“Walking and leaping and praising God” (3rd Sunday of Easter, 4/14/2024)

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Lessons

In today’s collect—the prayer that we use to collect, to center ourselves before the Scripture readings—we prayed “Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work.” It turns out that that prayer captures something central to today’s readings.

In today’s Gospel Jesus lays out the disciples’ task. They are witnesses, and in God’s generosity that dovetails with the promised proclamation of repentance and forgiveness of sins in Jesus’ name to all nations.

That, so to speak, is the theory. Our reading from Acts gives us an example of the practice. The lectionary choses to begin the reading with Peter addressing the people, which is odd, because the people are only interested in listening to Peter because of what just happened: entering the temple, Peter had, in Jesus’ name, healed a beggar lame from birth, who is now “walking and leaping and praising God.” Had Peter not started speaking the crowd would have demanded that he give some explanation.

So what happened? Luke sets the scene: “One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, at three o’clock in the afternoon. And a man lame from birth was being carried in. People would lay him daily at the gate of the temple called the Beautiful Gate so that he could ask for alms from those entering the temple. When he saw Peter and John about to go into the temple, he asked them for alms.”

Now, not only in 1st century Jerusalem, but in most times and places we expect to encounter numerous beggars at the entrances to holy places. The cathedrals of Bucharest, Manila, or Santo Domingo come to mind. The beggers easily become part of the landscape, and are typically not the object of the attendees’ attention. But, the text tells us, “Peter looked intently at him.”

We might wonder if something of Jesus had rubbed off on Peter. The Gospels tell a number of stories of the disciples screening folk who want Jesus’ attention. From earlier in Luke’s Gospel: “People were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them; and when the disciples saw it, they sternly ordered them not to do it.” Jesus will have none of it: “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs” (18:15-16). “You are my witnesses” does not mean “You are my bouncers.” And if little children, then others at the bottom of the status pyramid, even this beggar lame from birth.

So “Peter said, ‘I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.’ And he took him by the right hand and raised him up; and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong.” This is Peter’s imagination at work. Despite the societal script in which beggars are simply part of the landscape, Peter’s imagination has put this beggar and Jesus into the same frame, and moments later the beggar is “walking and leaping and praising God.”

So, understandably, a crowd gathers, and that’s where our reading starts. But to start the reading there—with all due respect to the folk who put these reading schedules together—is to miss the point. The witness with which Jesus entrusts the disciples begins not with Peter addressing the crowd, but with Peter’s imagination, with Peter’s mental map. Two elements, Jesus and the beggar, which could easily have stayed far apart, come together, and something beautiful happens. “Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work.”

When we think about witness or evangelism, we often think of words. And if the standard is the eloquence of Peter or Paul… Today’s reading gives us another approach. Most days we encounter some combination of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Where does our imagination place Jesus in these encounters? Truth be told, sometimes our imagination has no interest in placing Jesus anywhere near these encounters—so that’s where our work starts. “Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work.”

There’s an interior dimension to the Acts story as well. That beggar lame from birth that so easily becomes simply part of the landscape: perhaps like parts of our lives, situations, relationships, wounds whose pain is simply part of the landscape. What happens if we put Jesus in the same frame? Unlike Peter, but like most Christians in most times and places, we may have no idea what Jesus might be able to do. But that’s where Paul gives us some encouragement. Halfway through his letter to the Ephesians: “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine…” “Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work.”

The Two Miracles on Easter + 7 (2nd Sunday of Easter, 4/7/2024)

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Readings

Among the characters in Winnie the Pooh, one of my favorites is Eeyore. Eeyore knows that the glass is half empty. Among the apostles, Eeyore’s stand-in is Thomas, center-stage in the second half of today’s Gospel.

The story starts —as Thomas expected— with a crucifixion. On that last journey up to Jerusalem most of the disciples had been arguing about who’d be greatest in the coming kingdom; Thomas’ contribution was “Let’s go up to die with him.” And it wasn’t just Jesus hanging up there; it was the last three years of Thomas’ life, and a lifetime’s worth of hopes and dreams.

Now the other disciples are telling him that Jesus appeared to them the evening of the first day of the week. If they’re to be believed, it was quite a meeting: Jesus showed them his hands & side. He breathed on them: “Receive the Holy Spirit” (“Like the Garden of Eden”). “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Thomas: I need to see, insert finger, hand…

By the disciples’ telling, Jesus had given them the Holy Spirit & their marching orders, so there was no reason to think Jesus would appear again. Nevertheless, a week later Jesus appears again and offers Thomas the proof he demanded. Thomas responds with a confession unparalleled in the NT: “My Lord and my God!”

There are two extraordinary elements in the story: the encounters with the Risen Christ, and Thomas being with the other disciples at that second meeting. It would have been so easy for them to split. Imagine: eight days of the others celebrating Easter & Thomas still observing Good Friday. Altar Guild: what liturgical color would you use to keep everyone happy? Thomas could have written them off as gullible; they could have written Thomas off as faithless.

