Who Are You?

Do you know who you are? and what God has made of you?

SJF • Advent 3b • Tobias S Haller BSG

The priests and Levites asked John, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” +

“Who are you?” That’s a question that confronts us all from time to time, probably more often than we are aware. Sometimes we proclaim our identity without our even noticing we are doing so, as when we wear an I.D. card at work, clipped to a lapel or a pocket or a belt-loop, or on a cord or a ribbon or a chain around our necks. Most of us have probably been to meetings or conferences and been presented with one of those big sticky name tags saying, “Hello, My Name Is…” with a blank. Making sure everyone knows who’s who is important — at least everyone who is supposed to know. By wearing such a name tag you broadcast your identity to whomever wishes to take the time to look.

I was once at a conference out west where the delegates were warned to remove their name tags if they ventured outside of the complex, outside of the hotel conference center— a thief could see your name, would know your room was empty, and might break in during your absence! Even something as seemingly innocent and harmless as a name tag
could get you into trouble.

Other forms of the question, “Who are you?” are even more obviously threatening. A sentry challenges you as you approach the border: “Who goes there?” Or the question can be phrased in such a way as to make you feel quite uncomfortable or useless or less than worthy, as in, “Who do you think you are?” or, even worse, “Who do you think you are?”

John the Baptist was on the receiving end of just this kind of harsh question in today’s Gospel. “Who are you?” the authorities demanded. John first established who he was not: not the Messiah, not Elijah, not the prophet. “Then who are you?” they demanded with impatience. John replied, “Just a voice crying out in the wilderness, Straighten things up! Get your act together.”

Not content with that answer, they continued to press him. “Then why are you baptizing, if your aren’t the Messiah, or Elijah, or the prophet?” (This is where the“Who do you think you are” tone of voice comes in!) And John had the last word as he says, in effect, “If you think the Messiah will simply baptize with water, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

John knew who he was and who he wasn’t. And he knew that his call from God to prepare the way took precedence over other people’s demands that he behave himself, that he not get above his place — which is to say, they really wanted him to behave not as himself — not doing what he knew God wanted him to do — but to behave the way they wanted him to behave, to be what they thought he ought to be,

and do what they thought ought to be done; and more importantly for him not do the things they didn’t want him to do.

But John knew who he was and who he wasn’t, that he was not the light, but a witness called by God to testify to that light, and he would behave himself accordingly, whether the authorities liked it or not. He was a messenger, and he would deliver his message even if they killed him for it; which indeed they did. He knew what God wanted of him, and he did it.

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John is not the only one in our readings today who — at God’s call — finds himself behaving differently than his original identity might indicate, differently than people might expect. That is the wonderful thing about God’s call, God’s empowering call, God’s transforming call. It leads to behavior out of all keeping with human expectations, human limitations, some times even our own limitations, our own low expectations of ourselves.

Isaiah understands this personally: He knows that the Spirit of God is upon him, from the time of his first call, his first anointing, when he said, Lord, who am I? I am not worthy!

God sent an angel to take a live coal from the altar and touch it to his lips, to transform him to give him the strength and confidence to say, “Here am I; send me!”

Isaiah understands the transforming power of God, and he assures us in our reading today that at God’s call a great transformation will take place. The people will be given a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness in place of mourning. They will be inspired to raise up the ruins, to restore the desolations; they will be clothed like brides and bridegrooms with the garments of righteousness.

At God’s call things get turned completely around; as we heard last week: even the mountains get leveled, the valleys get filled in. And this week Isaiah continues his vision of this new world, where the behavior of God’s people is governed not by who they think they are, or what others expect of them, but by God’s penetrating and energizing and transforming call to them to be what God intends them to be.

In the fallen world, people are expected to act in accordance with their perceived identity, to behave themselves in accordance with the world’s demands and the limitations of their standing in society. Everybody in the fallen world had best know his or her place and position in the pecking order. But in God’s topsey-turvey world the reality is different: when we become conscious of God’s call, we are not limited to act only as people expect. It is our call from God, not other people’s expectations, that governs our behavior. We are not limited by our apparent identity.

We are called by God, who shatters expectations, who creates new heavens and a new earth, in which the former things are not even called to mind. We behave ourselves in accordance with God’s call, not the world’s limits. We behave ourselves in accordance with our deepest, truest identity, as children of God, made in God’s image, redeemed by God’s love, clothed with God’s righteousness, and sanctified entirely by the God of Peace. And that’s when we can do more than we ever could imagine possible.

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I would like to conclude my reflection this morning with a word or two about one of the great saints of the church — what better way to honor the examples of people God has called than to raise up our awareness of them!

For God calls some of the strangest people to his service: I mean, look around! Look at this crew today; we are all called, my brothers and sisters, strange as we may be God calls us and wants to make use of us.

Well, one of the strangest people God ever called was named — get ready — Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky. (He’s got the whole alphabet in there somewhere...) He was an unlikely figure to become a Christian saint. He started his life asa Lithuanian Jew, but he became an Episcopal priest here in New York— he even studied at the same seminary that I attended down in Manhattan — and he was elected the Anglican Bishop of Shanghai, China, in 1877, but then, he suffered a stroke in 1883, resigned and settled in Tokyo, Japan, where he died in 1906. Now that’s some unexpected journey; from a childhood in Lithuania, to death in Tokyo, with New York and China in between! And some might think his journey ended in China with the stroke that left him almost completely paralyzed. But the fact is, he kept working on a project he started before the stroke: he set out translating the Bible into Classical Chinese. In spite of the stroke, Schereschewsky continued working on this project, typing about two thousand pages of text, poking at his typewriter with the one finger of one hand — the only part of his body he could still move. In 1902, a few years before he died, he was recorded as saying, “I have sat in this chair for 20 years. It seemed very hard at first. But God knew best. He kept me for the work for which I am best fitted.”

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God calls us to be what God wants us to be, God calls us to the work for which we are best fitted, for which he created us to be and re-creates us to be — clothed in his power — and God can make use of us strange creatures, even when we might say, How useless is an old man who can only sit in a chair and type with one finger! God knows all the possibilities that are before us, and within us, and inspires our hearts to do what we can with what we have,

with the strength God provides. Isaiah knew that God would transform the world. John the Baptist knew that the light towards which he bore testimony would one day shine brightly through the dark world’s midwinter night. God calls us to be what God wants us to be, what God created us to be, and re-creates us to be, what God inspires us to be, and lifts us up to be, and sometimes, as in the case of Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky, what he sets us down to be. God does know best — and God calls us, us strange creatures, to do the work for which he knows we are best suited, for which he equips us with the skills to work in just such a way as to work God’s will, even in our infirmity and weakness, but all to God’s glory.

