today”, he began. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” These are the first words reported by Luke of Jesus’ public ministry. And they announce who he is and what he will be about. They are not all that different from the first words reported by Mark, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe in the good news”. Luke’s account of Jesus’ proclamation is set in the context of a regular synagogue service at the congregation where Jesus had grown up. The folks there had heard the reports of his teaching and his spiritual power from the other towns in Galilee. Perhaps it was to recognize a local boy who’d made good that they handed him the scroll and asked him to read. He chose his passage carefully. It is from the latter part of Isaiah, a section of hope and encouragement for the downtrodden and oppressed. It follows in the spirit of the great servant songs that describe God’s chosen and true servant as one filled with both compassion and thirst for justice; one who is humble and gentle and yet who will persevere and endure any hardship to carry out his mission. This particular passage gives these traits to the one God has anointed, that is to the messiah. And the messiah’s task is to bring the good news of the Lord’s favor.
Now, the people of Israel had been watching and waiting for the messiah for centuries. And their yearning was all the greater under the oppression of pagan foreign power of Rome. So Jesus’ announcement that, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” had a huge impact. But we’ll hear more of that next week. For now I’d like us to reflect on what it’s about to bring the words of scripture into active reality today. How do words written so long ago live for and in us?
Our first reading, from Nehemiah, gives us a strong parallel to our Gospel, but on a grander scale. It presents a pivotal moment in the history of the people of God, a sort of covenant renewal. The nation has returned from exile and is rebuilding itself in Jerusalem. The walls are repaired. The city is habitable. Now the life of the people must be rebuilt. I can’t help but think how all this lies ahead for the devastated people of Haiti. I pray they will find the kind of common ground that Israel turned to in their time of starting over.
What the rebuilders of Jerusalem turned to was the law of Moses, that which had shaped them as a community from the time of their escape from Egypt. The whole population gathered in the public square, “both men and women and al who could hear with understanding.” The ancient words were both proclaimed and interpreted by the priests and scribes and Levites so that the people got the sense and understood the import for their lives. The words leapt off the page and became a living reality to again shape the community.
The people are deeply moved by being called back to an awareness of who and whose they really are. It would be up to them to fulfill in their lives the words they were hearing. The text set the agenda for the time ahead and reaffirmed their particular relationship with the God who had created them as a people and called them into service.
What is happening in these two scenes from scripture, one in the great public square of Jerusalem and one in the small town synagogue, is not so different from what happens when we gather for worship each week. There is the same melding of horizons over time. Ancient words are read and the contemporary sense is given. Reader and hearer and preacher alike are faced with the task of integrating the words into their lives and bringing them to fulfillment. They are God’s word to us today as surely as they were to those who set them down so long ago.
When Jesus says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” he is telling the congregation, in effect, “I am here to do what he is talking about.” Throughout his ministry we see him seek out the people on the margins of society and call them into fellowship and service. We hear him tell them of their worth and of God’s joy in them. We hear him preach and teach and we see him heal their infirmities and free them from their demons. And best of all, we hear and see these things as no just about some long ago “them” but about ourselves. Jesus is teaching, healing, including and freeing us, each of us here today. Today is when God is acting. Here is where God is acting.
We embody this truth in every liturgy and, indeed, whenever we gather or act in God’s name. It happens when the word is proclaimed and we respond to it. It happens when we pray Jesus’ own words over bread and wine and find him present with us in the sacrament of his body and blood. Today is the key word. Now is when the time is being fulfilled. We are the ones who are called to believe and share the good news. To paraphrase Pogo, “we have met God’s servant and he is us.”
Christians are wont to see in Jesus the suffering servant portrayed by Isaiah, but many scholars believe the prophet was referring collectively to the nation, the gathered people of God, in those passages. This is not so great a contradiction as one might suppose. In the same way that the horizons of time meld when we encounter the scriptures as the living Word of God, the horizons of identity show themselves permeable between the individual and the collective.
This is nowhere more evident than in Paul’s great image for the Christian community as the body of Christ. If Jesus says of himself, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor,” we as his body, must affirm the same vocation for ourselves. All that Jesus did to demonstrate the fulfillment of this scripture in his day, we must own as our mandate today. Now, you and I are probably all too aware that we are not Jesus. But Paul shows us how it is to be done. Even though we, as individuals, possess only a fraction of the gifts that are needed, collectively we can claim them all. The challenge is to come together and to use them effectively to continue the work of Jesus in our own context.
For us as a parish, this means that no one ministry exists by or for itself. All our gifts and efforts must be seen as part of a greater whole. And those that are most visible and honored have greater responsibility to uphold those whose contributions often remain unsung. As with any body, conditioning and coordination are crucial. How are we doing with our strength and endurance training? Are all our parts in good enough communication for us to work together? And are we together attending to God’s word and ‘getting the sense’ of it as a guide to how we need to use our gifts to be faithful servants of God after the pattern of Jesus? It seems to me that the body of Christ is pretty stressed out these days. So it’s all that more important that we take good care of our bit of it and promote its health, strength and flexibility. Today is what we have to work with, individually and collectively. Now is when we are to fulfill the scriptures and live into our vision. Now is the time for us to build up the body of Christ.
© copyright 2010 by The Rev. Robbin Clark
January 17, 2010
The Second Sunday after the Epiphany, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Isaiah 62:1-5
Psalm 36:5-10
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
John 2:1-11
Anne Smith, seminarian
Two weeks ago I was about to take the General Ordination Exams, or GOEs, that are administered each year by the national church to candidates for priesthood. The exam tests for proficiency in seven areas. It takes four days, with three and a half hours allotted for each of the seven essay questions. It's sort of grueling the way comprehensive exams tend to be.
I've been in seminary for three and a half years, in part preparing for this exam. A lot of people were praying for me and the other test takers. At the end of the first day I felt okay. This seemed very odd to me. I wasn't stressed out. I had a sense of peace and calm about the test. It stuck with me for the whole week, too..
