What have we got to show for it?

SJF • Proper 6b 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
All of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil.+

It is said that once in ancient times there was a great king who posed a challenge to the wisest people of his court. He challenged them to create a ring that he might wear on his hand, with an inscription on it. This inscription was to have an almost magical property: if you looked at it when you were happy, it would make you sad; and if you looked at it when you were sad, it would make you happy. The king promised a great reward and the wise ones headed out to see what they could find.

Six months later one of them returned and presented the king with a golden ring with an inscription. At the moment the king was quite amused, and in good spirits because he expected this ring would not pass the test, and he would not have to give the promised reward. But as he looked at the ring, the smile faded from his face. For on it was inscribed the short phrase, “This too shall pass.”

Some believe that the king in this story was Solomon — and that would certainly explain why the richest man in the world in his day, who delighted in wine, women and song, who built the kingdom of Israel to the furthest expanse it would ever encompass, would towards the end of his life write the bitter and regretful reflection of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” And, indeed, Solomon’s great kingdom did fall apart shortly after his death, and never regained its position on the world stage.

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This too shall pass — this is a reminder that everything changes, that nothing lasts forever; and that can be bad news when you are enjoying yourself, or good news when you are suffering. Some five hundred years after Solomon, a Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, also known as a bit of a gloomy Gus, put it this way: “Everything flows.” Whether you want to go with the flow or resist it, the flow will win out in the end. However big and powerful you may think you are now, one day you will be a memory — and perhaps not even that, as time “like an ever-flowing stream, bears all its sons away.”

At about the same time as this gloomy Greek philosopher was meditating on the transient nature of all things, a similar idea came to the mind of the prophet Ezekiel. We heard him in today’s reading with his advice and warning to Egypt based on the example of Assyria, which the prophet compares to a cedar of Lebanon — a great tree with its branches reaching up into the clouds, which nonetheless ends up being chopped down. Empires, be they never so mighty, come to an end. The line of dominoes tumbles along: Assyria was felled by Babylon, Babylon by Persia, Persia by the Greeks (who also took down Egypt while they were at it.) But then the Greek empire built by Alexander the Great was divided at his death, and eventually fell to the power of Rome. Rome too divided, and was battled by barbarians at one end, and after it became Christianized, by the rise of Islam at the other end. And Christianity itself? Well, that brings us up to the present day — and more importantly — us!

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Because ultimately the question isn’t, “Will the church survive?” but rather, “In what form will it survive?” I think it will survive — we have God’s promise on that; but I don’t think it will do so by being a great empire. Great empires don’t seem to be too successful in maintaining themselves, perhaps due to the sin of pride that causes them to lose sight of the words on that ring: “This too shall pass.” It seems the more empires try to resist change, the sooner they fall — intolerance and clamping down on people brings about even greater resistance, division, and internal weakness. Empires may be big, but they are brittle. The great tyrannies of the last century, and those that have survived into this one, do not seem long for this world: the higher they seek to rise, the bigger they strive to get, the more viciously they suppress those who dissent, the sooner their fall seems secure.

Just as the little mammals were somehow able to survive while the giant dinosaurs were collapsing all around them, so too the church managed to survive, the church managed to make it through the collapses of Greek and Roman and European civilizations, not by being big and powerful, but by slipping through the cracks of history — squirreled away in the catacombs underground, or out in the monasteries or out in the deserts. And when the medieval church tried to seize secular power, and insist on central control of all of Christendom, it only served to hasten the Reformation. So it seems to me likely that the church will survive in this our time, and as time passes, not because it is big and powerful, or centrally controlled, but because it remains true to its faith in Christ; by placing its hope not in an everlasting earthly empire, but an eternal heavenly dwelling. It will, in the meantime, do its best work here and now in its own small way, not as a giant agribusiness, but more as a cooperative of small family farms — as the church in each place is a family.

For it isn’t about how big the tree is, or how expansive the fields — but about the fruit and the grain that comes at gathering and harvest-time. When the bough breaks and the tree falls, when the crop is harvested with a sickle, what do we have to show for it?

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It is to this distinction that the Apostle Paul turns. In his case, it’s not about trees or empires, but about bodies — physical and spiritual — though Paul speaks metaphorically in terms of earthly tents and heavenly houses. The earthly tent — this earthly tend — is going to be taken down and folded up — and Paul uses the rather uncomfortable analogy of someone being caught naked when their tent is removed! “This too shall pass” — our mortal flesh as fragile as grass, as passing as the flower of the field, will cease to be: ashes to ashes, dust to dust; as we are reminded every Ash Wednesday: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

The promise is that a more durable dwelling is prepared for us, an eternal dwelling in the heavens. It is something for which we long and hope, groaning for that fulfillment, even while we are reluctant to let go of the tent which is our temporary shelter. We would rather, as Paul suggests, bring our tent with us and set it up within the new house prepared for us. But Paul assures us that we cannot properly be at home with the Lord while we are fully at home in the body — yet whether at home or away, the important thing is not the transient and passing, but the relationship we have with God, in our constant aim to please God, whatever our condition.

This too shall pass — our youth, our successes, our possessions. But this too shall pass — our weaknesses, our failures, and our fears. All that is mortal and transient will be swallowed up by life: and we will stand before our Lord and God, before the judgment seat of Christ, with all that is past laid out before us and before God.

And that is when we will face the final question, “What have we got to show for it.” Has our life been filled with an effort to accumulate those transient goods of wealth and fame and fortune; or have we stocked our tent with a supply of faith and hope and love? It is not how tall the tree grows or how lush the greenery of the fields appears — but how much fruit and how much grain they bring forth.

Let us strive always, my sisters and brothers in Christ, amidst the changes and chances of this temporal life, to hold on to what is eternal and lasting, and come before our Lord bearing a rich harvest of a life lived in hope of God’s guidance, by faith in God’s mercy, and for love of God’s Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.+

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Three Things About God

SJF • Trinity Sunday 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Jesus said to Nicodemus, Are you a teacher of Israel yet you do not understand these things?+

Today is Trinity Sunday, our annual opportunity, on an almost-summer morning, to talk a bit about the nature of God — our Father and our Creator, but also Christ our Brother, and the Holy Spirit our advocate and guide. Today, in honor of the Trinity, I want to say three things about God, three things about the nature of God, about who God is, and what that means for us.

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The first thing I want to say is that God is One. This truth echoes forth from the first of the Ten Commandments, on through the most important Jewish prayer — the prayer that gives rise to all other prayer: Shema Yisrael Adonai Elohenu Adonai ehad — Hear, O Israel, The Lord our God is One Lord. And what was true for Israel is also true for us. Among the earliest errors to plague the church was the mistaken belief that the God of the Old Testament, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, wasn’t the same God who became incarnate in Jesus Christ. You will still sometimes hear people talk about “the angry judgmental God of the Old Testament” and the “loving God of the Gospel” as if there were two Gods. Well, I’m sorry, but we don’t believe in two Gods. We believe in One God — who is sometimes angry because we don’t do all that we should, but who is always loving because we are — even when we misbehave — his children, through the Holy Spirit.

Later, another misguided effort was made to parcel out history to the Trinity as if the Trinity were divided into three gods. A monk named Joachim of Fiore thought it made sense to give God the Father authority over the Old Testament times, Jesus the Son rulership for the few years he was on earth, and up until the time when things would be turned over to God the Holy Spirit in a new age of universal peace and love, which Joachim predicted would start about the year 1260. An interesting idea — but boy, was he ever wrong!

These errors, and others like them, forget that God is One at the same time that God is Trinity. The Trinity is not three Gods, but three Persons in One God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the same God who became incarnate in Jesus Christ, and the same God who fills the church in the Holy Spirit. God is One. That is the first thing to remember about God.

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Now, in case you haven’t noticed, we are doing theology! How about that! We are all theologians, quite consciously at least one day a year, when Trinity Sunday invites us to look for a moment at the nature of God. For that’s what theology is, looking at God not so much for what God does but as who God is.

Theology was long ago described as “faith seeking understanding.” Note the order. Theology isn’t about understanding seeking faith — if you try to understand God before you trust and believe in God you will never get there. We are too young to understand God, but if we love God and trust God, loving and trusting as only a young child can, our faith and love seeking to understand, God will then pour the Holy Spirit into our hearts. And God will do this not to give us all truth — nobody has the corner on the truth market — but to lead us into all truth, as a loving parent leads a child to learn. God graciously leads us into the beginnings of the glimmers of understanding. as our hearts and minds are turned towards God. Even though we cannot comprehend God, we can at least turn towards God and allow our hearts to be warmed by the glow of his love.

This is what Moses did when he turned aside to see why the burning bush was not consumed. He did not know beforehand that he was turning towards the Holy One of Israel. All he knew was that he saw something marvelous, and like a curious child, he wanted to know more about it. The bush burned, and yet it was not consumed.

And this burning yet unburnt bush provides me with the second thing I want to say about God: God touches his creation, and makes himself known to us through that creation, but God is infinitely more than the creation. God is not just the Creator of Everything that Is, but the Source of Everything that can Possibly Be. God utterly infuses and saturates the whole of creation, and yet God was God before creation began, and God will still be God after this creation ceases to be, and the new creation is begun.

The word for this marvelous quality of God is holiness. God is Holy: intimately connected to the universe, the source of its existence, and yet completely distinct from it. Perhaps it might help to think of how water permeates and fills a sponge, and yet is completely distinct from it. The water is still water, filling the sponge, saturating every pore — and without the water the sponge is just a hard, dry thing of no use to anyone!

So it is that God infuses the universe, filling it and making it useful and meaningful and fruitful. God is holy, deeply present while remaining completely distinct: the bush burns but is not consumed, and Moses, though called by God to approach, is warned to “come no closer” than is absolutely necessary.

God fills the universe and makes it work, but when at the end of time the universe is squeezed out like a used up sponge, God will still be God. God is Holy: that is the second truth about God to reflect on today.

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The third thing about God that our Scriptures teach us is that God, in addition to being One and being Holy, is also Loving. God loves us; indeed God loves us so much that he has given us his only Son, to the end that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but have everlasting life. Saint Paul tells us that God’s own Spirit speaks in our hearts and calls out “Abba! Father.” The Spirit speaking in our hearts lets us know that we are children of a loving God, who is the source of our being.

The problem is we don’t always appreciate how much God loves us. So Jesus tells the old sage Nicodemus that the only way to know God’s love is to be reborn, to be born from above, not through the flesh, but through water and the Spirit, God’s own gift to us. God loves us, and has shown us how to love him back. But again, it is not about understanding God first, but about loving God first, about being reborn, being a new creation, about becoming once again a child who can wonder and love and trust.

Our own lives as children and later as adults show us that love comes before understanding. Most of us have gone through that human transition, from loving our parents when we were little, and then as we grew into our teen years and began to try to understand the world, finding it very hard sometimes to understand our parents! And then, as we and they grew older, as the turmoils of adolescence cooled down and we became adults ourselves, we became aware once more of the love that was there all along.

The great American humorist Mark Twain noted this phenomenon when he said, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

That is part of what Jesus meant when he said that it is as a child that we come to God, that it is as one reborn that we come to know who it is that is the source of our life, that God is Love.

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Remember these three things our Scriptures teach us today: God is One, dwelling in light inaccessible from before time and forever. God is Holy, untouchable, beyond our reach, burning and yet not consuming, pervading but distinct from creation. And God is also Loving, generous, giving us a new birth through water and the spirit and making us children of God, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. May we ever thus be blessed by the God who is One, Holy and Loving, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.+

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The Spirit’s Doing

SJF Pentecost • B 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Jesus came and stood among them and said, Peace be with you.+

On Pentecost, fifty days after Jesus rose from the dead, and in fulfillment of the promise he had made, the apostles saw and felt the Spirit descend upon them in tongues of fire, and began to proclaim God’s saving deeds in many languages. But given the amount of woodwork in this church, if we were to see tongues of fire distributed and alighting anywhere we would likely sound a fire alarm! Clearly, when the Spirit comes to us — and I have no doubt of the Spirit’s presence, as I shall explain in a moment — when the Spirit comes to us it is in a less inflammatory fashion. We don’t see flames alighting on the tops of each other’s heads, we don’t find ourselves speaking languages we never learned to speak. How, then, do we know when the Spirit visits us?

We might begin by noting that even with such marvels as tongues of fire and the miraculous gift of languages there were still some folks who failed to see the Spirit at work on Pentecost in Jerusalem on that day so long ago. They attributed the disciples’ inspiration to hitting the bottle rather early in the morning, accusing them of being drunk and disorderly. Some, it seems, can not recognize the Spirit even when the Spirit is most obvious. So how, then, do we recognize the Spirit?

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The first sign of the Spirit’s presence with us is community, for the Spirit calls and summons us, drawing us together, or rather back together: re-membering us as members of the church so that we can remember God together.

There have been great souls who have been able to go it alone, great saints whose solitary encounter with God is the stuff of legend and sacred history. These are the spiritual athletes who encountered God flying solo, out in the wilderness, like Moses and Elijah, or the monks who dwelt in the Egyptian desert, some of them going so far as to live solitary lives on the tops of pillars, as far away from human society as they could get. But unlike such rare souls as the desert hermits, most of us will not find God in solitude on top of a pillar, but in community. If we are spiritual athletes, it is only as team players.

Moreover, the Holy Spirit appears to favor the public assembly over the private audience. “The disciples were all together in one place” when the Spirit came upon them. They were not pursuing their own personal holiness, but praying together — for and with each other — when the Spirit blew through the windows and set their souls on fire. It is in community — from the most intimate community of a loving couple, to the wide community of the church — that the Spirit comes to us, revealing Christ in our midst. Community, then, is the first sign of the Spirit.

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And the Spirit reveals Christ gathered with us too, revealed in our midst, revealed foremost as one who serves, who before his death washes the feet of his friends, and afterwards responds to their betrayal and lack of belief with words of peace, who offers them forgiveness so that they might be able to forgive in turn. This service and forgiveness find their natural home in community. For just as it takes two to tango, so it takes at least two to serve, two to forgive. Service and forgiveness flow from community as naturally as dance flows from the music, when you simply have got to move your feet to the persuasive beat.

So the ministry of hospitality, which combines service and mercy, and grows from community, is the second sign of the Spirit’s presence: as I have said many times before, “see how they love one another” is Christ’s identity badge for the church, a sure sign of the Spirit’s presence.

Hospitality takes many forms, in a parish coffee hour or visit to the shut-in; in an act as simple as an outstretched hand to help someone up these steps to the altar, or as formal as baptism. We offer a hospitable welcome to each newly baptized person, welcoming them “into the household of God” — a dwelling for the Spirit whose building-stones are ourselves — our selves, souls and bodies — as the church’s members.

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 natural response of the gathered community we call the church, the second sign of the Spirit’s presence.

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And what the disciples did upon the Spirit’s arrival was to proclaim the story of salvation to each other in many languages, so that those outside the house were attracted by the sound, and were astonished to recognize their native tongues.

This proclamation is the third sign of the Spirit’s powerful presence. The children of Israel knew this, and they were always telling their story to each other. Their story sustained them through exile and captivity in Babylon; and through and beyond the destruction of the Second Temple, and even up to this day — as we are reminded of the bombing attempt at two synagogues right here in the Riverdale section of the Bronx — through and beyond the most terrible and single-minded efforts to exterminate them. The Jewish people have told and retold their story to each other, in synagogue and schul, down through the years, and the Christian 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.

As 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. The world will not stop talking — or Twittering, or blogging — long enough to hear the gracious possibility offered to it.

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 at Saint James Church faithfully proclaim that story, the world may stop its chatter for a moment and overhear: that’s how it worked on Pentecost, and it can again. People who have forgotten that they are God’s children, in the midst of this great but terrible 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.

If we at Saint James Church then open our doors and our hearts and welcome them in, we will be magnified, and together we will offer glory to God such as never yet has rung from this corner of the Bronx.

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The Spirit reveals Jesus’ presence in the gathering of the community, in the hospitality they shared, and in the telling of the greatest story ever told. But the Spirit also reveals Jesus to us through a last sign unlike any other: in broken bread and a cup of wine. In the fourth sign of the Spirit’s presence, in the eucharistic feast, the one serving at the table 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 his band of Merry Men. And suddenly, everyone drops to their knees.

Suddenly, though the doors be locked, we realize who has been among us all this time, and we can hear his breathing. Suddenly the Holy Spirit descends upon us and upon these gifts and we remember and are re-membered into the Body of Christ.

Once one special Pentecost, that ancient Jewish harvest festival, the Spirit gathered the apostles together like a harvest of grain once scattered on the hillside. And together they welcomed, served, proclaimed, and feasted: in fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in prayer. We, their successors, can do no less. The Spirit has gathered us together. It is the Spirit’s doing, not our own. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, and the Holy Spirit our Pentecost has come to us. So come, let us welcome; come, let us serve; come, let us proclaim; and come, let us celebrate the feast. +

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Trust & Obey... God!

SJF • Easter 7b 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG Jesus prayed, Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, and that puts me in mind of wars and rumors of war, which sadly we have had more than enough of in the last few years. But Memorial Day also put me in mind of some of the great military leaders of our nation’s past. I was reminded of one of them this morning in an NPR broadcast: General George Patton, who wrote a book about leadership. In it he described how he would pick a soldier for promotion — a task he believed was one of the most important a commander could undertake. Patton wrote,

I line up the candidates and say, “Men, I want a trench dug behind warehouse ten. Make this trench eight feet long, three feet wide, and six inches deep.” While the candidates are checking their tools out at the warehouse, I watch them from a distance. They puzzle over why I would want such a shallow trench... Some of them complain that such a trench could be dug more efficiently with power equipment... If the men are the rank of lieutenant or higher, there will be complaints that they shouldn’t be doing such lowly labor. Finally, one man will say, “What difference does it make what Patton wants to do with this trench! Let’s get it dug and be done with it.” That man will get the promotion.