So when you are asked, “Who are you?”; when the border-guards of this fallen world challenge you with “Who goes there?”; when the proud and impatient try to put you down with a “who do you think you are?” you can say to them with all confidence, I am a child of God and I will follow God’s call, and I am going where God sends me, or staying put where God puts me! But whatever I do, God is the one who has called — and who are you to deny that call?+

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Homeland Insecurity

The call goes out: be alert, stay awake.

SJF • Advent 1b • Tobias S Haller BSG
Jesus said, Therefore, keep awake; for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.

Ever since the 2001 terrorist highjackings of planes used in the attacks on New York and Washington and the one that crashed in Pennsylvania, Americans have lived under a cloud of uncertainty such as has never before overcast our land. Gone are the days of, “it can’t happen here.” Not only has it happened, it has happened with a vengeance. And ever since then we’ve lived with the heightened awareness that it could happen again. Just when we thought things might return to normal, something happens somewhere in the world — in London or in Paris or in Nigeria — to remind us it might happen here again. We are geared to that motto, “If you see something, say something” — and every package sitting on a subway seat takes on a threatening air; and the color codes of yellow, orange and red alerts push us to the fiery end of the rainbow.

We all know how wearying this can be, perpetually being on our toes in this jaundice-yellow-alert world, and wondering when the next terrorist shoe-bomb might drop, when the next cloud of anthrax might spew through out of the air of a little Piper Cub airplane, or botulism get dumped into our reservoir just a few blocks from here, or Ebola deliberately be spread. For it isn’t just bombs any more, in the days of SARS and Ebola and avian flu. I grew up in the days of “duck and cover” - but now it’s “cover your cough” and slather Purell on your hands. Boy, is the Purell company making out! We become numb in this constant state of alert, and so, we become less alert than we really should be.

And it is important to be vigilant, we who have been taught that an empty backpack left on a subway train is not something to be ignored but reported; we who have learned the drill for quick traveling through the airport screening devices — what to wear and what not to wear! These daily reminders are there to snap our attention back into focus, to call us up sharp with the realization that we are at war — a war not fought simply on the battlefields, but in our airspace, on our street corners and in our public transportation system, in the air we breathe and the hands we shake. This call to keep alert is no nonsense.

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We in the church are also called to keep alert — by our Lord. And the church’s Homeland Security System has been working for quite a bit longer than our nation’s. We’ve been on guard ever since our Lord ascended into heaven and told us, through the disciples, that he would one day return. But because the return has been so long-delayed, so long-expected, we experience the fatigue that comes with trying constantly to be alert. And so the church has its color-coded system too: though the colors are different from those used in Homeland Security — from the other end of the rainbow. Our major color for alert is purple: the purple of Advent, which is the purple of royalty, to remind us that the message of Advent is, “the King is coming; be alert.”

Jesus gives us the example of a man who leaves his home in the care of servants, each servant with a task to perform, each one with a job. And the warning is: be at your work when the master returns; don’t let him find you asleep at the switch, or snoozing by the door. Be watchful, be ready, for you do not know when the master will return. It could be in the evening, even at midnight, or at the break of day.

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When you are an employee, you know how important it is to be found working when your boss comes around to check up on how things are going. It is truly amazing how quickly a game of solitaire can disappear from a computer screen, when you hear footsteps behind you! For you know the only way to be ready, is to be ready. Preparedness, by its very nature, is not something you can do at the last minute!

We are called to be awake, awake in the middle of this world’s long night, the particular “middle” that Jesus speaks of, the middle between his first coming among us as a child, and his second coming among us as a king in glory. We live in the middle between his first advent and his second. And we had best be prepared, even if he does not return on our watch.

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Some people have tried to combine these two forms of preparation, combining the sacred and the secular, the church and the state, the watchfulness of Homeland Security and the watchfulness of the Advent season. Along with storms and plagues of this last year I’m sure you’ve heard some folks use language of the Apocalypse — as they do any time anything terrible happens. You’ve heard me say this before. Several times since I came here in 1999, we’ve seen the announcements and heard the predictions from the far-out fringes. Some see the war in the Middle East as a fulfillment of ancient prophecy; and when you add the recent storms and earthquakes and epidemics, well, they are just sure that the second coming is right around the corner.

Well, as I’ve assured you in the past, they are definitely and completely wrong, for two reasons. One is common sense and the other is Scriptural. First of all, the common sense: these are in large part the same people who do this every time something happens — you’d think they’d learn, or we’d learn. They keep warning people it’s about to happen; and the date comes... and goes... and everything’s fine. How many of us here remember being told you had to hoard your canned goods before midnight on December 31, 1999. Remember that? Now, I don’t want to embarrass anyone, and I’ll be the first to admit I had some bottled water and extra batteries on hand that week. But it is not because I was afraid that God was going to be ending the world on New Year’s Eve — it’s that I was less trusting of Con Edison! Moreover, those of us who were here that night, here at Saint James Church for our midnight New Year’s Eve service starting at 11 p.m., know that the Lord did come among us that night — in the same way he’s been coming to Christians for as long as they’ve gathered in twos or threes in his name to break bread and to pray, right here at this altar, hidden under the forms of bread and wine, and coming into our hearts that cold winter’s night.

Second, and most important, is the fact that those who claim to know when Jesus is coming are contradicting Jesus himself. In today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “About that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” So those who claim to know when Jesus is coming are claiming to know something that Jesus himself said he didn’t know, nor the angels.

Think about it: the very reason Jesus told his disciples to be alert, to stay awake, was because he could not tell them exactly when he was going to come again — a secret known to the Father alone. If Jesus had known exactly when he was coming, why tell them to be alert, to stay awake and be on the watch? He could just as well have said, “I’ll return on the 28th of March in the year 2087. So just take it easy until then.” But Jesus assures us that he doesn’t know when he is going to come again to judge the world, only that he is going to come again to judge the world. And so he said, Be alert, keep awake.

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One thing is abundantly clear from our gospel message today: as the bumper sticker puts it, “Jesus is coming; Look busy!” We believe that God had (and has) a purpose, an aim in Creation, and anyone who’s pitched a ball knows that if you have an aim, you have a target. God had an aim in casting creation into being, as it arced on up through the history of the chosen people, on to the coming of Christ at his incarnation, and on forward to a future as-yet-unknown. That is when he will come again and make the whole creation new. For God’s creation is not an aimless exercise.

My brothers and sisters, that we are called to keep awake in the middle between these two extremes; neither thinking we’ve got the timetable for the last judgment in our pockets or on our mobile phones, nor imagining that there is no last judgment coming. No, we are called to stay awake in the middle, in the middle of the night, in the middle of our lives, in the middle of a world that alternately bristles and panics or wearies and ignores. We have been warned to be at our work, and to be alert to our salvation when it comes. For that is God’s purpose, God’s aim for us, that we do God’s work, and that we might be saved.

