Equipped to Serve

SJF • Proper 7c • Tobias Haller BSG
As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

In my sermon last week, I spoke about how the woman who came into Simon the Pharisee’s house and washed Jesus’s feet was reenacting a kind of baptismal liturgy. In today’s readings we have an even clearer exposition of that liturgy, including Saint Paul’s explicit reference to baptism.

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We begin with the Old Testament passage from the Prophet Zechariah. This prophecy has long been held to point towards both the crucifixion and the subsequent upwelling of repentance that would eventually bring many of the Jewish leaders into the church. The Book of Acts shows how the Apostles’ testimony to the resurrection convicted their hearts and enabled them to realize the generosity and graciousness of God. And the symbol of this generosity and graciousness is the fountain opened for the inhabitants of Jerusalem to cleanse them from their sin. Christians have seized upon this imagery from an Old Testament prophet and applied it to their own experience of cleansing and liberation, in that “precious fountain” that wells up “near the cross, near the cross.”

As with the woman who wept at Jesus’s feet, sorrow and contrition come before the cleansing fountain. There is an old theological word for this, which one hardly ever hears anymore except in the phrase, “I have no compunctions.” Compunction is that sharp realization that pierces you with the knowledge
of your own wrongdoing. I remember from my elementary school days a story that stuck with me — as I assume those who presented it intended. It was part of a good citizenship class, about good behavior and responsibility. It involved a bad little boy who liked to throw rocks at the passing passenger trains that ran near his home. And one day as he was throwing rocks in this irresponsible way, one of them shattered the train window, and the broken glass and the rock itself terribly injured one of the passengers. And it turned out to be the little boy’s father!

The compunction and sorrow of the people of Jerusalem is similar — as they realize that the one they have pierced, the holy one they have rejected and crucified, is as it were their only child, their firstborn. They are cut to the quick in this realization, that they have murdered their own child. It reminds me of Joe Keller, the father in Arthur Miller’s play, All My Sons — and perhaps Miller was thinking of this passage when he wrote the play. Keller realizes at last that his own shady business practices in selling substandard airplane parts to the military have resulted not only in his own son’s death, but the death of many other pilots — and he realizes with incredible pain, as the title says, that “they were all my sons.”

That is what compunction means — to be pierced by the knowledge of one’s own responsibility; to realize that, as Joe Keller’s younger son assures him, we all “live in the world” and are connected to each other, and bear intimate responsibility for and to one another.

When the people of Jerusalem realized what it was they had done, their flowing tears were answered by the flowing fountain of grace that rose up to cleanse and restore. And this continues to happen as that precious fountain flows in every baptism.

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The second stage of our Scriptural baptismal liturgy comes in our continued reading from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. It marks the first stage in being equipped for service, which follows immediately upon the baptismal induction: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ.” This may simply be symbolic language, or it may be one of the earliest references to the white robe that was given to those who were baptized, as a symbol of their new life — the same white robe, called an alb, from the Latin word for “white,” that all of us who minister in the sanctuary are wearing now.

This white robe not only symbolizes baptismal purity and renewal but it also serves the practical function of being a uniform. Uniforms are designed to obscure the individual differences of those who wear them, and to make them more, well, uniform! It would be very distracting if all of us serving at the altar were wearing our street clothes. It’s the same with the choir — who are now enjoying their summer vacation and not having to wear an extra layer or two on top of their street clothes!

But there is a greater significance to this uniformity when it comes to baptism — for the uniform is not just a white robe, but in a very special way it is Christ himself in whom we are clothed. We have become little Christs — Christians — for we have put on his uniform, his likeness. And that uniform covers not just our street clothes, but all of the other things that might identify or divide us one from another.

Saint Paul mentions three categories of distinctiveness that disappear under the uniform of baptism. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Christ covers over and conceals these distinctions — ethnic, social and sexual — most of them still quite capable of causing division in our own day, so you can imagine how divisive these categories were 2000 years ago! But for the baptized person, for the Christian who has put on Christ, these distinctions cease to have any consequence for us, or any ability to distract us from our mission. They disappear under the uniform, so we can be about our work.

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And that is the next step, for as anyone knows, just getting the uniform isn’t enough to be equipped to serve. People can get all dressed up and have no place to go! And so when we turn to the Gospel for today we come to that last bit of the baptismal liturgy that equips those who are baptized to serve. It’s a simple thing — it happens so quickly in a baptismal liturgy you might even miss it — as the priest takes holy oil and makes the sign of the cross on the forehead of the newly baptized, saying, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever.”

By doing this, we realize what Jesus said to his disciples: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” To be baptized means to bear that cross — and that cross is the essential equipment for our service to God and to our neighbor. For it is the cross that reminds us of Christ’s great gift to us and to the whole world. But it is useful as well as emblematic: it equips us in the way of deference, of giving of ourselves for the good of others — the opposite of the selfishness that puts down others or takes advantage of them.

When Saint Paul would write to the Ephesians about the Christian equipment, he would talk about that whole suit of armor: the helmet, shield, sword, and shoes. But here in the Gospel, Jesus presents us with one all-purpose tool: the cross that each of us bears day by day — as we walk in its shadow o’er us — as a reminder of what he did, and of what we are called to do as his followers — to set our own lives, our needs and desires, to one side; to deny ourselves and seek to serve others to the best of our ability in the strength that God will give us, through the cross.

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And so we return to that place on Calvary, and take our stand near the cross, near the cross — where the precious fountain of grace rises up, and the waters overflow in which we have been immersed, and by which we have been cleansed. And we rise from those waters to be clothed upon from on high with the uniform of God’s service, given a robe, and crowned with the sign of the cross in the middle of our foreheads.

We have been commissioned, my friends, commissioned and equipped to do God’s work in the world. Let none of us stand idle, but trust in his spirit to empower us to do the work he has given us to do, “till our raptured souls shall find Rest beyond the river.”+

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Good Housekeeping

SJF • Prober 6c • Tobias Haller BSG
Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love, that through your grace we may proclaim your truth with boldness, and minister your justice with compassion.

I spoke last week of how little Saint Paul seemed to have learned from his teacher Rabbi Gamaliel when it came to being tolerant of those with whom he disagreed, and you can see some ripe examples of Paul’s intolerance in today’s reading from his Letter to the Galatians. He was clearly more than a little put out with Cephas — that’s Saint Peter — concerning what was to be required of Gentiles who joined the early church. Paul was not afraid to go toe-to-toe with Peter over this issue, and called him on his hypocrisy.

The fact is, Paul was right to call Peter on this; what is troubling is the way he went about it. Peter had “caved” to pressure from the traditionalist wing of the church — those who insisted that Gentile converts to Christ needed to observe the Jewish law in order to be Christians. This made Paul simply furious, and in this letter you see him in high ranting mode: if Jews can’t keep the law — and I’m talking about you, Peter! — how can you expect Gentiles to? Make no mistake about it, Paul did not make many friends with this kind of language; and one might go so far as to wonder if the cause of the church might have been better advanced with a more harmonious approach.

For as the collect with which we began the our worship today, and with which I began this sermon, affirms, we do indeed call upon our Lord to keep this household of the church steadfast in faith. We want to hold the faith that Saint Paul preached, that we are justified in Christ through faith, and not by the works of the law; that we are saved by Christ, and not by our own efforts to follow a set of rules — a set of rules that even those to whom they were originally given, the people of Israel, were unable to keep.

We want to hold fast to this faith; but we also pray for our household the church to be kept steadfast in God’s love. Faith and love go together, and we need them both. That is why the collect goes on to ask for the grace not only to proclaim the truth with boldness, but to minister God’s justice with compassion.

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There is a wonderful example of this ability to combine justice and compassion, faith and love, in our Old Testament reading this morning. King David has done something terrible — something that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of the Sopranos. He fell in love with another man’s wife, seduced her, and then, when he couldn’t get her husband to sleep with her so that he might think that the child she would bear was his, sent the husband off into battle, and then arranged for the other troops to fall back and leave him exposed, so that he would certainly be killed in action. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand why it is that “the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.” And God sent Nathan the prophet to David.

And that’s where we see compassion mixed with justice. Nathan doesn’t confront David in Saint Paul style, going toe-to-toe and telling him what a terrible man he is, and what a terrible thing it is that he has done. Rather, Nathan tells David a story and then allows David’s own conscience to convict him — to open his eyes to the error of his ways.

It is one of the most powerful confrontations in all of Scripture, a powerful mixture of compassion and justice. God punishes David by taking the child who is the fruit of this adultery — and let us be careful not to interpret this as a punishment of the child, whom God takes to himself in his innocence. The punishment falls on David, to lose the child who might have been his heir, as Bathsheba’s next son, Solomon, would indeed be. David would later say, after the child of his adultery was taken up by God, “I will go to him, but he shall not return to me.” And so God’s justice is exacted, and yet by God’s compassion David is led not only to repentance but to an ever deeper understanding of God’s power and love.

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We see an even more eloquent example of this in the Gospel reading. The stage is set for a drama of contrasts: Simon the Pharisee, no doubt intrigued by what he has heard of Jesus, invites him into his home to dine with him. And a woman from the city, a sinner — and I don’t think I have to tell you what kind of a sinner she is — comes in and makes an incredible display of herself at Jesus’s feet. You may remember I’ve explained before that the reason she can stand behind him at his feet and wash his feet with her hair is due to Jesus lying on a couch at the meal, in the Roman style of that time. Had they been sitting at a dining table she would have to have been a contortionist!

Now, contortion or not, it takes no imagination to picture the look of indignation on Simon the Pharisee’s face. Pharisees, remember, are the people who are very fussy about observing the law — about not touching anything unclean, about washing your hands before eating, and making sure all the vessels are ritually pure. They are the Hyacinth Buckets — it’s Bouquet — of first-century Judaism. These are people who are trying to do the very thing Saint Paul told Saint Peter no one could do: follow the law in all its details down to the last jot and tittle, including how to fold your napkin after you’ve wiped your hands.

But Jesus, the ever-compassionate Jesus, doesn’t turn on the Pharisee and read him the riot act — which, as we know from other confrontations with Pharisees, he was perfectly capable of doing! Rather in this case he takes Nathan’s approach, and by telling a story that seems to be completely unrelated to the present situation, he gets Simon the Pharisee to convict himself. As a good teacher, he doesn’t spell out the answer to this moral dilemma; but provides the learner with the tools needed to understand it himself. He constructs a play within a play (or a story within the story) to catch the conscience of the Pharisee.

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We continue to pray that God will keep our household the church in his steadfast faith and love, so that we can proclaim God’s truth with boldness, and minister God’s justice with compassion. We pray this, but we often seem to lose the will to follow through on the harder work of helping people to help themselves in the moral dilemmas in which they find themselves — like Nathan and Jesus in our readings today. Too often in the church we hear voices raised that sound more like Paul or Simon than like Nathan or Jesus: quick to judge and condemn what they see as faithlessness, zealous and bold for the truth, and eager to see God’s justice carried out — but lacking in the love and compassion that would make their mission not only more effective, but more Christlike.

In doing this, as Saint Paul had the wisdom to realize about himself, they become noisy gongs or clanging cymbals: perhaps effective warning alarms to alert people to the very real moral danger in which they may find themselves; but ultimately less effective in actually saving people from themselves. Without love, without compassion, faith and justice lose half of their effectiveness.

Without love and compassion, the justice of the Pharisee would send that woman back out into the streets, to a life of sin and despair. Christ, in his love and compassion, allows this fallen woman not only to be with him where he is, but to minister to him, saved by her faith in response to his love and compassion.

Shall the church play the role of Paul at his most intolerant, or Simon the Pharisee at his most judgmental? Or shall we take the course of Nathan and of Christ and proclaim the truth in ways that those wounded by sin and despair can hear and be healed? Shall the church require its ministers to imagine themselves pure and free from sin by their own virtuous manner of life, by following the works of the law? Or shall it celebrate the ministry of those who do not sit in judgment but who, knowing their own weakness, lovingly and generously serve the body of Christ?

The woman of the city was no longer worried about her sins, which indeed were many, for she had turned to Christ. Nor does the gospel mention repentance — unusual for Luke who mentions it so often! Rather her tears reveal faith, hope, and love, flowing from the knowledge of forgiveness. We see in this incident the essence of the virtues incarnate in a woman thought by the Pharisee to be incapable of goodness, a woman who plays out the sacrament of baptism: with her voiceless confession of faith, the washing of her tears, anointing her Lord with fragrant ointment, sealed with the kiss of peace — and is then sent out in that peace to love and serve her Lord in the world.

Our Gospel today presents us two models for our encounter with Christ, and for Christian ministry. Here are two models for service to the body of Christ which is the church — the household of God. All who serve the Lord are sinners, yet all who serve the Lord are forgiven. Some will prefer to spend their time worrying about other people’s sins and whether the church can tolerate them. They will seek to obstruct their service, thinking all the while that they protect God’s body from the touch of unclean hands, and are simply being good housekeepers — like Hyacinth Bucket making people take off their shoes before entering her spotless house — if she lets them enter at all. Others will get on with the hopeful works of faith and love, of justice and compassion — the kind of good housekeeping that accepts the fact that there will be some cleaning up to do from time to time, because so many people have been made welcome in the house. Is there any question at all which of these Christ would rather have us do? +

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The New Life

SJF • Proper 5c • Tobias Haller BSG
God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles.

Many of us here, at different points of our lives, have probably had the experience of starting over. Whether you call it turning over a new leaf, or starting a new life, I’m sure I am not the only one here who, after having had a career in one line of work, went back to college (or seminary, in my case) and took a new direction in a different field of endeavor. I know a number of you who have charted a new course in mid-life: who went back to school to get a master’s in social work, or in nursing, or to study some new emerging medical technology. Some of you left the land of your birth to come to this country in search of new possibilities in a new life. You began a new direction in your life — perhaps even such a different direction that you could call it a new life.

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All of our scripture readings today describe new life. The Old Testament reading and the Gospel talk about new life literally — in both cases someone who has died is restored to life, two sons raised from the dead and returned to their mothers. These two readings form a kind of a golden setting for the gem of the central reading, in which Saint Paul tells the people of Galatia about his conversion, his new life which was such a departure from his earlier life in Judaism. The two outer readings, describing a literal new life, form as it were a “Saint Paul sandwich” — as that central reading from his letter to the Galatians tells of his figurative new life. And it is on the filling in this sandwich that I want to focus my attention.

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Unlike some of us who’ve changed our course of life in middle age because we were dissatisfied with how our lives were going, or felt a call to do something different with our lives than we were doing — Saint Paul was perfectly happy with his earlier life. Make no mistake about it, he was a star! As he says, he advanced beyond many among his people of the same age, and was far more zealous for the traditions of his heritage than they. We know from other accounts that he studied at the feet of one of the greatest rabbis of all time, Gamaliel the Great — who himself appears in the New Testament when he advises the Jewish leaders not to take a violent approach towards this new way called Christianity, lest they find themselves in the position of opposing God’s will.

It is ironic, though, that however good a student Paul was, he didn’t pick up on his teacher Gamaliel’s cautious generosity towards new things. No, Saint Paul was what we would call today — and what he called himself then — “a traditionalist.” He wanted things to be the way they always were, and he didn’t like change, particularly change that challenged things near and dear to this heart. While his teacher Gamaliel would call for toleration, Paul was zealous in his intolerance, and proud of it. He was not just politely advising people not to pay any attention to the Christians, to leave them alone and let this strange movement sputter and die out. No, Paul was busily seeking out Christian believers, arresting them, and seeing to it that the harshest penalty possible was carried out against them: he saw to it that Christians were put to death. He was not just a sympathizer in the anti-Christian cause, he was a zealot, a ringleader. And he became famous for it: so famous that he could assume that the people in far-off Galatia have heard, no doubt, of his earlier life in Judaism — before his new life began.

The reason Paul has to explain all this, of course, is because of that change of direction he took, that new life he began to live after his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus. It required explanation because it was such a complete turnaround, such a change — as the Christians in Judea heard, “the one who formerly was persecuting us is now proclaiming the faith he once tried to destroy.” This was not just a course correction: it was a 180-degree turn. It was a whole new life. It was like being raised from the dead. It was like being born again.

We hear stories of such amazing changes from time to time; many of them involving an encounter with Christ, perhaps not quite as literally as Paul’s encounter on that road to Damascus, but nonetheless real in its effect. I’m sure many of you here know about John Newton — the slave trader who began his conversion in the midst of a storm at sea, when the slave ship of which he was captain was in danger of sinking. There is an old saying that there are no atheists in foxholes, and the same goes for sinking ships! The thing is that John Newton followed up on his hasty intentions in the midst of a storm at sea, and eventually became an Anglican priest. He is remembered to us today chiefly because of his hymns, including what is considered the most popular hymn of all time, “Amazing Grace.”

But it is important to recognize that with John Newton, as with Saint Paul, the moment of conversion, the beginning of the new life, was followed up by, well, life. There was much, much more to Paul’s life and Newton’s life than simply the moment of conversion. In fact, conversion was an ongoing process throughout their lives. Throughout his ministry, Paul had his moments of intolerance, when his old impatient ways would come to the fore — just look at the later chapters of his Letter to the Galatians! — and he learned the hard lesson of patience in adversity.

And John Newton had to grow into his conversion, too. He did not, for example, immediately give up the slave trade after that stormy night and hasty conversion. It took a number of years for the light to break through completely, and for him to realize the error of his ways. He had a long way to go, and much more to experience, before he would join in the abolition movement with William Wilberforce, and help end the slave trade. And ironically, he did that in part by convincing Wilberforce not to enter the ministry, that is, not to change his course in life, but to remain as a member of Parliament, where he could work for decades to change the law of the land and eventually bring an end to the slave trade in 1807 — two hundred years ago last March.