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In our reading from the Acts of the Apostles today we hear the leaders of the early church setting about a similar task, the task of finding someone to be promoted — not to a superior military post, but to something far more important in the scheme of things. The disciples are about to promote someone to the rank of the apostles, to take up the empty slot created by the betrayal of Judas.

Patton’s way to choose who to promote from lieutenant to captain, and corporal to sergeant tells us what he valued in a leader in the army: he doesn’t want complaints but obedience. And what the apostles do to find a replacement for Judas tells us what they are looking for in a leader of the church.

The apostles agree that the candidate must be a witness to the whole ministry of Jesus, from the time of his baptism on through his ascension. They don’t want a newcomer won over because of the resurrection. They want someone who for three years has followed Jesus with faithfulness and trust, even through the dark times when he foretold and then underwent death on a cross. In short, they want someone they can trust because he trusted Jesus. They want someone who will remain faithful because he has remained faithful.

The chosen one’s faith would be focused on one who offered his followers nothing in way of an earthly kingdom, but whom all — with one exception — followed in obedience and trust. And it is to fill that empty slot in the roster, left by that one exceptional traitor, that the Apostles now set about their work.

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Now, to get back to earthly armies, we know that an army could not function if every soldier simply did as he pleased. Even with one soldier a superb sharpshooter, another an expert in breaking codes, another skilled at hand-to-hand combat, without leadership to orchestrate these skills the army would be useless. So the army has a strict chain of command and a strict code of conduct.

In the army you do what you’re told by you superiors. There can be no ifs, ands or buts — as General Patton’s story indicates. And the army’s success or failure depends in large part on how well the individual gifts and skills are woven together by the leader to produce an effective force, individual skills knitted together by the masters of tactics and strategy.

The church works in the same way, but with a vitally important difference — which I’ll get to in a moment. First, though, the church’s similarity to an earthly army lies in the fact that each individual Christian has unique gifts and skills, whether in prayer or witness, music or teaching, worship or fellowship or stewardship. But the members don’t simply “do their own thing” — the church has its leaders too, both lay and ordained. And a major part of the church leaders’ task is to weave the talents of all of the church’s members together into a strong fabric that can bear the weight of responsibility placed upon it.

Christians work together, not as free agents, but as parts of a body. Look at how the apostles describe the treachery of Judas. He “turned aside to go to his own place.” He turned aside, to do things on his own; and cut off from those he betrayed and rejected, he died a terrible death.

So what the apostles are most concerned about in finding a replacement is to find someone who has been with them from the beginning, someone who has proved his loyalty by staying with them. They want someone who stuck with it even through Christ’s betrayal, capture, trial and death; someone who trusts and obeys God, and so who can be trusted to take up the responsibility of leadership, someone whom the members of the church will also be able to obey, and trust they will be led in the right way.

That is how the apostles choose the candidates Joseph and Matthias, and the way they make the final decision as to which one joins them as an apostle tells us that vitally important different thing about the church. It shows us that vital thing that makes the church different from an earthly institution like an army or a government.

And that lies in how the apostles put the final choice into God’s hands. They choose able candidates, yes, but then they pray to God for guidance, and put their trust in God to make the final choice, casting lots to see who will be the new apostle. Can you imagine a general or a business owner choosing who to promote on the basis of casting lots? Can you imagine a nation electing its leaders by drawing straws or holding a lottery? Of course not.

This is where the church is so utterly different, so utterly unlike the world and its armies and industries. For although there are leaders in the church, both lay and ordained, whether vestry members, priests or bishops, the reason we follow them, within the church is not just because they hold authority, but because we know they are on the same journey with us — the journey of faith; and because we know that ultimately they are not in charge, and know they aren’t in charge. For they, and we, answer to a higher authority. There is one commander in chief above and beyond all who follow him, one in whom we can with sure confidence place all of our trust, and to whom we can commit and affirm and fulfill our promise to obey.

When the apostles cast lots to determine who was to join their number, they were placing their complete trust and obedience in God. They said, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which one of these two you have chosen.” Both candidates had shown themselves faithful and obedient — so in once sense the apostles couldn’t lose — but the final choice as to which was to be called would be left to God.

The apostles trusted God completely, trusting and obeying. The apostles knew that God is in charge, not any vestry, vicar, rector, warden, bishop or pope. We are, all of us, obedient servants who place our trust in the One we seek to follow with all our hearts. And we trust and obey our earthly leaders in the church when we know that they too trust in God. We know that they are fellow pilgrims and fellow workers, and that they seek with all their hearts to follow him in obedience to his will for the good of the church. We are all in this together, my sisters and brothers in Christ, all of us together trusting in God to make up for what we lack, obedient to him who saves us and who strengthens us to serve, as he promised, all of us Christian soldiers, marching onward in the confidence that the one leading all of us is none other than God himself, guiding us by his Holy Spirit and the cross of Jesus, “going on before.”

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I want to end this sermon with another war story but of a different sort. When the Japanese invaded China at the beginning of the last World War, missionary Gladys Aylward led a group of more than a hundred Chinese orphans to safety over the mountains from Yangcheng. It was a harrowing experience, and at one point she was on the verge of giving up, without hope of ever reaching safety. A young girl tried to comfort and encourage her by reminding her of the story of Moses at the Red Sea. Gladys complained, “But I am not Moses.” The child, with that special wisdom granted the pure in heart, said, “Of course you are not Moses. But God is God.” May we too always have such trust and such obedience.

God is God, to whom, as is most justly due, we ascribe all might, majesty, power and dominion, henceforth and for ever more.+

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Where Love Abides

SJF • Easter 6b 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.+

For as long as I can remember, at least since I was four or five years old, I have had a great love for dinosaurs. I know I am not alone in this, and there are probably more than a few people here who as children staged dinosaur combats with diminutive molded plastic figures of those ancient giants. One of my earliest church memories — I couldn’t have been much older than six — is about arguing with the Sunday School teacher about which day of creation God made the dinosaurs. (I could be a very annoying child!) There was a time I could rattle off the names, terrible-sounding polysyllables worthy of these mysterious monsters from the dawn of time. I’ve forgotten most of the names I knew, and they’ve added so many new ones as discoveries continue, that I can’t keep up. But my fascination and interest still remains.

So a few years ago, when I first saw the previews for the Disney film called simply Dinosaur, I knew I would have to see it. Well, it lived up to all of my expectations, as well of those of a theater full of attentive viewers, most of whom were much, much younger than me!

And lest you find it odd that I am talking about a dinosaur movie in the context of a sermon, I do so because a major theme of the film — and actually a major theme of just about every movie Disney or his successors ever made — is also a major theme of our Scripture readings today. For the primary message of the film is the difference between conflict and cooperation.

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This theme is echoed in our readings as the difference between self-giving love and self-centered fear. We are called to love one another, and even more, we are commanded to love one another by our Lord Jesus Christ. The fact that we are called and commanded reveals a simple truth: love is not natural, it is something we have to be reminded to do, called to do, commanded to do. If love came naturally, the world would be a very different place, and people wouldn’t be singing about “what the world needs now” — because we’d already have it without having to sing for it.

The history of life on earth, including the dinosaurs — and this is where the Disney movie departs from reality and heads off for fantasy land — life without the call and command of God is not loving. Life without the call and command of God is survival of the fittest, every man — or dinosaur — for himself, and the devil — or the Tyrannosaurus — take the hindmost. Nature without love is, as Tennyson observed, “red in tooth and claw” and natural life — as Thomas Hobbes put it — is “nasty, brutish, and short,” though Hobbes thought the answer was good government rather than the love of God.

But to get back to Disney’s fable: in the real world of the Jurassic age there was no enlightened dinosaur to teach that cooperation is better than competition, that the way to survival is not to be found through victory over the weak, but through charity. Real dinosaurs are not charitable! Love does not come natural, and love does not come easy

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Yet love does come. Even more important, love did come. Love came down in the person of Jesus Christ, the only Son of the God, God who is love — in person. God is the love that fills the universe with his desire for unity and wholeness, love that draws together things that are flying apart by spreading out his arms of love on the hard wood of the cross, to draw it all back together again, love that lifts up things that have been cast down, by stooping to the very depths to get under the weight of a fallen world and hoist it up on his shoulders.

Love came down to us in the person of Jesus Christ, and love called us and gave us a commandment: “Love one another; abide in my love.” This is the love that is greater than any other, the love that lays down its own life for the sake of the beloved; the love that puts others ahead of itself.

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This is the love we are called to; this is the love we are commanded to have for one another. This love is not just affection or warm feelings, but the gift of your very self for the sake of the ones you love. This is the love that marked the first Christian communities, such as the one that Barnabas gathered in Antioch, to which he called Saul, and in which those who believed in Jesus Christ were first called “Christians.” They must have been a particularly loving community — after all, they are one of the few to which Saint Paul did not have to write a letter of admonishment!

Somehow it seems they got it right, and the Scripture witnesses to their generosity and love in response to the prophetic warning that a world-wide famine was coming. Instead of hoarding their own resources, as well they might have done in the face of the terrible news, instead of looking out for themselves they took up a relief collection and sent it to Judea at the hands of Barnabas and Saul.

Think about that for a moment. For the ancient Christians of Antioch it wasn’t “every man for himself” but everyone for somebody else. The Christians of Antioch, were filled with the Holy Spirit, which is the Spirit of love. They didn’t fear for their own survival but risked all they could, to take up a collection to help the faithful three hundred miles away. God’s love, at work in their hearts, cast out the fear that urged them towards self-preservation, the fear that would have them concentrate on their own survival. God’s love transformed them into generous and memorable souls who were the first to be worthy of that old hymn refrain, “They will know we are Christians by our love.” And so it was in Antioch, that the believers were for the first time known by the name “Christian.”

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And this is still true. People will know we are Christians by our love. We will gain that name, that identity, not because we’ve got it printed on I.D. cards in our pockets, or name-tags round our necks; not because there’s a sign on the door or a cross on the roof. Anybody can get an I.D. card these days; anybody can put a sign on their door or a cross on their roof. Anybody can plaster a bumper sticker on their car, proudly asking you to honk if you love Jesus. Well, I can tell you, Jesus did not command us to honk; he commanded us to love each other as he has loved us! Anybody can slap a WWJD bracelet on their wrist — you know, the one that asks What Would Jesus Do? Well in response to WWJD, I say H C Y D W J W D I Y D K W H D: How Can You Do What Jesus Would Do If You Don’t Know What He Did? There are plenty of folks who call Jesus their Lord without the least interest in doing what he did, or even in doing what he said. What Jesus said is, “Love one another, Abide in my love,” and what he did was to lay down his life for his friends.

Jesus commanded us to love one another because he knew it takes a divine commandment to override the built-in natural drive to self-preservation that all of God’s creatures have carried in their brains and bodies from before the dinosaurs to today. Love is unnatural: natural selection is based on the survival of the fittest, not the love of the most generous. “Love comes from God,” as John the Beloved Disciple wrote, “We love because he first loved us.”

Love comes from God, for God is love. Love isn’t something we thought up, it is something God gives us. The love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that is given to us. It takes the grace of God to turn away from the biological imperative to preserve oneself, to favor oneself, it takes the grace of God to embrace the call of God to sacrifice oneself for others, to place others first. It takes God’s call and command to think first about the misfortune and need of another before you tend to yourself; to take up the collection for people you’ve never met when you hear they are facing famine, even when you yourself may not know where your next meal is coming from.

But this is what our loving God through Christ commands us to do, and this is what loving God through the Spirit empowers us to do. And when we do, we too will be known to be Christians as were the first believers in Antioch. We too will be known to be Christians by our love. Not because of the sign on the door, or the cross on the roof, the i.d. card in our pocket, the name-tag round our necks, the bumper sticker on our cars, or the bracelet on our wrist. But because the love of God dwells in our hearts, through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us, in Jesus Christ our Lord.+

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A Dream Come True

SJF • Easter 5b 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The Ethiopian eunuch said to Philip, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent my being baptized?”

Have you ever had a dream denied? Has there ever been something you wanted with all your heart and all your soul, and yet been told, “You can’t have it”? Maybe it was a job you wanted, something you felt you were ready to do, and skilled to do, a challenge you were ready to meet — but you were told, “Sorry, you’re not qualified.” We’ve all had experiences like that; we’ve all had our hopes dashed, our dreams put on hold. Yet somehow, it wasn’t the end. We kept on hoping all the same, kept on dreaming our dream, no matter how many times it was deferred or denied.

Every three years we hear a reading from the Acts of the Apostles about a man who had such a dream — and who had the disappointments that went with it. And it is such a wonderful story I can’t help preaching about it again this year — and I hope you’ll bear with me, because the reading tells us how a dream came true one day — one day when the man was least expecting it. And that is such good news that it bears repeating.

We don’t know what this man’s name was. All that we know about him has to be pieced together from the slim facts that Saint Luke wrote in the Acts of the Apostles. We know that he was an Ethiopian, the treasurer of the Queen of Ethiopia. And we know he was a eunuch — a man with no future as far as the people of his day regarded things: for a man who could not have children had no future, no hope.

But this was a man who did have hope. He had a dream, and a hope against hope. We don’t know when this man first had his dream. But we’ve got a very good idea what that dream was. One day some years before — how long we don’t know — this man had an encounter with a new religion — new to him — the religion of the people of Israel. He might have heard about it from descendants of the exiles who fled from Jerusalem when the Babylonians attacked and conquered it 600 years before. They had fled to Egypt and then on further south “up” the Nile, to escape the destruction of Jerusalem, and later they went as far as Ethiopia — some say they even had the Ark of the Covenant with them!

Perhaps the eunuch met a descendant of one of these Jewish exiles, or perhaps a Jewish merchant, trading in Ethiopia, as he sat in the waiting room in the Queen’s palace, there on some business or other, to pass the time in the hot and humid afternoon, got to talking with the Queen’s treasurer, talking about religion. You know people love to talk about religion! We don’t know what the Ethiopian’s religion was. If he was like most of the people at that time in history, he probably worshiped idols, or his ancestors, or a pantheon of many gods. So picture this Jewish merchant starting to talk about his religion, talking about a religion with only one God — but what a God!

Perhaps that started something to work in the heart of the Ethiopian eunuch, this man who spent most of his day toting up figures and counting coins, and checking the accounts for the Queen’s household.

As I say, we don’t know how the dream started; we don’t know for sure what led this Ethiopian eunuch to seek to follow this religion from the distant north, from up in Jerusalem. But one day, he must have reached the decision — the decision to become a Jew, to become a worshiper of the one true God, the God who made heaven and earth, and all that is in them.

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And that was when his dream was stopped cold. For as soon as he got up the courage to go to that local synagogue, that strange little building off on the side of the village, to tell the rabbi he wanted to become a Jew, the rabbi would have given him the sad news: it’s against the Law. Now, it wasn’t against the Law for everybody. Most Gentiles, if they wanted to convert to the Jewish faith at that time, could be admitted to the Jewish faith in a ceremony that ended with their baptism. That may come as a surprise: we tend to think of baptism as a Christian ceremony. But the church adopted baptism from the synagogue — and John the Baptist, the last of the Jewish prophets, baptized — that’s why we call him “John the Baptist” — he baptized for repentance before Jesus instructed his disciples to baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

For the Jews, baptism was a sign that you were purified, washed clean. Under the Jewish Law, people got baptized more than once, unlike Christianity, where you just get baptized once. Under the Jewish law, you got baptized whenever they did anything that made them ritually unclean. If you touched a dead body, for instance, or after certain kinds of illnesses — for women, once a month — you were expected to take a ritual bath that washed away the uncleanliness. Orthodox Jews still do that to this day.

But in those days, baptism became a symbol of purification: and when a Gentile became a Jew, the baptism signified washing away the whole former Gentile life, which the Jews considered unclean —remember from Acts of the Apostles, when Peter had the vision to come to the Centurion’s house, and the Centurion was amazed a Jew would enter a Gentile house — so baptism became symbolic of entry into a new life, purified from a Gentile past.

So one day the Ethiopian went to the rabbi to express his faith, and appeal to be admitted into the Jewish religion; he was asking to be baptized as a Jew. And the rabbi no doubt said, My friend, I see you are pious and mean well. You are seeking to worship our God — and Gentiles are welcome to do so, even in the outer court provided for them at the Temple in Jerusalem. And yes, some Gentiles even go further, and are admitted as Jews with the proper ceremony and baptism. But — how can I say this without offending you — you are a eunuch, and it is written in the Law of Moses, in the book of Deuteronomy (23.1): No man who is a eunuch shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.

At that moment, the Ethiopian’s dream was denied. All his hopes sunk. This wasn’t something he could do anything about. In case you don’t know this is one operation that you can’t reverse — there was nothing he could do — he couldn’t go to Monroe College to get new job skills; he couldn’t get a G.E.D.; he couldn’t use his wealth — which must have been significant — to buy his way into the Jewish religion. This was the end of his dream: He was a eunuch, and the Law was clear — no eunuch shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord. The most he could do was to continue as he had, a Gentile God-fearer.