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It was said that the great evangelist John Wesley was once asked, “What would you do if you knew the Lord was going to return tomorrow afternoon?” He said, “I would tonight sleep soundly, and rise at my accustomed hour and greet the day with prayer; then I should visit any of my congregation who are sick, and spend the rest of my time at my desk composing my sermon for the next Sunday: for I would want the Lord to find me at the work he has given me to do, and not in idleness. He has given me many days to serve him; and I would serve him as well on the last as on the first.”

Jesus may come tomorrow afternoon. He may come next month; he may come a million years from now. When he comes is not for us to know. That he will come is the substance of our faith. The best way to be prepared for his return is to recognize that he comes among us still in everyone we serve and honor in his name. Even though we do not know the hour of his coming, we are called to be awake and at work in the middle of this world’s long night. We’ve got the graveyard shift, my friends, and we are to keep awake, to be alert, to do God’s will, for we do not know when the cry of alarm will sound, when the last trumpet will blow, the king return in glory. May we be found doing his will when he comes.+

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The King Is Here

SJF • Proper 29a • Tobias S Haller BSG
Jesus said, When the son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory... and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

We come now to the last Sunday of the church’s calendar year — you know our calendar doesn’t quite match up with the secular and civil calendar that starts in January. Our church year starts on the First Sunday of Advent — next Sunday — and so this church year ends this week.

It ends with a celebration that goes in some places by the name of the Feast of Christ the King. It’s a reminder of who our King is, the King of kings and Lord of lords, the one under whose feet, as Saint Paul told the Ephesians, all things are put in subjection.

Our gospel today shows this our King in action. The Son of Man comes in his glory, sits on his throne, and executes judgment. Talk about an executive order! For this is not just an order, but a judgment; and a chilling judgment it is. For those who are rewarded are not great heroes and martyrs. No, the reward of blessing is given to people who did very ordinary things: who fed the hungry and gave the thirsty something to drink, who welcomed the stranger and clothed the naked, who cared for the sick and visited prisoners.

And those who are judged guilty, are not perpetrators of horrible crimes — those who here are sent away into eternal punishment are not mass murders and terrible villains. No, they are people who simply failed to do the same things the blessèd ones did: who gave no food to the hungry or drink to the thirsty, who shunned the stranger and provided the naked with nothing to wear, who didn’t care for the sick or visit those in prison.

And the reason these two groups of people are judged as blessed or cursed is because those they served or rejected were not just anybody — they were the King himself in disguise.

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We’ve all heard stories about kings in disguise. It is a daring enterprise for a leader to put on a false beard and eyepatch and a humble garment and wander among his subjects. He had best have a strong will and a solid ego, for the things he hears may not be to his liking. Without his crown, without his royal robes of state, a king may be treated just like anybody else — for good or ill depending on who is doing the treating. One of my favorite stories is that of King Alfred, who was hiding from Danish invaders back in the ninth century. He hid undercover for a while in a peasant’s hut. One day the peasant’s wife told him to keep an eye on cakes baking on the griddle while she went out on an errand. With all of his troubles, his mind wandered, and he allowed the cakes to burn. When the woman of the house returned she gave him a ferocious tongue lashing — not knowing, of course, that she was speaking to her king.

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But we don’t have that excuse. We’ve been given the warning of who our King is. Jesus, our King, has told us in words of one syllable that as we treat the least of those who are members of his family, so we have treated him. When we fail to give food to the hungry, when we neglect to give drink to the thirsty, when we don’t welcome the stranger, or fail to give clothing to the naked, when we don’t care for the sick and ignore the prisoners: we are doing it to him.

We at Saint James Church have a number of opportunities, not just as individuals as we walk through the streets day by day, but as a congregation, to honor our Lord’s royal presence among us. Let me just mention a couple with immediate impact in the next few weeks.

First of all, this Thursday is Thanksgiving Day, and as we have done for the past several years we will have a midday worship service and then serve hot meals to any who come to our door that afternoon; and I invite all of you to come and help in that service and to share in that fellowship.

Second, your vicar and deacon have at our disposal a small fund which comes from the loose plate offering received several times each year. It is called “adiscretionary fund,” and it is used entirely for charity and outreach. When someone off the street comes to the office door and asks for something to eat, or help filling a prescription, or money for the train home to Yonkers, it is from this fund that we’re able to give a fare-card, or a few dollars. Deacon Bill has been using part of his discretionary fund to provide food to the hungry through the Elijah Project: it’s a wonderful and creative way to share, and involves members of the parish in the work of sharing. And believe you me, it is at this time of the rolling year, as the winds grow cold, that more and more people are in need of help. So today’s loose plate offering will be set aside for that purpose, and so I ask you to be generous, helping us to help others in your name. There is an old saying that the ministry of hospitality may lead you to entertaining angels unaware. Believe me, when we serve any who are in need we are not just serving angels, we are serving Christ our King as well.

These are just two concrete and real things you can do to honor our King in disguise as he spends time among us, in the here and now, so that in the day of the great “then” he will recognize us as having treated him as he deserves.

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I mentioned King Alfred a moment ago. Well, a story is told of another English king, George V, who planned to pay a visit to the northern industrial city of Leeds. The town council was very excited, and posted banners announcing the royal visit throughout the city. Multitudes flocked in the streets to celebrate, waving the Union Jack and cheering to the sounds of the brass bands. A children’s school was fortunate to have its schoolyard right on the route of the railway train upon which the king would leave the city. It was agreed and arranged that the children would be outside in formation to greet the king as he went past, and he would wave at them in return. The children were, of course, terribly excited. The great day came and the children were ready to sing their song of greeting. Down the track, out of the long tunnel, the royal train came into the bright sunlight, the engine steaming and chugging its smokestack, the steam whistle loudly announcing the arrival. The train slowed as it came by the schoolyard and his Majesty King George V emerged from the coach at the end of the train and took up his place on the platform where the assembled children could see him. He was dressed as he normally did: in a black morning coat, striped trousers and vest, and a silk top hat. He waved politely to the children with his pocket handkerchief, and then the train picked up speed and he slipped back into the coach. The cheering of the excited children subsided, until there was only the sound of one little girl who was weeping her heart out. A teacher asked the little girl why she was crying. And the child looked up, and through her sobs and tears bitterly complained, “I thought we were going to see the king; but it was only a man in a top hat!” She was expecting to see the king looking as he did in the picture on the classroom wall, with his crown and red robe trimmed with ermine. That’s what she was expecting, but that’s not what she saw.

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What do we expect our King to look like? As we pass by a hungry person on the street do we think, “This is not our king, for where is his crown?” When we see someone cold and shivering in a threadbare coat, do we think, “This is not our king, for where is his regal robe?” When we hear that someone is sick and alone, do we assume, “This could not be our king, for a king would have courtiers and officials to take care of him.” When we see a stranger, do we say to ourselves, “This could not be our king, for where are his ambassadors?” When we hear of a person in prison, do we think, “This could not be our King, for no king would ever be convicted of a crime and sent to prison!”