But I had a sneaking feeling it wasn't quite right to ask God to bless me during the GOEs. Because God cares about the hungry, the sick, the marginalized and the oppressed--God cares about justice and mercy and love. And I felt a little bit like my little old GOE experience didn't have the urgency about it that so many of the world's problems do, like Haiti now does, for example.
And yet I needed God, and I did pray. And I was surprised by the power of the prayers that upheld me--by the certainty I felt that God was supporting me, that I was at peace because God's Spirit was with me. It actually took a little bit of work on my part to accept that God was present and at work in my life in this way.
Likewise in today's gospel. Jesus went to a wedding. No one was going hungry, and no one was sick. No one was being called to repentance--it was just a party, a feast. Surely God had bigger things to worry about? But there was a little problem--not a cosmic crisis, just the wine had run out. Someone didn't plan adequately, maybe. Maybe there was a shortage in the area, who knows. Is this the stuff we ask God for help with? Is this what Messiah has come for? To keep a party running smoothly?
I always thought Jesus was saying this really wasn't his concern--he was here for much more significant things. "Woman, why do you involve me? My time has not yet come." Jesus, you know, is so attuned to God's timing and God's plan that in the other gospels when the devil challenges Jesus to bring forth bread from the stone in the desert he won't do it--he's waiting on God. He knows God provides in God's good time.
I feel a certain amount of pressure to imitate Jesus in this--to put aside my own sense of timing and try to tune in to the Spirit, try to get myself in sync with God's plan and not impose my own ideas. I get to thinking that maybe some things I shouldn't bug God about, because God's business with the world is so big.
But then along comes Christmas and God's plan comes to the world as a tiny squalling baby who needs to be cleaned and fed and is in every way dependent on his human family's care. And along comes Epiphany and the extravagance of the star and the gifts of the wise men. And then we celebrate Jesus' baptism and again maybe there are people to be baptized. Maybe they're babies--and what do we do? We give them a bath. The ways and times God is present with us, and the ways and times God is at work in the world, aren't just the time we spend proclaiming the gospel, serving the needy, working for justice and healing. Our celebrations and symbols and service seem to be this mixing of the urgent and the typical, the momentous and the everyday, and that is how God comes to us.
Yes, Jesus went to a wedding. Yes, he is Messiah. The Gospel of John would have us remember that the Word living among us is a foretaste of things to come, the messianic banquet we are promised when we go to be with God at last. Jesus isn't just going to a wedding feast, Messiah is showing us the joy promised to us when we follow him. There is something to learn about our future with God here.
And then there's now. There's our time, the time we are living in. There are times when we're not thinking of future joy.There are times when we're not particularly going about God's business of feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, comforting the sick, whatever it may be you're gifted for and called to do. There are times when we're just working to meet deadlines, get where we need to be, get ourselves rested and fed and ready. And those times when we see friends, and celebrate life, and maybe go to a wedding ourselves. These things probably are not going to change the world. They're just daily. Do we ask God to bless these things too? Is God's presence making a difference for us then? Do we stop to notice?
Jesus went to one of hundreds of weddings that took place in his region during his lifetime. The wine runs out. The Messiah is in the house. It won't save Israel, but Jesus can help. So Mary asks him to help--asks Jesus for God's blessing on this mundane affair, this desire that is not really a need.
And Jesus calls her human. He says, "Woman"--not mother, but human being, woman--"what is that to us?" Because he is Messiah and his hour is not yet come. And yet Mary--who has a knack, it seems, for humble obedience, trusts that God's living presence there with her will help. Because it is not merely God's nature to be merciful to sinners, it is God's nature to love humankind and to give in abundance more than we even think to imagine.
We're human too. I may want to make Jesus my model of attunement to God's will, but I cannot overlook Mary. Mary, the model of faithful obedience. Mary, the one who invites God to bless her every moment and trusts that God will answer her. Mary who does not tell God what to do, but seeks to involve God in her life at all times because she knows God is the one she depends upon for everything.
Two thousand years ago, Mary invited God to bless a wedding, and through Jesus, God did bless that wedding abundantly, superlatively.
Two weeks ago, I invited God to bless me during the GOEs, and God did bless me with peace and presence of mind, abundantly, superlatively.
And you--what did you do? Did you ask God to be with you? Did you ask God to bless you? Did you trust God to do things God's way? Did you notice how abundantly God responded to you? Will you do it in the future?
© copyright 2010 by Anne Smith
January 10, 2010
The First Sunday after the Epiphany, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Isaiah 43: 1-7
Psalm 29
Acts 8: 14-17
Luke 3: 15-17, 21-22
The Reverend Robbin Clark
Baptism, Prayer, Ministry, Holy Spirit
These are the things we are given to consider on this feast day. The baptism of our Lord could be considered the last chapter in the “prequel” to the story of Jesus’ ministry. I say, “could be” because there is also the time of temptation in the wilderness, but we’ll get to that in Lent. For now, we can consider the baptism story a sort of “debut” for Jesus as an adult.
Mark’s gospel takes only eight verses to get us to this point. Matthew and Luke have already filled two and a half chapters with birth and boyhood background, not to mention the work of John the Baptist. John the Evangelist never actually tells us of the baptism of Jesus, but he joins the others in having the Baptizer proclaim him as the one who will baptize with Spirit and fire and on whom the Holy Spirit will alight in the form of a dove.
As with the nativity, our picture of the baptism of Jesus is a conflation of the various accounts. In fact, only Matthew and Mark give us a description of it. Luke relegates it to a subordinate clause, “and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying...” He doesn’t mention the river or the water. In fact, if you snoop around the verses skipped over in today’s gospel reading, you find that John had already been imprisoned. So what point is Luke making for us?
I think the key for Luke is that the Spirit comes upon Jesus as he prays. We will see as we read through this gospel in our Lectionary Year C that Luke shows us Jesus at prayer at all the important moments in his ministry. Our Catechism defines prayer as, “responding to God, by thought and by deeds, with or without words.” It is when we are at prayer that we are most open to having our lives directed and sustained by God through the action of the Holy Spirit.