These were Gentiles who could not, or would not take the final step to convert to the Jewish faith, but who still honored the God of the Jews, supported the local synagogue, and might even journey to Jerusalem, to worship as close as they could in the Court of the Gentiles in the outer precincts of the Temple. The Ethiopian had been a God-fearer, and a God-fearer he would remain — traveling to Jerusalem when he got the chance, to get as close as he could to the Holy Place; so close, and yet, so far!

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It was on his return from one such trip that the Ethiopian eunuch’s dream finally came true. He was on his way back home from Jerusalem, from worshiping in the Court of the Gentiles. He had a copy of the book of the Prophet Isaiah with him in his chariot, a handwritten scroll. That alone tells us he was a wealthy man, and a man devoted to the religion he so admired, but from which he was excluded. We can tell he was devoted because scrolls like these were precious and expensive — we take books for granted, we throw them away when we finish reading them — but in those times a scroll like this would have cost a whole year’s wages of an ordinary worker. If you can imagine spending $30,000 for your own personal copy of the Bible, you will understand the extent of this man’s devotion.

The Ethiopian was reading the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah — one of the great moments of grace in all of the Bible. For had he been reading some other part of the Bible, Philip might not have found the story that inspired him to share the good news with him.

Why was the eunuch reading Isaiah? When a book costs a fortune, you will choose your library carefully! The reason this man, this Ethiopian eunuch, had a copy of Isaiah lies in these verses from the 56th chapter: “For thus says the LORD: To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD, and to be his servants, ... these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer... for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”

These were the words of the prophet Isaiah that had kept that man’s dream alive, that fed his hope. Some day God would change his own rules! Some day God would act —somehow, some way, God would change his own rules, the rules laid down in Deuteronomy, and let the eunuchs into the covenant. Some day... Here was a promise to nourish a dream, to feed a hope. Some day...

So imagine how the Ethiopian must have felt as Philip began to expound the Scripture to him, telling how the prophecies about Jesus, prefigured in the words of Isaiah about the suffering servant, had come true. Prophecies coming true? And just in the last few months? And in Jerusalem? Imagine his growing excitement as he heard how the suffering servant of Isaiah was a prophecy of Christ’s suffering and death. Prophecies from five hundred years before were coming true, then and there in Jerusalem! If they were coming true about Jesus, could they come true about me?

And as Philip expounded and explained all the other Scriptures, how they were being fulfilled day by day, hope grew in the Ethiopian’s heart. Could it be that Isaiah’s prophecy concerning the faithful eunuchs, those who sought to please the Lord, who honored the covenant — could it be this too was on the verge of coming true? He could feel the hope welling up in him, filling his heart, welling up in his throat. And when Philip finally told the man about baptism, he could contain himself no more!

He’d asked it once before, and been turned down. But he could see that new things were springing to life, the world was being made anew, the prophecies were coming to fulfillment, and his dream was on the verge of coming true. And as he felt the hope rise in his heart, the chariot turned a bend in the road. And there, in the midst of the desert, was an oasis with pure, clear water — water as bright and hopeful as his own dream was in the desert of his life up till then. And he exclaimed, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

The fact that he was a eunuch didn’t matter any more: the prophecies were coming true! The Temple, as Isaiah promised, and Jesus proclaimed, was becoming a house of prayer for all people. And Philip and the Ethiopian went down into the water, and Philip baptized him — and his dream came true.

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And we don’t know what happened to that him after the Spirit snatched Philip away. All we know is that he went on his way rejoicing, back to his home in the south. But we do know this: the church in Ethiopia is one of the oldest Christian churches in the world. And we know who the first Gentile Christian in Africa was, even if we don’t know his name.

So if you have a dream that’s been denied, don’t give up hope. Keep that hope alive in your heart; fan it with the breath of the Spirit and keep that ember glowing, even when it seems like it’s going to go out. You never know. A man like Philip may cross your path when you least expect it. You may turn a corner and find water in the middle of a desert. Keep your hope alive in your heart, keep dreaming the dream and never let it die, even though it be deferred or denied. Keep the dream alive, feed it on hope and the Spirit: water it with your tears if you must. I tell you, the world is being made new. Though the desert be broad, there will be water in the wilderness.+

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Community of the Good Shepherd

SJF • Easter 4b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.+

The fourth Sunday of Easter is known as “Good Shepherd Sunday.” The collect and the readings remind us that we have a good shepherd whose voice we recognize, a caring shepherd who calls us each by name, a shepherd who places us ahead of himself, and who has laid down his life for us. We are the sheep of his pasture, and he has called us together as a flock, a community.

If you’ve ever driven through the country you can tell just by looking which flocks of sheep are well-cared for and which are neglected. You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you can judge a shepherd by his sheep! If you see a group of scraggly, muddy, dirty sheep huddled near a broken-down fence in squalor, miserable and moping, you know what kind of a shepherd they’ve got. And when you see fat and fluffy sheep munching on lush green grass, reclining in the sunshine and taking it easy, you also know something about their shepherd.

So it is that when you look at a church you can discern what kind of relationship that church has with its lord and master — and who the master really is. For not all churches follow the Good Shepherd. Some have had the misfortune to follow wolves dressed as sheep!

A few weeks ago on Channel 13 there was a documentary about Jim Jones and the People’s Temple; or what he called the People’s Temple. The haunting thing about this film is that it wasn’t a Hollywood made-for-TV movie. It was made up of home movies and news footage, expanded with interviews from the small handful of people who survived the mass suicide — or to name it more accurately, the mass murder, that took place in that tropical paradise gone bad.

And as I watched and listened I thought — who could possibly see this man as anything like a Good Shepherd? Even without the final chilling evidence of the mass murder/suicide itself — the video and audio show a man out of control long before that tragic day, an autocrat who could brook no disagreement, a manipulator and power broker. Who can look at the images of the aftermath of the Flavor-Aid cyanide slaughter, over 700 bodies of men and women, and 300 children; who can listen to the audio tape that was recorded during the 45-minute massacre, and say, This is the work of a Good Shepherd? Is it not the work of a thief who came in to rob and steal, a wolf who murders and slays.

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It is easy to see such marks of a bad shepherd. But what does the flock of the Good Shepherd look like? Well, the first thing to note about the community of the Good Shepherd is that, as the reading from the Acts of the Apostles tells us, “there was not a needy person among them.” In the flock of the good shepherd you don’t have one or two fat and happy sheep and dozens of skinny, benighted, forlorn sheep. The community of the good shepherd is marked with the brand of Generosity. Everyone helps out together, pitching in and working together for the benefit of the whole community, not just the profit of one or two at the expense of all.

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I once heard the story of an old man who lived in a small country town. He didn’t have much money; to make a living he did odd jobs in the houses up and down the dusty roads of that country town. He was quite a sight: his shoes rarely matched and his socks never did — when he wore them. He’d decided years before that suspenders were frivolous and a belt a luxury, so he used a strip of leather from an old harness to keep his pants up. He shaved about once a week, but no one knew precisely when it was, as he always seemed to have a three days growth. He would stop at the kitchen doors up and down those dusty country roads and ask if there were any odd jobs to do, anything that needed mending. The surprising thing people learned was that in spite of his personal appearance, his work was always top notch. It seemed odd that a man who was such a raggedy jumble could paint woodwork with such exquisite precision and care. It was always a surprise that someone who appeared so hastily put together could plane a door to make it swing just right, and even patch a leaking pipe so as you’d never know it leaked.

One family in particular took a liking to him and would always have him in to dinner when he stopped by. The children soon learned it wasn’t polite to make fun of his mismatched shoes and his harness belt. In fact, one day the father of the family thought he’d teach his young son a lesson in generosity, and gave the boy a pair of his own shoes, some new socks, and a belt and a jacket, wrapped in a sack, and told the boy to sneak down the road leave them outside the old man’s house at the edge of town.

Later that week the old man appeared, still dressed as always, to ask if any work needed doing. The family said no, but asked him in for dinner, as always. He thanked them and as they sat at table, the father suggested the old man say the thanksgiving, as he had once or twice before. They all closed their eyes and bowed their heads as the old man began. “God is so good. I’ve got so much to be thankful for. I am thankful for these nice folks who have me in to eat, and set a spell. But I want to offer special thanks that just this week someone left some shoes and a bundle of clothes on my porch.” The father opened one eye to glance in his son’s direction and smiled, and saw his son was smiling too. But the prayer wasn’t quite over. The old man continued. “And I thank you, Lord, that just yesterday I met some folks that could really use those clothes. Praise God!”

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That’s the community of the good shepherd! For what is generosity? When you give of your abundance, are you really being generous? When the glass overflows and the water spills our, is that generosity? Isn’t it generosity when you take the half glass that you have and share it with someone else? The community of the good shepherd is generous, generous with the kind of generosity that puts other’s first. The members of the community of the good shepherd so care for the wants of others that it doesn’t occur to them to say, “I need this more than you do.”

And out of this generosity there grows another sign of their community. John the beloved disciple writes, “All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness… No one who abides in him sins.”

A good member of that flock will not sin against another member of that flock. Now, the root of sin is the opposite of generosity, right? It is self-interest, the attitude that says, my needs come first — the opposite of generosity. That root taps deep, in all of us, right back to the tree that grew in the middle of that other tropical paradise, the garden of Eden, where Eve and Adam put themselves first rather than God. And you know what they got for it, something we’ve all shared in since, the day’s wage of sin, parceled out to all their descendants.

Ralph Woods tells a story, another country story, that illustrates the dead-end of such selfishness very clearly. A farmer heard about some new experimental seed-corn that was reputed to give a much higher yield. Sure enough, the first year he planted it, it brought in a bumper crop. Other farmers in the area saw this, and wanted to know his secret. But he was unwilling to reveal his source. When the neighbors appealed to him to at least sell them some of his corn for seed, he refused that too. He ensured that all his crop — aside from what he stored up for seed the next season, went to feed processing plants. None of his seed corn would fall into his neighbors’ hands. What he didn’t sell, he saved to plant.

Plant he did, and was a bit taken aback to find that the second year crop — while still good, and better than that of his neighbors— wasn’t up to the yield of the previous year. Still, he was doing better than the other farmers; and still he refused to share his secret or his seed-corn.

The third year was devastating. His crop did no better than any of his neighbors — all of them came in a little better than in past years, but nothing like the first year when he had planted his special variety corn.

And finally it hit him: his plans had been undone by the winds that blew over his and his neighbors’ fields. The corn stalks shed their pollen, all of them on all those fields, from the tall tassels swinging in the breezes. It spread enough in the mid-western winds to cross-pollinate all of the corn in the whole area — both his and his neighbors. This natural process increased the yield for his neighbors by as much as it decreased his. How much better off all would have been if he had shared his secret from the get-go, in a community of generosity.

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I said before, like shepherd like sheep. And our Good Shepherd is not selfish; rather he sacrifices his own life for the sake of the flock. And the community of the Good Shepherd similarly shows forth that graceful generosity that comes from placing another first, stepping aside in the dance of charity and love, sharing even when it doesn’t seem like there’s enough.

And isn’t that the message of the gospel, again and again. Think of that woman who found the lost coin after sweeping her house. What did she do after she found that coin? Did she put it back in the sugar jar? No; she threw a party for all of the neighbors round about. That’s generosity.

This is what marks that community, that is what the community of the Good Shepherd looks like: generous, self-giving, pure and orderly. Now, it might not look perfect at first sight. I mean, if there isn’t really enough to go round, and even so they share it all out, well, you might wonder at first about those mismatched shoes, the old harness instead of a belt. But you will sense at once the willingness to share in the work, to be generous and not to place oneself first. That’s what the community of the Good Shepherd looks like.

Is that what Saint James look like? Look around you. Do you see people you are glad to see? Do you see people you help when you can, people you can count on to help you? I know what I have seen, and I hope to continue to see. I’ve seen generosity, and the courage to pitch in. I’ve seen sickness and death, yes, those old bruises we bear because our first parents back in Eden looked out for themselves instead of trusting God. But I have also seen, even in the midst of sickness, even in the face of death, that generosity and sacrifice that is the mark of the Good Shepherd’s flock. I’ve heard him calling each of us by name, and I’ve heard a whole flock of responding voices of a whole flock of people willing to follow where he leads.+

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From Jerusalem

SJF • Easter 3b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.

You have to be careful sometimes what you read on the subway or an airplane. People will look over your shoulder, and often feel free to offer a comment on what you are reading. I studied Hebrew when I was in seminary, and one day on the subway I was reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, when an Orthodox Jewish man sat next to me. After a few moments, he leaned over and asked, with some astonishment, “Do you understand what you are reading?” I resisted the temptation to say, “Why, that’s just what Philip asked the Ethiopian eunuch when he saw him reading Isaiah in his carriage.” Instead I explained I was studying Hebrew in seminary. We went on to have a good conversation about Christians and Jews and their points of agreement and difference. I didn’t get much studying done, but this may have been a blessed opportunity for something more important!

In a similar fashion, one stormy night, an evangelist was flying to Philadelphia, when the man sitting next to him discovered he was a Christian — the evangelist was reading his Bible, and not just because it was a bumpy flight. After learning that the evangelist was a minister, the other man immediately launched into a recitation about how he didn’t feel the need for organized religion. (I guess he liked disorganized religion — which just goes to show he hadn’t checked out many churches, as I think if fair to say we get along being about as disorganized as anybody!)

Anyway, he was one of those who took this life easy, and thought the life to come would be easy too. He wasn’t an atheist, he just didn’t have use for any particular religion, and took the view that there were any number of ways to salvation.

As the plane bumped along its stormy course, the man expounded on this comfortable theology. “Anyone who lives a good life here and now will have a good life in the world to come.” He said, “There are many ways into heaven. I mean, here we are traveling to Philadelphia by plane. But we could have taken the train or bus, or driven if we’d felt like it. I think it is the same way with heaven.” The evangelist listened to all of this patiently.

Then the voice of the pilot announced the final approach to Philadelphia. Because of the severe weather the landing would be delayed, and the pilot asked people to be patient and endure the bumpy ride. Naturally people were nervous, including the minister and the man in the seat next to him. As the pilot concluded his message, the preacher turned to his seat-mate and said with a smile, “I’m glad the pilot doesn’t share your theology!” “What do you mean,” the other asked.

“Well, right now the pilot is getting precise instructions from the control tower in Philadelphia. They are sending out a radio beacon to guide us to the landing strip. If he departs from the beacon by even a single degree, we’ll miss the landing strip. I’m sure glad the pilot isn’t saying, ‘There are many ways to get to Philadelphia; I can take any approach I like. I can turn the radio off if I want to.’ I’m glad the pilot is saying, ‘There is only one way I can land this plane safely, one radio beacon to follow, and I’m going to stick with it!’”

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Today’s readings turn our attention not to Philadelphia, but to Jerusalem, the Jerusalem of two thousand years ago, and to particular events that happened in that certain time and place, events which we believe have a bearing on all times and all places. For it was in Jerusalem that Jesus was crucified; it was in Jerusalem he was raised from the dead; and it was from Jerusalem that the word began to go forth, proclaimed by Peter and the other disciples, teaching and preaching that there is salvation in no one else than Jesus; that there is no other name given among mortals by which we must be saved. Through the storm and the night, there is one sure and certain means to salvation, just as through that stormy late-night flight, there was only one beacon to guide to a safe landing.

This is what theologians call the “scandal of particularity.” Many people think it harsh to say that there is one way to salvation, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God who rules over heaven and earth, one incarnate Lord who died and was raised to life again. But the Christian faiths responds, That’s the way it is. Or rather, That’s Who the Way is!

If you think about it in terms of your own life you will see that particularity is not so strange after all. Each of us is particular; each of us is unique. There are many, many people in the world, but there is only one me, only one of each of you. There may be people who look like me, or have the same name as me, but they are not in fact me. There other Tobias Hallers out there — both “Tobias” and “Haller” are common names in Germany, where my father’s family came from generations back. I know, through the courtesy of Google, of at least two German Tobias Hallers: an ethnobiologist and a rock-climber. Believe me, we have very little in common but our names! And speaking of family history, generations back, in Frederick Maryland where my ancestors lived, two sons of my many-times-great-grandfather both had their own sons about the same time, and perhaps through a lack of communication, each gave their son the name Tobias. So it was in that one small town there were two Tobias Hallers running around, two cousins, who in later years. to tell them apart, people always referred to them by their trades: Hat-maker Haller and Mason Haller. I’m descended from the mason, by the way, not the hatter — which may explain my interest in restoring our buildings! But apart from that interest, which I share with my ancestor, and the name I share with all of them, this handful of Tobias Hallers than our shared name, and in one case a bit of our genes, some of our DNA. Each of them is or was him, and I am me, each of us totally unique people. And we’ve got the name tags to prove it! I’ll say more about that at announcement-time; but they’re downstairs waiting for everybody.

To put this into the context of our readings, in a more geographical sense, there are many cities in the world; there is even another Philadelphia — at least it went by that name in the days of the apostles — now Amman in Jordan. But even if there are other cities that bear the name, there is only one ancient Jerusalem.

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The special position of Jerusalem was announced long ago by the prophets. Jerusalem, a particular city built on a particular hill, would one day become the center of the world. And this is where we begin to turn from the scandal of particularity to the gift of universality. This is where we begin to see that the uniqueness of Jerusalem, and of Jesus Christ, is what makes the them accessible to all, what makes the kingdom of heaven accessible to all.

The prophet Micah said that one day the mountain of the Lord’s house would be raised up above all the other hills, and that peoples would stream to it. He foretold that many nations would come to it and would turn to the God of Jacob, to learn to walk in his paths. Isaiah and the other prophets echoed this message: all the world would come to Jerusalem.