Why did they stay together? Simple garden-variety virtues —I think— like faithfulness, patience, humility, the virtues that keep us going when all else falls away.

Humility: not having an artificially low opinion of oneself, but an accurate opinion. Not incidentally, this is precisely what the writer of 1 John is aiming at: 8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

While the obvious connection between 1 John and our Gospel is the business about “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands,” it was, I think, something of the shared ability to recognize themselves before each other as sinners that helped them stay together.

How much might have been lost for both Thomas & disciples if they’d split. Thomas might never have encountered Jesus; the other disciples might never have found the words Thomas found to capture their experience: “My Lord & my God!”

The point is that if we’re to encounter the Risen Christ, we do so in the midst of the disciples, in the midst of each other, warts & all. And that requires these mundane human virtues: faithfulness, patience, humility. These virtues, it turns out, are necessary not simply for human community, but for any sustained encounter with the divine.

Our texts speak to us pretty directly in a variety of ways. On the day to day, the living together in unity that the psalm celebrates and that the apostles achieved turns out to be remarkably difficult. The difficulty sometimes is over big issues (is the Lord risen or not?); more often it’s over small issues of the “squeeze the toothpaste in the middle or roll it up from the end” variety. But as anyone who’s lived in a family knows, it’s remarkably easy for these little issues to transition into big issues, and suddenly the toothpaste tube is about who always gets their way, who is being inconsiderate —you fill in the blanks. This is where humility and its twin, a sense of humor, help enormously.

What is at stake here is captured in the first two verses of our reading from Acts: Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.

The unity among believers is important because it makes the economic solidarity possible, a solidarity that historically speaking formed part of the appeal of the Gospel. Listen to the pagan emperor Julian complaining about the Christians: [I]t is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Christians support not only their own poor but ours as well, all persons see that our people lack aid from us.

And that in turn makes me wonder about Luke’s next statement: With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. That “great power” and “great grace” —something unconnected to the disciples’ unity and generosity, or its natural result?

God knows we could use great power and great grace in our testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. But if I’ve read Acts correctly, great power and great grace are not brought by the stork, but flow from unity among believers.

We cannot heal the divisions among Christians at the international or national levels, although, God knows, most of us ought to be devoting more prayer to this than we presently are. We can pay attention to our own attitudes and actions, and so, by exercise of humility, at least not contribute to these on the local level. From whom have you become estranged? You do not need to wait until the next penitential season to seek reconciliation.

For who knows, who knows how we may yet together encounter the Risen Christ?

“And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Easter Sunday, 3/31/2024)

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Readings [Isaiah, Acts, Mark]

Alleluia. Christ is Risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.

What a strange ending for a Gospel, yes? We’ll spend most of our time wondering about that, but first a word about our other two readings.

“On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.… he will swallow up death forever.” That captures one of the key dimensions of our Eucharists, and I’ll be using part of it as the Offertory Sentence this Easter season. The mother of all feasts—and each Eucharist is a preview.

And the text contains an important tension that we’ll notice in Peter’s speech. “On this mountain” (not any old mountain) “for all peoples.” Easter’s good news is for everyone; it’s rooted in what God did at a particular moment in human history.

Or, as Peter puts it, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality.” God loves the Roman conquerors no less than the Jewish conquered. Isaiah captured it: “On that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom the LORD of hosts has blessed, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage.’” And this God who shows no partiality offers salvation to all through Jesus of Nazareth, for “All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” But recently—the last couple centuries—we’ve found it challenging to hold the “no particularity” and Jesus as the source of forgiveness together. Here we might learn from Peter: Easter: good news for all peoples, not just the Christians.

The ending of Mark’s Gospel: readers have long found it perplexing. Perplexing enough that later manuscripts added a variety of “better” endings. The ending at v.8 is odd enough that some wonder if the original ending was lost very early. But Mark seems to like curve balls, so it’s worth wondering what it might mean that he ended with this curve ball.

“So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Mark’s portrayed these women in a positive light, encouraged us to empathize with them. And as we hear v.8 we may respond “No, please don’t get stuck there.” And if that’s the reaction Mark’s after, he’s employing an old strategy.

Recall how the Book of Jonah ends. God told Jonah to preach to Nineveh. Jonah eventually gets there, preaches, Nineveh repents, God repents of the threatened destruction, Jonah blows multiple fuses, and the book ends with God trying to make a case for divine compassion.

“Then the LORD said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?” (Jon. 4:10-11)

We’re not told how Jonah responds. Why? The important question is not how Jonah responds, but how we respond. Are we up for living with a God who extends compassion to our bitterest enemies?