What do we expect our King to look like? He has told us exactly how he looks. He looks like a man — a man hungry or thirsty; he looks like a woman — a woman far from home and looking for help; he looks like a child — a child sick and alone. For our King is King even without his crown, even without his robe of state; even without his top hat and morning coat! He is our King even when he is hungry, even when he is thirsty, or sick, or naked, or lonely, or in prison. He is even our King when he is nailed to a cross — and he did that for us.

What shall we do for him? He has told us. “Oh, that today, you would hearken to his voice.”+

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Dressed for Dinner

One garment can save your life... and it is free for the asking!

SJF • Proper 23a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
When the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe… +

Have you ever gone to a dinner party or social function and arrived to find that you were not, as the signs outside some posh restaurants say, wearing “proper attire?” Depending on the degree of the inappropriateness, this can be either mildly annoying or intensely embarrassing! Some fancy restaurants will keep a stock of ties or sports jackets on hand for the sake of gentlemen who show up deficient in one category or the other. Snooty they may be, but they are not so foolish as to lose business by turning away potential customers. Still, you might well risk getting a haughty look and a gesture towards the door, if not a helping hand from a bouncer. And if it’s a private function, you have no recourse, but to endure “the eye” from all the other guests.

It is very uncomfortable to feel out of place, and since, as the politically incorrect saying goes, “clothes make the man,” few things in polite society make one feel more out of place than being improperly dressed for the occasion.

And there are times when being improperly dressed can be more than an embarrassment. It can be a matter of life and death. You probably know the various TV reality shows that consist of amateur video of terrible accidents and disasters. It’s not the kind of show I really care to watch; not because it’s violent — I mean, I like a good action picture as well as anybody — but because unlike the fictional tales of Bond or Bourne, these videos are real, real tragedies of real people in horrible situations, and I just don’t like the idea of real tragedy being transformed into entertainment.

One of them, though, a terrifying one that I did happen to see, starts calmly enough. What you see through the camera is a group of skydivers jumping from a plane; and the camera follows them because the cameraman is one of them. As they descend towards the distant ground they are weightless, and you see them do a wonderful ariel ballet that forms all sorts of lovely patterns, then one by one they open their chutes and disappear.

But then, something goes wrong. The camera starts to shake uncontrollably, then begins a free-fall of its own, tumbling and twisting dizzily as it plummets to the ground, occasionally as it spins catching sight of a terrified man twisting in the air. In the excitement of the filming, the cameraman himself has forgotten his parachute. The most important thing to wear, the thing that would have saved his life is still sitting up on the plane, where it can do him no good.

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Yes, indeed, what you wear can save your life. In today’s gospel we have just such a story of how serious failing to dress properly can be. This isn’t just any old dinner party; this is a royal wedding banquet. And here is one of the guests sitting, as it were, in cutoff shorts, a tank-top, and flip flops. No wonder he is speechless when the king confronts him! What can he say? Before he can say a word, he is bound hand and foot and tossed out into the darkness outside the brightly lit banqueting hall, there to weep and gnash his teeth.

We are apt to sympathize with this poor guy. After all, he wasn’t one of the original invited guests — they refused to come, and they also faced the king’s rage. This man without a wedding garment is one of the second-string guests, the stand-ins, the ordinary folks who just happened to be in the neighborhood going about their business — or lack of business — when the king’s slaves gathered them all into the banquet hall. How could he be expected to have a wedding robe?

Yet that seems to be just what this unreasonable king expects, and out the poor guy goes. As with so many of Jesus’ parables, it doesn’t seem fair. He hadn’t been invited the first time around. He hadn’t asked to be invited the second time around. Yet he is treated as if he deliberately chose, with full notice and plenty of opportunity, as if he had received an engraved wedding invitation stating what proper dress would be, to come to the wedding without the proper attire.

So what is this parable all about? In particular, what is this wedding robe, that makes it so important? The man in question, after all, isn’t the bride or the groom, or a groomsman or the best man; he’s just one of the guests — invited at the last minute at that. What is Jesus teaching us in this parable? What’s is it about?

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First let me note that not all of Jesus’ parables are what’s called “allegories” — that is, a story in which each aspect of the story symbolizes something definite. Most of the parables are not like that; they are intended just to make a single point. And it misses the point in those cases if you try to explain each detail as if it corresponded to something else. But some of Christ’s parables, such as the story of the seeds falling on the different kinds of soils, which we heard earlier this year, do call for this kind of interpretation. Jesus himself demonstrated that by explaining what each kind of soil, or lack of soil, represented. So too this parable of the Wedding Banquet, and the Guests and the Wedding Robe is worth looking at point by point.

Those who refuse to accept the king’s invitation, for instance, represent those who refuse the Word of God. It may well be that the ones who kill the messengers, and have their city burned as punishment, represent the leaders who refused to heed the prophets and whose hardness of heart, according to Jewish tradition, was responsible for the capture of Jerusalem and its destruction in the days of Jeremiah.

In the second part of the parable, the church is portrayed, the church with open doors, where all are invited to join in the feast. But — and here’s where the wedding robe comes in — the heavenly banquet hall is not a fast food franchise. It is serious business, this kingdom of heaven, and there are no “dress-down Fridays” to say nothing of Sundays!

But don’t for a minute think that Jesus is talking about a dress-code for Sunday worship! As Jesus’ brother James reminded the early church, don’t turn away someone from your church who may be dressed poorly; Jesus loved the poor, and he spent most of his time with them. So this is not a parable about us dressing up for Sunday worship.

But remember, at the same time, the symbolism; the elements of the parable are symbols, not to be taken literally. This isn’t about literally dressing up, it’s about a wedding robe that here doesn’t represent a wedding robe: it’s a symbol of something else. The wedding garment is a symbol here: it represents the clothing from above, the new self that is put on in Christ.

One who sits at the Lord’s table is expected to have been clothed anew with the white robe of baptism, the robe that covers all our other clothing, just as Christ’s death covers all our sins. A few of us, on Sunday, literally do wear that ancient white baptismal robe — the ministers who serve at the altar here — you can see them all, dressed in these long white robes. In the early church, that was the kind of robe that would be put on someone when they went to be baptized. (And don’t we still today dress up even little babies in a little white suit, or a little white gown? As I sometimes say, there’s sometimes more fabric than baby, when I’ve done some baptisms here!) So this white baptismal robe is called an “alb” from the Latin word for “white” — as in albino! This alb is what we now have as a relic of that wedding robe. It represent new life that begins when you are baptized, the new self that is reborn in Christ.