And in Jesus Christ the prophecy came true, as he promised that everything written about him in the law of Moses, and in the prophets and in the psalms would be fulfilled. Through one person salvation was made available to all people. As Paul would say, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” Instruction did go forth from Jerusalem, carried by the voices of the apostles, teaching that Jesus was risen from the dead, and that in him new life and salvation lay, available to all. Those who were witness to the resurrection would carry that word to the ends of the world, beginning from Jerusalem. The word would be preached to all people everywhere, starting from a tiny group or people somewhere, from the particular to the universal, from the unique center to the infinite multiplicity of points on the edge of the circle, from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth — which though it has many places on its surface, but only one and exactly one center.

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So it is, my brothers and sisters in Christ, that the word of salvation has come to us. There is one signal being broadcast, but many can tune into it. There were, that stormy night in Philadelphia, no doubt many planes that landed safely, all guided by that signal from the single control tower, that radio beacon. There is one key to the door that leads to salvation, but once the door is opened anyone can enter through who chooses to. As Saint John the Divine wrote at the dictation of a voice like a trumpet, to the ancient church in that other Philadelphia: “I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut.” That door stands open still — one door through which many may enter. And that is only bad news to those who seek another way, or ignore the invitation.

There is one center to a circle, but an infinite number of points on its edge, each and every one of them exactly the same distance away from the center. There is one savior, Jesus Christ; his salvation is available to all who turn to him, to all who place their trust in him; he is equally close to all who seek him who is the firm center to anchor our compass.

As we continue our journey through the storm, through the night of our earthly life, may we remain attentive to the beacon, the shining light to keep us on course, the center point that will keep our circle true. That signal was first sent out, beginning from Jerusalem, from the little hill called Golgotha, outside the city walls, and then proclaimed more fervently from the heights of Jerusalem itself, proclaimed to its people to bring them to repentance, and then from holy Zion instruction went forth, out into the ends of the world, to the nations who dwelt in darkness; and the beacon is beaming brightly still, as Zion continues to publish glad tidings. All who tune their receivers to it can hear it, all who turn their hearts to the one who speaks through the ages and in all ages, can have their hearts warmed and spirits strengthened at the sound of his voice.

As we are buffeted by the winds of temptation, or tossed by the storms of sin and grief, when the darkness appears and the night draws near, and the day is past and gone, may we keep our hearts fixed on the one true signal of salvation that is beamed towards us from the heart of Jesus Christ our Lord, to bring us safely home.+

The story about the evangelist is freely adapted from an account by Tony Campolo.

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WIthout a Doubt

SJF • Easter 2b 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Jesus said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”+

There are all sorts of little sayings you hear in the church, little sayings that are said so often that people come to accept them as if they were Holy Writ. The problem is that many of these little sayings aren’t in the Bible, and worse than that they aren’t even true. One of them is, “Jesus said, ‘Love the sinner but hate the sin.’” Whenever I hear that one I always ask for chapter and verse; for, of course, Jesus said no such thing, at least as far as the Scriptures record. But that’s for another sermon.

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Today I want to look at the little saying that goes, “Doubt is the prelude to faith.” At least that’s one form of it. Alfred Lord Tennyson put it more poetically (which is fitting for a poet), “There is more Faith in honest doubt than in all the creeds.” Well, as someone who says the creed every day and twice on Sundays, I want to challenge that little saying, and on the contrary assert that doubt is the enemy of faith, something to be overcome; not an essential prerequisite or prelude to faith, but a poison that can infect or destroy faith.

Of course I acknowledge that doubt exists, but I affirm that faith survives and triumphs because it overcomes doubt. Many great Christians have had moments of doubt, moments in which they felt they’d made a terrible mistake, dark nights of the soul when they’ve felt so abandoned by God they began to doubt God’s providence, maybe even God’s existence. However, they survived those doubts; they regained their faith. We should hardly have heard of them if they had remained doubtful, certainly not as great Christians! In the same way people can survive deadly diseases: but that doesn’t make disease a beneficial stage towards a healthy life! Health comes with the end of the disease. And while it may be true that a healed broken bone is stronger than one that has never been broken, that is hardly a recommendation to go out and have all your bones broken!

No, I’m afraid that doubt remains a detriment to faith. It is something to be overcome, not embraced. Jesus puts it plainly when he faces the doubter Thomas, in five sharply pointed words: Do not doubt but believe. You can’t do them both at the same time!

As for Tennyson and all the others who have sung doubt’s praises, to be fair to them, what they’re talking about probably isn’t doubt at all, but ignorance. And those are two different things. Doubt is the enemy of faith, as much as suspicion is the enemy of trust. You can’t really trust them if you are suspecting them at the same time. The doubting skeptic will deny, until he is given reason to affirm. He tries to subsist in the world of “wait and see” — and “show me the money” — and since there are many things one never can or will see or be shown, things which must betaken on faith or the testimony of others, the doubter may spend an eternity waiting. Doubt, then, is thinking that something is false until proven otherwise; it demands first hand evidence.

Ignorance, on the other hand, keeps an open if not an empty mind: ignorance is simply not knowing — and given our human limitations, ignorance is a major part of our human condition: there are many things we do not know of a certainty, yet in which we have faith. To put it another way, Ignorance can be informed, but doubt must be convinced.

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Let’s look at our lessons for today, because they can help us see the difference. Peter addresses the people of Jerusalem, those responsible for the death of Jesus, in a moving speech that shows just how far God will go to forgive. He tells the people that they rejected Jesus; they chose to have a murderer go free, and killed the Author of Life. But he goes on to call them “friends,” and tell them that they “acted in ignorance.” As Jesus himself had said, “they know not what they do.” This ignorance, this clouding of the mind as Paul would later say, was necessary in order for God to fulfill what had been foretold through the prophets, that the Messiah must suffer. And Peter calls on them to repent and accept the truth of which they had been ignorant.

Peter is an eyewitness to the resurrection, there to testify and convert their ignorance into knowledge and bring them thence to faith, from unbelief to belief. And many of them accept his testimony.

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In comparison, consider doubting Thomas. For years those who want to cherish their own doubts have tried to exonerate Thomas. They want it to be okay for him to have doubted the reality of Christ’s resurrection, to have doubted the witness of the other disciples, and swear he had to see with his own eyes and feel with his own hands before he’d believe their testimony. After all, once he would see, their testimony would be superfluous. And although skeptical Thomas went on to do great things — tradition tells us he went as far as India, the apostle to bring the gospel into Asia — he couldn’t have done that if he had remained Doubting Thomas. Had he remained Doubting Thomas there would have been no gospel for him to preach, only his empty doubts.

Thomas’ doubts were not okay. They were something to be gotten rid of, to overcome. They would have killed his faith were it not for our Lord’s extraordinary willingness to put up with this disbelieving apostle, this disbelieving skeptic, and pay an additional visit to that upper room.

Jesus had shown his wounded hands and side to the other disciples, but he invites Thomas to go further. He invites the skeptic to poke and prod, to touch the risen flesh, delivered from death by the power of God. And he says to him, Do not doubt but believe.

There are paintings of this famous Gospel scene that show Thomas sticking his finger in the Lord’s wounded side. Personally I find that very hard to believe, nor does the Scripture tell us that Thomas accepted the invitation to handle Jesus so roughly. No, the text simply tells us that Thomas answered his Lord’s invitation with, “My Lord and my God.” And I picture him shocked and hardly daring even to look up, let alone to poke at Jesus’ wounds.

Even then, Jesus doesn’t let him off so lightly, he doesn’t let the beam of his severe attention drop. Okay, so Thomas now believes because he has seen. His ignorance, which should have been informed and dispelled by the witness of the other disciples, had hardened into doubt, had calcified into skepticism and it took a personal appearance from Jesus to wipe that doubt away: that first hand evidence, as Canon West used to say, of a hand with a hole in it.

And so Jesus goes on to say, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Blessed are those for whom the news of the gospel, lightening their ignorance, is enough. Blessed are those who only need to hear the good news, to gain the knowledge of God’s saving mission to humanity. Blessed are those whose faith rests not on the foundation of a ruined doubt, but on the solid rock of plain honest ignorance enlightened by the testimony of the Gospel.

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The evangelist John wants us so much to understand this. That’s why he wrote the Gospel, after all: to tell those who would come after what had happened. Doubt is not good. It can kill faith as much as jealousy can kill love; as much as suspicion can murder trust. Ignorance, on the other hand, is not our problem; it is our condition. The evangelist John, to make this point, steps forward for a moment at the end of the reading we heard, he steps forward as the author of the gospel to remind us, his readers, that there are many other signs Jesus performed “which are not written in this book.” He repeats this author’s note in the very last verse of his gospel, when he states that if everything Jesus had said and done were written down the whole world could not contain all the books it would take to tell it. In short, John is saying, I don’t have space or time to tell you everything. You are still ignorant in part. But you don’t need to know everything. What I have told you is enough. It is sufficient. The Scripture you hold in your hands, the Scripture you hear with your ears, is enough so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you might have life in him — and blessed are you who have come to believe.

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This is our condition, my sisters and brothers in Christ. We don’t know everything about Jesus. We don’t know how tall he was, what his voice was like. We have probably lost any number of his teachings and sayings along the way, things he did or said that no one ever wrote down. We are in partial ignorance; as Saint Paul said, “we know in part.” But, as Saint John reminds us, we know enough — and are blessed in that sufficient knowledge: like the daily bread that is enough for each day; we have enough.

We do not need to poke at the nail holes and the spear wound. We do not need even to see our Risen Lord as did his disciples in that upper room. We are among those blessed with limited knowledge, but also blessed with abundant faith, blessèd ones who though we have not seen, yet we have believed through the words of John and the other witnesses. For though we now can touch the Lord’s body only through the outward forms of bread and wine; though we now can serve the Lord only through our ministry to each other, and to the downtrodden and the needy, yet in our faith, our faith that thrives in the knowledge and the love of God, in our faith we are strengthened to proclaim that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and believing in him, to have life in his name; and in his name we pray.+

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Already Rolled Away

SJF • Easter B 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome ... had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back.+

One spring morning nearly two thousand years ago, three women headed to the tomb of a beloved friend to pay their last respects. He was one who had been judged a criminal by the state courts, rejected by the religious authorities, executed, and then buried in haste and without ceremony. So three women who had followed him in life came to the tomb to do the proper thing, to anoint his body and see to it that their dear friend might have at least and at last that final dignity.

But on the way to the tomb, something they’d forgotten came suddenly to mind. Perhaps in their urgency, perhaps in their sadness and grief, they had forgotten that a large stone had been rolled in place to seal the tomb. Now, on the way to the tomb to carry out their merciful task, they suddenly remembered, and said to one another, Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?

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That question echoes down the corridors of time. Who will roll away the stone? That stone was and is the symbol of death and finality, the seals and shuts away the dead, out of sight if not out of mind. The burial place is the end of the line, the terminal point towards which all life tends.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s no coincidence that if you take the subway that runs northward just outside the doors of our church, you end up at Woodlawn! End of the line; last stop; everybody out. I was not entirely surprised some years ago to see a law firm’s office in one of those small buildings huddled under the elevated station at the last station stop on the Jerome Avenue line, up there at Woodlawn. The name of the law firm is Lazarus and Lazarus — I can only say they’ve chosen an excellent location.

We are, all of us, on a train the ends at one Woodlawn or another. With April 15 looming, it might be wise to remember the old saying, “The only things certain in life are death and taxes!” You may get a tax cut or an economic stimulus once in a while — but death awaits us all. It is one journey we all must make, some day, that journey to the grave.

You may remember the film in which a man has a terrifying recurring dream: a hearse drives up to him, and the driver leans out and says, in a cheerful voice, “Room for one more, sir!” And then one day, he’s about to get on a crowded bus, the bus driver looks at him and says, “Room for one more, sir!” — and it’s the man from his dream! He is so startled he steps back and doesn’t get on the bus, and then watches in horror as the bus pulls away and crashes in a terrible accident.

Well, the fact is, as far as each of us goes, there is always room for one more, room for each of us in death’s carriage. How does the Scripture put it? All flesh is grass, its beauty like the flower of the field; the grass withers, the flower fades. And who will roll away the stone?

And it isn’t only literal death, you know. There are those little deaths that come before the final death; those little deaths that wither and fade the dignity of God’s children, seemingly without help or deliverance. Despair, prejudice, racism, hatred and fanaticism roll stones of obstruction into the lives of men and women and children every day. And some are impeded, and others are crushed.

Who will roll away the stone of anger and diminishment that leads people to despair — such despair, despair so bleak they feel that they have nothing to do but buy a couple of guns and kill as many people as they can before they end their own despairing lives in death. What can you do when anyone you see may be ready to lash out? Who will roll away the stone?

Who will roll away the stone of fanaticism, when people are so sure that they alone have the truth that they actually imagine it to be an honor to blow themselves up if only they can take with them as many of unbelievers as they can? Who will roll away the stone?

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Who will roll away the stone? The women asked themselves that as they came to the tomb that Easter morning. It is the question we each ask many times in our lives, not only in response to death, but as we see or experience despair, injustice, prejudice and hatred. Who will roll away the stone?

But beloved sisters and brothers, note this: Saint Mark tells us that when the women reached the tomb the stone was already rolled away! The one who was buried in the tomb wasn’t there any more. Christ was already risen from the dead!

That was good news, brothers and sisters. And that is good news. Not only was Christ risen, but Christ is risen! Who will roll away the stone? What do you mean? The stone is already rolled away!

Who will roll away the stone of injustice? The stone is already rolled away by the one unjustly executed. The one who suffered injustice has triumphed over injustice; he has given us hands and hearts to roll away any stone of injustice we may encounter. Injustice may flourish for a time, but it will not triumph in the end. The stone has been rolled away. The one imprisoned through injustice is imprisoned no more. He is not there.

Who will roll away the stone of prejudice and hatred and ideology and fanaticism? The stone is already rolled away by the one mocked and spat upon and nailed to a cross by the power of hate and envy and fanaticism, but raised from the grave by the power of God. He is not there!

And we who are in Christ, are with him where he is — not where he isn’t — not in the tomb, not in the grave, not sealed shut: but alive and active and able and equipped and empowered to do his will.

In our baptismal covenant — which we will reaffirm as we welcome some new members into the body of Christ — we will promise to honor the dignity of every human being. In fulfilling that promise, we the people of God can do all in our strength to roll away the stones of hatred and prejudice that still block the light, that still imprison, that still cause the little ones to stumble and the weak to despair. Prejudice and hatred still wield some failing power to captivate and crush in this world; and yet they cannot and will not triumph in the end. The stone has been rolled away. The tomb is empty — he is not there.

Who then will roll away the stone of death? That stone has already been rolled away by one who died and was raised from death. We who have not yet died, yet are day by day approaching it, recall, as Saint Paul said, “dying, but behold, we live.” We know that the journey does not end at the tomb at Woodlawn or anywhere else — the tomb is only a stop-over on our true journey.

Emily Dickinson once wrote:

Because I could not stop for death,
he kindly stopped for me,
the carriage held but him and me
— and Immortality.

That third passenger, Immortality, is made real and complete in Jesus Christ, and that makes all the difference. Death may drop us off at Woodlawn, but Christ will raise us from the dead. After all, he’s the one who can truly say, “Been there; done that!” The stone was rolled away and the tomb was emptied, emptied once and for all — once, for him; and in him for all of us. We who have died with Christ in baptism, we who have been raised with him, who seek the things that are above where he sits at God’s right hand, know of a certainty that we will one day rejoice with him at the heavenly banquet. The stone has been rolled away. The tomb is empty. And Christ is alive. Though Woodlawn looks like the end of the line, though death invite us into his carriage, we have a better hope, and a better promise, for Christ is with us on that journey, which does not end at the grave, but goes on into the risen life of our Risen Lord.

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Some years ago a Sunday School teacher gave the children in her class an assignment for Easter. Each was given a plastic egg — you know the ones, from L’eggs panty hose, collected by the women of the church over the preceding months. The children were given the assignment to find something that represented Easter, put it in the egg and bring to class on Easter Day. The day came, and the teacher gathered all the eggs and then opened them one by one. “Oh, what a lovely flower! Who brought the flower?” And a little girl stood to take credit, saying how the flower reminded her of the new life that comes in the spring. The teacher opened another egg, and found a pebble. Another child rose to say it was like the stone that was rolled away from the tomb. The teacher opened a third egg, but there was nothing inside. “Oh,” she apologized, “I must have mixed this in from the ones I hadn’t given out,” and reached for another egg.

But one of the younger children shouted out — in that unselfconscious way that children can — “That’s my egg!” The teacher thought the child hadn’t understood — he was very young, the youngest in the class — and said, “But dear, it’s empty.” And the child nodded vigorously and answered, “Yes, just like the tomb. Jesus isn’t dead any more.”

What’s the old saying, Out of the mouths of babes?

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Three women went to a solitary tomb two thousand years ago, and then recalled it was sealed with a stone. When they got there, they saw the stone had been rolled away. The one they sought was not there — the tomb was empty, except for the angelic messenger — for Jesus had been raised from the dead. What was true then is true now: The stone is already rolled away, and Jesus isn’t dead any more.

Being raised from the dead continues to happen in a million ways, big and small. Even in the midst of suffering and injustice and prejudice and hatred, we can find the stone is already rolled away and new life has begun, that we too aren’t dead any more.