But there was a long space of time between the stormy night of 1748 and Newton’s joining the abolitionists! Although something in Newton had changed in 1748 in the midst of that storm, although he had been born again that night, still there was much more to come as his new life took shape. He would later say that even after his conversion, “I was greatly deficient in many respects... I cannot consider myself to have been a believer (in the full sense of the word) till a considerable time afterwards.” Like any newborn, one who is born again has to grow into his or her new life, to come to maturity in that new life. It took years for him to realize that slavery itself was wrong, as Newton slowly learned the moral ABCs of his new faith, step by step, first crawling, then toddling, and finally walking tall and proud, in the full stature of Christ.

As Newton would put it, “I am not what I might be, I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I wish to be, I am not what I hope to be. But I thank God I am not what I once was, and I can say with the great apostle, ‘By the grace of God I am what I am.’” It is that amazing grace that not only starts us off on our new life in Christ, but teaches us the responsibilities that new life requires, and enables us to continue that life, a life that is lived, and lived out, in performing the actions of love and service that God commends — and commands.

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All of us here have been born again in Christ — some a long time ago, some more recently. All of us are living a new life, far newer than just a different career or line of work, but a life that is new at its very core. And we are all of us still growing in that new life, still learning, still finding new opportunities to love and serve God and our neighbors. Few of us will make such a turnaround as John Newton, from slave trader to abolitionist. Few of us will have the impact on the world that Saint Paul or William Wilberforce did. Yet each of us has been given a gift, a precious gift of new life.

What will we make of it, this new life? The good news is that what we make of it need not be our own doing any more than the new start was our own doing. The grace of God in Christ is at work in us every day, not just the day we first encountered him in our hearts. After all, as Saint Paul affirmed, God set us apart before we were born the first time, and is surely with us after we have been born again in his name! He is there to work with us, and to strengthen us to do his will — always and everywhere. He is not just a life preserver to be called on when the boat is sinking! He preserves our life every moment of every day, our new life — the life he gave us when we were born again in his name.

The new life is a life to be lived, my friends. Our rescue was only the beginning, and life lies before us in a path that not only leads us to God, but upon which God is with us every step of the way. So let us live life to the full, and say in full assurance, John Newton’s powerful words, “The Lord has promis’d good to me, His word my hope secures; He will my shield and portion be, As long as life endures.”

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In-Between Sunday

SJF • Easter 7c • Tobias Haller BSG

O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit.

As you know, many Sundays of the year have nicknames: Stir-Up Sunday (because the collect for the day begins, “Stir up, O Lord”), or Mothering Sunday (because on that day we remember, as the hymn says, “Jerusalem our mother dear”). Today is a Sunday without an official nickname, so I would like to suggest an appropriate one: In-Between Sunday. And I do that because, as our collect for the day suggests, this is the Sunday that falls in between our observance of the Ascension of our Lord this past Thursday, and the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, which we celebrate next Sunday. So this Sunday is a commemoration of that in-between time of long-ago: between the Ascension of Jesus, when he was taken away from the Apostles, and the descent of the Holy Spirit upon them.

This was a difficult time for the Apostles, a week and a half without a sensible presence of God, a presence they could feel and know: Jesus was gone, and the Holy Spirit had not yet come. Waiting can be a difficult experience, especially when what you’re waiting for is something you desire with all your heart and soul. I can remember as a child learning the strange relativity of time — how some time could pass so quickly, and other time could seem to go so slowly. Am I the only one here who as a child experienced the night before Christmas as the longest night in the year? — and not just because it was literally dark longer than most nights, but because of the anticipation of Christmas morning, when I knew that the red wagon I wanted so much would be there waiting for me — waiting for me much more patiently than I waited for it! Oh, for a child, the night before Christmas can be a long dark night of the soul!

And part of what makes this kind of expectant waiting so powerful, for a child waiting for Christmas morning or for the Apostles waiting for the Holy Spirit, is the heightened awareness and sensitivity — the alertness that makes you feel every second ticking by. There is a heightened awareness of the passage of time because we know something is coming, and we want it very badly. We are not simply waiting; we are waiting for.

Let me give you an example of this from the world of music. All of us here are familiar with the major scale — made perhaps more famous through that song from The Sound of Music. “Do re mi fa so la ti do.” It is a series of notes elegant in its predictability. “Do re mi fa so la ti do.” But what if I don’t follow through on the prediction; at least not immediately? What kind of tension does this produce? “Do re mi fa so la ti...” Do you feel it? You want that final note to resolve the tension that the series has created. You know how the scale is supposed to end and you want to round it out, to balance it off with that final note.

There is a story about a famous composer who lived downstairs from a family whose young son was taking piano lessons. One day the child was practicing scales as the composer was sitting in his study reading. The child was playing the scale over and over again. Then, for whatever reason, the child was interrupted before completing the scale — just as I did before. The composer, sitting downstairs, jerked his head, listening for that note. It didn’t come. He started fretting, not so much wondering what happened to the child, but what had happened to the note! As minutes passed, he became more and more irritated by this missing note. Finally, unable to bear it any longer, he jumped up, went out into the hall, ran up the stairs, pounded on the door of the apartment, and when he was finally let in by the startled mother, rushed over to the piano and without a word played the final note!

Is that something like how the apostles felt? Earnestly desiring the coming of the Holy Spirit? Certainly so, though more so as the Spirit is so much more important than the simple resolution of the musical scale. And so our collect today says, “You have exalted your only son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: do not leave us comfortless but send us your Holy Spirit.”

But wait a minute. Hasn’t the Holy Spirit already been sent? Didn’t the Holy Spirit come on Pentecost some 1,970 years ago? Have the authors of this collect gotten so caught up with our annual re-enactment of the events of Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost that they are suggesting we pray for something that has already happened?

For we believe that the Holy Spirit is with us to strengthen us — even if we have not yet been exalted to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before. But the Spirit has come to us, and blessed us, and revealed signs of his presence among us: in the preaching of the Gospel, in the joy of the knowledge of the love of God, and the powerful comfort that we feel in our hearts as we gather here to worship our Lord and our God and in our work in service to the world beyond these doors.

Sometimes the Church forgets this, forgets the presence of the Holy Spirit — when it begins to doubt and becomes obsessed with the busyness of life. We look at the divisions in the church — and between the churches — and wonder if we ever will be one as Jesus prayed that we would be. We look at conflicts and disagreements among Christians and wonder what has become of the spirit of unity, and the unity of spirit that should bind us all up in one.

At times, it seems, we are a bit like the jailer in the reading from Acts. He’s got the apostles in jail, securely locked up in the pokey after probably the strangest example of exorcism in all of Scripture: when Paul drove a spirit out of a young woman who kept following the apostles around shouting that they were servants of God proclaiming salvation. Sounds like free advertising to me! But as I said last week, these pagans could get on Saint Paul’s nerves! As the Scripture today says, “he was much annoyed”! So he drove out the spirit, and the slave girl lost her skill as a fortune teller, much to her owners’ distress; and Paul and Silas got thrown in jail.

Suddenly, there was an earthquake, and all the chains fell from the prisoners, and the jail doors flew open. And the poor jailer, thinking the prisoners must have all run off, was ready to kill himself when Paul called out, “We’re still here.” And he believed and was saved, and was baptized, along with his whole household.

Is the church forgetful like that sometimes — startled by the earthquakes of life, thinking our world has fallen apart — but forgetting that the apostles and their successors are still there; that the Spirit is still there; that Christ himself has promised to be with us wherever two or three are gathered together, and comes to us to be with us as our guest, in bread and wine each week?

We will celebrate Pentecost next Sunday. But this is a celebration of a remembrance — a commemoration of something that has happened. God’s Holy Spirit has come down, and is with us still. If we are at all living in the in-between, is not in between Christ’s departure and the Spirit’s arrival; but in between the Spirit’s coming and Christ’s return. And return he will, in power and great glory. We are not the only ones waiting, we the Bride of Christ awaiting the bridegroom at the altar rail, the Spirit standing close at hand and ready to give us away to our spouse when he comes.

“The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who hears it say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift. The one who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!”+

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Miracles Great and Small

SJF • Easter 6c • Tobias Haller BSG
When the crowds saw what Paul had done, they shouted in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in human form!”

There is no doubt about it; it was some miracle! This man in the town of Lystra could not only not use his feet, but he had never walked. From his birth on he had been carried here and there, and when he got old enough to do so, he had dragged or hobbled himself from place to place. And it just so happened that one day he managed to be in the right place at the right time, and he heard the preaching of the apostles Paul and Barnabas — and he would never be the same again. Paul would look him in the eyes and see something — some earnest hope, some as-yet-unrealized faith — something that convinced him that this man could be healed.

So Paul shouted out, “Stand upright on your feet!” And not only did the man stand up, but he sprang up and began to walk — this man who had never taken a step in his life. So as I say, no doubt about it: this was some miracle. It was a miracle not unlike the one that Jesus performed when he healed the man who had been blind from birth. This was not just about someone being restored to health, but rather someone being given health who had never possessed it, never in his life. Born blind or unable to walk, these two men experienced the power of God to do something completely new in their lives. It was some miracle.

This no doubt explains the wild reaction on the part of the people in that town. Paul and Barnabas were more than good physicians — more even than your average miracle worker. They must, these pagan folks believed, be the gods Zeus and Hermes themselves come down to earth — an event no less likely than if their planetary namesakes Mercury and Jupiter (to use the Latin names) were to start from the sky and pay us a call in the northwest Bronx. The pagans were sure this was the work of their gods, and were all set to worship the apostles then and there.

Now, I don’t have to tell you how irritable Saint Paul could get with pagans! It was bad enough just being in a town with a big pagan temple and idols on every street corner — and, apparently, no synagogue. Lystra was not a big important place, but it was one of those places in the midst of things, and so had been controlled by Persians, Greeks and Romans over the years — and you can be sure it had accumulated its share of street-corner shrines to supplement the big temple of Zeus just outside the city — definitely not the kind of place Saint Paul would have found to his liking! We’ll see some more of this next week when Paul gets to Ephesus. And when he got to Athens we would see Saint Paul in is his most irritable form, and he would be as tough on Athenian idols as Simon Cowell is on would-be American idols! And believe me, you don’t want to get Saint Paul irritable.

But in Lystra we have insult added to the proverbial injury. Bad enough to have to put up with idols on every street corner — but to be treated as if he were himself one of the pagan gods — that must have just pulled Saint Paul’s last nerve. I suspect that the historian Luke may have played down Saint Paul’s reaction when the townsfolk and the pagan priest approached to offer a sacrifice to the apostles!

Fortunately, as outraged as he no doubt was (he tore his clothes, after all!) Saint Paul was also smart enough to realize that this was what they call “a teaching moment” — an opportunity to make use of a misunderstanding to teach an important lesson. And the lesson was not just that they — Paul and Barnabas — were mortals like the citizens of that town, but that the miracle they had performed had to be understood in the context of the great work of the one true God — the one who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them; the one who reveals goodness not just in spectacular miracles such as healing palsied limbs and making the broken whole, but in those daily miracles — the gift of rain from heaven, and of fruit from the trees, the gifts of nourishment and joy that illuminate our daily life and make it livable.

In the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song, the main character sings a song about the hundred million miracles happening every day. And the examples of miracles she gives in the song are rather like those that Paul and Barnabas described: the beauty of the sky, the wonder of the rain and the flowers that bloom; and in one verse something more relevant to our reading from the Acts of the Apostles: “A little girl... just thirty inches tall, decides that she will try to walk and nearly doesn't fall! A hundred million miracles!”

What Paul and Barnabas told the people in Lystra in their preaching, what Oscar Hammerstein was telling Broadway audiences in his lyric, and what I’m telling you today in this sermon, is that while it may not be as spectacular as a man walking who has never walked, there is something miraculous in a child taking her first steps — I mean, she’s never walked before either! And the same God is at work in that child as the God who made heaven and earth, the seas and all that are in them, and who was at work in Paul and Barnabas, and in the man they healed that day so long ago.

And that same God is at work today — in you, in me, and in the trees that grow, and in the winds that blow, and the rains that fall and water the earth and bring forth life abundantly. A hundred million miracles are happening every day; and as the song goes on to say, “And those who say they don’t agree Are those who do not hear or see.”

And that brings me to one last thing I want to note about this incident from the Acts of the Apostles. It’s just a phrase, so it can pass by almost unnoticed — though I did mention it at the beginning of this sermon. Saint Paul looked at that man who had never walked, and saw someone“who had the faith to be healed.” Paul didn’t just pass him by the way the people of that town must have passed him by day after day, a man who may have lived his whole life out on that particular corner, maybe even leaning against the pedestal of some idol; probably begging for coins — although the Scripture doesn’t say that. But in any case he was someone upon whom the people of that town looked as a hopeless case; like the blind man in the Gospel this was someone who had been that way all his life and he just wasn’t going to change. The people looked at him and all they saw was his disability.

But Paul saw more: he saw, first of all, not a problem but an opportunity; not a disability, but a possibility, not an illness, but a child of God. He saw the possibility for the miracle before it happened: and that is the substance of faith — the man’s faith, and Paul’s faith. It was faith built on the knowledge that even to be is a miracle; to be born, an even greater one. Paul and Barnabas knew that God is the giver of every gift, the beginning of our life and, as even the pagans in Athens would agree, the One in whom we live and move and have our being. And the apostles saw something in that man that day, perhaps his perseverance in being there at all, rather than just having given up years before, perhaps the way he turned his head as he heard the gospel proclaimed for the first time. He was there, with a spark in his eyes and a hope in his heart, his faith kindled into life as he listened to Paul preaching the gospel — and Paul, looking at him intently, saw that faith, and in a flash that miracle happened.

What does the song say? “And those who say they don’t agree Are those who do not hear or see.” Those who do not hear the voice of God speaking through the Gospel; those who do not see the power of God at work in the world, and in the hearts of those who believe — it’s true they will not agree that a hundred million miracles are happening every day: miracles great and small — but they are happening, my friends, they are happening: all of them gifts from the hand of a loving God, who made heaven and earth, the seas and all that is in them, and to whom we now ascribe as is most justly due, all might, majesty, power and dominion, henceforth and forever more. +

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Then I Saw...

SJF • Easter 3C • Tobias Haller BSG
Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered…

Then I saw… then I looked... then I heard. That is the blessed refrain that runs through today’s second reading. Then I saw... then I looked... then I heard. Such is the language that confronts us in the passage from the Revelation to Saint John. Needless to say, revelation is only half of the story: and today’s passage emphasizes the other half — perception. As the title of the Bible’s last book suggests, revelation is always revelation to. God’s word is meant to bear fruit, and no matter how important the revelation or the one who gives it, it will not bear fruit unless there is also someone willing to see, to look, and to hear. As Jesus would put it, the Word of God, as seed cast abroad, needs suitable soil if it is to take root, grow, and bear fruit. To make himself known — in broken bread or in any other way — requires that there must be someone able and willing to know. Revelation is always revelation to.

How often don’t we perceive what is addressed to us, what is right in front of us, and thus remain fruitless and barren in response? How often is something unknown because we refuse to know it? And why is that? Why is it that we seem unable to see what, as my grandmother used to say, “if it was a snake it would have bit you”? Why are we so often unable to hear the warning sirens that alert us to danger? This is bad enough when all you’re looking for is the stapler or the ironing board; or all you are trying to hear is the voice on the other end of a bad cell phone connection. But when it is life everlasting, the chance for salvation, how much more important, how much more vital that we see and hear, take, touch and embrace what is offered so freely by our Lord and God.

Today’s other readings from Scripture, offer a response to the attentive John of Revelation. They give us examples of people who couldn’t, for different reasons, perceive what was right there, in front of or all around them. Thankfully, the people we hear about this morning went through an experience that opened their eyes, and then, then, they saw. Something happened to them, something — or someone — reached out and acted on their lives to allow them to see what had escaped their vision up till then. Then… then they saw.

When we look at them and hear their stories, we can see reflections of ourselves, and learn how to keep our eyes open and fixed on the one who was and is, and is to come, Jesus, our Lord and savior. For it is he who opens the eyes of those who do not see because they think they see. It is he who opens the eyes of those who do not see because they don’t know how to look.

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First, there’s our old friend Saint Paul, or, as he was known before his conversion, Saul. What kept him from seeing the grace of God? Well, Saul’s problem was that he thought he knew it all — you couldn’t tell him anything.

One of the great mysteries of perception is that we see what we expect to see — not what is actually there. If your head is so full of preconceptions that there isn’t any room anymore, you won’t be able to perceive anything new, even when it’s right before your eyes.

And this isn’t just about ideas, but appears to be programmed into our brains, regarding even physical perception. I just saw an interesting news-brief in Scientific American Mind, in which they show how people’s brains are so used to seeing bananas as yellow, and strawberries as red, that when asked to adjust a color image of these fruits on a computer to be a neutral shade of gray, people will add more blue to the bananas and more green to the strawberries than is necessary to make them gray — the human brain wants to see bananas as yellow and strawberries are red so strongly that if there isn’t at least a hint of the opposite color, the brain will still insist on seeing a perfectly gray image of the fruits as slightly yellow or red. Our heads are full of such perceptions, such “settings” almost like the volume setting on your TV. And if you’ve ever walked into a room in which someone who is hard of hearing is watching TV, you know that your and their idea of “loud” is very different!