For Christ has removed the shroud of death that covered all nations — he has swallowed up death for ever. And instead of that old winding cloth, that old shroud, he has given us this new garment of life. That’s why the man gets into trouble because this garment is available to all, this new creation in Baptism — that’s why the man without a wedding robe had no excuse — the free gift of God in Baptism is available to all who chose it, and the banquet table is open to all who are baptized. God’s heavenly banquet is like one of those restaurants that keeps a supply of neckties and sports jackets to provide for anyone who comes to the door not wearing one — there is no excuse for anyone not to abide by that dress code. The waters of baptism are available to all without cost, flowing freely for all of humanity — available — but not just “available” for Jesus wants all the nations to be baptized in those waters, as he sends out his disciples at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, telling them, Go and baptize all nations; baptize them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The church received those marching orders, and it has a mandate to go to all the world, to open the doors and invite everyone in, in to the baptismal waters, and the heavenly banquet.

To be baptized into God’s righteousness: That is what it means to be properly dressed for God’s table. It’s not about the clothes you wear, it’s about the new life that comes from above. As that great old prayer says, “We do not presume to come to this thy table trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies.” Those manifold and great mercies take the form of the wedding robe of baptism, into which all are invited to come. The chiefest mercy is the gift of grace through the death of Jesus Christ our Lord, into whom we are buried in baptism, with whom we share in this heavenly banquet, and in whom we rise to everlasting life. We dare to approach this table because we are clothed in the wedding robe of baptism, we are wearing protective garments, the armor of God, the new creation that comes in baptism.

The new garment of the baptismal self is more than proper attire; it is more than a jacket and tie, it is more than a tuxedo — it is even more than a parachute! It is the uniform of the blessed children of God, the robe of state of the royal children of God, the vestment of salvation — it is being clothed with Christ. Beloved sisters and brothers here today, however else we may appear to be clothed, in our ordinary clothes or in our Sunday best, or these ancient relics of earlier days, however we are dressed in physical clothing, let us give thanks to God that we wear as well the wedding robe of baptism. It is the garment whose one size fits all, and is given away for free — but nonetheless it is fit and proper for those who join the chorus of praise at the Lamb’s High Feast, the king’s great wedding banquet. +

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Turn Turn Turn

Walking in the Way sometimes means turning around... the meaning of repentance

SJF • Proper 21a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The son answered, I will not; but later he changed his mind and went.

Starting this coming Friday evening, our brothers and sisters of the Jewish faith will observe the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. In the synagogues they will read the Book of Jonah, a story of repentance both by the ones preached to, the Ninevites, and the preacher, Jonah himself. The Jews call this reading Ha Teshuvah, and it means “The Turning Around.” It can also be translated as The Repentance. But that’s where the problem comes in.

When we hear the word repentance we tend to think in terms of how we feel. We focus on how sorry we are about something we’ve done, how guilty or uncomfortable we feel. But turning around isn’t about feeling; it’s about doing. It is not a state of mind, or disposition of the emotions. Rather it is an act of the will, a movement of soul and body.

Everyone knows you cannot right a wrong just by feeling sorry about it! Even an accidental, unintentional wrong, like bumping into someone, requires at the very least an apology. And if that bump is rather more solid, such as a bump of an automobile, recompense for damages will be in order. It is not enough simply to feel sorry about wrongdoing, regardless of intention — you actually have to do something. You have to act, you have to move.

Think for a moment about the important part physical movement plays in the heart of the Jewish people: start with Abraham’s long pilgrimage from the land of Ur of the Chaldees, then the journey to Egypt in the days of Joseph, then that long Exodus back to the promised land, that forty-year-long wandering in the wilderness, from which we’ve been hearing highlights; then exile to Babylon, followed by another return to the land of promise.

And you know the story didn’t end there. After the time of Christ, after the times described in our New Testament, the Romans finally lost their patience with the numerous rebellions of the Zealot revolutionaries, and they burned down the Temple once again, sending the people into exile, scattered to the four winds. The Zionist movement of the nineteenth century reawakened the urge in Jewish hearts to return; and finally, after the horrors of the Holocaust, led to founding of the nation of Israel, and you need only look to today’s headlines to see how jealously that land is guarded against any critics and all enemies. And every Passover Seder still ends with that prayer, “Shanah haba b’Yerushalayim — Next year, in Jerusalem” so strong is the call in the Jewish heart to return home.

Over literally thousands of years, this idea of returning, turning back, returning to the land of promise from the many lands of exile, became a symbol for departure from the way of sin, for returning to the way of righteousness and peace. Movement, then, is an intrinsic part of the way the Jewish people have understood and understand themselves. Movement is embedded in every Jewish tradition — almost as much as food! — and that includes the Jewish Law itself.

The Jewish Law isn’t just about rules you obey, it is about directions that you follow, it is a Way in which you walk. Sin is described not just as doing bad things, but as straying from the path, or losing one’s way. And righteousness is not about sitting still — to live the righteous life you have to get up and go!

Jesus grew up with this understanding of the law and righteousness, and it is at the heart of his teaching. Righteousness, Jesus teaches us, does not lie in promises, but in performance. It isn’t enough just to collect brochures for the righteousness cruise; you’ve got to get on board the boat and take the journey. You can’t just talk the talk — you’ve got to walk the walk.

And so it is that repentance — returning to the right path when you have wandered astray — is not simply a matter of a change of heart or of mind. Repentance, turning around, goes beyond the change of heart and mind to include a change of direction. If sin is heading the wrong way, then salvation lies in heeding the moral compass, turning around, and heading back towards God, pleading to God, “Show me your ways, O Lord, and teach me your paths.”

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Jesus tells a short parable today about two brothers: and the key to the parable lies in that brother who changes his mind and turns back to the task that he had at first rejected. But the fawning subservience of the second son does nothing to fulfill the father’s will. He may at most have gained his father’s favor for a moment, but, as the old saying goes, ‘Wait ‘til your father gets home’ — and finds the work undone and that quick promise broken. He will not be so quick to trust that son the next time he makes a promise to do as he is told!

The other son, after that first refusal, comes to his senses, however. He realizes he’s offended his father by his hasty refusal to do as he was told. But he doesn’t just feel bad and dread the next encounter with dear old Dad. He pulls himself together and not only changes his mind — he goes! And it is only in the actual turning and going, in spite of his earlier denial, that this first son accomplishes his father’s will.

Jesus aimed this parable at those priests and elders who came to him and challenged him. They had a high respect for the Law and many interpretations of it. They knew it backwards and forwards; but they had built what they themselves called “a fence around the Law.” And in the process, they made the Law harder to follow; they made it like a beautiful park fenced off so that it was hard to find a way in or through it. In their hands God’s Law became a monument, rather than a path to walk upon. As Jesus would say to the Pharisees on another occasion, “You do not enter yourselves but you prevent others from entering.”