And even in the midst of death, even in the midst of the fear that the stone has rolled over us and is ready to crush us, and even when we finally do — as do we must — face that final journey, we will soon after discover that the stone has been rolled away, that Christ is alive, and that we are alive in him, victorious over death, our tombs as empty as his. Which is why, brothers and sisters, even at the edge of the grave, we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.+

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Down from the Cross

SJF • Palm Sunday 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The crowd said, He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.

With Palm Sunday, we begin the observance of Holy Week, the church’s annual recollection of the events that took place in Jerusalem about nineteen-hundred and seventy-five years ago. It is a week that begins in triumph, or what seems to be triumph, and ends in defeat — or what seems to be defeat. It is, in short, a week of surprises and turnabouts, of contrasts of light and shadow, of joy and pain, of light and darkness and then light again.

God willing we are beginning to see a different kind of light — that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel — concerning the war in Iraq. But I would like to remind you of something that happened near the start of that conflict, something that bears an odd similarity to what happened long ago in Jerusalem.

American troops entered the city of Najaf, one of the holiest cities for followers of the Shi’ite sect of Islam. Welcoming crowds greeted the Americans, shouting their joy at being liberated from the domination of Saddam Hussein, who supported the predominantly Sunni population that had oppressed the Shi’ites. For a change there was some fulfillment of the promise that Americans would be greeted as the liberators.

Unfortunately, the cheering didn’t last. The next day, because of confusion or malice, word falsely got around that the American troops were going to occupy the shrine of Imam Ali in the great mosque of Najaf, one of Shi’a Islam’s most sacred sites. As the rumor spread, the same crowds that the day before had greeted the American troops with open arms and shouts of welcome, stood with their arms stretched out, their fists in the air, chanting curses upon the infidels.

Does this sound familiar? Something like the contrast between the Palm Gospel and the Passion Gospel ? As poet Samuel Crossman wrote,

Sometime they strew his way,
and his strong praises sing,
resounding all the day hosannas to their King.
Then “Crucify!” is all their breath,
and for his death they thirst and cry.

As I recall the crowds in Najaf turning from cheering to cursing, I cannot help but think of the same turn made by the crowds in Jerusalem. Even stranger, the next stage of the story continues to hold its mirror up to the events of Holy Week. Both Jesus in Jerusalem and the American troops in Najaf made the same response to the crowds. Jesus, the lamb who opened not his mouth, submitted meekly to the assaults of those who cursed him. And the American troops, at the direction of their commander, chose an extremely unusual response for a military outfit, to show the people that they were there in good faith as liberators, not conquerors. Those American soldiers each went down on one knee, and lowered their weapons to the ground.

And this is where the difference between the two stories come in. The crowds in Najaf, when they saw the Americans’ response, quieted their protests. And when the soldiers stood and began to back out of the town, to back away and back down, peace was restored.

Jesus’ meekness, however, was not met with a corresponding charity. No, his meekness seemed to create in the crowds that cursed him an even greater anger, an even greater hatred, to which he continued to submit himself in meekness. Ultimately, he did not back down — and because he did not back down from the cross, we are here today to testify to him as our Lord and Savior, not simply to honor him as a wise and prudent teacher who got off the hook by careful diplomacy.

We know from the evidence presented by Mark and the other evangelists, their testimony to what happened in Gethsemane, that Jesus did not want to go to the cross; Jesus did not want to die. But he willed to die. He could have backed down from the cross and its pain anytime he chose. But he didn’t. He remained obedient unto death, even death on a cross. He chose to pay the debt of human sin to God, and as God, fully divine yet fully human, though without sin.

Sin is disobedience, and if Christ had given in to his own fears or the devil’s temptations he would not have carried out God’s redeeming work. And the last temptation, the last temptation of all was voiced by the crowds: come down from the cross. The crowds did not want a suffering savior, someone who would die for them to save them from their sins. They did not want someone who would die in meekness. No, they wanted some kind of Superman. They wanted to see Jesus use his superpowers, to rip those nails out of the wood, to break himself free, to come down from the cross in power and might, so that, as they said, they “could see and believe.”

But that didn’t happen. There was no flexing of muscles, no miraculous transformation like the Incredible Hulk, no breaking free from the cross, no explosive leaping down. There was only the stillness of the noonday sunlight, the weeping of the women, the occasional curses and taunts from the crowd, the buzz of flies, the creaking of the wood, and then clouds of darkness over the land for three long, slow and painful hours.

Then finally Jesus broke the silence, as he cried out in a loud voice, a cry of pain and anguish stretching back 1,000 years before his own birth, the cry of his forefather David, a lamentation of abandonment: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The crowd, of course, misunderstood. They realized by now that Jesus was not going to do a Superman act. But they thought that maybe he had some friends in high places. And so they took the wait-and-see attitude beloved by skeptics the world over, to wait and see if the prophet Elijah, would come to take Jesus down from the cross.

And so they waited, not so long this time, until Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. Up in the city, beyond the high walls, up on the Temple Mount, people said that the curtain of the Temple had been torn in two. But outside the city walls, on that little hill called Golgotha, something even stranger happened, something most folks didn’t see, but which the Evangelist Mark carefully recorded.

A soldier who stood there facing Jesus almost two thousand years ago did something as strange and unlikely as the American soldiers did in Najaf just a handful of years ago, something as strange and unlikely as the death of God’s own son. In spite of Jesus having failed to reveal himself as a superhero in disguise, in spite of Elijah’s failure to show up to rescue him from the cross, in spite of his death and suffering, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that soldier uttered words of faith that some even of Jesus’ own disciples had not yet dared to utter: “Truly this man was God’s son.”

Truly, he was God’s son, who suffered death upon the cross for our salvation. And so it was that the meekness of Christ was vindicated. The stories turn out to be not dissimilar after all, and in the end meekness and truth triumph over anger and hatred. Just as the submission of those American soldiers in Najaf turned the hearts of those who cursed them, so too in Jesus’ act of submission, he finally did turn one heart, as a soldier saw, perhaps for the first time in his life, that God’s power is made perfect, not in domination, but in obedience. That one man’s heart turned, moved by the power of God in Christ, not to compel, but to welcome; not to order, but to invite. It was only one heart, but it was the beginning, as countless hearts would come to be turned in succeeding weeks and years and centuries; and the word would go forth from that holy city, that holiest of cities, to tell abroad the saving death of Jesus Christ; to spread the welcome and the invitation to join the Meek King at his Banquet.

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I said at the outset that Holy Week begins in triumph, or what seems to be triumph, and ends in defeat — or what seems to be defeat. But the primary lesson of Holy Week is that we must never mistake meekness —— not using one’s power — for weakness: not having any power in the first place. Why did the soldier at the cross recognize Jesus as the Son of God? Not because he had no powers, nor because he exercised his powers, but because he had the confidence in God to lay them aside, to refrain from using the powers at his disposal. For that soldier knew, as perhaps only a soldier knows, that it takes greater courage to lower your weapon than to fire it. The centurion saw and believed, not because Christ came down from the cross, but because he stayed there, even unto death.

May we, when we are tempted to lash out, when we are tempted to save ourselves at whatever cost, when we are tempted to act in our own interests at the expense of others, may we remember Jesus on the cross who chose, on our behalf, to submit himself to the powers of death so that he might bring us eternal life. +

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Cost of the Promise

SJF • Lent 5b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.+

Well here we are on the last Sunday in March, the fifth Sunday in Lent. How many of us can remember back to Ash Wednesday and the days following, and recall the promises we might have made to ourselves concerning our Lenten disciplines, what we were going to give up for Lent? Have we kept those promises to ourselves? Or go back even further to New Year’s Day: how many new year’s resolutions have evaporated more quickly than the champagne stains left on the coffee table?

The sad thing is, we find it hard to keep promises, even promises we make to ourselves. There’s always an out-clause, a mitigating circumstance that we feel lets us off the hook. Either we made the promise in haste, or without realizing what we were doing, or, in the case of a promise made to someone else, we may convince ourselves that the other party hasn’t kept his or her part of the bargain, and so it’s quite all right for us not to keep our part in return.

If we are honest with ourselves and each other, it seems that many of what pass for promises in our world today are not commitments, far from binding contracts, and really not much more than good intentions. And we all know, as the old saying goes, what to the road to hell is paved with.

But the road to heaven — now that’s another thing. Thanks be to God that the road to heaven doesn’t rely on our good intentions, our failed promises, our neglected responsibilities. No, thanks be to God that the road to heaven does not rely on us at all — we didn’t build the road! It doesn’t rely on our failed promises or our broken covenants. No, thanks be to God that the road to heaven relies upon God, and upon none other. Thanks be to God that the road to heaven relies upon God and God’s promises, who is faithful and true and who keeps his promises to us even when we fail in keeping our promises to him.

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And yet the promises God makes to us do involve us, they do affect us. And thanks be to God that they do, for if it were not for the power of God working in us to help us we would be truly lost. Yet the fulfillment of these promises is not about our keeping the promise to God, but about God making the promise real in us. This promise of God is not the casual promise of a new year’s resolution, nor even the more piously considered promise to take up a Lenten discipline. This is the promise of grace: the costly promise of God, a promise not carved in stone but on human hearts, the human hearts upon which God wrote his promise, a promise made because God so loved the world. Neither was this costly promise of God made with merely spoken words, but in the word made flesh, the human flesh that Jesus took upon him when he shared our human nature, with all its pains, with all its struggles, and finally with its death.

Jesus tells his disciples that this promise, this costly promise, requires death before new life can come. This promise of new growth is the costly promise that every farmer knows of and trusts in, when he casts the grains of wheat upon the earth. If he keeps the grains of wheat in burlap bags in the storehouse, they will never grow. Each grain will just remain a single grain.

But if he takes that risk, if he rips open those burlap bags, dumps out the grain, and scatters it upon the earth, where he must trust and risk the promise of the rain and of the sunlight God will send, only then, only trusting in that promise, that costly promise, can the farmer hope his grain will bear much fruit.

In your imagination, for a moment, go back to the early days of human history when someone first got the idea to plant grain instead of eating it. Up until then people lived as hunters and gatherers, almost like the grazing creatures of the field, just moving from place to place as food sources were gradually exhausted. But then one day, perhaps some unknown woman — and I say woman because usually among people who hunt and gather for their living, the men hunt and the women gather — some unknown woman, noticing that food plants grow from the seed they bear, decides to take a chance. Say she has gathered a few handfuls of grain in a little wallet made from skins, and is ready to go back to the camp and grind it up to make porridge. And on the way she gets this amazing idea, as she passes those other growing plants. Instead of eating the grain, she is going to put it in the ground. She picks up a sharp stick and starts to make shallow furrows in the ground. The other women look at her as if she’s lost her mind and popped a gasket. They are even more outraged when they see her place the grain, a few seeds at a time, in those rows, and gently cover them with earth. “What are you doing?” they ask. And the woman can’t really explain — there are no words yet in her language for ideas like “plant” and “harvest” — and so she points to the other growing plants and says, “I think this is where they come from.” That was a turning point in human history — the beginning of civilization — because once you can grow your own food you don’t have to move around from place to place hunting and gathering. That was the beginning of civilization, and we don’t know the name of the woman to whom we owe it.

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But at the other great turning point in human history, we do know the one who took the action, who in a sense planted himself in the earth of our human condition knowing that only thus could humanity itself be redeemed, and come to new birth. Jesus embraced the human condition, learning obedience through what he suffered, embracing the costly promise of his Lord and God, the promise his Father made to him, when he begot him before all worlds; the promise his Father made to him when he called out in thunder on the mountain, reminding him that God’s name would be glorified through what the Son of God suffered; the promise that his Father made to him when Christ was lifted from the earth upon the cross, the signal of salvation hoisted for our good and at his cost, drawing the whole world to himself; and finally the promise his Father confirmed once and for all in raising him from the bonds of death, in freeing him from bondage to mortality so that we too might be free, free not just for a season or a time, but free for ever.

Such is the promise of God, the costly promise of God, the promise he made to us, confirmed and realized in his Son. For after all is said and done, it is not our ability to keep the promise that saves us — given our performance, we would be in a sorry state if it depended on us. It is rather upon God’s promise to us, God’s rock-solid promise to us, upon which our sure and certain hope is set. So for centuries people have gone forth trusting in God’s promise; so for generations have farmers cast their grain upon the ground; so for ages have servants followed him, trusting him and him alone, not knowing where they go, but knowing that where he is, so too there is where they choose to be.

The worldly-wise may scoff at this trust and call it “blind faith” — but blind faith sees and knows things worldly wisdom can never behold or understand. Blind faith is the wisest response to one whose promises are certain and sure.

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Some years ago, there was a terrible fire in an old two-storey wood-frame house. We hear of such tragedies every year here in the Bronx during the winter, as people knock over illegal kerosene heaters, and whole families perish as the flames devour their humble dwellings. Well in this case, the family managed to escape the house — or thought they had, until the father did a quick count of the children on the sidewalk, and then heard that most horrible sound: one of his children, his little boy calling to him from the second floor window, as the smoke billowed around the boy, blinding him so that he could see nothing. His father rushed over and stood beneath the window, calling up to his little son, telling him to jump, assuring him that he would catch him. The terrified child, his arms stretched out before him, his eyes clenched tight shut against the stinging smoke, yelled out, “But Daddy, I can’t see you; I can’t jump.” And his father shouted back, “It’s all right, son, it’s all right. I can see you!”

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God can see us, even when we do not have the strength or the skill to see him. God speaks to us, calls out to us, again and again, giving us yet another opportunity to hear and understand, even when we swear that all we hear is thunder. Still he speaks, still he calls us, calling us each by name to leap into his loving, waiting arms.

And God will keep his promise to us even when we have broken ours to him. God will catch us and save us when we take the leap of faith, as he redeemed his own son from the bonds of death in our sinful flesh, when he raised him from the dead. God has kept his promise and he will keep it again. God will keep his costly promise to us, without counting the cost. God has already paid the price, has planted the seed of his love in the earth of our human nature, and the Son of God has paid the price in his own flesh and blood. And having paid the price, we had better believe that God will keep his promise. +

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Real Refreshment

SJF • Lent 4b 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast.+

The fourth Sunday in Lent goes by a number of different names. One of them is the Latin name Laetare, which basically means “lighten up.” That’s one of the reasons I change from purple to rose-colored vestments on this day, which is also sometimes called “Rose Sunday.” Coming as it does about halfway through Lent it’s meant to be a bit of a “stop to catch your breath” during the long march through an otherwise penitential season. For that reason, it is also sometimes called Refreshment Sunday. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to have refreshments at coffee hour — at least not like the splendid luncheon we had last week courtesy of the choir. I’m happy to say, that luncheon raised$288 towards the church building fund. Now that’s refreshment!

The real refreshment in this Sunday celebration rests in the good news that we hear this morning — good news not only in the gospel where we expect to hear good news, but also in Saint Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. As I hope you recall, the last couple of weeks have had some pretty heavy messages about discipline and responsibility — about the work we are called upon to do and to carry out as Christians, whether it is in the form of duty to others, or in that cross we are called to take up day by day.

This Sunday gives us a moment to rest and reflect before we take up our burdens once again and continue walking that path of discipleship through the rest of Lent, and on through Holy Week. Today, in the gospel, Jesus tells the people to sit themselves down, to rest themselves for a bit, even it they are out in the middle of nowhere in a deserted place. And he prepares food for them, working with what seems at first to be an unpromising amount of ingredients, and yet feeding thousands and satisfying their hunger, giving them the strength to continue. It is a wonderful story and I’ve preached about it before.

However, rather than repeat myself I’d like to focus a bit on Saint Paul’s message this morning. “By grace you have been saved” — such an important message that Paul repeats it twice in that short passage. “By grace you have been saved.” There, now I’ve gone and done the same thing. But it is so well worth repeating — this simple phrase, by grace you have been saved — because as I have said before people often want to turn being saved into something that we think we do, rather than to accept it as something that God in Christ does for us.

And that is odd, because no one would him or herself take credit for being “saved from drowning.” Isn’t the whole point of being saved that it’s something that someone does for you, something you were not able to do yourself? There are times, of course, when you can save yourself — for instance, by heeding the fire alarm or the smoke alarm and rushing out of the building before the fire gets to you. But most of the time we hear of people being saved; it isn’t about them saving themselves but about other people saving them.

And in this case, we’re talking about being saved unto eternal life — Paul is reminding us that we have no power in ourselves to save ourselves. Turning back from our more refreshing language to what Paul said last week: you remember how he said, basically, “I can’t help it! The good I want to do, I cannot do; but the evil I do not want is what I do!”? And you will also recall his plaintive exclamation, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” and his subsequent good news in response: “Thanks be to God in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Just as he wrote those words to the Romans so too he repeats the same sentiment to the Ephesians: this is about being rescued, being saved from something from which you can’t save yourself. This isn’t about smoke alarms or fire alarms; it’s about being carried unconscious from a burning building, or hauled by a helicopter from the tree into which you’ve climbed to escape the flood, even as the water rises around you.

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Now, you also know that the worst thing you can do when someone is trying to save you is to struggle with them — perhaps you’ve seen the films or TV shows where someone is trying to rescue a foundering swimmer from drowning and the drowning person struggles so much that the rescuer has to punch them in the jaw to get them to stop so that they can be saved.