Then there’s one of the stories Luke tells. The Pharisees and scribes are grumbling about Jesus welcoming sinners. So Jesus tells some parables, ending with the parable we call “The Prodigal Son” but which might be better titled “The Two Lost Sons.” At the end of the parable the father’s thrown a party to celebrate the younger son’s return and the older son is refusing to participate. Here’s the ending:

“His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ Then the father said to him, ‘Son, 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.’” (Lk. 15:28b-32)

We’re not told how the older son responds. Why? The important question is not how he responds, but how the Pharisees and scribes respond, how—by extension—we the hearers respond.

“So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” And here again the question is not what the women do, but what Mark’s hearers do. In their political climate saying nothing to anyone would have sounded like a really good idea. So Mark’s ending serves as a sort of mirror: if I’m dismayed by the women’s reaction, am I doing any better?

Our political climate is, of course, quite different. But here too saying nothing to anyone can sound like a really good idea. So Easter becomes a celebration of generic newness rather than the shocking announcement that God has raised this convicted Jewish Messiah and named him the benchmark for human striving and the source of forgiveness for all. “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” And, oh, can I empathize.

Alleluia. Christ is Risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.

Venerating the Cross (Good Friday, 3/29,2024)

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Readings

One of things I treasure about our tradition is that on our High Holy Days our liturgies pretty much preach themselves. They carry us; we can relax into them.

With some exceptions, and today I’ll use the sermon slot to focus on one of them. Toward the end of the service there’s the Veneration of the Cross. What do we do with that?

There may be, I suppose, parishes in which everyone comes forward, and there the pastoral advice would be to resist group pressure. Don’t worry about what they’ll think of you if you don’t come forward. I’m told that’s not the problem here.

So what do we do with it? There are many possible answers. Here are a few; perhaps they’ll spark better ones.

Some of us are carrying burdens, some out of faithfulness, some because of the cards dealt. We might come to the cross for company. Jesus is no stranger to heavy burdens. As the Lord put it in Isaiah, “even to your old age I am he, / even when you turn gray I will carry you. / I have made, and I will bear; / I will carry and will save.”

Some of us: the language of 1928/Rite I comes too easily (“there is no health in us…miserable offenders;” “We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under Thy table”). We might come to the cross to hear—as clearly as Jesus can say it—you are worth it. Jesus: “If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?”

Some of us carry some anger at God’s choices that seem to bring on apparently unnecessary suffering for God or us. We might come to the cross to remind God that we’re still here, that the anger is still here, even if we have no idea how the conversation can productively go forward. From Isaiah again: “Come now, let us argue it out, / says the Lord.”

Some of us: there are no words to adequately express the gratitude we sometimes feel. We might come to the cross to say—with our body—thank you. We come up every week to receive Jesus’ Body and Blood; this time to say thank you. Jesus, the New Temple: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, / and his courts with praise.”

As I said, many possible answers. There’s no obligation, but perhaps the Veneration can be a means of expressing something important in your heart.

Extracting Israel from Egypt and Egypt from Israel (Maundy Thursday, 3/28/2024)

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Readings (With the 1 Corinthians reading extended to this)

Getting Israel out of Egypt is half the battle; the other half is getting Egypt out of Israel. The Maundy Thursday readings, with their Passover setting, invite us to think about that.

Getting Israel out of Egypt: The first reading tells of the institution of the Passover, a feast the Jews have celebrated every year since that night in Egypt.

Each family was to select an unblemished lamb, the Passover lamb, and to kill it at twilight. Some of the blood went on the doorposts and the lintel of the house and the lamb was eaten, with the family prepared to leave at any moment. That very night God would pass through the land, and Pharaoh would finally let the people go.

Until Jesus’ arrival, no other night was of such importance in the world’s history, for it was one of the defining actions of the true God, announcing that God desires not the obedience of slaves, but rather of free sons and daughters. In our country, African American slaves heard in this story God’s passion for their own freedom.

And every year since the Exodus the Jews have continued to celebrate the Passover to remember their liberation and —often— to reaffirm their confidence in God’s power to deliver them again from new enemies.

As the Gospels tell us, Jesus. the night before his death, celebrated the Passover with his disciples and reinterpreted its meaning. The meal had used bread and wine to celebrate the liberation from Egypt; Jesus reinterpreted the bread and wine in terms of his coming self-offering: this is my body; this is my blood.

Every Sunday when we celebrate the Eucharist, when we say “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” we are remembering this definitive reinterpretation. And to say “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” reminds us of how deeply God desires our liberty, and what God was willing to pay to achieve it. God desires that we be free from both our exterior and interior oppressors, free—in the language of our Gospel reading—to love.