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You know, there’s a restaurant in Georgia called the Church of God Grill. You probably wonder how it got that name! Well, it started out as a little storefront church — you know the kind I mean; there are dozens of them in every big city. The people of this particular little church would cook up and sell chicken dinners every Sunday after their worship service, in order to raise funds — much like many parishes do. But before long they found that more people were interested in the chicken than were interested in the worship, so they shortened the church service. Eventually the demand for the chicken dinners became so great that there was no time for worship at all, so they just closed the church and opened the restaurant, but kept the name, the Church of God Grill.

A bit closer to home — closer to me anyway, and to Mark [Collins] who studied there and served here as his field placement; and Sahra Harding who also served here and studied at General Seminary — the General Seminary is going through some tough times right now. In fact, it’s gotten so bad that the faculty have gone on strike. It’s a sad story; and I don’t know the details — I just heard about it yesterday.

But I do remember something from my time at the Seminary almost twenty years ago that reminds me of that Church of God Grill. I was having lunch one day in the cafeteria — which of course can’t be called a cafeteria in a seminary; it has to be called “a refectory” — but I’m having lunch, and at the table with me was a member of the administration. She was in charge of financial aid to students — scholarships and grants, which believe me you need when you are going to seminary — and we were just talking about the state of things at the seminary, and she said, “You know, the real problem with the seminary is: we end up spending more on each seminarian than we take in, in tuition and fees. If we could just get rid of all the students we could really have a great school!” The sad thing is she was serious.

That’s missing the point. And how often do people miss the very important points about what things are for — what they are meant to be. How often do they become an institution that is preserved long after the purposes for which the institution was meant are no longer being served? How do you keep that flame alive? Keep that fire of knowing what it is you are for and what it is you are meant to do? what you are called to do? It’s hard to be constantly renewed, constantly aware of the needs that you can serve if you will keep true to the cause for which you were started in the first place. But like that Church of God Grill, and like some people in the seminary, it seems they lose track and become focused on the thing rather than what the thing is for.

And so the same kind of thing happened with the scribes and the elders, with the priests and the Pharisees — at least some of them. They got so caught up with protecting the Law as a thing that they forgot that it was not meant for lip-service, but for action. It was a Way in which they were called to walk, not a thing they were required to admire and study and argue about, but to live. Jesus reminds them that the Law is something living only when you live it. It is not a piece of property to fence about, but a path to be walked; a freeway, not a barricade; a door to enter the kingdom, not a door to be locked and guarded. And so it was that the prostitutes and tax collectors who simply turned around and followed John the Baptist were responding to the spirit of the Law, and walking in God’s Way, while the self-righteous scribes, the elders, the priests who thought that keeping the law meant keeping it fenced in and protecting it, were instead fencing themselves out of the kingdom.

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So it was, and so it has always been. There will always be those who think God needs to be protected, that righteousness is about appearing righteous, saying the right words, rather than walking the path that righteousness requires. There are many who are satisfied with a religion that looks good, a religion that feels good, a religion that sounds good, but which accomplishes little of God’s will, who are big on promise but small on fulfillment, who dress the right way and say the right things, who sit in Moses’ seat, but fail in those important tasks that require them to stand up and get to work — visiting the sick and the prisoner, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and welcoming the stranger.

This is, sisters and brothers, a challenge to all of us. Let us not become the Church of God Grill. Let us receive strength and power from God not merely to honor him with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up ourselves to his service, and walking before him in holiness and righteousness all our days.+

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God's Justice Isn't Ours

thank God we don't get what we deserve... (apologies for the quality of the sound this week. This was recorded on the organ bench rather than the pulpit...)

SJF • Proper 20a • Tobias S Haller BSG
The landowner said, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?”

In spite of the fact that we’ve had a mild summer, it’s a little muggy today, and all things considered I can still sympathize with the workers in our gospel this morning who had to bear the burden of that long day and that scorching heat. So, to prepare for the coming fall season — it starts tonight! — and the winter that will no doubt be close on its heels, let me to remind you of a scene from one of my favorite winter movies, A Christmas Carol. I’m thinking of a scene from Scrooge’s younger days, when his employer, Mr. Fezziwig, throws the annual Christmas party for the workers at his warehouse. The Ghost of Christmas Past notes Scrooge’s pleasure at the festivity, and comments, “A small matter to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.” When Scrooge protests that it isn’t small, the Ghost reminds him, “Why! Is it not! He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves your praise?” Scrooge responds, more like his youthful former self than the cold mean thing he has become, and says, “The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.” And even as he says those words, he realizes how much he has changed since those happy days, before money became the golden idol of his worship, and as he feels the Spirit’s stern look upon him, he lowers his head in shame.

Well, in our gospel today we see a man very much like Mr. Fezziwig — the landowner in the gospel is eager to employ people, but also generous even to those employed only for a fraction of the day. Had he been like Scrooge, you had better believe he would have divided up those wages according to the hours worked, and the latecomers would have been pro-rated at only a fraction of a day’s wage. But this landowner is generous, and he does as he chooses with what he has.

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But wait a minute. If he is really so generous — as he describes himself — why doesn’t he give those who worked all day long an extra bonus? Why is it that they just get what they bargained for, while the latecomers get more than their fair share? For those who worked all day in the heat of the sun, and only get that agreed-upon daily wage, this does not appear to be generosity — at least not to them! — but favoritism. As far as they are concerned, it simply isn’t fair.

And you know what? They are right; it isn’t fair; but the landowner doesn’t claim to be fair — no, he says he is generous. And that, my friends, is the point of the parable.

Generosity isn’t about giving everyone what they deserve, or more than they deserve, but about the freedom of the giver to give out of his abundance to whomever he chooses — freely, not under constraint as if the giver were paying a debt, but solely because the giver wishes to give.

Now of course, this is a parable; and like all parables in this one Jesus is trying to tell us something about God and our relationship to God — what God’s kingdom is like. He is telling us about God’s generosity, as well as reminding us about human envy, how easy it is to presume upon generosity, to expect it, to resent it when others receive it and ourselves not.

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The lectionary pairs this gospel with the story of the Israelites complaining against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness of the Exodus. There is a Yiddish word that describes this kind of whining complaint: to kvetch. Well the children of Israel are the biggest kvetches in history, complaining and whining again and again. Even though God has delivered them from captivity and is bringing them into a new land of milk and honey — they kvetch! And even though they don’t deserve the treatment God delivers, God hears them and answers their kvetching and gives them the manna, the bread from heaven. God pours his grace and mercy on people who really don’t deserve it, people who have earned no credit with God and have even complained against God’s chosen leaders, kvetching like spoiled children. They don’t deserve God’s grace.