Saul the Pharisee’s brain was “set” if anybody’s was. He had studied at the feet of the greatest Rabbi of his day, Rabbi Gamaliel the Great, a Rabbi whose teachings are an important part of the Talmud even down to this day. Saul was a bright boy, an A-plus student, probably “teacher’s pet.” He was a true believer, fervent in prayer, surpassing all his classmates.

So when this new religion came along, this new faith called “the Way” he just said, “No way!” And with the fervor of a zealot he sought to smash the new faith, to crush it into the ground through whatever means necessary, including murder.

Yes, Saul thought he knew it all. And you might say, in Star Trek style, that his brain was set on kill, not stun! It took the grace of God stunning him — knocking him to the ground and even blinding him for a bit to finally open his eyes to see how seriously he had missed the point. His knowledge of Israel’s past, instead of leading him to see God’s new thing happening even in his day, had figuratively blinded him to the fulfillment of the promise that past foretold, the realization of all for which God’s careful guidance had prepared. He knew the story backwards and forwards, but he entirely missed the point; he knew the prophecies by heart, but failed to see them when they started to come true around him.

But thank God, then, he saw. After being figuratively blinded by his knowledge, God literally blinded him for a time, so that when Ananias laid his hands on him and baptized him, his eyes were opened with a new, fresh vision. Without him, the church as we know it would never have come to be, for it was to be Saul, renamed as Paul, who would bring the good news to the Gentiles.

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Then there’s Peter. Peter’s problem wasn’t that he knew too much, but that he seems only to have known one thing. Even though he was a witness to the Resurrection, he still didn’t seem to see the significance of that miraculous event. He’d been through the upper room experience, when Jesus had appeared. He’d was there when the Risen Lord, brought doubting Thomas to his knees.

He knew the Risen Lord. But what did he do as follow up? Did he start a great mission to evangelize the world, to spread the gospel of the Risen Christ? No. He went fishing.

Fishing was something he knew about. Unlike Saul, he wasn’t a rabbi, a learned man. He was a fisherman. That much he was sure of. He couldn’t quite grasp what all this resurrection was about. But fish, and fishing, he knew. Even though Jesus had said he’d fish for people, he was going to stick with fish.

The trouble is, now the fish weren’t cooperating. I can’t help but see the smile on Jesus’ lips when he called out over the water
to Peter and his friends, “Children, you have no fish,
have you?” And as he had said some years before, when he first met Peter (as Luke’s Gospel tells us), he said once more, “Try again.” And as it happened before, the nets were suddenly full of fish.

Then the disciple whom Jesus loved called out, “It is the Lord!” And Peter, dear, impetuous Peter, realizing his nakedness. quickly pulled on his clothes and jumped in the sea, swimming ashore to be with the Lord he now saw with newly opened eyes.

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How often are we like Paul and Peter? How often do we miss the abundant grace around us either because we know too much about too many things, or know too little by knowing only about one thing? How often do we rely on our accumulated expertise, resisting new and creative visions, new ways of working and thinking? How often do we fail to risk something untried, falling back on the same old same-old we know so well?

Sometimes it takes God’s grace to knock us into our senses, to blind us with the blazing accusation of how wrong we’ve been. Sometimes it takes the power of God to convert us and give us a new birth in order that we may open our eyes to see just how mistaken we have been. Paul thought he knew, and then, then he saw.

Other times it takes God’s gentle challenge to our tried-and-
true lives, our habitual and dreary return to familiar patterns, however unproductive, instead of risking the adventure God would set before us. Then God will call out to us, as we labor fruitlessly at the same old task, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” He said that once to Peter and Thomas, Nathanael and the sons of Zebedee one day by the shore of the sea, and then they saw.

May we be ready to receive that challenge, to hear that voice, to open our eyes to the startling reality of God’s presence where we thought it couldn’t be, or where we didn’t know it was, so that, one day we may join that other blessed seer, Saint John the Divine, to whom God revealed the secrets of heaven, and the glory of the world to come. May we, with all the saints and angels gathered round the throne, be able at last to say, Then I looked, then I heard, then I saw...+

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The Remains of the (Easter) Day

St James Fordham • Easter 2007 • Tobias Haller BSG
The men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

Do you know the phrase people use when they want to talk about something being really important? They might say, Top Priority Rush. Or maybe, For Your Immediate Attention. But if something is of the very highest importance, the phrase people are most likely to use to describe the situation is, “it’s a matter of life and death.”

Well, my friends, that’s what Easter is. It’s a matter of life and death. That’s what the Gospel is, that’s what the church is: a matter of life and death. Or perhaps it would be better to say, it’s a matter of death and life — for the death comes before the rising to life again.

And what a death it was. Not a peaceful falling asleep, surrounded by loved ones, saying some meaningful last words, something appropriate and suitable and memorable. That’s the Hollywood version of death, something out of a 50s romance in black and white — the Hollywood version — at least until Mel Gibson came along and shattered our sensibilities by showing us the horror of death by torture and abuse. For the death of Jesus Christ was not picturesque, it was not romantic. It was horrible. It was torture, slow and painful, drawn out for three hours. It was just as horrible as Mel Gibson portrays it in his controversial film; perhaps even more horrible to know that this wasn’t something unusual cooked up just for Jesus. No, this was the normal way traitors to the Roman State were punished in those days — state-sanctioned torture-to-death, publicly, nakedly, exposed and dying slowly in the hot baking sun, with a sign over your head saying, this is what happens to people who call themselves kings and set themselves up against Caesar.

So it was that Jesus joined suffering humanity in its most terrible form of suffering, as the victim of the wish to inflict the maximum of pain upon another person, wanting to make them suffer as an example and deterrent to others. And nailed to the cross, our Lord’s last recorded words were words of pain and suffering: “Why have you forsaken me; I thirst; it is finished.”

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Finished? Well, not quite. We know the story. For though this was a terrible death, out of it came a glorious rising to life again. Finished? Not at all — for it was out of death that the new life rose in glory on the third day. So, since death comes before life, in spite of the angels’ question, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” there was logic to the women’s search. They went to the spot where they had left him. Though now the stone was rolled away, that was the spot. Why did it look different? Why was there that unearthly light clinging to things. And who were these two men in dazzling clothes, with their challenging question: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

We know the answer: they weren’t looking for the living, but for the dead. They weren’t looking for the risen Lord, but the dead body of their dear, beloved friend, to do him the final honor of anointing his remains.

And yet there were no remains — no physical remains. What did remain? What remained of their hopes and dreams now? They came to the tomb with no hopes left at all, only spices prepared, but hopes dashed, dead and buried — the remains of grief. Surely they were prepared for death — and then they were surprised by life.

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How often have you been surprised by life? Haven’t there been times when you’ve given up completely on somebody or some thing, only to discover that change indeed was possible, that the unexpected has happened? That the person you thought so selfish suddenly does some generous act that sweeps you off your feet. That the spark you’d thought had gone out of a relationship suddenly catches fire in a blazing warmth and loving embrace? That the job you’d come to think was a dead end turns out to be the door to new opportunities you’d never expected?

Life comes out of death. It’s completely natural. The women came to an empty tomb, and found a message full of life. They came to ring down the final curtain on a chapter of their lives, to close the book with the burial of a dear friend and teacher, and found instead a whole new story just beginning.

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“Why do you look for the living among the dead.” You know, some cynical people might ask us the same question this morning. Not angels, but the devil’s cynical little henchmen so busily at work in our world today. It can take the form of the ad for the Sunday New York Times — you know the one with the couple lounging in bed on a Sunday morning saying how much they like the Arts and Leisure and the Crossword Puzzle. Whenever that ad comes on TV I want to shout, “Get out of bed and go to church!” Or it can take the form of the old story of the husband and wife waking up to the alarm clock on Sunday. The wife says to the husband, “Dear, it’s time to get up to go to church.” And he says, “Oh, I don’t want to go to church today. The service is so boring; and I hate the congregation.” And his wife responds, “Well, you have to go, dear, because you’re the minister!”

And then there are those more insidious devils, the ones that say, “Why do you bother going to church. It’s a dead institution, an oppressive structure from the past, it’s good for nothing and a waste of your time. The church is all tied up with its own issues, can’t seem to stop arguing about this or that , so that it’s hardlygood for anything any more. Why do you bother with the dead instead of getting on with life? Why bother with the church at all in this modern day and age.”

Well, I’ll tell you why I’m here — and it’s not just because I’m the vicar! I’m here because I know that my redeemer lives. I’m here because I know that death is not the end. I’m here because I know that the church can be like that empty tomb, that empty tomb that was not the end of the story but the start of a whole new one, a whole new life, a whole new world, risen and recreated — no longer dead, but alive. I’m here because I know that death is the beginning, not the end; that death is the prelude to new life. I know that the waters of Baptism may chill the body, but they quicken and warm the soul.

I’m here because of what remains — for it is out of what remains that new life springs. The tomb was only empty of what was dead; it was full of light and angels. That’s what I’m here for. I’m here because of all of you, all of you in whom the life of Christ lives and breathes and walks and talks and loves and builds and triumphs over death. You are all of you angels — messengers to me and to the world, that the end has not come, that the church is alive with the life of Christ. I’m here because it’s not the church that’s dead, but the world, dead on its feet and it doesn’t even know it, a dead world walking, and the church is its only hope for life.

I’m here because, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, it is a matter of life and death. Christ’s life, Christ’s death, and Christ’s rising to life again, for the sake of the world God loved so much that he allowed his only Son to give himself for us, to give himself up to death on the cross.

Beloved brothers and sisters in Christ, we share in Christ’s life, Christ’s death, and his rising again, every time we gather in this place, every time webreak the bread and share the cup. This is the life of the world; this is its living, beating heart; this is finally the only reason the world keeps on going at all. Christ has died. He was crucified, dead and buried. But Christ has risen. And Christ will come again. For the love of God, may we never lose sight of this truth, the only thing worth worrying about. It’s matter of life and death. +

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The Feast of Memory

Maundy Thursday at Fordham Lutheran • Tobias Haller BSG
Jesus took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

Memory is a very important part of human life. Think of all the popular songs that feature it: from “Try to Remember that time in September” through “Memories are made of this,” and the rather directive “You must remember this” and on to that somewhat annoying and hard to get out of your head hit song from the musical Cats that goes by the simple name, “Memory.” Memory is not only important for the world of popular culture, however — it is an important element in all culture: for without memory, without the ability to pass along what we’ve learned and experienced, we would be no different from the creatures of the field that live only that day-by-day existence and then pass from the scene, gone and forgotten. Memory, and the ability to transmit it, is part of what makes us human, and certainly a key to the fact of human culture. But memory is not only important for culture in general, but especially for that part of it that we call “the faith” as well.

We began our Lenten journey on Ash Wednesday, when we heard those words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Then last Sunday we heard Luke’s version of the Passion, in which the thief on the cross cried out to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Finally, earlier this evening we took part in a recreation of the Jewish Passover Seder — we as Christians as guests at someone else’s meal: for the Seder is ultimately the Jewish people’s celebration of their corporate memory. That is why it follows a somewhat school-bookish or classroom approach — strange in what is essentially a celebration built around a family meal.

But maybe it isn’t so strange, after all. I mean, isn’t it true when your family gathers for a meal in the evening that you ask, What did you do today? For the Jews, the Passover meal is the chance to ask those questions, not just about the day that is past, but about the ancient times of this people, and the formative tale of their great deliverance by the hand of God himself — deliverance from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke, as they fled that cursed land riddled with ten plagues, and then passed on dry foot through the parted waters of the Red Sea. And the memory of that great event was passed down from year to year, to be recalled again and again, so that each person who heard the story could feel that it was as if he or she had been there to experience those mighty works.

As I say, earlier this evening we shared in the story of our spiritual ancestors, the children of Israel. And now that we have come up into this sacred space we begin to reflect on how we share in the story that is more properly ours — the story of the central mystery of the Christian faith, as we join in remembering Jesus’ own transformation of the Passover feast into the Holy Eucharist, the Holy Communion that he commanded his disciples to continue to celebrate, with bread and wine, in remembrance of him. Through baptism we have become a new people — as if we had passed through our own version of the Red Sea; and through this holy meal we are reconstituted into the Body of Christ, who is, as Saint Paul called him, our Passover. And we do this through the power of memory — and of the storytelling to which it gives rise.

How does memory do its amazing work — and what are the signs that it is working among us? The first sign of the power of memory is community, for as we share the story memory calls us together, or rather back together: re-collecting us and re-membering us so that we can remember God. Unlike rare souls such as the desert hermits, most of us will not find God in solitude on top of a pillar, but gathered in community. God does appear to isolated spiritual athletes like Moses or Elijah in a burning bush or a still small voice. But usually God seems to favor the public assembly over the private audience. The disciples were gathered with Jesus in that upper room when he committed his memory to their care. They were not pursuing personal holiness, but praying together — for and with each other — when Jesus issued those startling commands to break bread that had become his flesh, to drink wine that was his blood.

It is in community — from the most intimate community of a loving couple, to the community of the church — that memory is multiplied as one voice takes up the story after another, correcting, adding, expanding the memory and revealing Christ in our midst.

And in that gathering, Christ is revealed foremost as one who serves, who before his death washes the feet of his friends, and afterward responds to their betrayal and lack of belief with words of peace, who forgives so that they may forgive in turn. This service and forgiveness find their natural home in community — and grow out of the memory and the story that is shared. For while one can remember on ones own, to tell a story implies at the very least one other with whom to share it. Just as it takes two to tango, it takes at least two to tell the story, and two to serve, two to forgive. Service and forgiveness flow from community as naturally as the dance flows from the music, as naturally as the story-telling flows from the powerful memory. So the ministry of hospitality, which combines service and mercy, is a sign of the power of the memory and the truth of the story: “see how they love one another” is Christ’s identity badge for the church, and a sign that we’ve got the story right.

Hospitality takes many forms, in a supper such as the one we just shared, or in a hospital visit; in an act as simple as an outstretched hand to help someone to their seat in church, or as formal as baptism itself. We welcome each newly baptized person through their own miniature Red Sea — there it is right over there! — “into the household of God” — a dwelling place for memory and story-telling, whose building-stones are the church’s members. Do you remember the children’s game: here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors, and see all the little people? The outside of a church looks like a building, but when the doors are opened the living, human construction is revealed — as a community. So hospitality is the beginning of the community we call the church.

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The wonderful thing about this growing community is that just as the memory and the story call the community together, the community then empowers further story-telling — for each person has his or her own story to tell. The children of Israel knew this, and were always telling their story to each other, not just at Passover! Their story sustained them through exile and captivity in Babylon; and through and beyond the destruction of the Second Temple. It sustained and sustains them even up to this day, through and beyond the Holocaust — the most terrible and single-minded effort to exterminate them. The church’s story is added to theirs, and each of us has a story, too, like footnotes and annotations expanding the history of salvation — so that the whole world could not contain the books that might be written.

If the world even cared! “The world” that confronts us today, is a world where community is shattered, a world that doesn’t know how to serve, a world that has forgotten its own story. I mean the world out there — right out on Walton Avenue — a world of noise without meaning, of sound and fury signifying nothing; chattering endlessly thanks to the ever-present cell phones — but isn’t it as if each user were locked in his or her own “cell” as they toddle through the streets proclaiming the details of their lives to the public? Endless talk, and no message, and the world will not stop talking long enough to hear the gracious possibility offered to it, to be reminded of its true story.

Well, the world needs a wake up call. And the responsibility to give that call falls on us, the members of the church, the Body of Christ: to tell the story of salvation to the world. If we in the church faithfully proclaim that story, the world may stop its chatter for a moment and hear what is truly important. People who have forgotten that they are God’s children, in the midst of this very city, might suddenly hear a voice speaking a language they haven’t heard for a long, long time, but which they recognize at once: a language from home, reminding them who, and whose, they are. And their story will enlarge our story,

Memory, then, reveals Jesus’ presence in community, and in the telling of the greatest story ever told. But memory also reveals Jesus to us through a sign unlike any other: in broken bread and a cup of wine. These are the means committed to us from his hand, to call us back together, to remind us who we are and who he is, and what we share. In this great work of memory, in the eucharistic feast the servant reveals himself as the bridegroom, and the story takes a classic turn: like Richard the Lionheart casting off his pilgrim’s cloak, revealing the king’s bright red cross on his chest to an astonished Robin Hood. And suddenly, everyone kneels. The King has returned. Suddenly, we are back in the upper room with him, sitting at the table as he breaks the bread and passes round the cup. Suddenly the Holy Spirit descends upon us and upon those gifts of bread and wine and we remember and are re-membered into the Body of Christ.

Once one Passover, Christ gathered the apostles together like a harvest of grain once scattered on the hillside. And after his rising again, he sent them forth, and together they served, and proclaimed, and feasted: in fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in prayer. We, their successors, can do no less. So let us hear once more the song of remembrance sung by the Spirit and the Lamb, addressed to us and to the forgetful world:

Remember, remember,
Come home, my scattered children!
Here's bread to break
and wine to drink.
Sit down and eat,
and I will wash your feet.

Remember, remember —
Sit still, my noisy children!
I'll speak the prayer
and sing the song
that tells of glory.
Listen to the story.

Remember, remember?
Look at my hands, my children,
Look at my side:
I am your friend
no longer dead
but known in broken bread.+

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The Temptation of God

Saint James’ Fordham • Palm Sunday • Tobias Haller BSG
He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!

