Tag Archives: glory

The God Who would be at Home with Us (6th Sunday of Easter, 5/25, 2025)

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Readings (Using the John 14 reading)

I hope you’ve not skimped on the coffee this morning, because we’re going to jump into the deep end, that reading from the Revelation. That, in turn, will set us up to think about what the Church is for—not a bad question since we’re only two weeks out from celebrating Pentecost.

Revelation likes images that shimmer, enigmatic images. John hears “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David,” but what John sees is “a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered” (5:5-6). So here, toward the end of the book, John hears “the bride, the wife of the Lamb,” but what John sees is “the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God” (21:9-10). This is something like what we encounter in Physics 101. Is light a particle or a wave? Yes, depending on what you’re trying to explain.

The new Jerusalem. No need for a temple, or a sun, for that matter: “for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.… for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.”

“The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.” Pull the camera back to include John’s Bible (our Old Testament) and it’s clear that this New Jerusalem is finally fulfilling the hopes for the original Jerusalem. Recall Isaiah:

In days to come
the mountain of the LORD’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be raised above the hills;
all the nations shall stream to it.
Many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. (2:2-3)

Something beautiful is happening, and the nations want in on it.

Then there’s that river the prophet Ezequiel saw flowing from God’s presence: “On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” So healing is needed—still! The city has gates, the classic means of controlling access, but the gates are never shut. A bit later we’ll hear “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift” (22:17). Jerusalem is finally fulfilling its role, being the place where God’s glory is visible and healing is freely available.

I mentioned enigmatic images a bit ago, and in its final chapters the Revelation takes these to a different level in the form of two juxtaposed stories. In the one, a decisive battle in which evil is destroyed and the great white throne before which everything is sorted out. On the other hand, open-gated Jerusalem offering glory, joy, and healing to all who would enter. Well, which is it? What the Revelation may want to show us is that within the limits of human language and human understanding our clearest picture is this pair of starkly contrasting images.

Perhaps this should not be surprising. Recall how our story starts. Genesis gives us not one, but two creation stories. In one everything is good from the start, the humans play no active role, the seven days are as much liturgy as anything. In the other God works by trial and error, Adam plays an important role, and the good emerges at the end of the process: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken” (2:23). To capture the reality of the beginning and ending of human history Scripture gives us pairs of stories.

What may be at stake in these pairs of stories is the challenge of doing justice to God’s sovereignty and human freedom. There’s a popular saying attributed to various folk (Augustine, Ignatius, etc.) “Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.” Maybe, but it could be heard as a call to run ourselves ragged. I like what the Ignatian author Jim Manney does with it:

“I prefer to reverse it: ‘pray as if everything depends on you, and work as if everything depends on God.’ This means that prayer has to be urgent: God has to do something dramatic if everything depends on me. It also puts our work in the right perspective: if it depends on God, we can let it go. We can work hard but leave the outcome up to him. If God is in charge we can tolerate mixed results and endure failure.”[1]

OK, what of the Church? In John’s vision there’s the New Jerusalem, finally doing its job. Sounds pretty good. What happens until then? Let’s circle back to the angel’s words: “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” “The bride, the wife of the Lamb:” that sounds like the language used elsewhere in the New Testament for Christ as bridegroom and the Church as bride. Or, to come at John’s vision from another angle, from 1st Corinthians: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you (3:16)?” Or, more extensively in Ephesians, “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God” (2:19-22).

Because God desires that all enter freely into joy, into God’s presence, God really needs a place where God can be at home, where God’s healing glory is visible, and that is the Church. That’s the dynamic in this morning’s psalm, God’s blessing here that ripples out to the corners of the earth. That’s at the core of today’s Gospel: “we will come to them and make our home with them.” This is why, by the way, the New Testament letters devote virtually no attention to evangelism and virtually all their attention to the elements in congregational life that make God’s healing glory easier or harder to see.

And this sweeping vision plays out in the decisions of specific women and men, folk like Lydia, that dealer in purple cloth from our first reading, folk like you and me.

We’re here, God knows, because we need to be here. And in the larger story that the Revelation brings into focus, we’re here because God needs places where God’s at home, where God’s healing glory can be visible in the common life of God’s people, whether gathered together or scattered through our communities during the week. A tall order, yes, which is why Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit on approach, the flaps extending, wheels down.

[1] https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/work-as-if-everything-depends-on-god/ (accessed 5/16/2022).

Glory: on whose terms? (The First Sunday after Christmas Day, 12/29/2024)

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Readings

Good morning, and Merry Christmas!

Our lectionary has set a rich feast before us; the sermon could go in any number of directions. We might focus on John the Baptist and the surprising logic of being a witness. The Word the Gospel celebrates is described as a light. Why does the light need a witness? We might focus on Jesus’ coming as opening the path to our becoming God’s daughters and sons. Or we might—and we will—wonder about the odd disconnect between the passion for Jerusalem in Isaiah and the psalm and those sober lines in the Gospel: “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.”