Which is, of course, what makes it grace. For grace and mercy are precisely needed where credit isn’t earned, where grace isn’t deserved. None of us is so good that we deserve salvation; none of us earns it, however much good we do; God doesn’t owe us anything. And yet our loving God gives us everything — even himself, in the Son of God, Christ Jesus our Lord. God isn’t fair by human standards, the standard of “get what you deserve”; but God is good — and God is generous, and treats us infinitely better than we deserve. Even the grace of believing in God is a gift from God, as Paul told the Philippians: “He has graciously granted you the privilege ... of believing in Christ.” God is like the landowner who surprises the part-time workers with full-time pay; God is like Mr. Fezziwig who doesn’t count the cost of bringing joy, but simply brings it. And God brings that joy not just on Christmas — believe you me, though that is when we commemorate the start of it all — but on every day of the rolling year. God, thank God, is gracious and merciful and abounds in steadfast love. His grace covers the multitude of our sins, and the generous outpouring of his blood washes away our guilt. None of us have worked for the whole of the day — all of us are latecomers, and God chooses to be generous to us because God isn’t fair by human standards, but because God is good through and through, the fountain of all goodness, the generous well that never runs dry.

For there is only one day’s wage, my friends, one day’s wage worth working for, one day’s wage with which we can be paid: the one day’s wage of the one Lord’s Day which will last forever, the one day’s wage of entry into the kingdom of heaven. God can give us no more than that, nor should we desire more — and he is generous to those of us who come late, as he is to those who came early: why, he even lets the last in first — so generous is this God of ours.

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Let me close with another parable. Once there was a man who died and came to the pearly gates where Saint Peter greeted him. Peter, in addition in to carrying the keys, had a clipboard in hand. He said to the man, “Before we let you into heaven there are a few questions you have to answer and I have to fill out this form. You see, we work on a point system here in heaven — maybe you’ve heard something about it. You tell me the good things you’ve done and I’ll score your points — and when you reach a hundred points I’ll let you into heaven. Is that alright?” The man thought for minute and then began to recite his good deeds. “Well, I was married for over 50 years and I never cheated on my wife all that time; I never even looked at another woman with lust in my heart.” Saint Peter said, “Very good; better than most, in fact; though as I recall you made that promise on your wedding day; but well done, considering it’s so rare: that’s worth three points.” The man was a little surprised at that score, but continued, “I was very active in my church — I went every Sunday and I was a longtime member of the men’s group.” Peter said, “Excellent; remembering the Sabbath and keeping it holy: that’s another point! But being a member of the men’s group? You are a man, aren’t you? I’m afraid I can’t give you any points for that.” The man was starting to feel very nervous, and said, “Well, I was also very generous with my wealth. I tithed to my church and I gave all my old clothes to the Goodwill.” Peter responded, “Let’s see, clothes you didn’t need any more... a tithe of your wealth… I recall hearing Jesus saying something about giving up all your possessions to follow him; but, hey, I’m in a good mood. I reckon that’s worth another point.” Exasperated, the man said, “My goodness, at this rate I’ll never get into heaven based on what I’ve done. I can only throw myself on God’s mercy.” And tossing aside the clipboard, Peter said, “Oh, that’s worth a hundred points right there. Welcome to heaven.”

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No my friends, God isn’t fair by our standards. He rescues and feeds ungrateful, disagreeable, judgmental, ornery kvetches and wretches and feeds them with bread from heaven. He gives to the latecomer the same favor as he gives to the one who works all day. And he gives us himself, my friends, he gives us himself. So let us not be envious, but rather thankful that God’s generosity exceeds even our greatest expectations, and that his goodness and mercy and grace endure for ever and ever.+

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Limited Forgiveness

Are there limits to what God will forgive?

Proper 19a • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
His lord summoned him and said to him, You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you? And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.

Today’s Scripture readings confront us with two deeply troubling passages. In the reading from Exodus, God delivers his chosen people Israel by causing the waters of the Red Sea to part so that they can pass through on dry land — safe and secure to the other side. So far, so good. But then God brings those walls of water crashing down upon the chariots and the drivers of pharaoh’s entire army, all those who had followed the people of Israel into that miraculous channel. There is no getting around the horror of this scene, and even though the Israelites will go on to sing in joy about their deliverance, we are treated to the reminder, in that closing verse, that they also saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore: bodies bloated, twisted, sodden with water, eyes glazed, staring sightless the sky— strewn on the seashore like so much rubbish or rags. It is a truly horrible, nightmare scene.

Exodus goes on to record that Moses and Miriam and the children of Israel celebrated and sang in thanksgiving for their deliverance, rejoicing in the downfall of their enemies. But there is also a Jewish tradition that when the angels in heaven began to join in the song,

the Holy One himself told them to stop. God said to the angels, “The works of my hand are perishing in the sea, and you want to sing praises?!”

That leads me to ask, why is God so hard on the Egyptians, who are the works of his hands as much as are the children of Israel? Why not let them escape with a lesson learned? Why toss them into the sea and bring those waters down upon them so that not one of them remained?

The clue to answer these questions lies in that second terrible reading we heard today — that story from Matthew’s gospel about the unforgiving slave, the one who although forgiven himself fails to forgive another slave, and so pays a terrible price — not just being thrown into prison, but being tortured until he should pay the entire debt. Jesus tells this tale in response to Peter’s question about how often one should forgive someone who offends against you. Probably thinking himself generous, Peter suggests seven times would be more than enough — but Jesus responds with a number eleven times that: one is to forgive 77 times.

That multiplier eleven reminds me of just how many chances Pharaoh is given — ten times Moses comes before him demanding that he let the people go, and all but the last time he says No; but then he backs out of his agreement and sets out after the people of Israel to recapture them. But even then, he gets one last chance — the eleventh — when he sees the waters part and Israel escape on dry land. He has the opportunity to see the hand of God at work in this miraculous deliverance, one last chance to repent the error of his ways and turn back; to forgive and forget. But he doesn’t take this eleventh chance — he orders the chariots forward. Which is how he ends up losing his army in the depths of the Sea.

At first this faces me with a dilemma — if God says you should forgive those who sin against you 77 times, why is God so hard on Pharaoh, and on that wicked slave in the parable. And the answer is that God forgives everything but the refusal to forgive. The wicked slave’s master forgives his debt, but not his failure to forgive another’s debt.

This answer shouldn’t really be so strange to us. To be forgiven one must forgive. Isn’t that what we say every day in the Lord’s Prayer: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us? The moment we stop forgiving, whether the first or the eleventh or the seventh or the seventy-seventh time, we are cutting off forgiveness for ourselves, cutting it off as surely as the waters of the Red Sea were cut off and then turned back on again.