Luke alone gives us a second book, one of stories about how the gospel spread on the lips and in the actions of the first followers of Jesus after his resurrection. The Book of Acts, as a sequel to the story of Jesus’ ministry, begins quite like the “prequel” ends, with the Holy Spirit coming upon people in prayer and empowering them for ministry. The Day of Pentecost inaugurates a new era as surely as the day of Jesus’ baptism did. In fact, it is as close as I can come to seeing a fulfillment of John the Baptist’s prediction that Jesus would be the one to “baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
I’ve always noticed that none of the gospels show Jesus baptizing anyone and wondered why this seemingly unfilled prophecy got such prominence. I now see it as pointing us to the communal over the individual. The Spirit is given to the assembly of the faithful. We might say to the church, but I would not want to limit it to the institutional boundary that implies. The gift of the Spirit animates the mystical Body of Christ that continues our Lord’s ministry throughout the ages and throughout the world.
The various descriptions in the early chapters of Acts show a variable relationship between baptism and the reception of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes they came together and sometimes one preceded the other. In today’s reading we see how the Spirit was bestowed upon the new converts in Samaria by prayer and the laying on of hands by Peter and John. This in some way replicates the pattern of our gospel story.
Over the long history of the church, there have been groups who have insisted on a separate or subsequent “Baptism in the Spirit” and have even demanded specific ecstatic behaviors as evidence of it. Others have looked to confirmation as a means of “adding” spiritual gifts to those who make an adult profession of their faith. Our church states unequivocally that, “Holy Baptism is full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s Body the Church.” We trust God to have bestowed the gift foretold by John and promised by Jesus when the assembly gathers in prayer to birth new members through the waters of baptism.
So, where does that put us who have come through those very waters ourselves? We are assured that we dwelling places of the Holy Spirit, what does that mean for our lives? First, as members together in Christ, it means that we are adopted in a special way as God’s children and given the inheritance of eternal life. To use the words we heard from Isaiah, we are redeemed and called by name. God has promised us presence and protection through our trials. We are precious, honored and loved. And we are destined to be gathered together in glory.
What an abundance of solace and hope! And now hard it is for us to truly take it in and believe it deep down in our hearts and souls. But that is what we are called upon to do, and with good reason. The Spirit we have been given is not just some soft, fuzzy “blankie” that will keep all difficulties and challenges far from us. It is quite the opposite. It throws us right into those challenges and provides for us the one way we can thrive in the midst of them.
The strength and power of the voice/word/breath/spirit of God comes through loud and clear in our psalm. Oak trees writhe and the wilderness shakes. Its splendor makes us cry. “Glory!” We are both awed and empowered by it. So was Jesus. Don’t forget his times of temptation and trial. We walk where he has walked and shown the way.
In a few moments we will renew our baptismal covenant. We will reaffirm our particular connection to God in Christ through the gift of the Holy Spirit. We will speak not only of what we believe, but of how we have promised to live out our faith commitment. At our Epiphany service this past Wednesday evening, we each had the opportunity to reflect on how we intend to respond this year to the light Christ has shined into our hearts. We lit a candle and offered it at the manger as our gift to the Christ child. Now we have the opportunity to place that offering in the context of our baptism.
This baptismal renewal calls us to consider how we are responding to God in thought and word and deed. It asks us to take stock of the ways our manner of life is or is not both prayer and proclamation. How are we using the gift of the Holy Spirit? Are we keeping the covenant we have made and continuing to grow into the full stature of Christ?
Our baptismal covenant doesn’t simply consist of renunciation of evil and a creedal affirmation. It outlines the life to which we are called. We have promised to be actively engaged in study, prayer and fellowship and to receive the sacrament regularly. We have promised to be engaged in an ongoing journey to self-examination, repentance and amendment of life. We have promised to share our faith and hope with others and to respect and serve our near and far neighbors. We have promised to engage the structures of society to bring about justice, peace and dignity for all.
It is only by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit that we can have the strength we need for this ministry. It is only the gentleness and solace of the same spirit that can keep our hearts from breaking in the process. God’s great love gives us both.
Thanks be to God.
© copyright 2010 by The Rev. Robbin Clark
January 3, 2010
The Second Sunday after Christmas, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Jeremiah 31: 7-14
Psalm 84
Ephesians 1: 3-6, 15-19a
Luke 2: 41-52
The Reverend Robbin Clark
Happy Tenth Day of Christmas. The decor and the music are still with the season, but the scriptures seem to have moved on. Luke gives us the single canonical account we have of our Lord’s youth, and it is quite unlike the magical miracle tales about the boy Jesus in some of the extra-canonical literature.
We are twelve years on from the wondrous elements of the Lukan birth narrative. The angels and shepherds and stable seem to have been forgotten. And Luke apparently didn’t ever know about the star and sages from the East that we will celebrate on Epiphany this Wednesday, much less about a flight to Egypt and a sojourn there for safety from Herod. Today’s gospel is a plausible story of an incident that could have happened to any large group of kin traveling together. “I thought he was with you.” “But I figured he was with the rest of the cousins.” Then panic and a rush back to Jerusalem on a frantic quest to find the missing child. A three-day search (and you might want to take note of that duration) culminates in the discovery of the boy exchanging ideas with the teachers in the Temple. The parents’ feelings all tumble together. Anguish gives way to relief and reproach, then deep puzzlement at Jesus’ response, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
I’ve wondered that as well, given all the hoopla around his birth. Those aren’t things a parent would forget. But I’ve learned that everyday logic is not always the best tool for understanding scripture. It’s better to go with a sense of what the author’s intent might be in terms of revealing the larger lines of the story. It appears that Luke wants us to know that Jesus was reared in a fully observant Jewish household. His parents had done the required circumcision and presentation in the Temple soon after his birth. Now we are told that they kept the command to make an annual Passover pilgrimage to the Jerusalem. Jesus, at twelve, would be just at the age to become a Bar Mitzvah, a son of the Covenant, and to pass from religious childhood to adulthood. In the same way that his mother’s utterance of the Magnificat when she was still expecting him harks back to Hannah’s song, this story recalls the description of the boy Samuel as he ministered in the Temple. So Jesus’ story is shown to be fully congruent with that of his people.