Getting Egypt, that is, getting the enslaving seeking and maintenance of status, out of Israel turns out to be at least as hard. It’s the focus of our New Testament readings. In Luke’s account of the Last Supper even that night the disciples were arguing about who was the greatest. So Jesus tries to get at it by washing the disciples’ feet. It horrifies Peter, not so much (I think) that Jesus is washing his feet, as that Peter has already figured out where Jesus is going to take this: “if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

Our Prayer Book encourages—but does not demand—a reenactment of the foot washing. These days it’s problematic. But the reenactment is less important than its point: a love that is oriented not by my comfort level or preferences, but by the needs of my brother or sister. Love oriented by my comfort level or preferences: that lets Egypt in through the back door. Love oriented by the needs of my brother or sister: that’s the liberty for which Moses struggled and Jesus died.

This business of washing each other’s feet—metaphorically speaking—shows up in that paragraph from Paul’s letter from which our reading was taken. The Lectionary assigns vv.23-26, in which Paul recounts Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist. But why does Paul recount it? For that we need the surrounding context. In those days—also at Corinth—we often celebrated the Eucharist as part of a dinner.

But what happened, what scandalized Paul, was that each family ate and drank from their own basket. The rich, baskets to go from one of the upscale restaurants; the poor, whatever they could find at a local food pantry. Egypt has not only entered through the back door; Egypt is running the place! So Paul recounts the institution to remind them that the Eucharist is about a life given for others, so that celebrating the Eucharist selfishly and as though it’s “business as usual” badly misses the point.

Notice how Paul unpacks this. “For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.” Notice: “the body” isn’t the Eucharistic bread; it’s the living Body of Christ composed of the brothers and sisters gathered around a common table but not —alas— around a common basket. “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner…” “In an unworthy manner” is not about whether I’ve properly confessed before Mass, or whether I have the right sacramental theology, but about whether I’m showing love to my Christian brothers and sisters.

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Washing each others’ feet, celebrating the Eucharist in a way that takes Jesus’ Body seriously: two first Century examples of where Jesus’ new commandment needs to kick in, given to us to get us wondering where that new commandment needs to kick in here and now.

Getting Israel out of Egypt: that’s God’s “yes” to our freedom, celebrated in the Passover and transposed—put on steroids—for all people in Jesus’ death as celebrated in the Holy Eucharist. Getting Egypt out of Israel, living freely: that turns out to be an ongoing project. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” May some of Jesus’ passion for our freedom rub off on us.

Holy Week in Stereo (The Sunday of the Passion, 3/24/2024)

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Readings

One of my memorable high school discoveries was that of stereophonic sound. Before, recorded music had come through a single channel. Now it was coming through two channels—one for each ear. It was like being there!

Mono, stereo: something like that is at play in our dual focus as Christians in Jesus’ life and our life. It’s in today’s collect, as it is in many of our collects: “Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the human race you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection…”

And it’s in our second lesson from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Scholars generally agree that Paul is using one of the earliest Christian hymns to Christ—it works pretty well laid out as poetry. And the reason Paul uses it is because he’s trying to encourage his listeners to think and act differently. Recall what he says just before the hymn: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. (Phil. 2:3-4).

A moving hymn—and we might not have known it had not Paul needed to talk to the Philippians about their own life together.

Jesus, the hymn says, “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited.” The pagan rulers—the Egyptians for millennia, the Mesopotamians more subtly, and now the Roman Caesars (as long as it didn’t get back to Rome) were happy to drape themselves in divinity to increase their authority, to increase—if that were possible—the perks of the job. And now here’s Jesus, the only one who could have legitimately done that, who refuses it, and says to his followers “So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (Mk. 10:42-45)

“Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” Paul’s talking about the big-ticket items, the issues that can divide Christians, divide churches. But he’s equally talking about the small-ticket items, the small decisions we make almost without realizing that we’ve made decisions. Sunday morning comes: do I decide where to be based on what I think I need or want, or based on the interests of others, those with whom I’ve been made one Body in Jesus? During the week: which people do I stay in touch with, whose interests am I serving?

As we move into Holy Week we can listen in mono, attending only to Jesus’ story or attending only to our world. Let’s be intentional this year about listening in stereo: Holy Week’s simultaneously about Jesus and about how we live as Jesus’ followers. Listen in stereo: it’s not simply like being there, it’s being there.

About those “unruly wills and affections of sinners” (5th Sunday in Lent, 3/17/2024)

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Readings

This morning’s collect:

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

It would be hard to improve on that collect as a guide to our lessons—and I’m not going to try. Rather, we’ll look at the collect, and then use it as a lens for looking at the lessons.

First, notice where the collect ends up: joy: “our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found.” God is seeking nothing less than our joy. C.S. Lewis nails it in The Screwtape Letters in Screwtape’s description of God:

“He’s a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a façade. Or only like foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it: at His right hand are ‘pleasures for evermore’. Ugh!” (Letter XXII)

Particularly as we approach Holy Week, we need to remember that the sorrow and suffering of Holy Week are on the way to something else: our joy and God’s.