Jerusalem, both a specific city at a particular longitude and latitude and one of the Bible’s central symbols for God’s passion to create and preserve a life-giving community. God deals with us individually. But because to be human—as Aristotle memorably defined it—is to be a political animal, dealing with us individually means dealing equally with our communities and institutions.

For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent,
and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest,
until her vindication shines out like the dawn,
and her salvation like a burning torch.

So Isaiah. And in the psalm the salvation of the individual and the salvation of Jerusalem are inseparable:

Worship the Lord, O Jerusalem; *
praise your God, O Zion;
For he has strengthened the bars of your gates; *
he has blessed your children within you.
He has established peace on your borders; *
he satisfies you with the finest wheat.

And in the run-up to Jesus’ birth as described in Luke’s Gospel this vision and these hopes are on full display. And then the lines in the Gospel prologue: “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.

How do we make sense of this strange story? The convenient answer: well, what do you expect from the Jews? Tapping into the latent anti-Semitism in our culture is convenient, because it lets us off the hook. But with Jesus, the apostles, all the New Testament writers being Jews, that’s a non-starter. How do we make sense of it all going sideways?

Let’s go back to Isaiah’s words:

For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent,
and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest,
until her vindication shines out like the dawn,
and her salvation like a burning torch.

In Jesus’ time Jews argued about how to hear those words. At one end of the scale: Jerusalem’s vindication as the condemnation of the gentiles. (The Zealots were here: the only good Roman is a dead Roman.) The other end of the scale: Jerusalem’s vindication as the salvation of the gentiles. And that’s where Jesus was.

It starts already in the angel’s proclamation to the shepherds: “Do not be afraid; for see– I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people” (Luke 2:10).

Fast forward to Jesus reading Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” From a nationalistic perspective, so far so good. But then Jesus chooses examples: Elijah in the famine providing for a gentile, that widow at Zarephath in Sidon; Elisha healing Naaman the Syrian of leprosy.

That argument keeps popping up, so that at the end when the Jerusalem crowd has the choice of sparing Barabbas, who’s killed Romans, and Jesus, who hasn’t…

“He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him”—because Jesus did not offer vindication on their terms.

So God’s story ends in defeat or in a long drawn-out stalemate? Hardly. “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” Receiving Jesus, believing in Jesus’ name: beginning with Holy Baptism that’s a life-long process. We don’t easily give up getting vindication on our own terms. But through this process God’s glory becomes visible, which was and is the point of Jerusalem’s vindication. Paul writes to the Corinthians: “You are God’s building… God’s temple is holy and you are that temple” (1 Cor 3:9, 17).

God’s glory, God’s healing, off-the-scale love in all its beauty and terror. (For John the Evangelist, recall, Jesus’ glorification and Jesus’ crucifixion are the same event.) God’s glory, Jerusalem’s vindication on God’s terms, the healing of the nations. We celebrate it in Jesus; Paul looks to celebrate it everywhere from Corinth…to Sun Prairie. While John the Evangelist writes “and we have seen his glory,” the story doesn’t even pause there. We assemble, we extend our hands to receive into ourselves Jesus’ Body, Jesus’ Blood, because there’s a whole world out there hungry for God’s glory.

Amen, and Merry Christmas!

The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost: A Sermon

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Lessons (Track 1)

Today our readings intersect with the Fourth of July. Which has the preacher wondering: how might the readings inform our celebration? The operative word is ‘wondering’; if these reflections prompt your own reflections, that’s more than enough.

In the collect we prayed “Lord God Almighty, who hast made all peoples of the earth for thy glory…” (BCP 207). That captures the surprising divine hopefulness in our readings, hopefulnesss in the face of profound human ambiguity.

David: throughout his career—most of which the Sunday lectionary necessarily skips over—his enemies have a habit of conveniently dying, David, like Pilate, always having clean hands. The text never accuses David, but it does give us enough information to force us to wonder about those clean hands. In today’s reading those hands are busy taking Jerusalem. Why Jerusalem? It gives David a power base independent of the decisions of the tribal elders: it is his city. Equally pragmatically, it, like Washington D.C., is a suitable national capital precisely because it’s not integrated into the tribal territories.

But what God hopes for in Jerusalem is reflected in Psalm 48: a very human city that witnesses to God’s protection, God’s loving-kindness, God’s justice. Humanity in God’s image: despite a very ambiguous human history that is already very long before David takes Jerusalem—Jericho was founded some 8,000 years earlier—God has not given up on human cities imaging God’s character.