Saint Luke the Evangelist tells us that as Christ hung on the cross on that Good Friday so many long years ago, challenging voices cried out for him to save himself, not once but three times. The religious leaders who had schemed with Judas to entrap him, the soldiers who actually carried out the gruesome work of crucifixion, and even one of the two criminals hung up there beside him to suffer and die in shame and agony — all of these, their voices succeeding each other in a fugue of temptation, called out upon him to save himself.

Nikos Kazantzakis called this the “Last Temptation of Christ” but I will be a bit bolder and call it the temptation of God. I don’t do so lightly, for Jesus Christ was God made flesh — even this wounded battered flesh. Those people were tempting God — tempting “God in Man made manifest” — Emmanuel — to turn aside from the path marked out for him, and upon which he had set his willing feet from before the foundation of the world. This last temptation was to refuse to drink the cup that — however much the Son had besought the Father in Gethsemane that it would pass him by — here on Calvary the Son of God would drink to the last bitter drop. Here on the bleak hill outside Jerusalem, the hill so barren and depressing, so bare of vegetation or any sign of life or comfort that people called it Skull Hill, on this bare mound Christ suffered a temptation multiplied by three, as three different sorts and conditions of people called on him to save himself.

These three temptations on Calvary echo the triple temptations with which we began our Lenten journey, the devil’s three temptations in the wilderness. And just as the first temptations told us a great deal about the devil and how he lays his snares for us to this day, and how his chief goal is to use us and abuse us, these last temptations tell us something about those who tempted Jesus, and about ourselves, and our own temptations to use and abuse what God has given us. It was no idle matter that, in the account of the Passion we just read together, we joined our voices with those in the crowd: for as the great old Lutheran chorale puts it, “I crucified thee.”

+ + +

First come the religious leaders — and if any of us were inclined to believe that religious leaders can’t be the witting or unwitting agents of the devil, the account of Christ’s Passion is there toshow us otherwise. Sadly, religion often becomes its own shadow, when intolerance and self-satisfaction combine in judgment: and some of the worst crimes in human history have been carried out in religion’s name. In this particular case, as they gathered to one side near the Place of the Skull, the religious leaders said, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!”

A theological question was chiefly their concern, as it was the devil’s first issue. “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Use the power that dwells in you, Jesus — if it dwells in you, if you are the Messiah of God — use the power to save yourself, whether from hunger or the cross. Prove that you are God’s son, God’s chosen one, the Messiah. Use it or lose it!

That is a powerful temptation, isn’t it? Use what you’ve got for your own needs: save yourself, if need be, by the skin of your teeth, by the sweat of your brow; don’t pay too much heed to anybody else — let them look out for themselves as best they can, and devil take the hindmost. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and you can’t be too careful, or too generous. Save yourself!

Yet Jesus did not give into that temptation, whether it came directly from the devil’s lips or second-hand in the religious leader’s scornful taunt. For he had not come to save himself, but to save the world. He had not come to use the powers at his command but to lose all for our sakes, for the sake of the whole world. He was not full of himself, full of his own power, but rather he emptied himself and took the form of a servant, a powerless one, one who had given it all away, dying that we might live. If he used himself at all, it was not to save himself. Like a heroic rescuer he pulled us aside to shield us as he placed himself in the bullet’s path. And he left us a warning: that it will profit us nothing to gain the whole world if we lose our true selves in the process, and that only by losing ourselves can we take hold of what is truly valuable — eternal life.

+ + +

Next came the soldiers who said, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself.” The political question was their chief concern. So it was as well for the devil, who showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and said, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority, for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” The temptation here is to use others to climb the greasy pole of worldly success: please the right people, grease the right palms, step all over your inferiors using them as stepping stones if need be as you scratch and climb your way to the top; but don’t forget at the same time to grovel to your superiors — it’s o.k. to have bloody hands and feet and a brown nose, if that’s what it takes to get ahead.

But Jesus would not use others to his own advantage; he would instead do to others as he would be done by, would turn the other cheek and save the weakest sinner — not because it was to his advantage, but because he truly loved his brothers and sisters, even when they turned from him and scattered, even when they betrayed him and denied him; even when they nailed him to the cross. The kingship of Christ was not the tyranny of an earthly monarch, but the charity of a heavenly servant, one who came not to be served, but to serve.

+ + +

The criminal said, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” Personal safety was this man’s concern, and the devil had played that card against Jesus in the wilderness: “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here” and God will protect you. This is the temptation to get off the hook at all costs, to force God’s hand and make God act, not as God chooses, but as we might want. The thief’s reaction is understandable: there he was on a cross, and the one hanging next to him was supposed to be a wonder-working miracle man, a man who could raise the dead, give sight to the blind. How natural to call on him to help them both, to use God by getting God to step in and save them both from this terrible predicament.

How often are we tempted to use God like a sort of emergency repair kit, instead of walking with him all the days of our life? How often do we save our prayers for the spiritual flat-tires, the physical blown fuses of our lives. We sure enough remember God when trouble rears its head, but how often do we thank God for the glory even of a rainy day, the blessing of being able to awaken in the morning at all, and have a place to sleep at night? How often do we give thanks even for a simple meal, for a piece of bread when we are hungry? The temptation to use God — when God is so generous — is difficult to resist — we so often forget God’s daily blessings that we are liable to call on him only when we feel ourselves in danger or in need.

Jesus resisted this temptation to call upon God, because he knew that God was there with him even in the midst of this suffering, even in the midst of this agony, the hands of God were there, ready and open for him to commend his spirit to them. This kind of trust is difficult for us.It is easy to fall into that trap of only remembering God when we’re in trouble. But God remembers us all the time.

And this is where we turn from the temptation, the turning aside or turning away, to the faithfulness that stays on the path, the faithfulness and commitment Christ shows us on the cross. God is faithful and true and he will remember us.

And this reminder to remember comes from a surprising place. “Remember me.” Someone else speaks up, someone we hardly noticed before — the other thief. Saint Luke alone of the evangelists records this for us, this reminder to remember, this call not of temptation but to fidelity, not of abdication but of commitment. The other thief does not say, “save yourself” or “save me” but “remember me.” He does not tempt the Son of God, but prays to him to do the very thing he does — to remember and hold the world in his hands. Familiar words in Saint Luke’s Gospel, for he also records Jesus had said the same thing to his disciples on the night he was handed over to suffering and death. We will hear that account later this week when we gather to do as he said, to break the bread and pray the prayers. As he sat with them in the upper room, he broke bread with them and shared the cup of wine, and he spoke those words repeated now how many times since, “Do this in remembrance of me.” And so it is that as we remember him, and all he did for us, it is a way to remind us that he remembers us. He is no longer distracted by the temptations that assailed him then and assail us now. He has triumphed over the devil and his works, he has beat down Satan under his feet, he has overcome the temptation to use and abuse others and God, and he remembers us in our pain as he rejoices with us in our joy.

Our yearly company with Jesus in his Passion has begun, as we set our feet upon the path of Holy Week once more. Let us then with courage set our faces towards Jerusalem and resist the temptations we face in our lives in the knowledge of his faith, his remembrance of us, who did not save himself, but gave himself that we might be saved. +

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So What's New?

SJF • Lent 5c • Tobias Haller BSG

Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed, will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves.

Some of you may have seen comedian Jeff Foxworthy on television. He comes from the poor white southern population of the US known disparagingly as rednecks — because the back of the neck is where white folks get a sunburn working out in the fields. Foxworthy has been using humor to take the edge off of this insulting epithet, and if you’ve ever seen his comedy act you will know how he has a whole catalog of things by which, if you do them, you would know that “You just might be a redneck” — besides having sunburn on your neck.

One of his lines is, “If you’ve got a new TV that works sitting on top of an old TV that doesn’t work, you just might be a redneck.”

Now, what struck me about this, is that I don’t think it applies only to rednecks. I have a feeling it may be more generational than regional, and more about attitude than income. And I say this because I’ve known many people over the years who have just these kinds of appliances in their homes — and I will confess to you that even as I speak, over at rectory there is a TV set that does not work very well, but is of an appropriate size and shape, that is being used more as an end table than as a television. In addition, there are at least two broken computers in the basement. But although I come from a family that is undeniably white, by most definitions poor, and from just south of the Mason Dixon line, the closest any of us ever came to agricultural work was mowing the lawn.

I know for a fact that I’m not the only person here at Saint James today who finds it hard to throw things away. I do not believe I am the only person here who has ever said, “Well, you’d never know when we might need it.” And if you don’t believe me, I invite you to take a tour of the church basement!

I said a moment ago that this may be a generational issue: those of us whose parents lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War were brought up — even in the relatively prosperous days following that War — with a kind of hyper-awareness about wastefulness, a memory of rationing and short supplies, of making do, of scrimping and saving. We were brought up to save things, to recycle things, and not to throw things away — in case we might need them some day.

So I think that perhaps many of us here can relate to those people in the Psalm this morning: those who sowed with tears; who went out weeping, carrying the seed. Why were they weeping? Well, these agricultural workers, these ancient Israelite rednecks, were living in a desert land, in the middle of a drought. They had a few grains of wheat — which they could grind into flour, and bake, and eat, and have nothing left; and then starve. Or they could plant those grains of wheat, even as they watered them with their tears, risking and hoping that the rains would come and the crop would grow. They would have to let go of the old — to give it up, literally to bury it in the ground as if dead — in order for the new crop, the new life, to come.

Our other scriptures today similarly talk about getting rid of what is old, but frankly in a much more dismissive way. Isaiah tells us, “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” And he refers contemptuously to what has gone before as being “extinguished, quenched like a wick.” I want to refer you to a more recent quotation that I came across last week, from a wonderful speech by Abraham Lincoln, referring to those who through the 18th and 19th centuries worked so hard to preserve and protect the institution of slavery, even as more and more people were coming to realize it was time for it to end.

It is fitting to recall this today — the 200th anniversary of the British abolition of the slave trade. It took decades of work by people like William Wilberforce to achieve that goal, finally, in 1807. Fifty years later, Lincoln noted how Wilberforce’s was a name that lived in honored memory, while those who supported slavery were forgotten for the embarrassment they were. It may be that Lincoln was thinking of exactly this passage from Isaiah when he compared Wilberforce’s legacy with that of those who favored slavery: “Though they blazed, like tallow-candles for a century, at last they flickered in the socket, died out, stank in the dark for a brief season, and were remembered no more, even by thesmell.” Now that is dismissive of what has gone before, remembering it no more — even by the smell!

Then in his letter to the Philippians, Paul uses similarly dismissive language when he says that since he came to know Jesus Christ, he has come to regard everything from the past as so much rubbish — and I will say that “rubbish” is a rather polite translation; I invite you to check that verse in the King James Version! Paul presses forward to what lies ahead and forgets everything, and I mean everything, that lies behind.

But then, just as we are beginning to think that rejecting things is what we’re supposed to be doing, Jesus brings us up short with that challenging text, quoting from a different Psalm, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” That begins to sound more like the lessons my mother taught me; or my grandmother — who saved every last bit of string that came into the house, and would even go so far as to iron aluminum foil in order to get more use out of it: “You never know when you might need it. Waste not, want not. Don’t throw that away; it’s perfectly good.” And, since my grandmother was a seamstress, “We can roll that cuff and the jacket will be as good as new.” I will confess that through most of my young years, the sleeves of my jackets revealed several inches of shirt-cuff!

So what is the difference, my friends, the difference between the builders who reject that cornerstone, and Isaiah who throws out the old candle stub when it’s too short to reach above the socket, or the sowers who go out weeping to plant their seed?

The difference — and what a difference it makes — is that practical virtue of hope; knowing when there is reason to hope and taking that risk, and distinguishing it from false hope that is only a form of folly, or folly that doesn’t have the wisdom to see the real present use for a cornerstone that fits precisely where needed. A candle stub that is shorter than the socket it sits in really is of no use — it is not going to get any longer, and will only burn down into the socket and, as Abraham Lincoln said, stink! I can keep that broken computer in the basement for as long as I like — but it is not going to start working, and I’d be crazy to think it will.

But the seed that the sowers bear in hope, is not like these other things — these candle stubs and rubbish — because seeds have a possible future. If you grind them into flour to make bread their future will be short. But if you plant them in the ground in the hope that the rains will come they may bring forth 60 and a hundredfold. The harvest can indeed be plentiful, so that even those laborers who go out weeping, carrying the seed, can come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves. This is the proper way to lose hold of what is past, to give it up, sanctified by the hope that in giving it up you will receive an even greater blessing in return.

Those who cling to the past or to the present, who can only value what they have obtained, or what they see before their eyes, are like the foolish tenants in the parable: they imagine that by wiping out the future — killing the one who has the right of inheritance — they will be able to take permanent control and possession of something for which they were only employed as temporary custodians. This is madness, surely — as mad in its own way but at a greater scale — as storing up rubbish or accumulating candle stubs or hoarding your seed and never planting it — even as you starve.

We are called, beloved, to fix our hope on better things — to fix our hope in Christ Jesus our Lord. In comparison to him all other things are worthless. As the hymn says so well, “My hope is built on nothing less, than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.” He is the stone that the builders rejected — and woe to us if we reject him too! Rather, we are called to open our eyes to see how perfectly he fits, how completely he can satisfy our deepest longings, our deepest needs, our deepest hunger. Let us not err like the builders who rejected that perfect cornerstone, but let us embrace him as the cornerstone of our lives, forgetting all the rest of the stuff the world clamors for us to substitute in his place. Let us set aside what is old and worthless, set it out on the street to be collected for the rubbish that it is. Let us plant our seeds in hope, knowing in hope that a rich harvest awaits; let us cling to the rock of salvation, who though rejected by others shall be the foundation for our lives, and for our lives to come.

He is a solid rock, a cornerstone secure, a sure and certain hope upon which our souls can take their stand.

“On Christ the solid rock I stand;
all other ground is sinking sand,
all other ground is sinking sand.”

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The Three R's

SJF • Lent 4c • Tobias Haller BSG

In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ...

About a month ago we ended the Epiphany season and began our Lenten pilgrimage by reflecting on the three virtues: faith, hope and love. This morning, I want to speak about three basic elements of the Christian faith — the three R’s, if you will — repentance, reconciliation, and renewal. These are the actions that put those virtues into practice. Surely they are appropriate subjects for the Lenten season of self-examination, forgiveness, and preparation for the ultimate renewal — Easter. So it is fitting that we all review these “Three R’s” and see what application they have to our lives as Christian disciples.

Repentance has suffered a fate common to often-used words. It has been confused with the similar-sounding words, penitence and penance. So for many today, repentance means feeling sorry over some past action. It is primarily an affair of the heart and mind: a matter of how you feel and what you think — a mental and emotional state.

When we hear the command to “Repent!” we tend to respond by sitting down and, like Fagin in the musical Oliver, “reviewing the situation.” In this process we think about the things we’ve done and left undone. We engage our emotions, and we experience a twinge of regret. Perhaps we say to ourselves we’ll do better in the future, then sigh, get up and go on about our business, feeling pleased with ourselves for being such sensitive, moral persons.

Or perhaps our feelings do go deeper. Perhaps we are conscious of some far weightier matter, some sin that truly troubles and weighs on our hearts — and yet that’s as far as it goes — we feel bad but simply remain in our bad feelings.

The problem with both responses: feeling good about ourselves for feeling humble, or feeling bad about ourselves because we are so awful, is that neither has much to do with the Gospel concept of repentance. In the teaching of Christ, feelings or thoughts, whether in the form of patting ourselves on the back or beating ourselves black-and-blue, do not represent repentance.

Now, I’m not saying we should not use our intellect to review our shortcomings, or that we should not engage our emotions and feel sorry for our failings— but feeling good because we’ve felt sorry is obviously shallow; and feeling so miserable that we are beyond redemption is surely presumptuous! And neither is true repentance.

What then is it to repent? What is Jesus looking for when he calls us to repent? While the repentance described in the Gospel does employ the intellect and engage the emotions, it culminates in another faculty of the human soul altogether: the will. Gospel repentance means not just that you are aware of your guilt, or even sorry for your actions, but that you turn around and act. C.S. Lewis once noted that the best thing to do when you find you’re going the wrong way is to turn around and head back! Or as the old anthem said, “Turn back, O Man, forswear thy foolish ways!” And it is the deliberate act of turning around that is true repentance.

To show us what he means by repentance, Jesus tells the story of the Prodigal Son. At first we appear to be on familiar ground: This young man becomes mindful of what he’s done, stuck in the middle of a pig-sty far from home, he reviews his situation and feels totally miserable.

But — and this is where repentance begins — he doesn’t stop there, with thoughts and feelings, moping to himself and feeling sorry.His sorrow and regret spur and spark him to his true repentance, which consists in getting up and turning around and heading back home.

The young man starts his journey, probably going over his confession in his mind as he goes. And here the story takes a surprising turn. The Father doesn’t wait to hear his son’s confession. He doesn’t wait to find out if the son “feels sorry.” He doesn’t wait on the porch in awful silence for the son to finish the long walk home under his unblinking eye. No, as soon as this loving Father sees his son coming, while yet far off, the Father runs to him and embraces him. For the culmination of repentance is God’s outgoing ingathering. Repentance leads us to reconciliation, our second “R.”