Part of that congruence is the note of inevitability in Jesus’ response to his parents. “I must be in my Father’s house,” he says. We will never know how fully he grasped his unique identity and vocation at this moment, but we will hear echoes of a growing self-awareness as he undertakes his adult ministry. “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also; for I was sent for this purpose,” he says after his inaugural sermon in Galilee.
Obedience to God and proclamation of God’s purposes were at the core of every prophet’s life, stretching far back into the tradition. Commentator R.E. Clements, writing about Jeremiah, reminds us that, “so far as Old Testament prophecy is concerned, the message of God was not regarded as a series of abstract theological propositions but rather the positive declaration of God’s purpose for his people.”
We see this in today’s first reading. It is an amazing and glorious statement of confident hope despite bitter experience of disaster. Most of what Jeremiah had to say was not so happy. The whole fabric of Israel’s society was falling apart and the people were driven from their land. This was seen as God’s just dealing with their disobedience and failures. But it was never seen as their destiny. God’s purpose for all God’s people has always been restoration and return. This holds true, whether restoration and return are defined, as they were in Jeremiah’s day, by repatriation and a renewed Davidic monarchy or, as we are more likely to look at them, by forgiveness, reconciliation and resurrection.
I have long been struck by the image of scattering and gathering used by Jeremiah. He is clear that God is in both. Scattering is seen primarily as a consequence of sin or unfaithful behavior. Exile from the land was not unlike expulsion from Eden. It is not until Jesus that we get an almost opposite and very positive image of scattering. Just as he himself was an itinerant with no settled abode during his ministry, he sends forth his disciples to preach, teach and heal throughout the towns and villages of his people and even into foreign territory. And his great and enduring commission to his followers is to go preach the gospel to the ends of the earth.
This represents a huge shift in what it means to gather and scatter. I see the seeds of it in our psalm for today. The singer extols the rightness and goodness of being in the Lord’s house. It’s like a bird finding a place to nest, a place to be secure and to perpetuate life. I can imagine this psalm running through Jesus’ mind as he lingered in the Temple in conversation with the elders. This feeling is summarized for me in verse 3, “Happy are they who dwell in your house! * they will always be praising you.”
But right away, in the very next verse, we hear a new note and a new way of understanding home and security. Verse 4 says, “Happy are the people whose strength is in you! * whose hearts are set on the pilgrim’s way.” The picture shifts from domesticity to journey, but without departing from God’s presence or blessing. Even desolate situations are seen as sources of strength and sustenance.
This fits with Jeremiah’s oracle of hope. The great gathering he envisions specifically includes those least able to thrive on a journey. They weep but are consoled and protected. All are rewarded with a great feast and with ongoing joy and comfort.
The earliest Christians were no strangers to this vision of restoration and return. But they centered it in the risen Christ rather than in the land or the Temple. Paul writes to the churches in Ephesus of the blessings we have been given in God’s having called and chosen and destined us as members together in Christ. Like the prophets before him, he declares God’s loving purpose for us. He offers profuse thanks for the gifts and graces God has in store for us and which we can already claim. But he also prays that we grow in understanding of the ways of God and be strengthened to walk in those ways.
In this we are brought again to the image of gathering and scattering and, by extension, to all the polarities that make up our lives and offer both tension and balance. Our very bodies live by the constant juxtaposition of breathing in and breathing out, of rest and activity. We each need both solitude and companionship, challenge and support, risk and security, novelty and consistency. Sometimes they are not given us in the proportions we might choose. Sometimes we feel all scattered in a bad way and need to be reminded that our destiny is to be gathered with all creation into the very heart of God and to feast there together. But sometimes, and these are usually the times that our sense of being ‘at home’ in God is the strongest, we stand ready to be sent forth in mission and ministry, to bring good news of binding up to a broken world. Every Eucharist, we are gathered forgiven and fed before being sent out again. Like Jesus, we need to “be in my Father’s house.” And like him, we need also to go forth to offer solace and hope because we, too, are sent for this purpose. I bid you to make a weekly habit of this gathering and scattering so that you may know Christ and made him known and live into the hope and consolation that is your destiny as the gathered people of God.
© copyright 2010 by The Rev. Robbin Clark
December 27, 2009
First Sunday after Christmas
Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Psalm 147
Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7
John 1:1-18
The Reverend Arthur Holder
“In the beginning was the Word.” To many people, it probably doesn’t seem like much of a start. Did the whole created universe really begin with a mere word? A word is just a breath of air, a sound that stands as a reminder of some thing, some one, or some idea. Surely it is the thing, or the person, or the idea, that matters—not the word. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” said Shakespeare’s Juliet. Isn’t a word just a name or a label with no power in itself?
That was certainly the attitude of Doctor Faust in Goethe’s famous poem. Faust is working on a translation of the Gospel of John and puzzling over the first sentence. Of course he knows that the traditional translation of the Greek term Logos is “In the beginning was the Word,” but he cannot bring himself to attribute so much creative initiative to a mere word. So he considers translating Logos as Thought, or as Power, but in the end he settles on a new translation that he considers an improvement on the original: “In the beginning was the Deed.” When Goethe wrote his poem in 1808, he knew that modern philosophers and theologians tended to agree with Faust, at least in practice. Deeds are the true reality; words are only secondary.