To get to joy there’s work to be done, and that occupies the rest of the collect: “the unruly wills and affections of sinners.” Our wills and affections are “unruly” not only because they may run counter to God’s rule, but also because they’re very imperfect indicators of even what we really want. The British ethicist Oliver O’Donovan recently took this up: “We cannot take any of them [desires] at their face value. ‘It wasn’t what I really wanted!’ is the familiar complaint of a disappointed literalism. To all desire its appropriate self-questioning: what wider, broader good does this desire serve? How does it spring out of our strengths, and how does it spring out of our weaknesses? Where in relation to this desire does real fulfilment lie?”

Strange, isn’t it? In most areas our culture encourages us to be suspicious; three of our great secular “saints” are the masters of suspicion: Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. But when it comes to our desires that same culture encourages no suspicion. When a desire says “Jump!” my only appropriate response is “How high?” With a little more wisdom, when a desire appears, we might well ask “Well, what’s that about?”

Our collect asks God to “order” these desires: “Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise.” Both love and desire are in themselves good; if they can just be properly connected to appropriate objects! And, as the collect recognizes, loving God’s commands and desiring what God promises are not bad places to start.

Our first lesson, the promise of salvation in Jeremiah, deals with the people of God as a whole. God will make a new covenant. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” How this will happen is not explained. And while the New Testament (“the New Covenant”) picks up Jeremiah’s language, it is reticent about claiming too much. In the light of the history of the Church, that’s probably fortunate. That said, the collect’s “Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise” sounds very much like the interior change we need.

Our psalm continues the same themes. As you may recall, all of Ps 119, the longest of the psalms in the Psalter, is dedicated to the praise of the Law. The bottom line, again, is joy (note “delight” in vv 14, 16). And because of the joy and for the sake of future joy the psalmist immerses him- or herself in the Law, treasuring it, meditating on it, probing it, putting it into practice. (In passing, notice that the psalmist is assuming a certain amount of simple memorization, a practice that has too much fallen out of fashion in our tradition.)

In our New Testament lessons we watch the concerns of the collect play out in Jesus’ life. While there’s no suggestion that Jesus shares our sinfulness, it’s clear that even for Jesus obedience is not effortless. Hebrews tells us: “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and being made perfect he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him.”

Again, in the Gospel Jesus looking toward to his own death says “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” The other Gospels describe Jesus wrestling with the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane; this is John’s Gethsemane scene. “And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’?” This is how the collect’s “Grant your people grace to love what you command” plays out.

It has to do with the Father’s will, it has to do—and this is essentially to say the same thing—with the sort of world the Father created: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” This applies to Jesus’ followers; it applies equally to Jesus. Again, Jesus does not send us down a road on which he has not already walked.

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Creative perishing; the Creator’s interventions (4th Sunday in Lent, 3/10/2024)

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Readings

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” We’re now two weeks out from Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week; the lectionary gives us this text to enter into its meaning.

Our texts are first about God’s love. Physicists talk about the different constants whose precise balance makes the universe possible: gravitation, electromagnetism, etc. Well, if God loved us any less, human history would have been very short.

Our verse talks about God’s love and our not perishing. Knowing God’s love, I can deal with the perishing part, and the ways I still opt for perishing. (That’s what we acknowledge when we confess.) Our three lessons offer portraits of what perishing looks like. Not all of it applies to any one of us; most of us will find something to chew on.

Finally, a word about “eternal life.” In the Gospel of John, ‘eternal life’ is not life after death. It’s God’s life in which we participate now. Because it’s God’s life, it’s not limited: it’s eternal. Because it’s God’s life, it’s full & festive. In the Gospel of John Jesus’ first miracle is turning a very large quantity of water into wine.

Numbers. Our first reading tells of Israel complaining —again— in the wilderness on the way from Egypt to the Promised Land. In the last two chapters God’s given them water from the rock —again— and given them victory over a local king —again— but Aaron the high priest has just died, and they’ve also been denied passage through Edom, which means a substantial detour.

So they are complaining against God and Moses: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” That’s verse 5. On that trajectory, we’d be reading about them picking up stones to stone Moses in v.6. More, it’s a classic example of spin: all of this is your fault; we’re the innocent victims. The people neglect to mention that they’d asked for deliverance from Egypt & that they’d rejected God’s command to enter the Promised Land directly a few chapters back, which is why they’re in this wilderness. Spin.

To get the conversation back on track God sends serpents. Are all the bad things that happen to people God’s punishment? Of course not. Does God punish? Well, unless we thoroughly rewrite both the Old & New Testaments, yes. Here, for example. Both to get the conversation back on track and —probably— to save Moses’ skin, serpents. And when the people ask Moses to intercede, God tells Moses to put an image of a serpent on a pole, so that those who are bitten can look at that serpent and live. No natural connection between looking and living; just God’s choice. God seems to like physical signs: this one-time use of the bronze serpent, more enduring signs like the rainbow, or circumcision, or Holy Baptism, or Holy Eucharist.

‘Spin’…a new word for a very old practice. “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” We learn it very early; by the time we hit puberty it’s become as natural as breathing. Worse, we often believe our own spin: it really is only their fault. And that erodes our capacity to repent. If I have nothing to repent of… If the words of the General Confession are mostly reminding me of other people’s sins, that’s perishing.

So it turns out that there are two portraits of perishing in these few verses. Getting bit by a serpent turns out to be the easy one: look at the bronze serpent. The other way of perishing is to be so deeply into spin that we know that it’s God & the rest of the world that’s not OK, not us. We don’t want to put God into the position of wondering whether more serpents are necessary. The good news is that God will not easily abandon us to our spin.

Ephesians. Paul’s letter gives us a different portrait of perishing. Recall the opening verses: “You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient.”

It’s texts like these that drive the examination of candidates in our baptismal rite. “Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?” “Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?” (BCP 302)

OK. What are we talking about? We don’t find it difficult to come up with examples: Hitler’s concentration camps, Cambodia’s killing fields. Easy to come up with examples on our enemies’ turf! Where Satan might be active here? Ah, the blue state/red state, left/right divides. I suspect that one of Satan’s major accomplishments in this country is the frequency with which Christians simply parrot the Democratic and Republican talking points against each other. Righteous indignation is great for keeping the focus on the speck in the neighbor’s eye.

Relying on our own strength, renouncing Satan et al would be a futile exercise. In the context of Holy Baptism it’s a glad confession that God’s love in Jesus gives us a real alternative to following the course of this world.

But here we need another digression: “…following the course of this world.” What do we mean by ‘world’? “God so loved the world…” “…following the course of this world…” If we think about it, the New Testament uses ‘world’ in two very different senses. The first and primary sense: the world as God’s creation: as God’s creation it is good, God loves it, and God’s in the process of redeeming it. The second sense: the institutional opposition to God on the part of rebellious humanity in concert with Satan, the spiritual forces of wickedness, the evil powers of this world. In God’s world six days of work produce seven days of food. In the world we’ve laid on top of that sometimes not even seven days of work produce enough.

In other words, God’s world has been hijacked; Jesus is in the process of taking it back…and invites us to participate (baptism). As Paul puts it, “We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”

Perishing: also about being part of this world order that sets itself in opposition to God. God’s love means that united to Jesus we can change sides.

Our Gospel. Here’s a third picture of perishing. “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” Really? Only in extreme cases do we experience ourselves as loving darkness. Most of the time it’s simply a matter of sensing that some things are better off in an obscure corner.

And so, at the family level, it’s remarkably easy to fence off areas as “what we don’t talk about.” And those fences can become walls which tend to thicken over time.

Secrets. Some things don’t start out as secrets. They become secrets as we make choices regarding what we tell to whom…or not. This is one of the reasons we offer private confession in our tradition. It can be hard to believe that God can forgive or redeem what I fear to name. (And, of course, sometimes what I fear to name is not a sin at all.)

“…that everyone who believes in him may not perish…” Again, believing in Jesus is not believing things about Jesus. The demons Jesus exorcised knew lots of things about Jesus, for all the good it did them. Believing in Jesus is putting your weight on Jesus, trusting Jesus. It’s like trusting the rope when you’re first learning to water ski, or trusting your soles when you’re rock climbing. Believing in Jesus: knowing he’s got my back—and getting on with the work he’s put between my hands.

Perishing: loving darkness more than light. God’s love: offering us a love that frees us to inch into the light and discover to our astonishment that we are not destroyed, but restored.

In sum we humans have an impressive arsenal of ways of perishing. From our 1st lesson: we end up believing our own spin. From our 2nd lesson: we’re born into a world in rebellion in which God’s creatures are corrupted and destroyed; that’s what’s normal. From our Gospel: there are situations in which darkness is really…convenient.

The good news is that God loves us, and that God’s arsenal is even better equipped than ours. With our consent —sometimes as small and vulnerable as a grain of mustard— God continues to transform us into daughters and sons who can live and dance in the light.

Psalm 19 (3rd Sunday in Lent, 3/3/2024)

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Readings

Each of today’s readings could fuel multiple sermons. This time around let’s focus on Psalm 19. Thematically it breaks into three parts: creation (vv.1-6), the law (vv.7-11), and what we might call divine intervention (vv.12-14). Each part is an important part in a faithful life. Is it a complete picture of a faithful life? No. There’s no attention to the community—for that we’d need other psalms. But it gives us more than enough to think about this morning.

“The heavens declare the glory of God, / and the firmament shows his handiwork.” Creation proclaims God’s glory; creation is worthy of our sustained attention. The physicists give us the clearest picture of this, the fine tuning of the various constants that make a stable universe possible, for which see folk like John Polkinghorne. For the world of flora and fauna, I often return to Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

“The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here? The point…is not that it all fits together like clockwork…but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz” (p.135).

“Consider the lilies of the field” Jesus tell us, and how much of his teaching depends on his having first himself considered God’s creation! So theologians like Augustine talk about God’s two books, Scripture and the book of nature. In short, the first part of our psalm: going outside and paying attention is a spiritual discipline.

If God’s glory is found in creation it’s equally found in God’s Torah (“teaching” or, more narrowly, “law”). The joy expressed in this second part, vv.7-11, is perhaps most clearly expressed in the Jewish celebration of Simhat Torah (“Joy of the Teaching/Law”). The Torah (Genesis-Deuteronomy) is read in the synagogue over the course of the year. Simhat Torah, in which members of the congregation dance with the Torah scroll, celebrates the end of the reading and the opportunity to begin the reading again. The Decalogue, that part of the Torah from our first reading, gives us an opportunity to enter into that joy. “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” What follows: how to live as free people. The Godly Play curriculum calls this text “The Ten Best Ways to Live.”

“You shall have no other gods before me.” There is only one God we need to keep happy. An improvement over the various polytheisms then on offer, with multiple gods to keep happy. An improvement over our current de facto polytheism. So many gods want a piece; so many commercials: without me, you’re toast.

“Remember the sabbath day.” God’s creation is generous enough that six days of labor provides for seven days of life. If seven days are required, or if the scheduling is such that there’s no dependable weekly day of rest, that’s a sure sign that Pharaoh has returned.

You shall not murder, commit adultery, steal, etc. We don’t have to do these things to preserve/enhance our life.

“The Ten Best Ways to Live” indeed.

Now, the big surprise in the psalm is that it doesn’t end with v.11. After all that’s just been said about Torah, why do we need vv.12-13? Why indeed?

It turns out that we humans are pretty good at coopting/subverting anything, including Torah. In our best moments this happens almost by accident; in our worst, quite deliberately. The dog is wagging the tail, the dog is wagging the tail… and one day we discover the tail wagging the dog.

The activities Jesus discovered in the temple (John 2). “In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables.” All that probably started legitimately enough: animals are necessary for sacrifice and some worshippers may have preferred to buy locally rather than bring the animals from their village. The money changing? Common currency had an image of the emperor, for whom divine prerogatives were claimed, and the temple authorities came to believe that such coins were inappropriate in the temple. It starts legitimately enough; but soon the penny drops that there’s a great deal of money to be made. The tail wags the dog, and all for the greater glory of God.

“Cleanse me from my secret faults…keep your servant from presumptuous sins.” The psalmist doesn’t explain how God does this, even as it’s clear that if it’s just me and Torah it’s not going to end well. How God does this: here’s where the psalmist could have talked about the community, particularly those members of the community that I don’t like to listen to. (“I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter” [Mk. 6:25].) It’s probably more prudent to listen to John than to leave God no other alternative than sending in Jesus, whip of cords in hand.

This unexpected turn in vv.12-13 is probably related to Paul’s critique of “the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning” in our second reading. Often the problem with this wisdom/discernment is that it assumes that we’ve heard all we need to hear from God. We have the Torah; we have the Bible; what more do we need? And we end up crucifying Christ again.

But the psalmist’s “cleanse me” trusts that it doesn’t need to end like this. “Cleanse me from my secret faults…keep your servant from presumptuous sins.” Why? Look at the last verse: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart / be acceptable in your sight, / O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.” The heavens are declaring God’s glory—that’s where we started. The psalmist’s hope/prayer is that the psalmist’s voice finally join that voiceless praise.

Not a bad agenda for Lent—or the rest of the year: get outside and pay attention, drink deeply from Torah with its “Ten Best Ways to Live,” listen for how God—often through our neighbor—may be trying to free us from our self-serving readings.

On losing and saving one’s life (2nd Sunday in Lent, 2/25/2024)

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Readings

At about the same time that Abraham and Sarah were in Canaan, there lived in Egypt a bureaucrat named Sinuhe. Through circumstances not of his choosing he ended up spending time in Canaan. Eventually he got back to Egypt; here’s a section from his memoirs describing that happy return:

I was placed in the house of a Royal Son. There was noble equipment in it, a bathroom and painted devices of the horizon; costly things of the Treasury were in it. Garments of Royal stuff were in every chamber, unguent and the fine oil of the King and of the courtiers whom he loves; and every serving-man made busy with his task. Years were caused to pass away from my flesh, I was shaved and my hair was combed. A burden was given over to the desert, and clothing to the Sandfarers. And I was clad in soft linen, and anointed with fine oil; by night I lay upon a bed. I gave up the sand to them that dwell therein, and oil of wood to him who smears himself with it.

It’s an unexpected window on what must have been Abraham’s experience, moving from the urban comforts of Ur and Haran to the frontier area west of the Jordan River. He had moved there in response to God’s command and promise of land, posterity, and blessing. He arrived; he waited, and waited, and waited. Months turned into years, years into decades, and still he owned no land, and had no children.

I wonder what advice we would have given Abraham. I wonder what advice I would have given Abraham. At what point do you throw in your cards and walk away? We remember Abraham and hope to be counted among his true sons and daughters because he didn’t walk away. He was still there when God Almighty showed up after his 99th birthday, confirmed the earlier promises by a formal covenant (treaty), and announced that within a year Abraham and Sarah would be changing diapers.

Abraham would have understood Jesus’ words: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” What else do you call leaving Ur & Haran for the outback, and staying for decades supported by nothing more than a promise?

“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” What was true of Abraham was true of Jesus as well. Abraham left Mesopotamia; Jesus left heaven. As that ancient hymn puts it:

who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.

Jesus does not ask of us anything he’s not already asked of himself.

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” The Ash Wednesday service invited us to self-examination and repentance, prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and here we are.

“Follow me.” Also today folk sometimes experience Jesus calling them pretty directly to far-off places: Ur to Haran to Canaan. Usually, it’s a matter of doing the best one can to let Jesus’ life flow in ours in the midst of our responsibilities, to offer up lives whose faithfulness will give God joy.

It’s easy to hear Jesus’ words as unreasonable demand: deny oneself…lose one’s life. How might we think about that?

For starters, Jesus’ words echo a truth we’ve already met in other areas of life: any serious project requires self-denial. If I want to learn a musical instrument, or a sport, or a craft, I have to set aside time, time that I may want to spend doing something else. Or take a more serious project: becoming a parent or a spouse. Here we start out by signing a pile of blank checks. And then the checks begin to come in, some small, some large.

Our culture, of course, does not help us much here. Daily we’re told that the highest good is our individual self-fulfillment, and that our duty to self-fulfillment trumps any other commitments we’ve made along the way.

When we turn to Jesus, the temptation is very strong to understand the Christian way as another means of self-fulfillment. Fortunately, we have 20 Centuries’ worth of experience to remind us of why this is a bad idea. In pre-Reformation England, for example, it was necessary to set a limit on the size of the bishop’s entourage —cooks, falconers, hunting dogs, etc— during Episcopal visitations. At the popular level, a great deal of the energy that fueled the 16th Century reformations was anger over this sort of clerical abuse of position.

Not that we have to wear bishops’ purple to participate. As disciples, we naturally try to save our lives. Here each of us face our own challenges. I, for instance, can be very jealous of what I call “my time,” so part of parenting involved the repeated challenge to be generous with time. Again, there have been times when I’ve found myself in a desert, and the temptation has been very strong to throw in the cards and walk away. Lent is a time to reflect on these particular challenges, and again ask for God’s grace to respond to them.

Now, a warning. There has been a strong tradition in our culture that values men’s selves more than women’s selves. Women are supposed to deny themselves to serve men; men are supposed to assert themselves. Jesus’ words are horribly misunderstood if they’re heard as supporting that tradition. In the Bible’s vision both men and women bear God’s image, both are called to be stewards of the world’s resources. Jesus has no interest in asking us to deny a self we have not yet learned to value.

To return to our theme, from the perspective of God’s project, Jesus’ words are absolutely necessary because the alternative —discipleship as self-aggrandizement— is so damaging to the Church, so damaging to our common life.

Follow me. Responding to that call may mean long stretches in the wilderness; it will mean a continual struggle against co-opting that call into another means of self-defined self-fulfillment. Friday mornings we pray “grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace” and in quite unexpected ways God responds.

But there is a deeper logic to Jesus’ words than simply avoiding the Kingdom’s getting co-opted. We assume that we know who we are. So of course we’re in a perfect position to chart the path to our own fulfillment. “Captain of my ship, master of my soul.”

But spouses and parents know that as they give themselves to these roles they enter a voyage of self-discovery. Even more so the way of discipleship: in the process of following Jesus I discover who I am.

In an old Hassidic story, a rabbi receives a vision of the Gate of Heaven with many people outside. A voice of great beauty is calling out names, and people are entering the gate. But there are more names than people entering, so the rabbi asks an angel standing nearby, “Where are the people whose names are called and aren’t entering?” “They are here” —replied the angel— “but they do not know their own names. Only when they learn their own names will they be able to recognize them when they are called.”

As we continue to respond to Jesus’ call, we continue to learn who we are, we get better—God willing—at recognizing our own names.