Now just as repentance is more than feeling sorry, so Gospel reconciliation is more than a handshake and a “Let bygones be bygones.” And reconciliation in the Gospel isn’t like reconciliation of a checkbook or an account — where the goal is to have the plusses balance the minuses. No, in Gospel reconciliation, God always tips the balance to the surplus of grace, for God is more ready to give than we are prepared to receive. God would never make it as an accountant! Reconciliation is the act of a gracious and loving God, reaching out to save what has been lost and to set things right, out of the abundance of his grace.

I need to note here, that in Luke’s Gospel, two other parables immediately precede that of the Prodigal Son: The Lost Sheep, and the Lost Coin. In all three, repentance is intimately tied up with God’s gracious perseverance in seeking out that which is lost, going beyond the expected to do the astounding. Whether God is portrayed as Good Shepherd, Careful Housewife, or Loving Father, the power of reconciliation resides with God. The Shepherd could have said of the lost sheep, “Leave him alone and he’ll come home, wagging his tail behind him.” The Housewife could have said of the lost coin, “I’ll probably find it some day down behind the sofa cushions.” And the Father could have stayed on the porch, and when his son finally reached him, said, “Well, I see you’ve finally come to your senses. But since you’ve spent your inheritance, the best I’ll do is take you on as a hired hand. And you’ll have to sleep in the barn; ‘cause we don’t allow the help in the house.”

But that isn’t what happens in any of these parables. In each case the reconciliation is extravagant - it goes well beyond the expected, and tips the balance generously. The Shepherd doesn’t just find the sheep, and doesn’t just lead the sheep home, but carries it home rejoicing! The Housewife doesn’t just find the coin and put it in the sugar bowl and go about her business; she calls the whole neighborhood to celebrate — and probably spends more on the party than the coin was worth. And the Father doesn’t stand in the doorway waiting for his son to apologize; he runs down the road and meets him and embraces him before he can get a word out.

This is the glory of grace, its extravagance, that God comes to us in compassion while we are still on the road home— while we are yet sinners. It is not we who reconcile ourselves with God, it is God who reconciles us, and the whole world, to himself, in Christ Jesus, taking no account of past sins. And this brings us to our third “R”— Renewal.

We’ve turned around, forswearing our foolish ways — that’s repentance. We’ve been met on the road and embraced by our loving God — extravagant in his gracious forgiveneness — that’s reconciliation. But note that the Father in our parable doesn’t seem to pay any attention to his son’s confession; he doesn’t even say, I forgive you. No, he simply takes no account of past sins. I said before, God is no accountant — he always juggles the books in our favor. But we know who’s been keeping account, right? We know whose been keeping careful track of things. The older brother: he’s stewed over this for a long time, he’s made his list and checked it twice, and he rattles off the whole list of offenses to remind his father of how badly his kid brother has acted. But the father isn’t interested in this account of past sins. He’s too busy ordering up the fatted calf, the best robe, the new shoes, the ring. He’s completely caught up in the fact that the lost has been found, the dead restored to life. He is going to strip the dirty coveralls off that boy, hose him down to get rid of the last relics of the pigsty, dress him as a prince and hold a par-tay! — and that’s renewal.

Paul catches the same excitement in the passage we read this morning: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; the old has passed away,
behold the new has come! All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.” We too have been reconciled — had our dirty overalls stripped off. We’ve been hosed down and washed clean in the waters of Baptism. And we’ve been dressed up — not as hired hands — but as ambassadors of Christ! We, who once moped in the spiritual pig-sty of sin have been given the ministry of reconciliation. We who once languished in a pigsty in a foreign land, have been commissioned as ambassadors of our true heavenly country!

And, as with repentance, thoughts or feelings are not enough to carry us through in our work as ambassadors. It is not enough to be well-informed about the needs of the world. It is not enough to feel sorry for those who have not yet heard the good news. It is not enough to pity the homeless, the hungry, the poor, and the sick. We are called to action. Just as awareness of and sorrow for our sins is the spur to move us to repentance, so too the pity we feel for the sick, the hungry, or the poor is meant to spur us on to charity.

It is all too easy to feel sorry for someone. We do it when we see a drama on T.V. or at the movies, and those are just fictional characters! Our work as ambassadors of Christ, as ministers of reconciliation, must consist of more than feeling sorry. For just as with repentance, feelings of compassion, unless they are followed by acts of compassion, are worth nothing. If we are to be true to the one whose gracious action, in giving himself to death on the cross, saved us from the power of sin, then we too must act. God has brought us to this fourth “R”— righteousness. In Christ we have the power to become the righteousness of God to people far and near.

This righteousness is ours only as a gift— a gift of grace, which we receive like the prodigal himself, who was restored not because he felt sorry for himself, but because his father loved him so much.

For the Father did love the Son, and loves us too, so much so that he gave his Son to the end that we might not perish, but have everlasting life. By making him to be sin who knew no sin, God canceled the debt of sin, nailing it to the cross, deader than a doornail. God has rolled the stone of our disgrace away, as surely as the stone was rolled from the tomb in which our Lord and Savior lay.

And grace has been with us every step of the way. God’s grace spoke in our hearts, bringing us to repentance. Grace led us on the road of return, and fed us with the manna of reconciliation on the way. Grace renewed us and clothed us in garments of righteousness, and grace will see us through on our mission as ambassadors of Christ. Let us therefore celebrate, and invite everyone, near and far, to the celebration, for that which was dead has come to life, and the lost has been found. +

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The Flame of Love

SJF • Lent 3c • Tobias Haller BSG

The bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.

For the last two weeks we have been exploring the great virtues, beginning with faith and hope. Today brings us to greatest of the virtues, the enduring and eternal virtue, the one that lasts for ever: the virtue of Love — completing the circle that began on the Sunday before Lent began, when we heard those beautiful words from Saint Paul: Love never ends.

Love is eternal, Saint Paul told the Corinthians. And love is eternal because it is reborn in every instant. Love is always now. Faith looks to the past, and gives thanks for all that God has done. Hope looks to the future and trusts in God to provide. But love lives in the present, if it lives at all.

It is no good telling someone you loved them once, or that you’ll love them some day — who wants to hear that? And even hearing someone say, “I have always loved you” or “I will always love you” wouldn’t mean anything unless the one saying it loves you now. Love, true love, is eternal because it is alive in every moment. Love is like a fire that burns, but does not consume.

Moses confronted that love one day while he was keeping his father-in-law’s sheep, living as a stranger in a strange land. God appeared to him as a flame that burned but did not consume, burning eternally on holy ground.

The God of love chose to reveal himself to Moses for one reason: he had heard the cry of his people in Egypt, and would deliver them, because he loved them, because they were his. The eternal love of God became, in that particular time and place, (as it always becomes in every time and place) the present love of God in action. The God of the faith that was past, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob’s faith in God, the God of the hope of the future, who would visit and deliver his people, here on the mountain reveals himself as God Who Is Who He Is, or even better (as one translation — a Jewish one, I might add, the Koren Jerusalem Bible — puts it) the God who Is now what he always will Be. This is the God of the eternal and everlasting Now, the God who is love, burning but not consuming; giving life, not taking it, the God of love, present to forgive, to rescue and to redeem; the one who was, and who is to come — but who is always Love. As Saint John would affirm many centuries later, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

Some of the theologians have focused on this story of the burning bush, and the Name God tells Moses to call him by, as a way of emphasizing God as pure Being, He Who Is, or “Being itself.” I would like to suggest that Saint John’s description is more apt — rather than get involved in debates about the nature of being, and like the former President parsing what is is, and simply declare that God is love. And that when we love we are most like God.

My brother in Christ Thomas Bushnell made a fine observation not too long ago. He pointed out that while we are called to have faith, hope and love, there is a reason for love being the greatest. We have faith, but God does not need to have faith — God is the object of our faith. We have hope, but God doesn’t need hope; God knows what is to come better than we do! Faith and hope relate us to God, because we have faith in God and hope for God’s plans for us; but love is the means by which we reflect God’s own being, as mirrors or likenesses of God, made in God’s image; and this responding love joins us to God; for God not only has love, but as Saint John says, God is Love.

After all, as Paul assured us, Love believes all things and hopes all things — it embraces both faith and hope — and it endures because it is embodied in the eternal nature of God, and it is through love that we are joined with God. That love of God that Is God, is eternal — it burns forever, and never consumes the source of its flame.

Most of you have probably seen the famous photograph taken in 1972 at the height of the Vietnam War, a disturbing photograph of a nine-year-old girl, running, burning and naked, from a napalm attack. It is a picture most of us probably find it hard tolook at for very long.

But there’s someone who for years found it even harder. His name is also John. He is the man responsible for bombing the village from which that horribly wounded, burning young girl is running. He had been assured by reconnaissance that there were no civilians in the area — twice. Yet after the bombing was over and done with, there was the photograph. The photograph was documentary evidence of the faultiness of military intelligence.

After the war, that photograph haunted John, appearing again and again in newspapers and magazines, in film clips and television programs, one of the most-reproduced wartime photographs ever taken. Think of that: think of the worst thing you’ve ever done turning up on the History Channel, featured in newspaper articles, even reprinted in your children’s high school history books. How’s that for a Lenten exercise? The worst thing you’d ever done plastered everywhere for all the world to see. For John, it was a constant reminder, a constant pain, not just for Lent, but his whole life.

And there was nothing he could do about it. He wanted to tell the girl in the picture he was sorry. He wanted to say it wasn’t his fault, that he’d been told there were no civilians in the village. But there was the picture, with its own pain fixed for ever, the open-mouthed face with its silent scream, the skinny, burned, naked figure running with arms waving in pain, a silent agony in black and white.

Then, in June of 1996, John learned that the young woman in the picture not only had survived, but was still alive. Her name was Kim. He also learned the story of how the photograph had been taken, the moving story of the pain he’d only known as a still image on a page. On that day in 1972, Kim and her family had been hiding in a building when it was hit. They ran into the street, where the napalm from a second bomber hit them. As the young woman ran, she tore off her burning clothing; two of her young cousins were killed. The photographer, seconds after snapping that horrible picture, was joined by other journalists, pouring what water they had in their canteens on her burns, doing what they could before she was rushed to a hospital.

John heard that Kim was going to speak at the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, and he knew that he had to try to see her. As he stood with the thousands gathered there, he heard her say that if she ever met the man responsible for her suffering, she would tell him she forgave him. They could not change the past, but they could work for a better future.

John found a way to get a note to her, a note telling her that the man she spoke of was there. He wrote later of their meeting, “She saw my grief, my pain, my sorrow. She held out her arms to me and embraced me. All I could say was, ‘I’m sorry; I’m so sorry; I’m sorry,’ over and over again. At the same time she was saying, ‘It’s all right; it’s all right; I forgive, I forgive.’”

The flame of charity burns, but it does not consume. The fire of love is fierce, but it does not destroy; on the contrary, it builds up and bears fruit — and it endures. Whether a burning bush, or the generous heart of a young girl who could forgive great pain, or the twisted figure on a cross crying out, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do”: Love burns, oh how it burns — but it does not consume. And it will keep on burning, persistent and earnest until it warms the coldest hearts into responding love.

Compared to God’s eternal love, our love may seem lukewarm. We aren’t burning bushes aglow with the love of God. Sometimes we may be more like fruitless fig trees in need of loving care and a second chance, or even a third, some cultivation and probably a good load of fertilizer! We can be a pretty sorry sight, sometimes. But it’s all right, it’s all right, God assures us again and again. God forgives us, he forgives us. And he loves us. As Leighton Ford so aptly put it, “God loves us as we are, but God loves us too much to leave us as we are.” God sends us gardeners to tend us, to cultivate and nourish us, loving us year by year into fruitfulness, And God sends the fire of his love, the flame of charity, to transform us and to warm us. God will keepon loving us, persistently warming us with the flame of the Holy Spirit until we glow with the love that burns but does not consume — the everlasting flame of the love of God. +

The story of the Vietnam photograph is based on a press release from Evangelical Press News Service.

Hope Grows Like a Forest

SJF • Lent 2c • Tobias Haller BSG
Our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there we are expecting a savior... +

Last week we began our Lenten exploration of the great, enduring virtues by looking at Faith. Today we turn our attention to the second virtue, Hope. I said last week that Faith looks both to the past and to the future. Hope, however, by definition, looks to the future alone. The problem is, when things aren’t going well, a miserable present can make the future look grim, especially if one has not cultivated this particular virtue.

We can learn something about the nature of hope by looking at those who are hopeful. Take Abraham in this morning’s reading from Genesis. God promises Abraham a rich reward. And at first, Abraham makes use of that wonderful freedom to talk back to God, to “give God a hard time” in the way I referred to a few weeks ago. He makes ample use of his freedom to speak up, and to speak out: a freedom nourished through an intimate relationship with God, that peculiar Jewish virtue called chutzpah, which is clearly related to hope — for who argues if he has no hope of winning the argument? When God tells Abraham that he will receive a very great reward, Abraham doesn’t just give thanks — because he’s got a bone to pick with God. So he puts God on the spot by saying, “What will you give me, for I continue childless. You have given me no offspring, so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.” He’s saying, essentially, “What good can you do for me if it is only for me — if it is not something I can pass on to the future. Whatever good you give me will be bitter if I know that only a slave will inherit it, and not my own flesh and blood.”

So God shows Abraham the stars of heaven, and assures him that not only will he have a child, but his descendants will be more numerous than the number of those stars. And then, having sweetened the hope for the future — that is, a host of descendants to whom to pass along the blessing — God names the blessing itself, and promises Abraham the land from Egypt to Assyria, for him, and more importantly, for his descendants for ever.

Abraham’s story tells us two things about Hope. Hope is a flower that blooms in the desert, about believing in a promise yet to be fulfilled. It is about a promised future, not a present reality. It comes to be in the midst of awareness of what is lacked, of what is needed. It is those who thirst who hope for water, those who hungerwho hope for bread. In this case, it is the childless man who hopes for descendants. We hope for what we do not have: As Saint Paul wrote to the Romans, “Who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

It is precisely when things look bad that hope springs up to rescue our hearts from falling into desolation. Those who are “hopeless” have nothing to live for. Just as memory for God’s generosity in the past gives rise to thanksgiving and faith, so anticipation of God’s goodness for the future is the gift of hope. Hope rings in the voice of God telling a childless man that he will have more descendants than there are stars in the heavens. Hope is God’s promise to a homeless man wandering in a land far from the place of his birth, that this strange land will be his children’s and his children’s children’s home. So it is that hope is most needed precisely when things look their worst; the promise is most dear when things look most unpromising.

The second thing Abraham’s story tells us about hope is that it embraces others. Hope is about sharing. The reward God gives to Abraham is not just for Abraham, but for his descendants: to enjoy the land the Lord has given them. Hope is not just for yourself. Faith is something you have for yourself — you may have faith in someone else, but you don’t have faith for someone else; though your faith may encourage others to find their own faith. But hope, at its most hopeful, goes beyond your own hopes, to include others — and you can have hopes for others, even when they have no hopes of their own, when they have given up; and you can have hopes for others even when you defer realizing your hopes for yourself. How many parents work extra hard to raise money - not to make themselves rich, but to provide for their children’s education? Their hope is not for themselves, but for their children. And so it is with Abraham’s hope, nourished by God’s promise, for the generations and generations to come: life in a promised land.

Hope is shown in the ability to postpone an immediate reward for the sake of a greater one down the road. Some years ago a study was done with young children, to examine just this question. Each child sat at a table with a plate and a single cookie. The researcher would say the cookie was theirs, and they could eat it now, but if they would wait for five minutes until the researcher came back, they could have twocookies. Each child would then be left alone for five minutes, with the hidden cameras rolling. You can guess what happened: some of the children took the cookie right away, and others waited, some unable to overcome their impatience giving in and taking the cookie after a struggle — and for those that endured to the end, that wait of five minutes seemed an eternity. But that wasn’t the end of the study. I don’t think anyone would be surprised at these results. The researchers kept track of those children for ten years, to see what happened to them. And it seems that the children who deferred eating one cookie in the hopes of getting two generally did better at school and in life than the ones who gobbled the cookie as soon as the researcher left the room. I can’t tell you how many of them became investment bankers; but on average they did well for themselves. Hope that looks to the future, the ability to defer in patience, can help equip one for a hopeful and productive life.

Let me tell you the story of another kind of hope, the kind of patient hope that looks to the future. French author Jean Giono was hiking in the Alps in 1913. Due to the growth in industry, the whole region had been deforested, and the barren landscape, dry streambeds and abandoned villages bore testimony to the wastefulness of going for short term profits. Industrialization had eaten the cookie, so to speak. Giono met an old shepherd who invited him to share his hut for the night. After a humble dinner, he watched the old man carefully sort through a pile of acorns, casting aside the ones that were cracked or moldy, until he had 100 perfect uncracked acorns. Giono asked what the acorns were for. The shepherd told him that in his travels over the last three years, he had planted 100,000 trees, poking holes in the ground with his shepherds staff as he walked along, and dropping in an acorn here and there, and of those he reckoned that a fifth had sprouted. Of the sprouts, he expected about half to survive the weather. But even with a return of only ten percent — a tithe, I might add! — he would go on planting.

Some years later, after the Great War ended, Giono returned to the region, and discovered how far the forest had grown. And with the forest had come renewal to the streams, the beginnings of meadows. After the Second World War Giono, himself now an old man, visited the area again, and found it aglow with prosperity. He wrote, “On the site of the ruins I had seen in 1913 now stand neat farms... The old streams...are flowing again. The villages have been rebuilt... People have moved in, bringing youth, motion, the spirit of adventure.” The old shepherd who planted acorns in 1913 knewthat the forest that was yet to come was not for him to enjoy. He not only deferred the one cookie, but decided that the double portion, when it came, would be for others to enjoy. He did not live to see the forest, but in his heart he walked every day through a forest of hope.