But that was not the ancient way of thinking about words and deeds. For the ancient Hebrews and the early Christians too, the Word of God was much more than a reminder or a label. For them, a word was actually a kind of deed—the most powerful kind of all. Remember how in the Book of Genesis (1:1), God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. As the psalmist declared, “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made.” (Ps. 33:6) And in the Epistle to the Hebrews (4:12), we read that “The Word of God is living and active.” To the ancient mind, the word has power in it. When someone speaks, things happen. When God spoke, the universe came into being.
One of the most prominent features of postmodern thought is a recovery of the power of language. The so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy, theology, history, and literary studies has reminded us that words make the worlds we live in. When we label people or call them names, we are putting an identity upon them. When we tell stories about the past, we are constructing the shape of our society today. When we predict what will happen in the future, we are making an argument about what should happen. So language is not just descriptive; language is creative, even performative.
In an influential book with the wonderful title How to Do Things with Words (2nd ed., Harvard University Press, 1975), the British philosopher J. L. Austin coined the term “speech-act” to refer to utterances that are performative because the saying of them makes things happen. Three of Austin’s examples will help us understand what the Word of God is doing in today’s scripture readings.
The first example is something that happens at a wedding. When the bride or groom says, “I take you to be my lawfully wedded spouse,” saying the words of this vow actually make the marriage take effect. The couple getting married are the proper ministers at a marriage; the priest and congregation are there to witness and bless their union. Saying the vows makes the words of the vows come true.
The second example is something that happens at the christening of a new sailing ship. The designated sponsor breaks a bottle of champagne on the ship’s bow and says, “I christen you the USS California” (or whatever the ship’s name is going to be). And those words actually give the ship its name and commission it for the work it has to do.
The third example is what happens with a last will and testament. If I write in my will that I bequeath all of my worldly possessions to St. Mark’s Church, then when I die the parish treasurer can cash the check with confidence because the words in my will have a powerful legal and financial effect.
Earlier I said that these examples of performative speech-acts are relevant to today’s scripture readings. Isaiah is talking about the joy of a nation delivered from exile, which he compares to a bridegroom decked out with a garland and a bride adorned with jewels. “The nations shall see your vindication, and all the kings your glory; and you shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give.” (Is. 62:2) So here we have both a wedding and a naming ceremony. Israel is made a new people because their relationship with God has been changed from enmity to intimacy. They have a new identity because they are now in reality what God has always envisioned them to be. God speaks, and it is done. God promises, and it comes to pass.
Then in his letter to the Galatians, Paul writes about our changed relationship with God by comparing it to the bequest in a will. Long ago, God promised Abraham that his offspring would inherit a blessing. As Paul explains in the verses just before those we heard this morning, that offspring is Christ, and in baptism we have been united with Christ. So as Jesus is the natural-born Son of God, we are now God’s adopted children. And how do we know this? Once again it is through a speech-act, but this one is a little different. Instead of just naming us as children, God sends the Spirit of the Son into our hearts where the Spirit cries out, “Abba, Father.” And so we become God’s adopted children because the Spirit of Christ himself is praying within us and addressing God as our Father. And praying that prayer makes us God’s children, and if children then heirs of the promise.
Finally in the Gospel of John we have the greatest speech-act of all: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.” (Jn 1:14) The Incarnation (or “Enfleshment”) is the ultimate performative word. In the human life of Jesus, we see what God’s Word does, and what God’s Word truly is. No one has ever seen God—until now. “It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.”
The Incarnation may have been the Word’s greatest speech-act, but it was not the last. The Word who made the heavens and the earth, the Word who delivered Israel from slavery and from exile, the Word who became flesh and lived among us—this same Word wanted us to have communion with him here and now. So he took bread and said, “This is my body, which is given for you.” And it was so. And he took a cup of wine and said, “This is my blood of the New Covenant, which is shed for you.” And it was so. Every time we eat this bread and drink this cup, it is Christmas all over again. Every time we circle around this altar and hold out our hands to receive him, Jesus is Emmanuel—God with us.
All our Christmas joy depends upon the Word made flesh. If you have received a present that made you glad this Christmas, if you have felt a little closer to someone you love, if you have found any beauty in the music of the season, or smiled at the excitement of a child, then you should know it was God who was speaking to you in those moments and saying, “I love you, and I want to be with you.” As the poet John Betjeman wrote:
No love that in a family dwells,
No caroling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare—
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.
“Christmas” (1954)
Christ was with us in the manger, and now he is with us at the table. God’s Word is living and active; best of all, the Word is always Love. Christmas made communion with God’s Word possible, and communion with the Word will keep Christmas forever in our hearts.
© copyright 2009 by The Rev.Arthur Holder
December 25, 2009
Christmas
Luke 2: 1-20
The Reverend Robbin Clark
The moments and memories of Christmas are many, but this story is at its center. There’s a sweet simplicity about it, but it is fraught with nuance and subtext. These verses have been productively mined for meaning for nearly two millennia. We see the machinations of power and how they drive the lives of common people. We feel for what they and we have to put up with as a result. We see extraordinary messengers of God breaking through into ordinary lives. We note how people respond when that happens, and perhaps wonder what we might do ourselves. It’s a story that’s accessible. You can get right into it and imagine yourself in more than one of the roles. Yet it is cosmic in scope and invites us into contemplation of the very nature and purposes of God. All the customs and celebrations, nay, the industries that have grown up around the story sometimes threaten to overwhelm it. Often they seem completely divorced from it. But the light of the story shines on, even in darkness. And the best of our “seasonal” traditions do take us to some of the core truth it expresses.
This year, after a hiatus of several seasons, I had the opportunity to attend performances of both A Christmas Carol and The Nutcracker ballet. In each of them, the story, the one we have just heard, is taken for granted rather than told or, really, even referenced. The action is simply set at Christmastide. In A Christmas Carol, we have a Victorian cautionary tale, complete with ghosts, whose moral might be summarized as, “What goes around, comes around. Beware.” Disregard for anything but moneymaking has turned Ebenezer Scrooge from a likeable young man into an isolated, resentful old one. He disdains and distrusts relationships and, in particular, has no regard for the poor. It takes a quartet of ghostly apparitions to break through his hard, cold shell and free his heart to extend itself in love.