And that human ambiguity has been equally on display in Corinth and Galilee. The Corinthian Christians: quite ready to trade in Paul for a newer, shinier model. Galilee: Jesus’ hometown has Jesus amazed at their unbelief. Nevertheless, Paul keeps engaging with the Corinthians, Jesus sends off his disciples to cast out demons, heal, proclaim the good news of God’s kingdom.

God remains hopeful despite the human ambiguities—and that’s perhaps a model for us. God knows, there are enough profound ambiguities in our history, so much so that there are multiple arguments over how sanitized a version to present in our schools. But if the Old and New Testaments are any guide, we do not need to whitewash our past to be hopeful about our future. God, eyes wide open, retains hope, and so might we—also on this July Fourth.

From the Gospel: “So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent.” Repentance, absolutely necessary, gets tricky very quickly. We all have our lists ready-to-hand of what our opponents need to repent of. Calls to repent, to wake up, etc. easily become favored weapons in our rhetorical arsenals. But one of the many interesting things about Scripture is that it often treats the content of repentance as something needing discovery. Take Paul’s well-known words from Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God– what is good and acceptable and perfect.” So that you may discern…

As a contribution to that discernment, let’s circle back to Paul. If we wonder why Paul is having problems with the Corinthians, recalling the social context helps. Three elements. First, honor (or glory—one’s reputation) was key in the empire. Honor (glory) is necessarily comparative: if you have more, I have less. So there’s a constant jockeying for honor. Second, honor is closely tied to occupation. Working with the mind is more honorable than working with the hands. Third, the social order was organized by patronage: wherever you were on the social scale, you sought to be a client of a more honorable (powerful) patron. You gave the patron honor, the patron gave you protection. And in Corinth all three of these elements seem to have been on steroids.

Had Paul conformed to this world, he would have become a client to one of the powerful local Christians. This would have meant not having to work, all the skids well-greased. Instead, he refused patronage and worked with his hands. The stench of his profession probably never completely disappeared. So his competitors—at one point he calls them the “super-apostles” (11:4) are eating better, dressing better, don’t stink, and certainly have more time on their hands.

That’s the trade-off Paul faced. Accept patronage, and any number of doors open easily. But accepting patronage in that context meant exempting society’s glory game from criticism, a game that placed too many in the category of poor, foolish, weak, and expendable, a game in which “Blessed are the poor” is absurd.

And that’s the trade-off Paul couldn’t make. He’d come to Corinth proclaiming “Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). If that’s the starting point for envisioning God’s glory, then it’s our notions of glory that need revision. So Paul talks of having “this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us” (2 Cor 4:7). And in today’s reading “whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”

God’s glory and our notions of glory: oil and water. So Jesus in the Gospel of John: “How can you believe when you accept glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the one who alone is God? (5:44)

That’s a trade-off that we constantly face. Satan is, I suspect, quite happy for us to focus on inner peace and how-do-I-get-to-heaven-when-I-die if that leaves untouched the ways honor/glory are allocated here. Satan would have been quite happy for Jesus to have a long and peaceful career had Jesus been willing to leave the current honor/glory arrangements unchallenged:

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'” (4:8-10)

That’s the hard part about that prayer “who hast made all peoples of the earth for thy glory:” God meddles with our assumptions about God’s glory, about what glory looks like. ‘Meddles’ is maybe too weak a word. “Blessed are the poor;” “whenever I am weak, then I am strong:” what habits does the Spirit need to nurture among us to make these self-evident?

So, repentance. Our July Fourth celebrations typically celebrate the new thing that this nation claims to be. Perhaps repentance means wondering if we’ve taken “new” seriously enough. Perhaps there’s no road to something genuinely new that doesn’t pass through encountering Christ crucified as the starting point for our notions of glory and where to look for it. Otherwise, same old, same old. Been there, done that. Isn’t it time for something new? Let’s give July Fourth the celebration it deserves!

Re the Daily Office Readings 4/28/2020

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Photo by Benjamin Suter on Pexels.com

The Readings: Exodus 19:1-16; Colossians 1:1-14; Matthew 3:7-12

Today’s readings align in striking ways, so that we might profitably print out the following excerpts and mark them up, noticing common themes…

Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites.” (Exodus 19:5-6)

For this reason, since the day we heard it, we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God. (Colossians 1:9-10)

Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. (Matthew 3:8-10)

What do you notice? I notice:

  • The first reading—as long noticed by Jewish readers—is like the culmination of a courtship, in which G-d pops the question. Divine vulnerability, on full display, and equally present in the other readings.
  • So much of creation is glorious—and we might pause here to recall our own short list of examples. G-d desires that humanity’s glory be no less heart-stopping. (Why do we settle for less?)
  • With John the Baptist divine desire comes out as demand. This is the G-d of the Exodus, and humans are powerful enough that the alternative to glory is desolation and oppression.

What do you notice?