Hope is not about individual good fortune, but about shared joy, joy that is a gift to others.

In today’s Gospel we see Jesus standing between the two realities of hope, the promise and the sharing. Jesus confronts the unpromising reality of the earthly Jerusalem. Here is a city that murders the prophets, a city that is like an obstinate child who refuses the comforting embrace of its mother, who would rather be miserable and sulk than be held and fed; who grabs the cookie even before the researcher has left the room! But Jesus can see, even in that unpromising town, the glimmer of a future heavenly banquet, at which people will come from east and west, from north and south, to join Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets sharing in the great feast in the kingdom of God, in the new Jerusalem. Jesus can look at the empty plot of land, or the devastated wreck of a ruined town, and see a forest. He can look at Jerusalem in all its imperfection and see the promise of what it can be, of what it will be. He can look at Jerusalem in all its obstinate self-will, its murderous ingratitude, its selfish grasping, and see the sharing of the heavenly banquet. Jesus has hope, hope in the promise that is shared.

We too live between the two Jerusalems, the spoiled and unpromising Jerusalem of much of our daily life, and the hopeful joy of the Jerusalem in which the Lord’s table is set, and in which our true citizenship lies, a citizenship shared with the multitudes who gather for the banquet. May we, as our Lenten pilgrimage continues, learn to see the promise and the sharing and the hope, even when things seem unpromising, when people prove selfish, and hope seems impractical. May we learn to hope in God’s promise for generations to come who will worship in this place, setting aside that dedicated portion of our treasure, that tithe out of all that God has given us, to preserve and protect and rebuild this place. May we sit in patience, not gobbling our resources for immediate needs and pleasures, as we wait for the realization of a better promise. May we learn to plant acorns; even as we hope for the forest that will be.+

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The Two Faces of Faith

SJF • Lent 1c • Tobias Haller BSG
Jesus answered him, It is said, Do not put the Lord your God to the test.+

Lent is now upon us, that season of the church year in which it is customary to take up some form of spiritual discipline, to prepare for the great celebration of Easter. While it is traditional to keep the Lenten fast as a time to curb our vices, I’d like to invite all of us to celebrate our strengths as well, to undertake a discipline of virtue. As well as giving up something that’s bad for us, or something bad we do — and we shouldn’t have to wait for a special time of year to do that! — let’s take up and exercise something good we could do more of. I mentioned one such practice last week: the daily reading of a portion of Scripture — and if you do not already have that discipline as part of your Christian journey you might take it up this Lent — and never set it down!

I also spoke last week of the great enduring virtue of Love — how we can scarcely hope to do without it. Today, I would like to explore another of the three great virtues: Faith. This virtue lies close to the heart of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, a child of God, and a bearer of the good news. On this first Sunday in Lent, then, let’s take a look at faith, or more precisely, faithfulness — which is faith in action.

To start with, faith is not just about believing some fact, but about trusting a person. Surely we all know the difference. If you have faith in someone, you will trust what they tell you; and if you don’t have faith in someone, you’ll find yourself having to check everything they say. When we say, “We believe in one God” we just don’t mean, “We believe God exists.” It is not God’s mere existence we proclaim, but, as the Creed continues to point out, what God has done, in the creation and redemption of the world. When we say we believe in God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we are placing our trust, as Christians, in the one God who is supremely trustworthy: God the Father, creator of heaven and earth, the Holy Spirit, the lord and giver of life, and the one on whom our faith is founded, and who is completely faithful: Jesus Christ the Son of God and our Lord. He, we are assured, was faithful unto death, even death on the cross. God doesn’t change — God’s love is steadfast and constant; the sort of faithfulness you can trust in. As that wonderful hymn verse says, “Who trusts in God’s unchanging live builds on a rock that nought can move.” That rock doesn’t move — and if you take your stand upon it, neither will you. We as Christians take our stand upon that Rock — and that Rock is Christ. Surely such a faithful Savior is worthy of our faith, and we are promised that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shallbe saved.” Our faith is based on what we see when we look back at what Jesus has done for us, and what he will continue to do: for he is faithful.

So faith has two faces: giving thanks for what has gone before, and trusting in what will come after. Unlike that warning you see on investment prospectuses (or is it prospecti?), “past performance is no guarantee of future performance” — here we are not relying on the performance of the stock market, but on the one who is the source of our being and doing: on God himself, who created, redeemed and sanctifies us. That kind of trust, that kind of faith, is secure.

A few weeks ago we heard Jeremiah’s description of those “who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord”; they are like trees planted by streams of water — in contrast to those like sorry shrubs in the desert, who trust in mere mortals. And faithfulness is the fruit that trusting trees bear — fruit that is borne because those trees are planted by the unfailing stream, and send their roots down deep, to draw on that well of faithfulness of God, who provides all that is needed.

This fruitfulness of faithfulness is described in our reading from Deuteronomy today — quite literally! The children of Israel have been delivered out of Egypt, brought through forty long years in the desert, and they are about to enter the promised land. They have received bread from heaven, and water from the rock — given food and drink all their weary way, by the God who is faithful and true. But before they enter into the promised land, while still on the borders — still collecting manna, still drinking the water God provides — Moses gives them a way to remember all that God has done for them once the manna ceases, and they drink from the springs of Israel.

And what a simple liturgy it is! To take some fruit, the first of the harvest, and to stand before God, and to remember: to remember your roots, your ancestors — that wandering Aramean Abraham, who left his home to wander afar in a faith based on God’s promise and covenant — to recall the hardships and travels, the desert years, the ups and downs, the manna and the water; and above all, to remember God’s mercy and promise — God’s faithfulness — and to give thanks for all that God has done. That’s where human faithfulness comes in, the response that grows out of faith in God.

This is what God asks of the people he has rescued and redeemed: that they remember... remember God, and give thanks. And we do well to remember too: Hasn’t God brought you out of many a scrape? God will be with you through this one, too. Never stop giving thanks; never lose faith. For God is faithful, too.

Our faith, as I said, is largely faith in God’s faithfulness: our faith in God’s future performance is based on the hard evidence of past performance coupled with faith in God’s steadfastness. And this is how our faithfulness of thanksgiving for the past turns towards faithfulness of trust in the future.

Today’s Gospel shows us this kind of faith that looks back to remember and ahead in trust. Notice how each of the devil’s temptations is an attack on Jesus’ own faith and trust in God his heavenly Father. And notice too how each one of Jesus’ responses to the devil always points back to God, always returns the focus to God, in whom Jesus trusts as a son trusts his loving father, and from whom the crafty devil is trying to distract him — as the devil has always done.

And I’d like to look at that little dialogue today, fleshing it out just a bit to see if we can imagine what was going on in the Devil’s mind, and in our Lord’s, based on the few words recorded by the evangelist. Through this, I hope we can better understand the faithfulness of Jesus in the face of the devil’s temptation.

In this expanded dialogue, the devil begins, “You must be awfully hungry, after forty days without food. You know, God gave your ancestors bread in the desert when they wandered back in Moses’ day — not just for forty days but forty years! Why, if your Father could give the people bread from heaven in the desert, why doesn’t he give some to you? I’m sure he would if you asked. Or you might create some yourself; I mean, here we are out in the desert, and if you are the son of God, why, you should be able to make manna come from heaven, too, or even make this stone into a loaf of bread!”

But Jesus responds, “God did not just give the people bread in the desert; for one cannot live on bread alone. God also gave his people the Law and the Covenant, life-giving words from his very own mouth. I will not forsake the latter in order to take a shortcut to the former. The time will come when I will provide bread in the wilderness. I will feed thousands with that bread. But more than that I will give myself as bread from heaven for the whole world, feeding more than thousands upon thousands in fulfillment of that Law and Covenant, bread which you neither know nor never will taste.”

Then the devil shifts to the a mountain top view. “Look at all this, all this glory and authority. All this might, majesty, power and dominion. It all belongs to me, and I will give it to you if you will forsake God and worship me.” But Jesus responds, “I will worship God alone, serving only him. You think the authority of the nations is yours to give to whom you will, but those who sell their souls and profane their faith by worshiping you have lost what truly matters. For what does it profit one to gain the whole world at the loss of one’s soul. I will not forsake the living God to worship one of his creatures. I will not serve you — the fallen angel who refused to serve your maker! I will not sell myself to gain the world, but I will give myself for the sake of that world, to save it; because for this I was born.”

Then the devil takes Jesus to Jerusalem to the top of the Temple. “It’s awfully high up here. Do you really think you could survive if you jumped? Do you really have faith that God will send his angels to bear you up? Do you really believe all that stuff in the psalms? Prove it! David died — the one who thought he was God’s anointed — do you really think God will save you from the Pit any more than he did you ancestor? Prove it! Show me your faith, if you are the Son of God.”

And Jesus answers this, the hardest temptation, “No. I will not put God to the test. That would be the death of faith, because testing is the opposite of trusting. I know that God will lift me up, and highly exalt me, lift me from a place from which no one has ever returned, no not even David, from death itself. God will break down your doors — they will be opened that the King of glory may come in to raise me up. I will not put God to the test; but I will put my trust in him.” And so the defeated devil leaves him, to bide his time. The devil might test, but Jesus will trust.

That, beloved, is the key to faith: the trust that we place in one who is trustworthy: and who is more trustworthy than God?

There is a scene in Pilgrim’s Progress that sums up this faithfulness. Pilgrim has put his faith in God; and God has told him to stay on the road, to persevere in his pilgrimage, and promised that he will reach the Celestial City. But as he comes to the top of a hill and looks down the road ahead, he sees two lions on either side of the road. He moves on down the road, repeating to himself, “God said, Stay on the road; so stay on the road,” even as he wonders what might happen to him. God has brought him safe thus far, so he trusts God will continue to protect him. So he stays on the road, and as he approaches the lions, he sees that they are not on the road, but beside it; and what is more, they are chained, so that they cannot even reach the road. And so he passes between them, close enough to feel the breeze their paws make as they claw out towards him but only fan the air, and he passes unharmed, and continues on his way to the Celestial City.

Faith has two faces: the first looks to the past and says, Remember and give thanks, the second looks to the future and says, Trust. Can we do that together this Lent? Can we search our hearts and remember God’s goodness with thanks, and trust in God with a faith as firm as Jesus’ own faith in his heavenly Father?

From what captivity have we been delivered?
Through what deserts have we been brought?
With what food have we been fed?
Between what lions do we now walk?
Let us remember; let us give thanks; and let us trust; in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. +

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Voices of God

SJF • Last Epiphany C 2007 • Tobias Haller BSG

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

We come now to the end of the Epiphany season, and our Gospel reading ends on a note that resounds as an echo to the Gospel reading with which the season began. On that first Sunday after the Epiphany we celebrated the Baptism of Jesus — and commemorated our own. The Gospel for that day ended with the voice of God saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Today we commemorate Christ’s transfiguration on the mountain, where he reveals himself to his three closest chosen disciples. And again the voice of God speaks on the mountain, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him.”

The commandment to “listen to him” is not just for Peter, James and John; it is given to us as well; we too are commanded to listen to the voice of Jesus the Son of God. And we obey this commandment in many ways in the church.

Most importantly, we listen for the voice of God in the Holy Scriptures, and we are most attentive to God and readiest to hear his voice as we experience the reading of the Bible week by week in church, in the context of our worship, where our voices blend together, not simply reading and hearing and listening, but singing, praying and celebrating as well.

There is much debate these days about Scripture and its meaning and interpretation and authority. Sad to say, some people seem to want to reduce the Bible to a kind of Berlitz phrase book where you can get all the answers — especially answers telling other people what to do! There are others who want to treat the Bible like a reference book you pull down off the shelf only when you need it, rather than as a constant companion on our daily pilgrimage. And I want to reflect today on how we best make use of the Bible — not as a stopgap — but as a guide for our lives, and a companion with us on our journey: a lamp unto our feet and a compass for our pilgrimage.

It is first of all important to note that while we call the Bible the Word of God, we do not call it the words of God. For unlike the Qur’an, which according to Muslim belief was written by one man as a single volume at the direct dictation of Allah, our Bible was recorded by many hands — human hands — over many centuries. And only the tablets from the mountaintop are said to have been written directly by the hand of God — all the rest comes to us from human hands. The scriptures were assembled over many years from the experiences of many people from the whispers God whispered in their ears, or the shouts God shouted from the hillsides, but also including and expressing their own reflections and history, their own thoughts, prayers, and opinions. Our Bible does not speak with just a single voice. It is even more than a dialogue between God and one faithful interpreter. It is rather a chorus of voices, some of which claim to speak for God, but many of which represent not God’s voice but a human response to God. In this mix of many voices we need to listen very carefully, and take care to distinguish between what is truly God’s word for us, and what may have been intended as God’s word for someone; or to discern what isn’t God’s word at all, but merely a human opinion.

Sometimes the Scripture writers themselves make it relatively easy for us to tell the difference. When the prophets say, “Thus says the Lord,” we ignore them at our peril. Other times it is equally clear that the scripture is not recording God’s words, but human words, words spoken in response to God. Often the scripture is plain historical record, as in the books of the Kings and Chronicles; often the writer of the particular passage is offering us his or her own wisdom or prayer, as in Proverbs or the Psalms. When David says, “I called to the Lord in my distress,” it is clearly David who is distressed, and David who is speaking — not God. Similarly, Saint Paul often lets us in on his thoughts, and in a few cases, as in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, he is takes great pains to note the difference between God’s commandments and his own opinion. He wrties, “I say — I and not the Lord” as he gives his opinion on what Christians married to nonbelievers should or shouldn’t do. Saint Paul would no doubt be scandalized to hear people claiming — as some do today — that everything he wrote or said should be treated as if it was “the Word of God.” He had the humility to confess that he often spoke with the “tongues of mortals” and was more often a clanging gong than he wished he was!

And this is where the difficulties arise. For often, discerning God’s voice among the many voices that speak to us in Scripture is not so simple. Most texts to not come with handy labels saying, “Thus says the Lord,” on the one had or “Peter said, ‘Let us make three dwellings’” on the other — and Scripture attests that Peter didn’t know what he was saying! And even when the prophet does say, “Thus says the Lord,” how can we be sure that what the prophet speaks is truly God’s word. Scripture records at least one incident in 1 Kings chapter 22, when the prophets all speak wrongly — 400 of them promise victory to the king, claiming, “Thus says the Lord.” And when one lone prophet warns that their promises are mistaken, they turn on him and literally slap him upside the face and have him put in jail!

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So a large part of the church’s task is to help its many members with how best to understand and act upon the saving message the Scripture holds for us. This is why the Bible, in which God speaks to us through many voices, is best heard and understood in the church, the gathered assembly which is the body of Christ, and of which we are individual members.

This is not to say that we should not also do our own personal reading of the Bible — and I hope all of you have this discipline as part of your Christian walk; and if not, may I recommend it would be an excellent thing to take up during Lent, which is about to begin this Wednesday!

But private reading of the Scripture is never enough by itself: it is in the interchange that takes place in the church, the ability of each member to say, “I think this is what it means” that we come to better understandings than we could come to on our own — for the Scripture is not a matter of any one individual’s interpretation, but rather the gathered wisdom of the members of the church comparing notes, as we seek together to grasp at God’s meaning. It is in the church, which is to say, in Christ, that as Saint Paul said, the veil is lifted from our minds so that we can together understand the Scripture.

Still, it is obvious to anyone who reads the papers there are still disagreements as to what Scripture says, what it means, and what it means for us. It has often been said that if the Scripture were plain and clear there wouldn’t be so much division and dissension among Christians! There is scarcely a verse of Scripture that has not been disputed at some time or another — even something as seemingly straightforward as “Thou shalt not kill” has been debated in causes as remote as capital punishment and a “just” war.

However, within our Anglican tradition, we have been given a rare opportunity to continue to discuss the meaning of Scripture for us, for we Anglicans — exceptionally among Christian bodies — take very seriously Saint Paul’s words: we know only in part; we do not claim certainty; or infallibility, as I mentioned last week: and we have proclaimed from the Reformation on that we believe the Scriptures to be “sufficient unto salvation” — that is, not that the Scripture is infallible or inerrant, but that the Scripture, as the Prayer Book says on page 868, “containeth all things necessary to salvation.” We have the faith and hope that even though we make mistakes, God will lift the veil to help us understand his will for us, sufficiently to the end which he intends: which is our salvation.

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But even with the veil thus partially removed by faith and hope, we still have at hand the difficult task of understanding as best we can what God means for the church and the world, to find the voice of God among the many voices both in Scripture and in the church itself. Richard Hooker, the sixteenth century theologian and single most important architect of what we now call Anglicanism, often referred to this process as “sifting” the Scripture. And this is a useful analogy for the task.

Some years ago a friend of composer John Cage sent him and his collaborator David Tudor: a box each of assorted Indian spices. Upon opening the packages, they found the lids had come off the spice-jars, and the spices were all mixed together. Cage simply put the whole mess in a corner of his apartment and tried to forget about it, but Tudor set about assembling a selection of sieves of varying sizes, from coarse to extremely fine, and over several weeks sifted through the mixture of spices until he had separated each and every grain back to its original jar. He then went to John Cage and said, “Whevever you’re ready to start on yours, so am I.”