The Nutcracker ballet, lightening considerably the tale it was based on, takes us into a child’s world of wonder and awe. The ugly and odd nutcracker doll becomes a handsome prince who vanquishes the threatening mouse king and leads Clara into a transformed world of sweets and flowers and snowflakes come to life. Her fantasy dream hints at the amazing potential in the common things around her.
In addition, this year I’ve been struck by the poetry of Christmas set to music in the hymns and carols of both church and concert hall. Lines pop out at me, and my soul cries, “Yes! That’s it exactly!” or else I’m surprised and struck by an insight I’d never had before. So this simple story and all it has brought forth keeps opening up and multiplying meaning for our lives. It can both convict and inspire us. What we must keep in mind to be true to it, though, is that it is first and foremost a story of God’s love for us.
Seven centuries ago, a young woman, thought to be on her deathbed, had a series of visions. They were a lot scarier than Clara’s in the Nutcracker, being focused on our Lord’s crucifixion. She gave the rest of her life over to prayer and reflection and writing about what she had “seen”. She is called Dame Julian of Norwich, and her work is still revered as a spiritual classic. She titled it Revelations of Divine Love. Her ongoing quest was to know God’s meaning and purpose. After some fifteen years, she wrote that her “spirit’s understanding” had come to this: “You would know our Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well. Love was his meaning. Who showed it you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love.” Christina Rossetti’s poem, which we have at Hymn 84, says it this way: “Love came down at Christmas, love all lovely, love divine.” So how do we receive this love, and how do we show it forth in our lives?
First, we receive it as a gift, for it truly is the greatest gift we will ever get. No one can earn love. We can earn money, and sometimes we can even earn appreciation, respect and trust. But love is always a gift. And it is always a mystery. That is why our fitting response to it consists of awe and wonder and deep gratitude. The only answer to the “why?” of love is, “just because.” As much as we treasure the love that we have been shown and the ones who are dearest to our own hearts, God’s love for us is surer and more lasting, stretching to eternity. Nothing can deter it. And the Holy One who created all things did not shrink from entering fully into our human life to show us what love looks like and acts like in the flesh. Jesus’ example of love is no less transformative than Clara’s fantastic dream, and we bow before it with the same awe and wonder. But we don’t “wake up” from this transforming vision. It is before us at all times, that we may ponder it and live by it.
It is the living of love that concerns Dickens in A Christmas Carol. A more recent writer, Scott Peck, defined the behavior of love as “extending oneself for the good of the other.” This is what Scrooge will have none of. The ghosts present a chilling picture of the end he will come to if he does not change his ways. I am reminded of Luke’s story of the rich man and Lazarus, his poor neighbor whose needs he ignored. Marley, from his own place of torment, gets to warn Scrooge, unlike the rich man in the story who was forbidden to go back and warn his brethren where their behavior was taking them so they could repent.
It is to Scrooge’s credit that he eventually “gets it” and is transformed. He begins appreciating and bestowing kindness. He cares. He shares generously. He extends himself, not only for the good of his nephew and his employee Cratchit’s family, but for the common good as well. His circle of caring widens.
At the recent climate summit in Copenhagen, Archbishop Rowan Williams preached eloquently about extending ourselves to the widest possible circle of caring, the care of all creation. He took as his text the words from St. John, “perfect love casts out fear.” He knows, as we do deep down, that fear is our greatest impediment to living the love-filled lives God intends for us. To be sure, there are many things to be afraid of in this world. Throughout human history people with power have oppressed and abused those without. For generations, the “haves” of the world have wantonly used up the resources of land and sea and sky, and the “have-nots” have copied them in trying to catch up. A fear is creeping over us that we all may have left it too long. There are those who try to scare us into action, but they more often end up paralyzing us in despair. The only thing that will work is love. Only love begets hope and ignites possibility. We will do for love what we will do for no other reason.
We’ve lived through a decade of fear mongering about terrorism and threat that has heightened hatred around the world. Only love, with its innate self-extension toward the other can begin to turn us toward a more helpful direction. This is true not only on a cosmic and societal level, but in our own lives. The love that was born at Christmas was not born into privilege. Jesus’ self-extension was extreme. To quote Christina Rossetti again, “Enough for him whom cherubim worship night and day, a breast full of milk and a manger full of hay.” That’s a real stretch. What sort of stretch can we make in response?
In this holy season, what might we discover is “enough” for us? How might we open up our souls and make greater use of our capacity to care and to share? How, in our own particular situation, can we commit to the behaviors of love? to attentiveness and generosity? to extending ourselves for the good of the other? Remember that “other” includes those with whom we are already in close relationship, and those with whom we share this congregation, this city, this nation and family of nations, and also the whole created order. It’s a huge project. But be mindful that even God started small – with one tiny baby.
I think God was smart to do that. A new baby is probably the best trigger for our self-giving love and for our awe and wonder. All the accretions to the central story of Jesus’ birth are OK with me if they trigger in us that two-fold response of love answering love. That’s what Christmas is about. I’ll let Dame Julian sum it up for us.
“So it was that I learned that love was our Lord’s meaning. And I saw for certain, both here and elsewhere, that before he ever made us, God loved us... and in this love our life is everlasting...In it we have our beginning.”
A blessed new beginning to you all.
© copyright 2009 by The Rev. Robbin Clark
December 20, 2009
Fourth Sunday of Advent, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Micah 5: 2-5a
Hebrews 10: 5-10
Luke 1: 39-45
The Reverend Robbin Clark
The first thing my college roommate did when she found out she and her husband were expecting was to head to the library and bookstore. She wanted to prepare herself with knowledge about what she would be experiencing, so she went to the experts who wrote books. And she read them eagerly.
Maybe Mary was doing essentially the same thing. But without access to a bookstore or library, she went to consult with her kinswoman Elizabeth, who was six months further along in a God-touched pregnancy. The angel had tipped Mary off when announcing her own call to bear the Son of the Most High into the world. Maybe Mary took it as a “suggestion” to make the visit. One doesn’t mess with announcing angels. Or maybe she was doing just what so many of us do when we find ourselves in a new and strange situation. We seek out someone who has “been there”.
All explorers of new territory hope they can find a native guide. They want someone who can speak from personal experience of what lies ahead. Native guides are not necessarily the sort of people who would write a book or be considered an expert, but they know the territory because it’s where they live. Maybe they’ve never sat down and thought about the nuances of navigating it, but it’s in their bones. To be with such a person is immensely helpful to the “newbie”, whatever the nature of the territory or experience.
I was first introduced to the power of this sort of “been there” mentoring in nursing school. Our instructors told us that some of our most important allies in working with patients recovering from very invasive surgeries would be those who had been through the very same surgery themselves. Whether it was the Ostomy Association or Reach to Recovery, those who had “been there” were instrumental in helping bowel and breast cancer patients adapt and move forward. One visit could turn everything around by providing a real concrete example of a new normalcy and thus engendering hope and resolve.
In the decades since, I have seen this dynamic in action over and over. Our own Bob Kolenkow travels the country giving talks to inform and encourage fellow diabetics. Each of the Twelve Step family of programs depends on the same “been there” mentoring in their sponsorship structure and at each meeting. I myself rely on it in Weight Watchers. And a similar thing happens in a myriad of affinity groups organized around common interest or experience. It may be Parents Without Partners, Lavender Lions, the bridge group and chick flicks or a grief support group or a clergy colleague group.
Growth in the faith usually follows a similar pattern. We mature in the faith by being around folds who are a bit ahead of us on the journey. New Christians must have baptismal sponsors to help guide them, and candidates for Confirmation are given companions on their journey. A prayer or bible study group can really help us to live into our baptismal vows, as can a relationship with a spiritual director. A parish community provides such a structure of support, whether at any given moment, we are the helper or the helpee. It’s what we can do for one another.
Mary looked to Elizabeth, not just for advice about pregnancy, I imagine. There were probably lots of pregnant women in Nazareth for that. But she needed help with how to deal with being an instrument for accomplishing God’s will and purpose for humanity. And Elizabeth does not disappoint.
From the moment of Mary’s greeting, Elizabeth acknowledges that this is not just about comparing notes on being pregnant. She immediately references the larger context. She blesses Mary and her unborn child and wonders aloud at her own role, “And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?” She praises Mary’s faithful acceptance of the angel’s message. Maybe they sat down and recalled together all the ancestral stories of God’s involvement in special births, stories about Sarah laughing at the angel visitors who predicted Isaac’s birth, or about Hannah being mistaken for a drunk while she was praying so earnestly to conceive Samuel.
Whatever brought it on, Mary suddenly peals forth in song strongly reminiscent of Hannah’s. The Magnificat expresses the amazing power and grace of God to transform, liberate and lift up. Mary sings, not only of her own situation, but of God’s tender concern and faithful advocacy for all the lowly and marginalized of the world and of God’s blessing and care for them. And she utters a warning to the rich and mighty of the world. They will not always be so. Tables will turn. God’s promise is sure and true. Awe and obedience are our proper response to them.
These messages were not new with Mary. They had been on the lips of God’s prophets for centuries. And Israel’s God was well-known for choosing unexpected persons to carry the message and lead the people. Jacob, Joseph and David were all younger sons set over their elders. Many of the prophets were outsiders, including Micah, whose words we heard earlier. He was a champion of authentic worship and social justice, and he predicts another divine reversal in the emergence of God’s anointed ruler from little, no-account Bethlehem. He promises that ruler will bring forth peace and provide for the people, that they may dwell secure. It is a vision not unlike Mary’s.
Mary’s song shows such confidence in God’s promise of mercy and transformation that she speaks of them as already accomplished: “He has scattered the proud…cast down the mighty…filled the hungry.” I don’t see that yet. I see a lot left to be done before those changes are fully manifest. I guess that’s where we come in. Like Mary and Elizabeth, like the prophets before them, and like every Christian since, we are called to be part of God’s effort to transform the world. We are called to lift up the lowly and to empty ourselves of proud conceit and disproportional riches. And we are to do this on the personal, community and global levels. In us, God is continuing the tradition of calling the unexpected and the unready. What are we to do to navigate in this new territory of becoming instruments of God’s will?
We’re in luck. God’s mercy and kindness have provided for us a native guide, a “been there” mentor who knows the territory in his very bones. Jesus, the incarnate Son of the Most High, lived a human life completely open and obedient to God’s will. Everything about him demonstrates the potential that is in each of us. Being with him can transform our confusion and fear into hope and resolve.
Like Mary, hiking off in haste across the Judean hills, we need to go to Jesus whenever we are faced with a new and challenging situation, and whenever our hope and resolve are wearing thin. And sometimes we don’t eve have to go that far. For Jesus is continually coming to us in one guise or another. Maybe it’s a moment of insight or release in worship. Maybe it’s an unexpected connection with a stranger. Maybe it’s via a news report or startling statistic. Maybe it’s through time spent with trusted friends. It might even be in all those books.
The fact is that Jesus came among us to be our “been there” mentor and fellow traveler as well as our savior. Our experience folds into his and is transformed by it, so that we may live the new life he has brought us.
© copyright 2009 by The Rev. Robbin Clark
December 13, 2009
Third Sunday of Advent, Rev. Common Lectionary Year C
Zephaniah 3: 14-20
Philippians 4: 4-7
Luke 3: 7-18
The Reverend Robbin Clark
Only twelve days ‘til Christmas.
Now, we all know that these are not to be confused with the twelve days of Christmas, but there seems to be a fair amount of confusion about this in the secular mind.