And sometimes we too fight and struggle against being saved. Saint Paul knew something about that — remember how, when he still went by the name Saul, he started out as a zealous persecutor of the church, determined to wipe it out. You will also recall how Jesus appeared to him on that road to Damascus and literally knocked him down, and said to him, pityingly, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me; it is hard for you to kick against the goads.”^{Acts 26:14}

The fact is, we sometimes make it harder than it is — and of course it will be hard if we think it is something we have to do for ourselves rather than something we allow God to do for us, to continue to do for us.

I’ve said before — I think I may have said it last week — how what God asks of us is so simple that it’s hard: loving God and our neighbors. And it’s the same with salvation. How does the old saying put it, “Let go and let God!” We often want to make it more complicated and harder than it is, as we kick against the goads in our own way.

Years ago, one of the big food companies — it might’ve been Betty Crocker, I’m not sure — came up with a packaged cake mix that was going to be revolutionary. Everything was complete in the box; all you had to do, literally, was add water. Well, it was a flop — people didn’t buy it because they simply couldn’t believe that everything was somehow
reduced to that powder in the box, and all you had to do was add water. So after a period of dismal sales the company adjusted the formula, took out a few of the ingredients, and then re-marketed the product with new instructions: in order to bake the cake, in addition to the water, you had to add one egg. And everybody was happy.

And so, because I know all of you — and I myself — want to be more active participants in our own salvation, even as we know and understand that we are not saving ourselves, but are saved by Christ — still, we want to do something; and the continued good news is that God gives us some things to do.

The normal thing to do, first of all, when someone rescues you and saves your life, at the very least, is to say, “Thank you.” And surely that is what we do here every Sunday in our worship — when we give thanks to God for all that he has done. In fact, you may be surprised to hear that the word Eucharist, the name for our celebration, means “giving thanks” — so thanks-giving is at the heart of our worship; not just on that Thursday in November, but every Sunday.

But if someone saves your life, you will probably want to do more than just thank them. And that is precisely and appropriately where those works come in, that Paul mentioned. Saint Paul is careful to note that our works do not save us — it is grace alone that saves us; as he says, “a gift of God, not the results of works, so that no one may boast.” But he goes on to say, “we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” Our works have not saved us — God has — but primarily in order to put us to work! God, having saved us, has prepared good works for us to do — and God expects us to do them.

Doing good — loving God and our neighbor — is not the cause of our salvation but it’s result. We are able to do these good things because God has saved us; not merely as a way of giving thanks to God — although it is that — but as a way to spread the word to others that they really don’t need to add that egg to the recipe — that the box meant what it said: all that was needed was water, in which we are all baptized; salvation is freely offered to all, once and for all, through Jesus Christ.

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And that refreshing news is meant to empower us to take up our work once again — work not to earn salvation, but made possible because of salvation. It is as if every person rescued from drowning were to become a life-guard. For that is what we are; for that is what we are called to do, to assist in the work of saving others, by bringing them the good news that salvation has come. Salvation empowers us to get to work to spread the life-saving message that there is no need to go hungry in a world where a few pieces of bread and fish can be multiplied by a gracious God, to feed thousands. Salvation empowers us to spread the message that we need not despair when we feel discouraged or defeated; we need not struggle and fight against the rescuer who is carrying us on his shoulder gently laid, and brought home — where we can truly rejoice. We are empowered, all of us, to tell others that in the midst of trouble there is refreshment — there is a flowing fountain that rises in the middle of the desert, the source of a stream on whose banks grow trees whose leaves shall be for the healing of the nations.

We have been saved, brothers and sisters, saved and rescued, and refreshed. So come, let us worship; and then let us get to work.+

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Body Building

SJF • Lent 3b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Saint Paul wrote to the Romans, “Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”+

In the movie The Karate Kid, young Daniel seeks a master to teach him karate. The master tells him he must agree to obey his instructions to the letter, without any objection, without any question. Daniel has visions of that smart white suit, and a black belt within easy reach, so he readily makes that promise.

But when he shows up for his first class, karate master Miyagi-sensei tells him to hold on to his T-shirt and jeans; he’s not ready for that smart uniform yet. Instead of taking him to the work-out room the Master takes Daniel outside and puts him to work painting a fence, showing him exactly how the brush must move, evenly and smoothly up and down. Daniel figures since Miyagi-sensei is going to teach him karate for free this is the least he can do, to paint the old man’s fence for him.

The next day he arrives expecting to start class, only Miyagi-san puts him to work scrubbing the floor, again showing him how to move the wash-brush left and right. And again, Daniel thinks this is probably only fair trade — but begins to wonder when the karate lesson is going to start.

The next day he figures it’s about time, only to discover Miyagi-san has another chore: washing and waxing three beat-up old cars, after more tedious instruction, on how to bend to fill the sponge with soapy water, and how to move the polishing cloth in circles circles circles. When the end of that long day comes — this third day — the boy can restrain himself no more, and blurts out, “I thought you were going to teach me karate, but I’ve only been doing your chores!”

Miyagi-sensei turns in anger. Daniel has broken his promise to do as he was told without question, without objection. The old man snarls, “I have been teaching you karate. Defend yourself!” and thrusts out his arm, up, then down. And Daniel, reacting immediately, guards himself up and then down, with exactly the movement he’d used to paint the fence.

The Master then sends out a powerful kick, and using the same bending motion he’d used while dipping the sponge in the soapy bucket, Daniel dodges. And so it is for each assault the old man throws; each one is countered with a movement learned in the household chores. At the end the Master stares at the boy, frowning, but with a little bit of a twinkle in his eye, and then walks away in silence.

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The church has it’s own training program for body building — building the body of Christ, that is. And sometimes the program may seem to have as little to do with the life of the world to come as painting a fence has to do with karate. But if we look closely at the discipline of the church, we will find that it works in much the same way, strengthening us and training us to do God’s work even as we do worldly work.

And I take as an example the Ten Commandments, God’s training plan, which we repeated in the Decalogue at the beginning of our liturgy, and heard in full as our first lesson this morning. Only the first three commandments directly address what you would normally call “religious” issues, directly defining our relationship with God. The fourth commandment is transitional: it deals both with God and us, and relates our rest here upon earth with God’s heavenly rest at the end of creation.

But the rest of the commandments, a majority six out of ten, deal with entirely human affairs, and hardly seem theological at all — God is only even mentioned in the commandment to honor ones parents, to assure those who do so of a reward. Apart from this passing mention to God, the last six commandments focus entirely upon us, and how we are relate to each other. We turn, as Jesus’ own summary of the law puts it, from matters concerning our love of God to matters concerning our love of neighbors, with our parents standing right there as the first “neighbor” we encounter.

From the commands to worship God alone, to accept no substitutes for God, to honor God’s name and to remember the sabbath, we move to the commandments about honoring our parents, not killing, not being unfaithful, not stealing, not bearing false witness, and not envying our neighbors. Those six commandments have nothing explicitly to do with God, and yet it is God who gives them to us; it is God who gives us these exercises, these chores.

It may seem to be as irrelevant to religion as fence-painting is to karate, but God knows better. God knows that if we do not love our neighbor we cannot love him. God gives us each other to practice on, so to speak, teaching us what love is all about. You may remember what John the beloved disciple wrote, “If any one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.”^{1 John 4:20}

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Still there are those who think, like the Karate Kid, that they can rush right into loving God without loving their neighbor. They concentrate their effort on the externals, and miss the essence. And when the Master comes, he is simply furious.

Look at what happened to the Temple in Jerusalem — which was intended as a house of prayer for all people. The priests had leased out the Court of the Gentiles, leaded it out to traders, as if the Gentiles didn’t matter to God, as if all the rest of the people of the earth didn’t deserve their place in God’s Temple, as if God hadn’t provided them with their own space to worship him. The leaders rejected God’s transforming grace. The conformed the Temple to a world-view in which Jew and Gentile couldn’t possibly get along, let alone worship in the same building. They refused God’s purpose that the Temple be used as a training ground for the next world, for God’s new creation, in which all people — Gentile and Jew alike, would be gathered into God’s kingdom.

The Temple took 46 years to build, and about a decade to corrupt. But it took only a day to cleanse it, when the Master came to whip it into shape.

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We still need periodic visits from our Lord and Master, and normally we get them once each week on the Christian sabbath, the Lord’s day, when God reminds us that our religious disciplines are meant to turn us into disciples; our love and honor shown to God are meant to equip us to love and honor each other, to train us to be all that we can be. God wants to build the body of the Church, the body of Christ.

When our worship of God doesn’t have our heart in it, when it is mixed with worldly concerns, it won’t be able to inspire and lead us to love our neighbors more. And if our love and respect for our neighbors is only a token and a show, it will not equip us an empower us to know and love God. But when our love and respect for others is truly and freely given, it will strengthen us to bear God’s love, building our spiritual muscles as we are clothed with grace to bear the weight of glory, freed from the body of death and given the body of life, which we become as we are built into the church.

And as I say, when it doesn’t work, when we come to see loving God and neighbor as empty exercises that have nothing to do with our daily life or the life of the world to come, well, that’s when we need the Master to spark us to remember what we’ve learned, to spark us to life as he challenges us, and changes our chores into charisms.

That transformation of ourselves, our souls and bodies, into something better than what we are to start with, that took more than one day, the day Jesus took to whip the earthly Temple into shape. No, this takes a bit longer. It takes three days — from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. For it is in that particular destruction and rebuilding, that destruction that took place on Good Friday, and that rebuilding that took place through the rest in the tomb, and on to the glorious rising on Easter Day, Jesus shows us how completely made-over we can become when we live in him, when we allow him to live in us; when we let him into our hearts to transform the temple of our body into something new and amazing — even if it takes 46 years to build, or 56, 66 — dare I say 86? There is always room for rebirth, renewal and restoration. And we don’t the strength to do it on our own.

Who will deliver us when our spirit fails and languishes? Who will deliver us when our discipline seems pointless, and our spiritual well runs dry? Who will deliver us when our friends and our neighbors just get to be too much for us and we flee to some imagined sacred haven where it will just be God and us? Who will deliver us from this body of death?

Well, thanks be to God in Jesus Christ our Lord! For Jesus Christ, starting with his own death and resurrection on that weekend long ago, shows us perfect body building: building his body, the church, that wonderful and sacred mystery. And it starts out there, my friends, out in the world, out there where six out of ten of the commandments are obeyed, out in the world where it is so tempting to dishonor our elders, to lie and to cheat and to steal and to kill and to covet. For if we have not made peace and loved our sisters and brothers outside the doors of this church, we will find neither peace nor love within. We will simply find ourselves changing the coins and buying the pigeons, instead of worshiping the one true God who alone is love.

But again I say, thanks be to God in Jesus Christ our Lord! He will help us; he has helped us. He has not forsaken us, and has in his own person shown us that even what is dead can come to life, when it is built up in him. When spiritually dead are raised to new life when they let Jesus into their lives, they can be built into the body of the church to do God’s will in the world.

When the church is working as it should, trained by its Lord and Master, it is a marvelous thing to see. When the church is working as it should, people can love the unlovable, forgive those who hurt them, comfort those who suffer, rejoice with the joyous, kneel with the humble, and stand with the righteous. This is the body that God wants to build us into if we will let him. This is what God means the church to be. This is what Christ died for, and this is what he was raised to life for. Are you ready, sisters and brothers; are you ready? +

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Conflict in the Desert

SJF • Lent 1b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan.+

When the phrase desert war is mentioned, Iraq or Afghanistan likely to come to mind: the memory of past conflicts or the continued battles we see on the newscasts. Before the current conflicts, we saw war in Kuwait with Stormin’ Norman leading a high-tech war fought largely, and swiftly, from the air — not like the current conflict on the ground, in the streets, and in the hearts and minds of the people of Iraq.

For those of us with a few more years on us, however, desert war might conjure up instead names like Montgomery and Rommel. We might envision not high-tech missiles but the tawny tanks of the Afrika Korps, decorated with palm trees and Balkankreuzen — Greek crosses outlined in white. Fascinating that the instruments of the Nazi war machine in North Africa should be emblazoned not with the swastika but with the sign of the cross — adding blasphemy to their infamy.

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For if we go back much, much further, we find the one whose cross is model for all other crosses — the one who by his cross won the greatest war of all, the war for our souls; the war to save the world. That was a real “world war.” If we go back to the times of our Gospel reading, we will find a desert war of far greater antiquity, and of far greater consequence, than either the campaign in North Africa, the lightning-strike war in Kuwait or the long-drawn-out wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For in the Gospel we come upon the primeval battle of Good against Evil which is the model and prototype all other struggles. We come upon the opening battle of a war which would not end until it came to the Cross.

Here the protagonist is not a Montgomery or a Schwarzkopf, but God’s beloved Son. And although it is tempting, for the antagonist, to dress up Adolph Hitler or Osama bin Laden in red tights, with horns and a pointed tail, in our Gospel reading today we encounter no counterfeit second-rate would-be devil, no mere villain, but the source of all villainy: the fallen angel Satan, the Adversary of all humanity, the enemy of the Old Adam and the New.

We can read histories and see films of the Second World War, we can watch the video coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan on CNN. But Mark, evangelist-reporter for this gospel battle, gives us few details; it’s a bit like the scrolling headlines at the bottom of the screen. Unlike Matthew and Luke, Mark doesn’t tell us how Satan tempted Jesus, or what the temptations were; only that he tempted him.

But Mark does put his own spin on the account. While Luke and Matthew tell us that the Spirit “led” Jesus into the wilderness, Mark uses stronger language. He tells us the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness; and that doesn’t mean the Spirt was chauffeur! This is not the language of transportation, but the language of compulsion and command, surprising language that tells us surprising things about God, God’s Holy Spirit, and God’s beloved Son. This is no-nonsense language about why God’s Son was born, what he came to do, and how he would go about doing it, as Peter says, “once for all.”

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In today’s epistle Peter gets right to the point, doesn’t he? And it’s the same point Mark is making in his Gospel. Jesus came to save us, to suffer for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God. He was put to death in the flesh but made alive in the Spirit. What Mark recounts is the first sortie, the first battle in a war that would end only with a death upon a green hill far away, outside a city wall, a death that signified not a loss, but the final victory over death. This scene of temptation is the beginning of the greatest war of all, the war in which all of humankind is at stake, and Mark is setting the stage to tell that greatest story ever told.

The Spirit of God, having descended upon Jesus in the River Jordan and equipped him with power and grace, clothing him in righteousness, sends him forth into battle like a general commanding his army. The Spirit drives Jesus out into the wilderness to face his enemy and ours, the old serpent, Satan.

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Think a bit about this Satan character for a moment — he appears so rarely in the story of salvation, and Mark just barely mentions him in this passage. And yet his role is pivotal — for he is the saboteur who tries to win by stealth — the spy or the terrorist who works on the sly. But don’t let his techniques fool you into thinking he is just a minor character. Satan is the Adversary, the Obstacle, the stumbling-block. Satan has no life in himself; he can’t create anything or accomplish anything; he is powerless to do so since he has cut himself off from the source of all light and life. He cannot create. But he can get in the way.

While the Spirit of God is the source of light and life, the one who gets things going, Satan is the one who tries to bring them to a halt. If the Spirit is the engine, then Satan is the roadblock. Satan is the one who gets in the way, the stumbling-block, the dead weight that opposes and drags down.

Satan is the blocked-up spiritual sink that overflows and makes a mess of your life. Satan is the inner voice that says to a hopeful young person planning for college, “You’ll never make it.” Satan whispers to the woman who’s raised a family and now wants to realize her dreams for a career, “Who do you think you are?” Satan says, “You can’t do it!”

But thanks be to God, the Spirit answers, “With God all things are possible!” Satan may get in the way. But Jesus, driven by the Spirit, compelled by the Spirit of God, can and will plow through Satan’s obstacles, conquer that ancient adversary, and remove the stumbling block on our behalf.

But it isn’t easy. This is a Desert War, not a Desert Picnic. And this first battle in the desert is just the start of a war that will last three years, a war that in fact is still played out in human hearts and souls when we forget that the war was won; the war is over — it ended almost two thousand years ago — Christ was victorious and all we need to do when Satan gets in our way is to remind ourselves of Christ’s victory on our behalf.

Satan has been defeated. He is still alive, if you can call it living But though he may fume and spit and try to spread his poison, his weapons of mass destruction have been destroyed by the one who had the power to conquer him. Satan can have no ultimate power over us, for his greatest weapon, death, has been disarmed: death no longer has its sting, grave has no victory, since we have been assured in Christ of life eternal. Death may hold us for a while, but only for a while, and then we will be set free by the one who conquered sin and death for ever.

And it isn’t just bodily death I’m talking of here — but all those little deaths: those little denials and negativities; the things that put you down and make you feel like less than you are; the powers that diminish and diss you. I recall something C S Lewis said back during the cold war, when everyone was afraid of nuclear war. An interviewer asked him what he thought of the atomic bomb. He said, “If I should happen to meet an atom bomb, I would say, ‘I’m not afraid of you. I am an immortal soul. You are only a bomb!” So too, we are empowered to say to Satan, and all his kin — all his little devils of diminishment and negativity — “Don’t you realize that you were defeated by Christ? That’s what you are, Losers!”

God’s Holy Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan, and Jesus overcame that obstacle in the power of that Holy Spirit. He overcame the opposition of small-minded folk who thought he was claiming too much for himself. He overcame the religious leaders who thought they had God in their pocket. He overcame the Roman Empire that thought it ruled the world but couldn’t even govern itself.

But there is more. Jesus did not simply defeat those who strove with him on earth; he defeated the ancient enemy who rebelled against God in heaven, who fell from heaven — and great was his fall — to squirm and hiss his poison and falsehood into the ears of our first parents — to do harm, yes, but ultimately to see all his harm undone, all his obstacles removed, including his greatest weapon, death.