The Scriptures are like those mixed up spices. We have, for example, two creation stories in chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis; two accounts of the flood woven together; there are four Gospels that disagree on a number of points — and these are just a few examples of the jumble. Agnostics and atheists look at the jumble and decide they don’t want to bother with it. At the other extreme, Biblical fundamentalists imagine we’re not dealing with various spices at all, just a particularly unusual blended curry. But we Anglicans hold that Scripture is a mixture of many different ingredients, that we can come to understand better as we sift and separate them.

In doing this we have at our disposal a number of “sieves.” I’ve already mentioned the importance of the community of the church, and its faith and hope. Also important is the study of the ancient languages in which the Scriptures were first written. So too is the knowledge of history and culture, to understand that a given turn of phrase may mean something very different in different times and places. Then since we are dealing in all cases with very ancient manuscripts, many of which are damaged, all of which are copies of copies of copies of now lost originals, we look to the study of how manuscripts are edited, and the kinds of mistakes people make when they copy things by hand. Then too the study of the many literary forms in which the Scripture is written can help us understand them better: from the short, sharp wisdom of a proverb, to the extended meditation of a psalm, from the historical narratives to the challenging symbolism of the apocalyptic books like Daniel and Revelation.

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But ultimately there is one final sieve that we will employ if we are truly to understand God’s meaning for us. All the other tools of human wit and wisdom will do no good in passing on God’s message, even the divine gifts of faith and hope will be of no avail, without the most important tool at our disposal. Saint Paul said it best, in words that have challenged the church for nearly two thousand years: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”

Love is the finest sieve that separates out all the harshness, all of the roughness from the Scripture to leave the pure gold of the Word of God. It smooths the rude accents of anger and self-righteousness with which some of the biblical speakers speak, and it shapes our understanding too as we read the text not to find a weapon against someone with whom we disagree, but an opening for grace and love to thrive and grow.

Remember, beloved, that love is the purpose for which God’s written word came to us. And even more importantly love is the reason God’s Incarnate Word, God’s own beloved Son, came to us to be with us. For just as God gives us the Scripture to guide us, so too God loved the world so much that he gave us his only Son to the end that we should not perish, but have everlasting life. Love is God’s sufficient purpose for us; love is also thesufficient means by which God comes to us in word and in person, and love is the means by which we can begin to come to God, and to some understanding of God’s will for us.

In all of our reading, marking, learning and inwardly digesting the Scripture, let our minds be seasoned with the knowledge of God’s love: for it is only in his love that we will understand God and his loving purposes for us. The law has come to an end in Christ. As for prophecies, they will come to an end as well. Only love never ends, the greatest of God’s gifts, incarnate in his own beloved Son, his Chosen one: let us, beloved, do as God commands, and listen to him.+

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Misplaced Trust

SJF • Epiphany 6c • Tobias Haller BSG
Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord.

A couple of weeks ago I got a pair of those computer glasses designed for working while sitting in front of the computer. The focus of these glasses is fixed about two feet in front of my face. What I’d found is that with my bifocals, I was having to bend over and lean forward in order to see the computer screen and it was giving me an awful pain in the neck. Anyway, the new glasses seemed to work fine — at least as long as I was sitting in front of the computer. But I learned very quickly that it was dangerous to keep them on if I had to get up from my desk to do anything else. At one point I had to go downstairs, and very nearly fell down them! The short-range focus on my computer glasses caused me to miss an entire step which I didn’t even see was there. There’s an old saying, “I couldn’t believe my eyes!” And in this case I shouldn’t have.

As I might say, in keeping with the reading from Jeremiah, I put my trust in my own mortal flesh — or my eyeballs, anyway. Now, of course, Jeremiah is talking about much more serious things than a stumble on a staircase. He’s speaking about the lousy leadership that his nation has experienced for centuries. Out of all the kings of Judah, only a handful have been decent, godly, and righteous. Most of them have gone from bad to worse, and as Jeremiah predicts, the kingdom is on its last legs — and he would live to see its fall.

So Jeremiah’s warning, not to put your trust in mere mortals, is based on hard experience. You can sense just how miserable he feels in his description of those who do put their trust in mortals: they are like a shrub in the desert, far from water, destined to shrivel and wither in a parched wilderness, an uninhabited salt land.

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Have you ever felt like such a shrub? I mean, have you ever felt betrayed or deceived or disappointed because you put your trust in someone who didn’t live up to your expectations? If you’ve never felt this way, you are either incredibly lucky, or you just haven’t been paying attention! I think most of us have been let down by people in the past — friends or family, children or parents or spouses. And who of us hasn’t, at one time or another in our lives, felt betrayed by our elected leaders, from City Hall to the White House? Just like Jeremiah, we’ve learned that kings are not always good and wise and righteous.

The problem is that we often trust our eyes — or we’ve got the wrong kind of glasses on — able only to see two feet ahead of our faces. We see what we want to see, we believe what we want to believe, rather than listening to that quiet little voice of God’s angel sitting on our shoulder, saying, “Watch out!” We want to trust people, especially our leaders, whether in the state or the church — we don’t want to constantly have to go around with an attitude of suspicion and mistrust, not believing anything we hear. And yet, we keep getting burned by the bad leadership of those in whom we placed our trust. And as I say, this can happen in the church just as much as it happens with City Hall or Congress.

We see a good example of this in Saint Paul’s ongoing struggle with the church of Corinth. What a handful they were! It’s sometimes as if not only did they have the wrong kind of glasses on but were wearing blindfolds. They seem eager to believe what anybody tells them — and in the passage today it’s a serious misconception they’ve stepped into. Someone’s been telling them there is no resurrection of the dead. Now, all other things aside, the resurrection of the dead is one of the central tenets of the Christian faith. You can sense how frustrated Paul must’ve been trying to explain this to the Corinthians. It is said, by the way, that Saint Paul was bald — at least he is always shown that way in the old icons — and no doubt he pulled out a few hairs over the Corinthians. He’s saying to them, if there’s no resurrection, what’s the point? It’s like wanting to study mathematics without being bothered with numbers.

It reminds me of something from my childhood. My aunt Barbara was taking me to the movies to see the film version of the Broadway musical, The Music Man. We got into the taxi and she told the driver to go to the theater. As we went along, the driver said, “I saw that movie. I didn’t understand it; I mean, every once in a while, the people would stop talking and start singing! It didn’t make any sense.” I can still remember the look on Aunt Barbara’s face as she turned to me in silence as we sat in the back seat of the taxi!

This must be something like how Saint Paul felt about the Corinthians — they want to be Christians, but without all that stuff about Easter! — like a musical without music.

The question is, Why would these Corinthians have trusted anyone who came to them with a message so out of keeping with the heart of the gospel they’d already received, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” How could they have placed their trust in someone giving them such an off-the-wall rendition of the gospel?

Well, there was a stream of thought in Greek philosophy — and let’s remember that Corinth is in Greece — that spiritual and bodily don’t go together, that they are opposed to each other. This philosophy taught that the spirit is good, and that the body is bad. The pagan Greeks had no trouble believing in the immortality of the soul in an afterlife. But it was a disembodied kind of afterlife. The Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead must have seemed to them to be just, well, icky. The idea of dead bodies getting up and walking around, re-animated corpses, was repulsive. And someone must have taken advantage of this repulsion to start teaching a new gospel in which there was no such resurrection.

So Saint Paul begins, in the passage we have today, by saying that if there is no resurrection of the dead we might just as well close up shopright now. He will go on to explain that the resurrection of the dead is not a disembodied kind of resurrection — but nor is it simply the re-animation of a corpse. Spirit and body are not opposed — especially since the Word of God himself became flesh and took on a human body — and our resurrection is like the Incarnation in reverse — when our bodies shall take on that spiritual reality, and we shall be like him. This is the Gospel of Christ, after all, not “Night of the Living Dead”! Paul will explain that the resurrection body is not just the physical body reanimated — but a whole new kind of body, indeed, a spiritual body: a body no more like the bodies we have now than a growing stalk of wheat is like the seed that gives rise to it — more living, more vibrant, more productive, more solid and real than our merely physical bodies. Christ’s body, and our bodies, are like seeds that have grown (in his case) and will grow (in ours) into something wonderful and unexpected.

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We don’t know if the Corinthians ever understood Paul’s teaching. He had to write to them again, and Saint Clement did too, decades later. But this serves as a lesson to us — not to put our trust in mere earthly concepts, or to trust the pared down version of the faith that some might be tempted to offer us rather than its fullness and its glory. It is easier sometimes to accept these bargain-basement explanations; just as it is easy to forget to change your glasses when you get up from working at the computer —believe me! It is easier to put your trust in what you think you see, what you think you know, what you want to hear, than to wait and keep your trust for what you hope and believe from God. It is easy to jump to simple answers rather than work through the hard challenges God places upon us.

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Which brings me to the present day, and not the human body, but the body of the church. In the next few weeks there are going to be some major meetings concerning the future of the Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a member. As you know, some of the other parts of the Anglican Communion haven’t been too happy with us for a while. Some of them would like to see the Anglican Communion radically altered: from a fellowship of self-governing churches into a kind of constitutional empire with a strong central government: designed mostly to prevent the individual members from doing anything the majority doesn’t approve; and chopping them off if they don’t toe the line. I don’t honestly expect much to come of this — as I don’t think some of those most eager to govern others would like to be governed in this way themselves — as they may realize before they sign on the dotted line.

Besides that, this form of government for the church seems a shortsighted step backward. It’s as if these church leaders still have their computer glasses on, only able to see two feet ahead, rather than to see the long sweep of Christian history behind us and of the Christian hope before us — so that their eyes aren’t properly focused on Christ, and what he would have us do, but only on the immediate troubles. It is as if they are trying to encase the body of the church in some kind of preservative — always to keep it the same — even though history shows us that the church is constantly growing and changing because it is alive — alive with the Risen life of Christ. For Christ came to offer us new life — and if fear of what is new drives us only to hold on to what is old, instead of the wonderful resurrection of the dead — transformed and transfigured in ways we cannot expect or predict — we will end up with a church that just goes through the motions — like a preserved dead body pulled by strings, twitching in a semblance of life but not truly alive.

One of the reasons I am an Anglican, an Episcopalian, is because Anglicans say, right up front, something that most other churches are unwilling to admit, and that is: “the Church makes mistakes.” It was a big step forward to be able to say that. And it was a big step apart from both the Roman Catholics who relied on the authority of the Pope, and from the Reformers who relied on their supposedly infallible understanding of the Scriptures. This attitude of humility that Anglicans adopted, not just to be different, but to affirm a deep truth, reflected what Saint Paul tells the Corinthians later in this letter: our knowledge is incomplete, and there is much more to be revealed. And we’ll hear more about that passage next week. And that is why Anglicans rejected at the beginning, and have avoided ever since, a church with a strong central government that suppresses discussion or exploration of new ideas — for we learn from our mistakes as well as from the things we get right, just as I learned to take off my computer glasses when I get up to go downstairs. We know that we mortals are fallible — yet we trust in the resurrection of the dead — that God has still better things planned for us than we can ask or imagine.

Queen Elizabeth the First, who ruled when the Anglican way was emerging into its reality, rejected the title her father Henry the VIII assumed — Head of the Church. Elizabeth knew that title belonged to Jesus, and she chose the more modest title of “Governor in earth of the Church of England.” She had no wish to make the error of absolutism — as if any mortal, whether pope or monarch, could have the last word that belongs to God alone.

And so it is that we classical Anglicans do not put our trust in mortals, even bishops and primates and monarchs — but in God, who, we are confident, can help us to work through our errors and bring us into his truth: a truth to which we can never come if we try to stand still in a changing world. For that is how the shrub ends up stuck in the middle of the desert — unable to move when the stream that nourishes it changes course, and unable to send out its roots to follow the stream — and so ends up in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. If we close our eyes and our hearts and our minds to God’s Holy Spirit working even through our mistakes; if we trust in government by earthlyleaders instead of spiritually embodied communion with each other in a fellowship of equals, there will be little hope for us.

So let us pray, sisters and brothers, that what lies before us is an opportunity for resurrection, for new life, transformed and transfigured by grace through faith. Otherwise we may find ourselves in a desert without water, a musical without singing, a vision set only two feet before our faces, a life with no future, a church with no spirit. “If for this alone we hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” For freedom Christ has made us free, so let us turn to him, and not to mortals, to make mere flesh our strength. Blessed are you, our Lord assures us, when people hate you, when they exclude you, revile you and defame you on account of the Son of God. He has better things prepared for us than any Primates could concoct or connive. And he it is whom we proclaim our only governor, our mediator and our advocate, and our Lord and God.+

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Giving God a Hard Time

SJF • Epiphany 5c • Tobias Haller BSG
I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.

As members of Christ’s Church, members of his body, we rejoice in being part of a community of faith with deep roots. These roots don’t just go back to the time of Christ himself, but long before, back into the rich soil of Jewish tradition, the faith into which Christ himself was born and from which he drew so much for his teaching and preaching.

One of the wonderful things about that Jewish tradition is the way in which it is permissible for the faithful, now and again, to give God a hard time: to complain, to lament, to “kvetch” — even to struggle with God. This is what Jacob did when he wrestled with that mysterious stranger and later realized he saw God face to face; or what Job did when he sought an explanation from God for his condition; or as Abraham did when he pushed the envelope of God’s mercy towards the wicked cities of the plain. The point is that God is strong enough to take our complaints, just as God is great enough not to need our flattery. And what happens afterward, how God responds to our complaints, will always be instructive and challenging.

We heard Jeremiah complain to God last week, when God commissioned him to speak his word — complaining that he was too young for the job. And this week we see God’s angel appear to Gideon, and the first thing Gideon says is basically, “What have you done for us lately?” — “Where are all of God’s wonderful deeds that our ancestors recounted to us?” And how does God respond? God says to Gideon, “Go in this might of yours and deliver Israel; I hereby commission you.” And Gideon, like Jeremiah, then responds with yet another complaint: that he and his family are too weak to accomplish such a great task.

Now what interests me about this incident, in addition to the freedom God gives people to make their complaints known, is how God responds to those complaints. God doesn’t say to Gideon, “You’re right; I’ve really fallen down on the job but I promise to do better in the future.” Rather, in response to Gideon saying, “What have you done for us lately,” God essentially says to him, “So do it already! What are you waiting for?” God puts the task squarely in the hands of the one who complains — the squeaky wheel not only getting grease, but a road to run on, and a map to drive by!

I’m reminded of our Lord’s initial response to his disciples, when they come to him in the wilderness complaining that there isn’t enough bread to feed the multitudes of people who have followed them: Jesus initially responds, “You give them something to eat.” When you complain to God, God may well put your complaint right back into your hands.

Or rather, God may show you that you — just like Gideon — already have the strength and the capacity which you thought you lacked — that you already are able to solve the problem you are trying to lay at God’s feet or place in God’s hands. Everything, after all, comes from God — and God is neither stingy nor parsimonious, but generous and abundant. God not only gives us all that we need at a minimum, but has already given us what we need in abundance, to deal with any problem that might arise in our lives. God, unlike Pharaoh, doesn’t expect us to make bricks without straw! And God only asks from us what he has already given us the capacity to do.

So it is that Gideon is already a mighty man, fully capable of defeating the people of Midian — all he needed was the encouragement; and as the story goes on, just to make the point that God is glorified when humble workers do great things, Gideon gains his victory with a pared down troop of guerrilla fighters instead of a massive army.

Gideon complains to God — and God commissions him and sets him to work to accomplish the very thing he complains about. So be wary — when you complain to God, God may well challenge you to do the very thing you want God to do for you — but know that God will also equip you for the task with all that you need.

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Another way people give God a hard time is not in the complaints they make about what they want, or that they think God hasn’t done, but about other people. People love to complain about other people, you know! We see that in Saint Paul: originally an enemy of the church because he doesn’t think the church is doing what God wants. Paul’s problem is that he thinks he is doing what God wants, but is actually following the instructions of the religious authorities who are set on wiping out the Christian movement — a policy with which he is fully in sympathy, as he has no use at all for those crazy Christians. Paul not only gives God a hard time, but the church as well — running up and down Palestine with subpoenas in one hand and death warrants in the other, doing his level best to destroy what he sees as heresy of the very worst sort — these terrible Christians with their crazy ideas that are turning the world upside down.

And how does God respond? God finally — and literally — knocks Paul for a loop, blinding him with the light of his truth and a voice that says, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” It takes all of this to get the self-righteous Pharisee to realize just how far off the mark he is. Not only is he not doing God’s will, but he is working against it!

So be careful when you give God a hard time by focusing on other people’s faults, and giving them a hard time, presuming to have God in your pocket and the right or warrant to persecute others for their faith. God may give you an even harder time — though again, it will be for your own good, and for the good of the world; for his grace is great, and his mercy endures for ever — and he desires that none should be lost, even those who set themselves against his will for peace and goodwill among all people: God can take the church’s persecutor and make him into one of its greatest defenders.

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The third way people give God a hard time appears in our gospel today. Jesus tells Simon to put out into the deep waterand let down his nets for a catch. Unlike Gideon, Simon hasn’t asked for anything or complained about not getting it. Unlike Paul, he hasn’t been fighting against God. He’s just minding his own business, washing his nets after a long night of work, in which he has caught nothing. What Simon does is sing the old hard-luck song beloved of cynics and pessimists everywhere, “Been there, done that — and all I got was this lousy T-shirt — or empty nets.” Simon is one of those people for whom every silver lining has cloud, and every promise conceals a disappointment. He gives God a hard time because he doesn’t understand God’s capacity to do new things — he’s seen it all, he’s tried it all before, he’s been there, done that — with nothing to show but empty nets.

But does he get a surprise! Not only does he catch fish, but he catches so many that the nets are nigh to breaking. And realizing how foolish he’s been, he falls on his knees and confesses his failing. And Jesus gives him that great task — the same one he would later give Paul: to spread the church and its gospel.

So be careful when you complain to God, that the glass is half-empty, or that the well is dry, or that you’ve been there and done that: God will pour such abundance upon you, such overflowing grace, that you won’t know what to do with yourself. The great good news is, God will know what to do with you! Even though you thought you’d been there and done that, God will send you where you never imagined you could go, and empower you to do things you never thought you could do.

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This is the very reason God puts up with all our complaining in the first place. Whether we complain that we are too weak and too small, or that other people aren’t doing what we think they ought to do, or that we’ve tried as best we can but have just given up — God’s complaint department has answers for all of these. It is a grace and a commission far beyond our imagining; it is a power that can work in us and with us for God’s purpose for the world — to restore, and to build, and to save. By the grace of God we are, all of us, what we are, andGod’s grace toward us has not been and will not be in vain. God will put us complaining, kvetching folk to work — through the grace of God we will do greater things than we thought we could do in our weakness, better things than we thought anyone could do in our self-righteousness, and more abundant things than we had done before on our own. Thanks be to God who commissions and empowers us, reforms and corrects us, and sends us forth into the world to do his gracious will.+

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All Those Gifts!

SJF • Epiphany 2c • Tobias Haller BSG

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit.

Last year my niece sent me a computer disk with scanned images from my mother’s collection of photographs. I remembered some of them, having looked through the box of loose photos many times while growing up. I’m grateful that before my mother’s death I was able to sit with her and ask, “Who is this” or “Who is that” to get the many relatives sorted out — and marvel at the way in which family resemblances can allow you to see your sister’s face in a faded sepia photograph of your great-grandmother as a child.

One of the pictures I remembered clearly was one my father took one Christian morning, and it showed the children coming down the stairs in our bathrobes and p-j’s: me, my younger brother, and two of my sisters — one more sister still too young to walk downstairs on her own, and another not yet born. My brother, who was about eight at the time, looks so cute in the picture — he is so excited he can hardly contain himself. His eyes are wide and his fists clenched, as he stands there in his Doctor Denton’s pajamas with a grin like to split his head open.

Of course, what all of us kids in the picture are looking at is the Christmas Tree, and more importantly, the gifts under it. All those gifts! Even a family of modest means such as my own was always able to muster at least two or three gifts for each of us — and with six children and two parents, plus the gifts for Grandma and the crowd of aunts and uncles whose presents we would deliver through the course of the week to come — most of the real estate under the tree was pretty well covered with packages wrapped with ribbons and bows.

The parents knew where the gifts came from — they had bought them with my father’s hard earned income — and with all those mouths to feed my dad spent most of his working life at two or three jobs at a time. All those gifts meant some sacrifice by my parents so that we children could have a wonderful Christmas. I think, by the time this picture was taken, I was old enough to know where the gifts came from; but my younger sisters and brother still harbored a belief in the man in the red suit. And even though our home didn’t have a chimney (a fact about which we tried not to talk too much) — the younger children believed that all the gifts came from Santa Claus. In one sense, even I knew there was a certain miracle in all of this — as I was becoming old enough to realize how little money my father made as a school-teacher, and why he worked nights at other jobs — yet under the tree were all those gifts.

Saint Paul the Apostle wrote to the members of the church in Corinth about just such a matter. He was talking about spiritual gifts, not Christmas presents, but he was making a similar point: that these gifts are miraculous, spiritual, and wonderful, and that they come from God. Even the simple gift to declare Jesus is Lord, for no one, he says, could possibly declare that Jesus is the Lord under his or her own steam. This is not the kind of thing one could think up on his or her own — such a declaration is the sign of the presence of God, a declaration made under the influence of God — a gfit from God. And so too all those gifts possessed by the members of the church — as I said last week, gifts that come to us as part of our baptismal heritage — all those gifts distributed among all the members, different abilities for different situations, all come from the same Lord, the same Spirit, for the common good. Whether the wisdom to teach, or the knowledge to discern, a deep faith or the power to heal, the gift of miracles or prophecy, or to speak in the language of heaven or to interpret it — all those gifts come from one and the same Spirit, Saint Paul tells the Corinthians — and us.

The reason for this Pauline reminder was due to some of the Corinthians beginning to treat the gifts not so much as gifts from God but as personal possessions. They’d begun to quibble and get jealous about each other’s gifts, and to compare and rate them like children on the first day back to school after Christmas: “What did you get?” (I have to admit this was part of how I first learned of the limitations on my family’s budget — as I compared the Christmas gifts I had received with some of the more lavish ones of my classmates.) So too, some of the Corinthians, like the schoolchildren, had begun to suggest that the simpler gifts — what might even be called the cheaper gifts — were less important, or perhaps not even from God at all. I mean, what does it take to say “Jesus is Lord.” Just so many words, right?

But what Paul is saying to them — and us — is, No; even that simplest acclamation of faith can only come from God, for it proclaims God, and no one can speak of God without God providing the faith that powers the proclamation. There is one Lord, one God, one Spirit — and the Spirit provides all those gifts, in all their variety, from the simplest to the most extravagant. And what Paul is trying to get the Corinthians — and us — to do is to turn from their seeming maturity — for they think they’ve become like wise older children who know that the Christmas gifts don’t come from Santa at all. Paul wants them and us to be truly mature — with the maturity that allows an adult to believe like a child; for as our Lord himself said, no one can come to him except as a child.

In this sense, Paul wanted the Corinthians — and us — to become like children, to realize that the gifts we possess come — not from our own deserving, and not from Santa, after all, but from someone else — and here it is helpful to switch to Spanish for a moment: no Santa, pero Santo — el Espíritu Santo: the Holy Spirit — whose color, I might add, is also red; but who brings us gifts far better than those our parents gave us, or that we deserve.

It is God who provides us with all those gifts, poured out upon us through the Holy Spirit because God loves us so very much. Remember, my friends, even when we learned that the gifts we received on Christmas morning came from our parents, it was love working through them that enabled them to go without for weeks on end so that we children might have more on Christmas morning. The gifts of God required God to give — and he gave his only Son for the sake of the world because he loved us so much.

All those gifts — the gifts of wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment, tongues and understanding, and even the simplest gift to say, “Jesus is Lord” — all the whole pile of presents piled under the tree: not the Christmas tree, my friends, but the tree of sorrow, which is yet also the tree of joy, upon which the greatest gift of all was hung — all those gifts come from God and for the good of God’s people. It is not for us — as it was not for the Corinthians — to compare and rank our spiritual gifts like envious schoolchildren, but rather to put them to work together for the good of the church for which Christ died.

Let us then employ all those gifts, as God has given to each of us and the Spirit empowered all of us together, that we, as our Collect says, illumined by God’s Word and Sacraments, may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, so that he may be known, worshiped, and obeyed to the ends of the earth.+

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Washing Up

SJF • Epiphany 1c 2007 • Tobias Haller BSG
John said, I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming... He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

We ordinarily think of washing as something to be done after the completion of a particularly dirty job. If you’ve been working in the garden, hands in the dirt, you will want to wash as soon as you are finished — and you’ll be careful not to track dirt into the house, too! And we take special care after even messier jobs like working on a car engine or a piece of equipment, or doing a painting or varnishing job — I’m sure many of us know how difficult it is to get motor grease or house-paint off of your hands, and how many repeated washings it takes to get the stains finally cleared away.

Washing often marks the end of a task, the completion of something — as even Pontius Pilate observed, washing your hands of something is a way of saying you need have nothing more to do with it — it is water under the bridge and down the drain.

And so it is that baptism — which is a kind of washing — is undertaken to denote this same kind of ending. We baptize to wash away sin — both the original sin we inherit as part of our human reality, and any actual sin we have committed prior to our baptism. As with many an ordinary washing, we wash away the past, and the dirtier the past activity has been the more urgently we need to wash.

I’m sure all of us here have seen the signs in the lavatories of restaurants, intended to remind the employees of the health code: Employees must wash hands before returning to work. Note that this washing not only addresses the past, but looks to the future. It isn’t only about what you have just done — about which the less said the better — but about what you aregoing to do — not just about endings, but more about beginnings. And it is this other side of washing that I want to emphasize today: that it is not just about the dirty work that has gone before, but about the new tasks that lie ahead.

For this is the other side to baptism, the side that looks to the future. The washing in baptism is not just to mark the end of something — the old sins that are washed away. In fact, the main emphasis in the washing of baptism isn’t the past, but the future — the new beginning — the initiation into a new life to be lived as a baptized person, a member of the body of Christ, a new citizen of the heavenly country. This washing, which Christ himself undergoes before he begins his own earthly ministry, is primarily the mark of the initiation of a new chapter, a new work, a new life.

The difference between these two kinds of baptism are summed up in what John says about his own, and about the one that the Messiah will bring. John baptizes with water to wash away sin — and that’s that. He is continuing the mainstream Jewish practice — literally in the main stream! — the tradition of ritual bathing to wash away ritual impurities in a symbolic act — to wash away the various impurities that could and did come about through contact with things the Jewish law defined as unclean: mold or mildew, disease, blood and other bodily fluids, a dead body, or non-kosher food. Many pious Jews in those days were constantly heading for the bathhouse or the river to undergo a ritual cleansing from ritual uncleanness.

The twist that John the Baptist introduces — and he is not the first to do so — is to call on people of all sorts and conditions to undergo a symbolic washing not just for ritual faults of the body, but for the moral uncleanness of the heart: to undergo abaptism of repentance for the moral sins that really are more important and deadly than the merely ritual faults of touching something unclean. One of the reasons the Pharisees become so offended at this is their feeling that they have been so conscientious about avoiding ritual uncleanness that they don’t need to wash! They’ve come to see the ritual matters as most important, almost a protective against sin — and in the process, as Jesus would later note, neglected the weightier matters of the Law: justice and mercy and faith.

John also affirms that the Messiah will go him one better. The Messiah will not simply bring a baptism like John’s, to wash away old impurities and sins, but a new baptism in the power of the Holy Spirit and a cleansing fire that will make people into a whole new being — not just a fresh start in the same old way, but a new life in a whole new way.

But then, as we commemorate today, John gets — well, I won’t call it a “surprise” because he is expecting it — but he gets to experience what he had predicted. “The sinless one to Jordan came” and there before John’s eyes is the very one he had said would come. And this is the turning point of history: and it marks the change in the fundamental nature of baptism. For Jesus is without uncleanness or sin: there is nothing to wash away, nothing at all. It is, in his case, only about new life, the new beginnings, about that which lies ahead. In this sense, it is more like the washing that a surgical team does before an operation. It is the preparation for a new task, not the cleanup after an old one.

The baptism of Jesus marks this new beginning for the world: that baptism is about new life, a life filled with the Holy Spirit and the fire of faith, and initiation into thebodyof Christ himself, the church. And this is another way in which baptism is like the washing that a surgical team does before an operation. The team is focused intently on preparation for the task ahead — the delicate operation in which they are about to participate together. The members of that surgical team may have come from any number of other tasks before they gathered at the OR. But whatever they were engaged in before, they are all now preparing for a joint task that lies ahead, in which each of them — surgeons, nurses, technicians, assistants, anesthesiologists — will take up their particular part.

This reflects the nature of the church itself — in which we all have been washed in a baptismal initiation and preparation, and all are called to work together in the mission of the church, yet each has a task to fulfill: whether teaching, or building, or witnessing; whether working to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, or comforting the sick; whether preaching or serving, singing or reading, fixing a parish lunch or painting a parish hall — all of us have been washed in preparation for service, initiated and commissioned as ministers to take on our various ministries that join and mesh into the one great task of God’s mission: to restore all people to unity with God and with each other in Christ. And today we will add one more member to this task force, one more very young member to the team — who may at first be capable only of small things and simple tasks — but who will with God’s power and grace grow in love and service as the years pass.

So may we, all of us, commissioned and inducted and initiated in Christ’s service through our baptism, take upon ourselves the serious tasks to which God has called us, united in the mission of the church, that we may,at the end of our lifes’ journey, in the quiet at the end of the long day’s work, hear the voice of the one who spoke from heaven, assuring each of us, “with you I am well pleased.” +

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Light in Darkness

1st Sunday after Christmas 2006 • Tobias Haller BSG
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.+

Just the week before last the world turned a corner. A few days before Christmas something happened that changed the world for everyone. Now, I’m not talking about anything to do with politics, with the Sudan, or the Middle East, with a new Secretary General for the United Nations, or a new Congress about to take up its calendar of business in the new year. I’m talking about something more physical, something measurable that took place in the world, something that would have happened regardless of congress or the United Nations, regardless of the Sudan or the Middle East.

What I’m talking about is this. Just before Christmas, the earth reached a point in its year-long march around the sun, where the angle of the planet’s tilt against the sun’s beams was such that the hours of sunlight, — which had been growing shorter and shorter for us who dwell on the northern half of the world — stopped, turned in their tracks, and began to grow longer again. Imperceptibly at first, but minute by minute, from just before Christmas on until next summer, we will have more and more sunlight every day, day by day. The earth, which until a few days before Christmas had been walking its course around the sun hunched over like a man with his collar up and his coat pulled tight against the wind, the earth, which had been turning its back on the sun, began to turn around, to tilt towards the light.

John the Evangelist wrote, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” John tells us, in the prologue to his Gospel, that thoughthelight shines, there are some who do not see it shining. There are some who reject the light or ignore the light, or deny the light. Even though the light of the world was in the world, “the world did not know him.” It is as if the world wanted to continue that long winter of discontent, hunched over, coat pulled up, shivering, cold and miserable, unaware or uncaring that the light was beginning to shine.

The Greek philosopher Plato described the human condition in a similar way. People, he said, were like prisoners in a cave, chained so that all they could see was the wall opposite them. Behind and above them, at the mouth of the cave, was reality and daylight, But all the poor prisoners could see were the shadows cast upon the wall of the cave opposite them. And they were so used to looking at the shadows, that they came to forget that there was another world, a brighter, higher, more substantial world, behind and above them. All that was needed was to turn around to look at the light and life that was there awaiting them, behind and above.

That is what human beings need to do, according to Plato: to turn as surely as the old world itself turns, to turn from the shadows to face the light, the glory of ideal reality. There is a word for this kind of turning: it is called “conversion.” We might also say, repentance. It is turning around to face what before we had denied, rejected, or ignored; to turn away from shadows and face the light. As Plato put it, “Conversion is not giving people eyes, for eyes they already have; it is instead giving them direction, which they have not.”

Plato, of course, was not a Christian. He lived centuries before Christ was born, and never knew the light of Christ, and the possibilities for redemption that Christ would offer. For Plato, it was enough for people simply to turnthemselves around, on their own power, under their own steam. For Plato, all that was needed was for the prisoners to throw off their chains, to stand and turn around.

What Christ offered to the world was different. Christ was not simply a great moral teacher, like Plato, someone who would address the world like an impatient schoolmaster, a disciplinarian of the “Just Say No” school of thought, a lawgiver who would say, “Stand up straight, turn around, and see the light.” People had plenty of experience with such moral teachers, Gentiles and Jews alike had their Plato and their Moses, philosophers and lawgivers and countless moralists who offered their disciples the path of discipline.

But Christ was different, and would do something different. The Evangelist John probably never heard of Plato, but he knew the difference between Moses and Christ: that it was through Moses that the Law came, but that Christ brought grace and truth. Christ knew that people were unable by themselves to help themselves. He knew that wishing doesn’t make it so, and that though the spirit is willing, yet the flesh is weak. The prisoners had come not simply to tolerate their chains, but to enjoy them. They’d become cozy and comfortable in their prison. The prisoners had forgotten that the shadows were shadows, and that there was more to life than the shallow and insubstantial patches flickering and fluttering on the screen. Did I say “screen”? Hmmm. How many people even now are like those cave-dwellers, spending all their time staring at patterns on screens, living virtual lives in virtual reality, instead of actual lives in actual relationship with real, live brothers and sisters face-to-face? Humanity was — and apparently still is — so in love with shadows that it had come to hate,to resent, to deny the light.

So Christ, who is the light, did not simply command us to turn around to see him behind and above us. Instead he came down to us, The Word becoming flesh to dwell among us, pouring his light into our hearts. He came to the prisoners to set them free. As Saint Paul says, “In the fullness of time, God sent ... the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”

When the light of God Incarnate is enkindled in our hearts, we no longer need to turn around, to turn this way or that, in order to see the light. Instead, we can see it shining out of each other, and the light that shines out of each of us can bring light to a darkened world. The light of Christ, enkindled in our hearts, can shine forth in our lives, and put the shadows to flight. The source of light, you see, casts no shadow of itself: the candle flame, the light bulb, whatever it is from which the light comes, casts no shadow, knows no darkness. The darkness can never overcome it. When the light of Christ shines in our hearts, there can be no shadow, no darkness there. When the light of Christ shines in us and through us and out of us, the world can come to see and know the presence of God in Christ, “the true light who enlightens everyone,” a light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not, cannot, and will not ever overcome it.

Christ is the light of the world, and he has poured his light into our hearts. Bear this light in your hearts, beloved, through what is left of Christmastide this coming week, through the turning of the year ahead and the many years after. As the old world turns toward and away from the light of the sun, may we never turn our faces from the light of the Son of God, and may that light of Christ glow in our hearts, and shine forth in our lives for ever.+

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