We know it’s Advent and that Advent is a season of spiritual preparation for the coming of Jesus Christ – in power and glory to judge the earth; in poverty and vulnerability as the infant of Bethlehem; in ways subtle or startling as our friend and guide on life’s journey. But we also live in the world, and our preparation is often more about writing cards, figuring out what gifts to give to whom, wrapping and (worst case) sending them, not to mention attending and/or hosting seasonal social or musical events. And let’s not forget decorating. It’s time to deck the halls and trim the tree. Like many of you, I guess, I get my tree from one of the Delancy Street lots. It’s a little way I can contribute to their good work.
What Delancy Street does, through a lengthy and rigorous program, is to help people in the throes of alcohol or drug addition to turn their lives around. I came to know it in the Bay Area, but it now has branches in other places as well. When I lived in Santa Fe, I had the opportunity to visit their program site in northern New Mexico. There was a lot to see and to learn, but the thing that has stuck with me most is “the bench.”
When individuals want to be admitted to the program, they come to the office at the complex. Probably they expect to be ushered right in and welcomed to the community. Instead, they are told to have a seat on “the bench” until someone is ready to see them. This is not a cozy waiting room with comfy chairs and a bunch of magazines to read. And it’s not just for a few minutes. It’s a hard plank in a cold hallway. People have waited hours, even days, on “the bench.” They wait until the staff, all experienced graduates of the program, senses that they are really ready to commit themselves to the hard work of transformation.
I can only imagine what goes on in the heart and mind of someone waiting on “the bench.” And in their body, for withdrawal can be a terrible thing. Many have left, often in great anger. Many also come back, for they know their need and their powerlessness to make it on their own. “The bench” is a wilderness location, and it is harsh. But, beneath its hard surface, it is a place of redemption. It is a place of truth and a place of promise. It is a “narrow door” and it leads to a demanding path. But that path is nothing less than the way to new life.
There’s no “bench” at St. Mark’s where folks must sit while they contemplate being baptized. And I don’t think it would do a lot for parish growth if I took my cue from John’s “brood of vipers” speech in responding to baptismal inquiries. At the same time, I have seen far too many instances of folks bringing a child for baptism and never being seen again. The covenant we make in baptism is deep and demanding, and it takes a lifetime to live into it. The early church knew that and had its own form of “the bench”, a three-year catechumenate. During that time, those seeking a transformed new life in Christ had to live “as if”. They had to practice the Christian life so that when they received the promised gift of the Holy Spirit as they went through the baptismal waters, they would be prepared live appropriately in their new state of grace. They would know and trust the community and the community would know and trust them. Each would feel secure in the other’s commitment.
We try to get the same results by open invitation and lots of latitude to proceed at one’s own pace and in one’s own way. This has a lot in common with Jesus’ own practice, and it’s very optimistic. Many of us need something akin to “the bench” to help us get serious about living a transformed life. Sometimes our “bench” is a medical crisis or a relationship upheaval. Sometimes it is a great loss. Sometimes it is a professional or economic moment of truth. Occasionally, it is a sudden realization of blessings or a profound moment of joy. It can even be the vaguest stirring in the soul that nudges us onto a different path. Whatever it takes, it is a sign that God has come to us to draw us closer, and that is cause for rejoicing.
Maybe that is why Luke is bold to end his description of John’s “tough love” message with the words, “So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.” The Gospel was about to burst upon the world in the ministry of Jesus. John stands last in the great succession of prophets that looked for the Messiah’s coming and tried to help people prepare for it. The words we hear today from Zephaniah and Isaiah are words of comfort and exultation, but they stand alongside many dire warnings.
The world is clearly not in the shape that God wants it to be, and it is a prophet’s job to point that out. Prophets break through our persistent denial and expose the contradictions between God’s intent and our action. But prophets are called to truth, and the truth is that all of the failures and deficiencies in our lives are as nothing in the face of God’s love for us. It’s not that they don’t matter or that we should not repent and commit ourselves to do better in the future. It’s not that we have done no damage to the earth and to each other. It’s not that repairing that damage won’t be costly and difficult, if it can be done at all. These realities are all part of the picture. But the frame for that picture, that which contains and shapes it, is God’s love for us and God’s eagerness to be active and present within and among us.
It is that loving presence and empowerment that brings the transformation we seek. Our sins, however sorely they may hinder us, are no match for God’s grace and mercy. That is why we rejoice and give thanks in even the direst of situations. God comes to us as friend and advocate. No more cringing in fear. That only paralyzes us. We are to stand and sing and draw sustenance from God’s nearness. We are to throw off the burden of our lacks and our wrongs and our shame and partner with God for a transformed life and world. We are to get off the bench and into the program. We are to live into our baptism.
And we are each to do so as appropriate to our situation, just as John advises. Or, as Paul points out elsewhere, we are to make the most of the particular gifts we have been given, ministering according to them. This is not to deny the core values and principles that apply to us all. Good fruit is good fruit, whether it’s a pear or an apple or a persimmon. Gentleness is on top of Paul’s list in his advice to the Philippians. John stresses generous sharing, honesty in our work, abstinence from intimidation, oppression and economic injustice. Zephaniah reminds us to care for the weak and the outcast. And all of our readings emphasize our continual calling to pray and give thanks and to share the good news with others.
This is “Rejoice Sunday.” It’s a time to celebrate God’s nearness and recommit ourselves to our journey into the full stature of Christ. Check the pew you’re sitting on. It’s a lot like a bench. Take moment to feel what it’s like to be on the verge of transformation, and to recognize that you and God and the community all have crucial parts to play in making it happen. Get in touch with your yearning for joy and peace. Ready yourself to receive them and reflect them in your life. Let these remaining twelve days of Advent focus on the real preparation for Christmas. Practice gentleness, generosity and justice and you’ll be well on the way to joy and peace. As we sang to begin this service, “let each heart prepare a home where such a mighty guest may come.”
© copyright 2009 by The Rev. Robbin Clark