Jesus overcame Satan in the wilderness and on the cross. He overcame death and the grave, and he gave us the power to overcome sin and death in him and through him. Christ fought for us victoriously on earth, and he rules for us in majesty in heaven, where he sits at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers subject to him, having put all things under his feet, including the last enemy, death. Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory in Christ Jesus our Lord.+

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Not Alone In This

SJF • Last Epiphany 2009 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
No prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.+

One of the most interesting characters in the legends of ancient Greece is Cassandra. She was the daughter of Priam and Hecuba — the king and queen of Troy, that ancient city that got into trouble when Cassandra’s brother Paris abducted Helen of Sparta. Sparta and its Greek allies launched a thousand ships to start a war that lasted ten years, just to win her back. I’ll tell you, sometimes the legends of ancient Greece sound like a cross between “Days of Our Lives” and “The World at War”!

But back to Cassandra, daughter of the Trojan royal family: she was so beautiful that, according to the myth, even the god Apollo fell for her. Instead of a box of chocolates and some flowers, he gave her the gift of prophecy. Oracles were his specialty, after all. However, Cassandra didn’t reciprocate Apollo’s love. I guess that’s natural — I mean, after all, he gave her the gift to see right through him, and know what he was after — a dangerous gift it seems to me for a man to give to the object of his affection! (I think we’re getting back into “Days of Our Lives” territory here.) Well, Apollo didn’t take kindly to this. Cassandra forgot it’s not a good idea to get on the wrong side of a Greek god. Apollo didn’t take away the gift of prophecy, but he added a curse to it: Cassandra would remain a prophet, able to proclaim what was going to happen, but with the added curse that no one would ever believe her.

And it was this curse that finally brought an end to the Trojan War. For when the Greeks seemed finally to give up and go back home, they left that gigantic wooden horse outside the gates of the city that had withstood the siege for ten years. And the Trojans didn’t believe poor Cassandra when she shouted from the top of the tower: “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!” True to the curse, the Trojans didn’t believe her; they hauled in the wooden horse, and that night the Greek SWAT team crept out of hiding in the horse’s belly, opened the gates, and let in the army to enter and take the city. And ever since, the name Cassandra has been attached to someone whose warnings go unheeded.

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Have you ever experienced that in your own life? Perhaps you’ve given someone some sage advice that they ignored, and ended up paying for it. You’re left either to commiserate or say, “I told you so” — and neither one of those is very satisfactory, is it? I’m sure there must have been more than a few financial advisors who said, “You really need to diversify your portfolio. I know Bernie Madoff’s offering a great return — an almost unbelievable return — but it’s better to play it safe and spread your investments around.” Scientists have been warning about global climate change for decades — but it’s taken huge chunks of the Antarctic ice-shelf collapsing, and glaciers thousands of years old disappearing for people finally to take notice — and there are still people out there who deny it is even happening!

Prophets often go unheeded — even when the prophecy is no more than common sense; and that can be, let me tell you, a very discouraging experience — when you see something, a danger that you try to warn people of, but they pay you no mind, or take you seriously.

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Clearly that is how Elijah felt, in that powerful episode from the First Book of Kings. He’s ready to call it quits — earlier in the chapter he says he’s ready to die, but when God’s angel offers encouragement he continues on the run for his life. His zeal for God has not won him any friends, and it seems that all Israel is against him. He’s spoken the truth to confront their idolatry, and what has it gotten him? So he high-tails it to the mountains and hides in a cave. God speaks to him, asking him, “What are you doing here?” And Elijah offers his excuse — everybody’s against him; he’s the only prophet left. And God tells him to “step into his office” — to come out of the cave, for the Lord is about to pass by.

And what a passing by it is! God puts on a spectacular show of power: wind so strong it splits rocks, an earthquake that shakes the mountain, and a powerful fire. And yet God is not in these powerful, noisy forces — but rather in that sound of silence (a more accurate translation than“still, small voice” we are accustomed to). And out of that silence, God repeats the question, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

Interesting how asking the same question twice forces the one you ask to think hard about his answer! Even though he says the same thing, I’m sure you can detect a little bit of doubt begin to creep into Elijah’s voice when he answers the second time, talking about how zealous he’s been, how solitary and alone, the only one who hasn’t forsaken the true God.

And that is when God drops the full truth on him, and the full depth of what God is about to do. God tells Elijah to get back to work, to anoint new kings, and a new prophet to succeed him — and they will tramp out the vintage of the grapes of wrath, slaughtering up and down the country all of those who have turned away from God to worship idols. And that is where the full truth comes in: Elijah’s mission has not been a failure. He is not the only one left. He has not been alone in the task. In fact, there are seven thousand others who have not been deceived, seven thousand others who have believed his prophecy, remained loyal to the Lord, not bowed the knee to the false Syrian thunder-god Baal, nor kissed his bovine statue. To put it in contemporary language, “They haven’t taken any bull.”

Elijah has not been a Cassandra after all — he has not been a solitary voice, ignored by all. In fact, a good number have heard and believed him — it is not “Elijah against the world.” His prophecy was understood and received by others, even when it seemed to him that no one cared.

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This is in part the point that the Apostle Peter is making when he says that prophecy isn’t a matter of speaking, and not listening as well. The prophetic message is confirmed by the believers who accept it — and by their own experience showing them the prophecy is true. Peter himself had heard Jesus promise that some of the disciples would see him revealed in glory — and Peter assures those to whom he wrote that it actually happened. He’s not making this up, people! He was there, on the mountain, and the promise was fulfilled, when he saw Jesus transfigured, robed in dazzling whiteness, and joined by Moses and Elijah. And so it was that the prophetic message was more fully confirmed. It wasn’t just his own individual experience, but that of James and John as well. It wasn’t a matter of personal interpretation — rather it was a confirmation of his actual experience, in that small company of apostles on the mountain, when God spoke through the cloud, out of the silence, to announce the presence of his Son, the Beloved.

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And so it is that the church has preached and prophesied ever since. It isn’t just me speaking to you, but you listening to me; it isn’t just me speaking at all, but also my listening to you, and to my teachers in the faith, and the many teachers in the faith that all of us have had, as we listen together to the words of God — not in a whirlwind, or an earthquake, or a fire: but speaking to us out of the silence of our own attentive listening, listening as we always do for the voice of God’s Son, the Beloved. We are not alone in this: we are together. And we find the words to be true because they accord with what we have been shown and know.

And just as God did not leave Elijah on the mountain, or the Lord Jesus leave the apostles on the mount of Transfiguration, so too we are sent forth, sent out on a mission with the message more fully confirmed, and the dawning of the morning star rising in our hearts — forth from this place where we gather to hear God’s word and find ourselves transfigured, commissioned by God’s power to go forth and spread that message to others, so that they too may become disciples of our Lord and God.

And as we go we will find that we are not alone in this missionary task either — others have planted seeds which we may water in the work of evangelism; we are not the only church in town, and thanks be to God there are many thousands who have not bowed the knee to the idols of our age — to easy wealth and scornful greed, of selfishness and scant care for others. No, we will find that the message has gone before us, and our main task will be to confirm — to remind those who received God’s word but have perhaps not yet acted upon it, that now is the time, the acceptable time, the year of the Lord’s favor, to do his work and will.

May we, my sisters and brothers in Christ, be strengthened in this confidence, not relying simply on our own personal interpretation, but in our communal discernment; encouraged as Elijah was, as were Peter, James and John— confirmed in the knowledge that God sends us out to do his work for the spread of his kingdom; through the coming Lenten season and beyond, to the eternal and never-ending Eastertide, to the glory of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.+

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Particularly Clean

SJF • Epiphany 6b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG Naaman the Syrian asked, Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?

There are two things about the Christian faith that often provoke controversy, sometimes even within the church. The first is the claim that Christ is unique, the sole assured way to salvation. This doctrine is embodied in Jesus’ statement that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that no one comes to the Father except through him. The second is the observation that what God demands of us through Christ is neither complicated nor difficult, but simple. And this is embodied in Jesus’ statement that his yoke is easy and his burden light.

We can find a foreshadowing of both of these doctrines in the story of Naaman the Syrian warrior — and leper. Naaman hears of a cure of his illness from a young slave who was kidnaped from her home in Israel. He sets off loaded with treasure, expecting some kind of grand royal reception. What he gets, however, is a message from the prophet Elisha to go and wash in the Jordan seven times. And the Scripture describes his anger at what he perceives to be off-handed treatment.

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Naaman’s anger has two aspects, which reflect the two Christian doctrines I mentioned a moment ago. First, he finds it is absurd that there should be anything special or unique about the River Jordan. Aren’t there rivers back in Syria that are bigger and better? What’s so special about the River Jordan? Second, the Syrian general expects an elaborate healing ceremony, some kind of a ritual where the prophet will come forth and call on God by name and wave his hands over the diseased spot.

But the general’s servants know better, and they give him very good advice: if the prophet had asked for something difficult, wouldn’t you have done it? How much easier simply to do as he says, to wash and be made clean? And so he does, and is healed, and comes to realize that the power of God is at work both in its particularity and in its simplicity. Only God can save and heal; and what God asks is simple, as simple as the faith to do as you are told.

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Let’s look more closely at these two attributes of God’s power and working. First, God’s power and working are particular. God could have chosen to settle his people Israel by some other river than the Jordan; he could have taken them up to Syria to settle by the Abana or the Pharpar. For that matter, when they were in captivity in Egypt, he could, instead of bringing them to the Promised Land, simply have wiped out Pharaoh and kept them comfortably settled by the Nile — a far more impressive and significant river than the Abana, the Pharpar or the Jordan. Or, choosing instead when he led them forth from Egypt, in forty years of wandering he could have led them to the Tigris or Euphrates or even the other way on up north and into Europe. God could have led his people to the Rhine or the Seine or the Thames. Or, he even could’ve inspired them to build boats, and bring them to the Hudson or the Mississippi! Why, God could even have settled his people by the shores of the Bronx River running through the Botanical Garden just a few blocks away!

But he didn’t. God settled his people in Israel by the Jordan, and that was where the slave-girl came from who told Naaman about the prophet, and that was where the prophet lived, and that was where Naaman went, and that is where he was healed. There; and no where else.

In the same way, God could have chosen to become incarnate in fifth century BC India, or in twelfth century Japan or fifteenth century Mexico. But he didn’t. God chose to be incarnate, “God in Man made manifest,” in the person of Jesus Christ, born in a suburb of Jerusalem in the reign of Caesar Augustus of Rome and Herod the Great of Palestine. This Jesus would be a man of a particular height, speaking a particular language, of a particular complexion and build, and most importantly, and particularly and uniquely and most importantly God from God, light from light, true God from true God.

The uniqueness and particularity of Christianity after all doesn’t lie in its content but in Christ himself — personally. Other religions have creeds and scriptures, liturgies and teachings and moral advice, many of them similar to Christianity in many respects. But only Christianity has Christ, the Son of God. It is in him that the Christian faith finds its uniqueness and particularity.

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So it is that Christians believe God’s power and working to be particular. And God’s power and working are also simple and direct. God could have commanded the prophet Elisha to put on a big show for Naaman the Syrian, something to impress him with thunder and lightning and spells and incantations, wavings of the arms and high drama. Instead he simply told him to take a bath, seven dips in the river.

In the same way, Jesus could have healed that leper that approached him, in the Gospel we heard this morning, with an elaborate ritual. He could have placed upon him some complicated act to perform after he was healed. Instead he simply touched him and spoke the word, and told him to do no more than what the Law of Moses already asked, a simple offering to the priest to certify the cure.

The simplicity of Jesus’ teaching is given in his own summary of the ancient law of Moses: to love God and one’s neighbor. That is the simplicity of Christian duty, simplicity so simple that sometimes it is hard! How many Christians down through history have afflicted themselves with terrible penances instead of simply doing what Jesus asked, to love God and their neighbors! And even that love takes a simple form — to do to others as we would be done by.

This is so simple and so fair that even a child can understand it — perhaps better than many an adult. Perhaps that is why Jesus said we had to become like children if we are to enter the kingdom of heaven. For children know what fairness is — believe you me. If you don’t think so, just try a little experiment with two children: sit them side by side and give one of them a dish of ice cream and the other a bowl of oatmeal, and you see if they can’t tell the difference! Of course, it takes a bit longer for the child to learn that fairness also means giving up something. I’ll be if you tried that experiment you might find a child ready to share the ice cream. It takes a while to learn that sometimes, but children do often grasp it, and you can see them, especially if they don’t know you’re watching, sharing, giving up his or her own toy, or learning to share it with another — that takes a while, sometimes; and sometimes we forget, too soon.

And yet children often seem to grasp that spirit of generosity to others that can put many an adult to shame. And perhaps that is why Jesus said “come to me as a child does” — with a clear sense of what is fair, but also a willingness to be generous, a willingness to share with others.

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After all is said and done, Jesus does not ask heroic feats of us. He has done the heavy lifting for us. He bore the cross for our salvation, and he asks us each to take up — each of us — our own cross, not his. He carried his cross, and he only asks us to take up our own, and follow him. This yoke of our own cross is easy and the burden light. For even given his unique and particular power, he asks of us only a simple task. He does not expect us to do anything more than to accept his love: to love him and to love each other just as he has loved us.

And to help us on our way he touches us in the sacraments and he speaks a word to us in the Scriptures, and he says to us, Be made clean. Be made clean from the false self that seeks only itself, and turn to the true self that gives itself for others. Be made clean from the burden of guilt so that you may accept the yoke of service. Be made clean of the elaborate show of religion so that you can experience the simplicity of faith. Be made clean of running about in confusion and aimlessness after this or that way to salvation, so that you can run the true race with your eyes fixed on the finish line, where an imperishable crown awaits you.

The way lies before us, as particular and clear as a lane marked out on the 400-meter track; the task lies before us, as simple as putting one foot in front of the other. All we are asked to do is follow: to run with perseverance the race that is before us, led by the one who goes before us to prepare a place for us: the one who has touched us in Baptism; the one who has spoken to us in the living word of his Scriptures; the one who has washed us clean in his blood; and the one who has fed us with his own body at this holy table: even Jesus Christ, our only mediator and advocate, to whom we offer our praise and thanksgiving, now and for evermore.+

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Everything to Everybody

SJF • Epiphany 5b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.+

At the retreat I attended the week before last, the gathering reflected on the tension between the works of charity — feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, and so on — and the works of justice — seeking to transform society by getting down to the roots of what causes hunger, poverty, and an inefficient health care system. One thing with which I came away from this discussion was how, for the church, it is a “both / and” situation. We are called to help the individuals who come across our path with food, clothing, and care — like the Good Samaritan. But we are also called to work for the good of the whole society in which we live, to help fight the causes of hunger and poverty. I also noted that Jesus, in his own ministry, takes part of both aspects — immediate charity and systemic change — he heals those who come before him, but also — on the cross, and through his blood — heals and saves the whole world.

Many who have no belief in God, even a few atheists down through history, have said that while they can accept Jesus as a good and wise man, even if they don’t accept him as the Son of God; they can see he taught good things, did good things, even healed the sick — though they ascribe his ability to heal to his persuasive personality acting on suggestible individuals, rather than to supernatural power acting on disease and demons.

And it is easy to see how a shallow reading of the Gospel might lead to this assessment. Jesus does spend a good deal of his time preaching and teaching and especially healing.

Our gospel today is a good example. Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law. Word spreads and the sick and possessed of Capernaum gather at the doorstep come sundown, and he cures many of them. Even Peter sees Jesus in this light, as a great healer, and chases after him when he leaves in the early morning, to bring him back to the village to continue the healing work.

What Peter fails to understand, and what the non-believers are even further from understanding, is that Jesus does not see himself primarily as a healer of the sick, but as the bearer of a message. Jesus does do the exhausting work of healing in response to the crowds who seek his touch, and we know it was exhausting from the story of the woman with the hemorrhage; you recall, she crept up behind Jesus and said, if I only touch the hem of his garment, I’ll be healed. And she did so, and what did Jesus feel? He felt the power drain out of him, as that healing took place. So we know it was exhausting to him.

So when morning comes he slips away in the pre-dawn darkness so he can have a little rest and to collect himself, and most importantly, to pray. And when Peter comes after him, to drag him back because “everyone is searching” for him, Jesus tells him that it is time to move on to other towns, time to move on to proclaim the message, for that is what he came to do.

Jesus did not come to earth to set up a clinic, to settle down as a Galilean country doctor, but to spread the good news of salvation — which is the healing of the whole person, body and soul, from the deadly effects of living in this fallen world of ours. He came to save that world itself, from the effects of its fallenness.

Jesus did not want to be everything to everybody, a jack of all trades but master of none! Jesus came to reveal himself not as everything to everybody but as One for all, the master of God’s household, come to set that house in order. He is even more than the bearer of a message — he the message itself: he is the Word of God.

Jesus came to earth not simply to heal a few Palestinian Israelites of their maladies, but to heal all of fallen humanity from its enslavement to sin. Jesus came to earth not simply to teach some basic principles of good behavior, justice and fairness, but to be the source of light and life for the world. Jesus did not come to earth simply to spread the good news, this gospel: he was the good news. Jesus only had to be himself to be the living presence of God — the Word of God made flesh — for that is what he was. After all, there were dozens of preachers and teachers and healers in first century Israel. But there was only one Son of God.