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God, it seems, is ready to forgive any sin except the sin of being unforgiving. And that is so because nothing is so unlike God — and what God wants for his people — as being unforgiving. I said a few weeks ago that the mercy of God is like a well that never runs dry, and that is true. God is always more ready to forgive than we are to repent of our own sins — but the lesson before us today is that God is not ready to forgive us our failure to forgive others for their sins against us. In other words, God wants us to be like God — to be loving and forgiving. We cannot be like God in power, or in wisdom, or in any of the other ways in which God so far surpasses merely human life — but we can forgive

when others sin against us.

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In his letter to the Romans, Saint Paul makes this point very clearly: “Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.” I reminded us a few weeks ago of the clear, succinct teaching of Jesus, “Do not judge.” For judgment is the opposite of forgiveness — and in the long run, as Paul suggests, it is a form of idolatry in which we put ourselves in the place of God and act as if we were the agents of God’s judgment. But what God wants from us is to be God’s agents of forgiveness — to spread the grace rather than the fear, to forgive the debts and the trespasses, the harms and the hurts, the offenses and the crimes. How did John the Evangelist put it: “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved.” Christ commissions us as his agents in spreading that work — the Son’s work — not the work of condemnation, but the work of salvation and grace through the forgiveness of sins. We are not called to store up grievances and grudges but to pour out grace and gratitude.

The irony is that some people think they are acting most like God when they judge others; when in fact we are most like God when we forgive others — for it is in God’s nature to forgive. And the only thing, it seems, that God will not forgive is that narrow, stingy, mean, nasty tendency not to forgive.

We learn a lesson today from Pharaoh and his army, his chariots and his horsemen; we learn a lesson from the slave in the parable — when given the opportunity to be tough and mean, to hold people to standards that meet our expectations (even when we fail to meet the standards others set for us), to keep people down instead of setting them free: God has shown us how to act, in graciousness and generosity, and with forgiveness, so that we too may be forgiven every fault or failing in our lives. Mark the words of Jesus: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

Brothers and sisters, let gratitude and grace abound, the gratitude of forgiving one another all we owe each other, and the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit will truly be with us ever more.

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In the Name of Love

God is Love. That's it.

Proper 17a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Let love be genuine… hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection… Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Have you ever faced a task beyond your ability? Have you ever been given a job that made you feel totally inadequate, one you couldn’t get out of no matter how hard you tried? Well, if you have — welcome to the Moses Club. Our Old Testament reading this morning gives us the beginning of the call and ministry of Moses — and you can see him wriggling with those same feelings of inadequacy that we do, feelings that would follow him throughout his long career as shepherd to the wearisome flock of Israel.

But what this scripture also shows us is that God has an answer for those feelings of inadequacy, those moments — or years! — of weakness and incapacity like Moses; those times of getting it just completely wrong like Peter in our Gospel today: the realization that you can’t do it alone, but you also don’t have to do it alone. Sometimes all you have to do is get out of the way and let God be God!

Now, most of us are well aware of how almost nothing we do is truly done by ourselves alone: that we all depend upon each other for virtually every aspect of our lives. As the old saying goes, If you see a turtle on the top of a fence-post, you know he didn’t get there by himself!

It is in part the joy of Christian community, as Saint Paul encourages the Romans: its members support each other with genuine love, with mutual affection, with zeal and ardent spirit serving God in each other, outdoing each other in showing honor to each other. But a big part of the good news is that it isn’t just each other we depend on — ultimately all of us and each of us depend on God, who helps and supports all of us. He does it by his presence with us, his teaching to guide us, his patience to give us time to complete the work, and the nourishment to bear the fruit God desires. And all of this is because of the love of God.

“Let love be genuine,” Saint Paul said to the Romans. We catch a glimpse of the most genuine love there is in today’s reading from the book of Exodus, when Moses encounters God in that bush that burns but is not consumed: the love of God that is an eternal flame that does not consume the inexhaustible being of God.

Love is eternal because it is reborn in every instant. Love — God’s love — is always now. This is especially true when you compare love to the other two theological virtues, as they are called, faith and hope. remember what St Paul said? “...these three, faith hope and love; but the greatest of these is love.” Faith looks to the past, and gives thanks for all that God has done. Hope looks to the future and trusts that God will provide. But love lives in the present, if it lives at all.

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

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Moses confronted that love that day he was keeping his father-in-law’s sheep, living as a stranger in a strange land. The God of love chose to reveal himself to Moses for one reason: he had heard the cry of his people in Egypt, and would deliver them, because he loved them, because they were his. The eternal love of God became, in that particular time and place, (as it always does in every time and place) the present love of God in action. The God of faith that was past, the faith of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, their faith in God; the God of the hope for the future, that God would visit his people and take them and deliver them out of Egypt; the eternal and everlasting love of God would be revealed on that mountain — as God reveals himself as the God who is love, burning but not consuming: the one who was, and who is, and who is to come — is always Love. As Saint John would affirm many centuries later, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

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

When Moses complains to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” God responds, “I will be with you.” In other words, God is assuring Moses that he isn’t going this alone. God will be with him. And as a sign of his presence, God — after a little bit of needling from Moses — tells Moses his name, which is I AM , or in Hebrew Ehyeh.

Now Hebrew, unlike English, doesn’t have tenses, at least not in the way English does. (I hope you’ll pardon this Hebrew grammar lesson, because it is important if we are to understand God’s Name; because it doesn’t translate very easily into English, and I can hardly think of anything more important, given this reading!) Instead of past, present and future, Hebrew verbs have only two forms called perfect and imperfect: the perfect describes an action that is completed and finished. It’s the “been there and done that” of language. The imperfect, on the other hand, describes an action either that was repeated or continuous in the past, or something that is happening now that hasn’t yet finished, or that is going to happen in the future. It might seem odd to think of God referring to himself using the imperfect. After all, we always think of God as perfect! But the difference in language is that perfect is dead — it’s the past, it’s done; it’s finished. What God is saying to Moses is that he is without end — there is always more to God. We can plumb the depths and think we’ve understood God, but we’ve only touched the surface, the outer edges of God’s being. God is without end; never finished.

This imperfect form of the language is what God uses when he says I AM WHO I AM: in Hebrew, Ehyeh asher ehyeh. This not only means “I am who I am,” but, “I have always been what I have always been,” and “I will be what I will be” or “I am now what I have always been and will be.” All of this is summed up in this name: and what a wonderful way to know the name of the eternal that has always been, is now, and ever shall be.

This is God’s Name, and it assures us of the kind of presence we can rely on in our weakness or our inadequacy. Not just someone who “is there for you” but someone who has always been there for you and always will be there — for you, and with you now: whose very name means Eternal Being Present. Truly, our help is in the Name of the Lord: the eternally present helper.

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

After all, as St Paul assures us in his Letter to the Corinthians, in that famous passage so often heard at both weddings and funerals (and what better places are there to be reminded of the power of God who is love!): