“Love one another:” Putting it into practice (6th Sunday of Easter, 5/5/2024)

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Readings

The first lesson from the Acts of the Apostles tells of the Holy Spirit coming upon the Gentiles —Romans, mostly— while Peter was still preaching. And with that all the parts of Jesus’ commission and promise “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” begin to be fulfilled. For once this still very Jewish Church crosses the enormous cultural hurdles to preach to the Gentiles it’s a relatively short step to the ends of the earth. Once the doors are open to the Gentiles, it doesn’t matter much if they’re in Naples, Norway, or North Lake. “And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith” indeed.

If we ask about the motor for that victory, there are two obvious answers. The first is the Holy Spirit. Who else but God’s Spirit could have given the apostles the backbone to stand before the Jewish leaders and the Roman Empire? But the second equally obvious answer is the love that has been the constant theme in our readings these past weeks. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” And in another context Jesus said “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you…have love for one another.” All the things that Jesus could have said but didn’t: “if you have flawless theology; if you are without sin; if you…” Well, we might as well segue into St Paul’s paean to love in 1st Corinthians: “if you speak with the tongues of angels and men…” Nope: “if you have love for one another.”

I thought very briefly about organizing this homily around the question “What does the Bible say about loving one another?” Then I quickly realized that that was absurd, because you wouldn’t be far wrong if you said that on the whole the Bible is about nothing else than loving God and loving one’s neighbor. So “What does the Bible say about loving one another?” would be a very long sermon. Better, it’s something we spend our entire lives learning.

So the question pretty quickly became What might I say that would be useful to us here and now about “love one another”? Here are four themes to chew on: confession, generosity, no-fault, and forgiveness.

Confession. “Love one another” doesn’t get very far unless we’re willing to acknowledge ourselves as serious sinners. If my own experience is an indication, we’re ready to admit we’re sinners, but not serious sinners —that’s other folk. Years before I got married a friend described marriage as the ideal context for discovering the depth of one’s selfishness. He was right. And in the first years of marriage the times I came closest to throwing in the towel were the times in which my choices were to flee or acknowledge to myself just how selfish I was being. To which the Christian tradition with exquisite pastoral sensitivity says “Well, duh! What did you think Jesus died for, your parking tickets? So repent & learn how to love this woman.” How often are we tempted to walk away from each other because the relationship is an occasion of unwelcome self-knowledge?

Generosity. “Love one another” is about —to steal from St Paul— hoping all things, believing all things. St. Ignatius in the Spiritual Exercises put in best: “it should be presupposed that every good Christian ought to be more eager to put a good interpretation on a neighbor’s statement than to condemn it. Further, if one cannot interpret it favorably, one should ask how the other means it. If that meaning is wrong, one should correct the person with love; and if this is not enough, one should search out every appropriate means through which, by understanding the statement in a good way, it may be saved.”

So when we find ourselves mentally mapping a conflict in a way that puts the others entirely in the wrong and us entirely in the right, all the warning bells should be going off, first because we are offending against charity regarding the others, and secondly because this mapping blinds us to our own sinfulness. The sad thing about this is that all of us have been working hard since kindergarten at getting good at this sort of mapping, and by puberty it’s mostly instinctive. As with the barbarian hordes, so with us: following Jesus means laying down weapons that we’ve gotten very good at using.

No-fault. “Love one another” is pretty much a no-fault policy. That’s the point of Jesus’ words in Matthew 5: “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.” Again, notice what he doesn’t say: not “if you remember that your brother or sister did something bad to you” or “if you remember that you did something bad to your brother or sister” but simply “if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you.” If the relationship’s broken, that’s the trigger, and whose “fault” it is…is irrelevant. What relationships need some TLC?

Forgiveness. “Love one another” is about forgiveness. The stakes here couldn’t be higher. “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” I don’t know of anything harder than forgiveness, whether of others or of ourselves. Many times the best we can do is to pray for a little more openness to forgiveness.

And when it comes to forgiveness we need to be careful not to cut corners. People say: well, I forgive him, but see if I’ll trust/respect/talk to him again. That doesn’t work, and here’s why. It’s not simply that Jesus ties us forgiving others and God forgiving us together. It’s that the way we imagine God forgiving us is linked to how we forgive others. And God’s forgiveness is reckless and extravagant. The prodigal son gets new robes, the fattened calf, and a seat at the head table. The Epistles repeatedly celebrate our boldness and freedom of access to God’s presence. “[You have] made us worthy to stand before you” says one of the Eucharistic prayers. And this is the way we’re to forgive. It is an integral part of the freedom Jesus has won for us. The flip side: if we persist in forgiving at arm’s length (“I forgive you, but…”) we should not be surprised if we wake up one morning and discover that our image of God looks less like the prodigal’s father and more like the prodigal’s elder brother: well, you’re back, but don’t you dare make yourself at home.

“Love one another” It’s about being willing to learn the depth of our brokenness. It’s about putting the best interpretation possible on the conduct of our brothers and sisters.  It’s no-fault. It’s about forgiving as God forgives us: recklessly, extravagantly.

Let me leave you with a final image. Football games are usually won or lost in the trenches, the hard away-from-the-cameras work. It doesn’t matter who’s playing quarterback for the Packers if by the time he gets the ball the backfield is filled with guys wearing the wrong color jersey.

Loving each other when that “each other” is hard to love is that work in the trenches. There’s no glamour to it, but it wins games —and our Lord is out to win the world. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Life on the Vine (5th Sunday of Easter, 4/28/2024)

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Readings

Jesus’ resurrection, the beginning of the New Creation, ripples out to the ends of the earth.

We watched the beginnings of this last week in Jerusalem; this week we’re in Samaria–almost, and in a bit we’ll focus in on Samaria.

But there’s a second ripple effect in our texts today, starting with the Gospel, moving through the Epistle, and ending in Acts.

The Gospel. In last week’s Gospel, Jesus described himself as the Good Shepherd. We noticed that “Shepherd” is not a new image, but had been and continued to be a powerful political image. Not surprisingly, Jesus’ followers proclaiming him as Good Shepherd encountered persecution and martyrdom from other authorities who claimed the exclusive right to that title.

This week, “I am the true vine.” And “vine” too has a history. Let’s do some word associations: Golden Arches… McDonald’s; Uncle Sam… United States; Badger… Wisconsin; vine… And we draw a blank. In Israel, we’d have gotten “Israel” The vine is one of the most basic symbols used in the OT for Israel: “You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove away the nations and planted it” (Ps 80). The prophets play off it: “Israel is a luxuriant vine that yields its fruit” (Hosea 10). Most elaborately, Isaiah develops an allegory of God seeking good fruit —justice— from Israel the vine and encountering only rotten fruit —injustice.

So when Jesus says “I am the true vine” it’s big. Never mind being the Messiah of Israel, he’s Israel. The closest analogy is Louis XIV’s “L’état, c’est moi.” (The State? That’s me!) What’s going on? Well, this comes after about 1200 years of history with Israel, God the vinedresser seeking good fruit and finding mostly stuff that even the livestock would turn up their noses at. So God decides that if this relationship’s going to have a future, God must unite with our humanity and play both parts, vinedresser and vine. Our task becomes infinitely easier: not producing fruit on our own, but simply staying connected to that fertile Vine.

I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me as I abide in you. William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury in the mid-20th Century wrote of these verses: “All forms of Christian worship, all forms of Christian discipline, have this as their object. Whatever leads to this is good; whatever hinders this is bad; whatever does not bear on this is futile.”

In developing the image, Jesus says “apart from me you can do nothing.”

This may grate, since particularly in this culture independence and autonomy are such high values. We may see it as a design defect: if God had done a better job, we’d be more independent. But there’s another way of looking at it.

We Christians confess the Triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Holy Trinity: eternally equal, eternally interdependent. The Father without the Son and Holy Spirit can do nothing. The Son without the Father and Holy Spirit can do…nothing. The Holy Spirit without the Father and Son can do…nothing. So when this Triune God creates humanity in God’s image, is it surprising that we are created to be related to God, created, so to speak, to run on God? Rather than a defect, it’s an undreamt-of privilege, Cinderella getting an invitation to the ball.

C.S. Lewis puts it this way: “The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made. Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?” (Mere Christianity 176).

We spend our life together with God discovering what this means, how this happens. The obvious question is how do we abide/stay connected? In the verses that follow this text —we’ll read them next week— Jesus talks of love and keeping the commandments. Those sound like they might be going in two very different directions, but are not. As we’ll hear next week —and may already recall from Jesus’ summary of the Law— the commandments are finally simply about loving God and loving one’s neighbor.

The Epistle. The epistle too is concerned with abiding, God abiding in us, we abiding in God. The epistle’s particular concern is lack of love between Christians, and so its repeated command is “Love one another.”

Why should we love one another? The epistle reminds us of The Story: God so loved us that He sent Jesus to bring us from death to life, from separation to union. God so loved us —recalling the Gospel— that God played and plays both parts: Vinedresser and Vine. If that’s the story, then the only way to live that fits with the story is love.

How serious is this? “Those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”

In contrast to our culture’s assumptions and the impression you can easily get from the Church’s history, God doesn’t regard loving God and neglecting to love one’s brother or sister as an option. We can’t, in other words, keep two sets of books: my relationship with God, my relationship with my brothers and sisters.

We’ll spend some time looking at what this means in practice next week, because I need time to say something about our reading from Acts. Suffice it to say that the Apostle in Acts, Philip, has heard first-hand from Jesus about the Vine and the Branches, about the need to love each other, and has had some years of learning to do this with the other Apostles, a challenging group to love even on their best days.

Acts. The assigned reading in the lectionary tells of the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch. From the position of the story in the book, he looks to be a Jew or a proselyte. Although it’s a lovely story, I want to focus on what happened in the verses just before it: Philip’s visit to Samaria and the conversion of many Samaritans.

First, a bit of background. Saul, David, and Solomon ruled over a united Israel. After Solomon’s death, the northerners rejected David’s dynasty and Jerusalem as the place of worship, so now there were two kingdoms: the Northern Kingdom (Israel) and the Southern Kingdom (Judah). The city and region of Samaria is in the heart of that old Northern Kingdom. Centuries later in Jesus’ time, the Samaritans still followed Moses, rejected Jerusalem, and were universally scorned and shunned by all the Jews. When good Jews went from Galilee north of Samaria to Judea or vice versa, they’d do so on the east side of the Jordan, so as not to have to set foot in the region of Samaria. It had been going far longer than Hatfields/McCoys or Packers/Bears.

So here’s the thing. Nothing would have been more natural for Philip and the Apostles than to continue writing off the Samaritans. Nothing would have been more natural than for the Gospel to have leapfrogged Samaria for the Jewish dispersion throughout the Roman Empire.

But that’s not the story and that’s not the script. The story is God’s love turning enemies into friends: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” The script is Philip going to Samaria. In the Name of Jesus people are delivered from possession by unclean spirits, people are healed —and there is great joy.

Learning to abide in the true Vine, learning to love the other apostles sets Philip up to recognize in the Samaritans not The Enemy, but simply other folk for whom Jesus died and was raised.

I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me as I abide in you. In a world torn by multiple divisions nothing could sound more like irrelevant navel-gazing. But it’s precisely this “Abide in me as I abide in you” that gives the Church the traction to go where it would not otherwise have gone and to make of enemies friends.

Jesus the Good Shepherd (4th Sunday of Easter, 4/21/2024)

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Readings

I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

Jesus the Good Shepherd: a well-known image. Today’s readings give us a chance to explore it.

“Shepherd” is an image that works on multiple levels. In ancient Israel folk would be familiar with shepherds, and most would know first-hand the importance of good shepherds who were attentive to their sheep, gentle with the weak, strong against their predators. And not only in Israel but throughout the ancient near east rulers, whether good or evil, liked to be celebrated as good shepherds of their people.

King David had confessed “The Lord is my shepherd,” using the Name that later became too holy to be pronounced, which scholars usually vocalize as Yahweh. And here Jesus is saying not “The Lord is the good shepherd” but “I am the good shepherd.” It’s that way of speaking that pointed his followers to the confessions hammered out centuries later, such as the Nicene Creed that we’ll use later in this Mass: “very God of very God.”

And one of Ezekiel’s most profound promises of Jesus’ coming (Ezek 34) picks up the image:

Mortal, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel: prophesy, and say to them– to the shepherds: Thus says the Lord GOD: Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep.

We know this world too well. The New York Times ran an update today on CEO salaries in 2020. Some examples:

  • Norwegian Cruise Lines $36M
  • Hilton $56M
  • Paycom $211M

No wonder there’s not enough for everyone else when many at the top are incapable of saying “enough.”

Ezekiel continues in this vein for a good stretch. Then:

I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord GOD. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.

So that day in Jerusalem, Jesus’ “I am the good shepherd:” I imagine Ezekiel hearing it and smiling…or pumping his fist.

Jesus the good shepherd, come that we might have life, and have it abundantly: green pastures, still waters. In a world in which too many leaders point to paths that lead nowhere, offer solutions that are worse than the problem, very good news. Jesus the good shepherd: that’s an image—a promise—to hand onto. And sometimes we find ourselves hanging onto it for a good stretch.

Now, it doesn’t take going around the block many times before we wonder what this image is really promising, whether we can rely on that promise. And here David can help us. For the psalm that starts “the Lord is my shepherd” contains not only the comforting words about the green pastures and still waters, but also the business about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, There’s a table spread—but “in the presence of those who trouble me.” That sounds like David’s life. And perhaps one of the reasons we’re given such a full account of David’s life (most of the two books of Samuel) is to watch the Lord as David’s shepherd through all of it.

Near the end of the psalm: “Surely your goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” “Follow:” that’s perhaps one of the most regrettable translations in the entire Bible. Literally: pursue. My enemies may be fast; the Lord’s goodness and mercy are faster.

What happens if we move from David’s poetry into the prose of our lives? We know that in this life good Christian lives can end badly and painfully. This is why Paul, talking about our hope in the resurrection says “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:19). Perhaps David pointed toward this in the last line of the psalm: “and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.” Death doesn’t play the last card.

But there’s another truth, equally important. John’s first letter, a sort of “Dummy’s Guide to the Gospel” spells it out: “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us [that’s the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep part]—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” So the Shepherd’s action becomes a model for our action. We are taken up, as it were, into the Shepherd’s work. So yes, there’s still the valley of the shadow of death. And John’s telling us not to let any Christian walk it alone. John continues: “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”

“Who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Here we might return to that NYT article. It turns out that none of the virtues are stand-alone—even love. If I don’t know how to say “enough,” my capacity to love will be severely limited. That’s perhaps the most important take-away from that article: whatever the issue, am I able to say “enough”?

It’s important to notice that John isn’t an outlier. The same Gospel in which we hear “I am the good shepherd” tells of the Good Shepherd’s command to his disciples: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

“Jesus, the Good Shepherd” is first about Jesus; it is immediately also about how his followers are to follow: loving “not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” And it is through these followers, by the way, that Jesus does much of the shepherding: love is the lubricant that allows us to receive and give what we need from each other.

So the command to love extends only as far as the church walls? Obviously not. It focuses on “one another” because if we’re not working on that there’s little hope that we’ll be of much use to those outside the walls. If we are working on that, the walls will be no barrier.

Let’s circle back to Ezekiel:

I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord GOD. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.

It’s reasonably clear that the abundant life Jesus brings is about much more than the fortunes of individuals, though it’s not less than that. The Shepherd’s out to set the world right, restore our institutions so that they serve, and stop destroying. But here’s where it gets confusing. In our experience setting the world right usually involves a large army and a great deal of violence. Jesus’ strategy is different. So Jesus really isn’t trying to set the world right, but limiting himself to something more modest, something simply interior? No. He’s out to set the world right, but armies and violence don’t cut deep enough. Jesus knows this is confusing, which is why we have parables like the mustard seed: the beginnings seem laughably insignificant, but, oh, the end product.

So, yes, working on this “love each other” business, the church walls are no barrier. “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened” (Matt. 13:33).

I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

Amen. Alleluia. Alleluia.

“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.