Ultimately, the Gospel of Jesus Christ isn’t about all his good deeds as teacher or healer, but about who he was, and who he is: the Son of God, the savior of the world. This is the heart of the gospel truth.

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Saint Paul, on the other hand, knew very well that he was not the message, he was not the Word of God, but the messenger, one who delivered the Word of God. Preaching the gospel was no source of pride or boasting, it was an obligation, a commission, a duty. In his preaching Paul worked every angle, taking every opportunity to make the gospel accessible to as many different sorts and conditions of people as he could, always with that goal of winning them to Christ, always with the goal of bringing them to salvation.

Because Paul was the messenger, he knew how important it was that his message be understood. And so he took on many roles to reach many people, to meet people “where they were” and to speak to them in a language they could understand, so that the precious message wouldn’t pass them by. To his fellow Jews Paul emphasized his own background in Judaism, as a disciple of the great Rabbi Gamaliel, whose teachings are recorded in the Talmud and studied by pious Jews even to this day. Paul would argue the Torah with the best of them, as well as making use of the different traditions withing Judaism, between the Sadducees from Pharisees, for instance.

To Gentiles outside the Jewish covenant, Paul moved with the ease and liberty of a Roman citizen of no mean city, a man acquainted with the latest trends in Greek philosophy, and able to quote the classical poets to Greeks and Romans as well as he was to quote Moses to his fellow Jews.

Paul did want to be everything to everybody, but only so that he could lead them to the One for all, Jesus Christ.

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So where does the church today find itself? Are we everything to everybody? One for all? Some of the leading experts on church growth point to the booming megachurches of the South and the West. These are huge building complexes with worship auditoriums ranged with rows of reclining padded seats. Instead of hymnals and prayer books, the texts are projected on giant screens during services. And those services are accompanied by orchestras, and you won’t find a child in the congregation, because the have full nursery service in a separate space; breakfast and lunch are served before and after worship, there’s a Starbucks in the lobby, you can pay your pledge with a credit card, and during the week you can attend classes not just in Bible Study but weight-loss and aerobics. These are the churches of one-stop-shopping; and if Saint James Church is a boutique, they must be the Mall of America; and they appear at first glance to be very successful. The question is, do they have members or customers?

What has happened to the gospel that Paul wanted to make “free of charge.” In the effort to be everything to everybody, is proclaiming the gospel taking second place to meet the carefully targeted needs of a consumer market?

Saint Paul always had a very clear sense about why he was being so flexible and accommodating to those he met — so that he might by all means save some. “By all means” — in whatever way he could: the goal was to save. Certainly a church needs to be willing to be open and flexible, ready to welcome all regardless of nationality or background, their culture or class. The church also is charged to provide for basic human needs. And I think we do a good job of that here at Saint James, with our efforts to help the Carpenters’ Kids; and I trust we will do even better when we complete our work on restoring the parish hall, and now that the basement office is brand-spanking new, and when we move our financial operations into that space, we will be able to start up our food pantry and thrift shop.

We are called to be more than welcoming and accommodating. We are called to provide those we welcome and accommodate with the Gospel, not just with comfortable seats and nice music, with child care and yoga classes — even with food and clothing itself — but with that message that doesn’t just reassure but challenges; not something that merely entertains, but transforms.

We can learn from Paul and his willingness to be everything to everybody, learn to be open and welcoming, and flexible and ready to adapt to the needs of a changing world. But we can also learn from Paul and from our Lord how important it is to concentrate on the message of salvation revealed in Jesus Christ.

Jesus healed, but then he moved on to proclaim the message, and finally to Jerusalem and Calvary, to the cross and the tomb, and then on to glory. The church gathers here and everywhere it gathers to meet that same Jesus, the Jesus who healed, but also the Jesus who died for us and rose again; the Jesus who shed his blood upon the cross for our salvation: which is not merely the healing of our bodies but of our souls and spirits — he is the “One for all” to whom all of our “everything to everybody” evangelism leads.

May we never tire of the daily tasks of charity, but also be not so wearied that we fail in the tasks of justice. May we welcome all, to guide them to the One. May we be strengthened to remain true to the obligation and commission that we share with Saint Paul, to proclaim the gospel, so that by all means — in every way we can — we might save some.+

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Knowing and Loving

SJF • Epiphany 4b 2009 • Tobias Haller BSG
Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge, but anyone who loves God is known by him.+

Alexander Pope, the English poet of the eighteenth century, wrote that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Sometimes, Saint Paul assures us, too much knowledge — or rather thinking you know more than you do — can be dangerous as well. Ignorance can get you into trouble, but so can thinking that you know something about which you are mistaken.

This is where we get into the world of known unknowns — things you know that you do not know, and unknown unknowns — things you don’t even know that you don’t know. For instance, I know that I don’t know how much the moon weighs — though I could find out by looking it up. That’s a known unknown. But in the days before Galileo discovered them, no one would have wondered how much the moons of Jupiter weighed, because no one even imagined that Jupiter had any moons. That was, at that time, an unknown unknown.

But what is even more dangerous is to have in your head something you think is a known known — something you are sure you know — but about which you are mistaken. Someone who thinks the moon is made of green cheese, for example, may also know that the moon exists and how much it weighs, but be entirely mistaken about the material from which it is made. And dare I remind us that the man who brought up all these distinctions in recent years, between known unknowns and unknown unknowns, Donald Rumsfeld, was himself a victim of his own partial and incorrect knowledge — his belief in the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — when there weren’t any there. When a little knowledge, partial knowledge, puffs you up to the point where you think you know more than you actually do, trouble is sure to happen.

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One day a rushed businessman had a few moments between connecting flights at an airport, and he decided to go to the crowded café for a snack. He bought a newspaper at the newsstand, then got a paper cup of coffee at the counter, along with a very tempting bag of Famous Amos cookies. Juggling his shoulderbag and his newspaper, his coffee and cookies, his hat, coat and gloves, he found his way to the tables in the food court. In the midst of the crowd he was pleased to find an empty table, where he settled all his belongings, sat down and began reading the paper. A few moments later, a stranger’s voice attracted his attention, and peering over the top of his paper asked if he might share the table. The man gave a curt and businesslike nod and went back to reading.

Another few moments passed as he perused the news on the latest declines and crises, when he heard, coming from the other side of the newspaper wall he had erected, the distinct crinkle of a Famous Amos cookie bag being opened. Lowering the paper, he saw that the man sitting opposite him had opened his bag of cookies, which he’d left lying on the table between them, and smiling at him all the while with a look of guilty pleasure, the stranger took one out and ate it. Well, the man was speechless; but he reached over, took a cookie out of the bag, and with a somewhat defiant crunch ate it. The stranger smiled again, and took another cookie from the bag, after which the man, glaring at him, also took another himself and munched it even more defiantly. This went on for a bit, until the stranger reached into the bag and came up with the last cookie. Smiling, he broke it in half, popped half in his mouth and handed the other half to the still-astonished businessman. Shaking his head in disbelief at this audacity, he nonetheless took the half-cookie and ate it even more aggressively, as if by crunching fiercely he might finally convict his opponent of his incredible presumption.

Just as he had worked himself up to the point of saying what he thought of this unbelievable behavior, a voice came over the PA system to announce his connecting flight was boarding. He hastily gathered up his shoulderbag, coat and gloves and newspaper, and made his way through the bustling crowds to the gate. As he approached the desk, he reached into the side-flap of his shoulder-bag to get the ticket for the connecting flight, and there, next to the ticket, neatly nestled, his fingers encountered his unopened bag of Famous Amos cookies.

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Knowledge puffs up, especially too little knowledge, while love, even a little bit of love, can build up. The Corinthians, about whom we heard last week, and about whom we will hear more as we move towards Lent, the Corinthians thought of themselves as particularly knowledgeable and sophisticated. Corinth was, after all, a cultural center of ancient Greece, a cosmopolitan city. What Paul was attempting to teach them, in an unusually gentle way for him, was that maybe they didn’t know quite as much as they thought, or know about what really mattered. The Corinthians’ knowledge told them that as there is only one true God, that idols are mere nothings, and not worth worrying about, so eating food offered to them was permissible, since in their sophistication they knew that such an offering was meaningless. But like the man who thought the stranger was taking his cookies, they were only seeing things from their side, from their perspective.

Paul tried to show them the other side, what their knowledge might do, what results it might have, if some Christian believer less sophisticated than they were to see them eating food in a pagan temple. “Take care,” Paul said, “that this liberty of yours does not become a stumbling block to the weak.” So Paul urged them to temper their knowledge with love and consideration for their weaker brothers and sisters, who might take offense at their sophisticated liberty. He urged them to be more like the stranger in our airport story, who though he could have been indignant with this man for taking half of what really were his cookies, smiled tolerantly and even shared the last half-cookie with him. His knowledge, the generous man’s, while complete, was tempered with charity. He would not, as Paul said, allow food to become a cause of someone’s fall.

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A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And much knowledge, untempered by love, can be a very dangerous thing. For knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Knowledge in itself is morally neutral, like a shovel. Use a shovel to dig a ditch, or plant a garden, and you accomplish something useful. But use a shovel to whack someone over the head and you have turned it into a weapon.

Knowledge, by itself, does not always lead to virtue, and knowledge without love can be cold, empty and vicious. As we see from our Gospel this morning, the demon recognized Jesus immediately, before many of the disciples, even, and said, “I know who you are.” You’d better believe the demons know who Jesus is, and as Saint James famously said, they tremble in that knowledge. Their knowledge does them no good, because they rejected God at the very beginning, choosing to take their own course rather than rejoicing in the one God had intended for them.

So Jesus doesn’t engage the demon in a debate concerning the facts. The facts are as the demon states them. No, Jesus simply orders the demon to shut up and get out, to leave God’s human creature, God’s human child, alone! As the old Appalachian folk song says, “Get your finger out of it, it don’t belong to you!”

Yes, knowledge in itself, without love, is worthless, even dangerous; it puffs up; it gives those who possess it an inflated estimation of themselves; while love, which is so often expressed in humility and charity, is blessed, and it builds up.

The Corinthians didn’t heed Paul’s warning, and continued bickering for decades more before their church finally fell apart. That is a warning to us all not to place our trust in our knowledge, however extensive we may think it is, but to put our trust in God’s love. Knowledge always has limits, and can never be perfect until that final day when all is revealed. In the meantime, let us take care with one another, loving first rather than leaping to judgment on the basis of uncertain knowledge. For in all that we do with each other, can we really be sure we know whose cookies we’re eating?

Let us pray, as we do in the final blessing, for the peace of God that passes all understanding, that we may be kept safe and secure in the knowledge, but more importantly, in the love, of Jesus Christ our Lord.+

The Fire Alarm

SJF • Epiphany 3b 2009 • Tobias Haller BSG
And immediately they left their nets and followed him.+

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, once said that the Constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech does not give one the right to yell “Fire” in a crowded theater. He was assuming, of course, that there was no fire. It would indeed be a dangerous prank to shout “Fire” in any crowded place — when there is no fire. People could be seriously injured, maybe even killed, in the panic.

But what if there is a fire? What if there is some imminent danger and you see it? What do the signs in the subway warn us? “Si ves algo, di algo — if you see something, say something.” Surely it is incumbent upon you to do something to warn those around you of danger they — and you — are in, and shouting might just be the best way to do it. This is part of our understanding of civic duty — the responsibility we bear for one another. And it is no accident that the ancient rabbis taught that one of the principle failings of the wicked city of Sodom was precisely that people there did not look after one another, did not look out for others. It was said that the people of that wicked town were the sort who if they saw both your and their house on fire, would fight the fire at their own house but leave yours to burn.

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In today’s Gospel Jesus bursts upon the scene fresh from his baptism and temptation in the wilderness, which in the headlong style of Mark’s Gospel have taken up only the first thirteen verses. We are hardly off the first page, and yet the story presses on. The story has hardly begun and here is Jesus storming in and crying out, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” And immediately, to use one of Mark’s favorite words, immediately he calls those four disciples — Simon, Andrew, our own patron James and his brother John — and immediately they follow him, leaving behind their nets, their boats, and in the case of the two sons of Zebedee, their bewildered father and the hired servants. It is as if Jesus has burst into the crowded theater and shouted, “Fire!” and the audience has jumped up and run for the exits, tossing buckets of popcorn in the air and leaving their coats and handbags behind in the rush to escape the disaster.

That is the immediacy with which Jesus delivered his message, and the immediacy with which the received it — at least by some of those who heard it. And let us recall what “immediate” means — with nothing in between, no intermission, no transition or connection. Those who follow Jesus will leave behind all the connections to their former lives: their nets, their boats, even their families. They will be transformed into disciples, and given a new task, to fish for people. And it happens all at once, without preparation or warning or transition. Jesus calls; they follow; no questions asked — immediately.

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It seems strange then to turn to our reading from Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. In contrast with the panicked immediacy of Mark’s gospel it is as if Saint Paul is saying, “Not so fast!” He says, “Let each of you lead the life that the Lord has assigned,” and later, “Let each of you remain in the condition in which you were called.” Could it be, after Jesus calls out, “Fire!” that Paul should counter, “Sorry folks; false alarm”? Of course not, and if we look more closely at what Paul is saying, we can learn that far from contradicting Jesus’ gospel, Paul’s warning is — in its own way — a realization of it.

Paul is not saying, ignore the call of Christ: on the contrary Paul is saying that Christ is calling at least some of the Corinthians to do what they are already doing, because that is what God wants. Let each of you lead the life, he says, that the Lord assigned, and the state in which God has called you.

While Jesus did and does call some to leave their nets and boats and families behind to follow him as disciples on the road, Paul assures the Corinthians that Jesus also calls some people — in fact most people — to stay right where they are, right as they are, to “bloom where they are planted” as the old saying goes. Paul assures us that God calls some to stay put and do the work God has given them to do with singleness of heart, and to do that work with the newly discovered commission that it is God’s work, and that the kingdom needs those who toil at home as much as it needs those who toil on the road. And what could be more immediate than continuation? Continuing to do God’s work without intermission, being assured at last that this is the task the Lord has assigned? Discipleship takes many forms: for some it means totally changing their lives, for others, a deeper commitment to the life they already lead.

For what matters ultimately is how one’s heart stands with God, how well one’s heart is attuned to God’s will for each and every one of us. The Corinthian congregation was being split apart by some troublemakers who were insisting that in order for Gentile men to become Christian they had to be circumcised. Others felt that anyone who had given in to that teaching had betrayed the faith, and should seek to remove the marks of circumcision. It is hard for us to imagine the church being torn apart over such matters, though we have been through many similar debates in recent years, which centuries or decades from now may seem just as absurd as the circumcision argument did to Saint Paul. “Circumcision is nothing, uncircumcision is nothing,” Paul affirms, “but obeying the commandments of God is everything. Let each of you remain in the condition in which you were called.” The problem, of course, as I’m sure some of the Corinthians must have said to Paul, is that the Scripture was clear. The Scripture demanded circumcision of any Gentile male who wanted to be part of the holy people, anyone who wanted to eat of the Passover. But as Paul would also say to the Corinthians, “That was then; this is now. Since Christ has come, he is our Passover who has been sacrificed for us. Things have changed, and Paul is trying to get the Corinthians to hear God’s call to them in the blood of Jesus, over the noise of their squabbles — and they squabbled over just about everything, spending their time in useless controversies instead of building up the church for which Christ died and rose again, and to whom he gave his body and his blood. That is the thing Paul keeps trying to call them back to again and again — the significance of that holy meal, the Holy Eucharist. But, of course, they even argued about that!

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This is a powerful lesson for us. This is a lesson for us as a congregation, and a lesson for all Christian congregations, a warning not to act like the Corinthians and let the church fall apart over matters about which God doesn’t give a hoot.

But there is also a lesson for us as individuals. Some of us will be called to life-changing tasks, like the fishermen by the sea-side, called to follow Jesus by leaving behind the nets of entanglement with the old life, abandoning the boats that provided security and livelihood, and even forsaking the comfort and support of family and home. Other of us, and if we can judge from Paul it will be the majority, will be called to follow Jesus by finding his commandments for us in our hearts, by discovering, like little Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” that there’s no place like home, and that we can be most effective blooming where we’re planted, bearing fruit in season and flourishing with leaves that do not wither.

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Downstairs in my office is a picture of a liturgy in this church from about 1985, and I can see myself in it, and I’m sitting right there. Father Basil Law is opposite on the other side, as Bishop Paul Moore preaches in the aisle. I had no idea at the time that God would call me one day to follow him on a path that would lead me to seminary and to priesthood, and a parish up in Yonkers; but then by his grace to be planted right back here just a few feet from where I was almost 25 years ago!

But that is how the call of God works sometimes. Sometimes when God yells out “Fire” you will discover that the fire is in your own heart, and it is a fire God doesn’t want you to put out, but to share, and God will help you find the place to share it best, if you will let him. That is what Paul tried to tell the difficult Corinthians, that by squabbling over the gift they were destroying it, like peevish children who fight over a toy and end up breaking it beyond repair, and neither of them can enjoy it. God calls us, all of us and each of us, sometimes to journey, sometimes to remain, but always to be his. God calls us each by name as I said two weeks ago, and gives us each a task as I said last week. He knows our going out and our coming in, our rising up to follow on the road, or our sitting down to work where we are. May we — each of us and all of us — answer his call, be faithful to our task, and ever conscious of his presence, the burning of the Holy Spirit, the fire of his love in our hearts; to whom we give — as Father Basil Law was always wont to say from this pulpit — as is most justly due, all might, majesty, power and dominion, henceforth and forever more.+

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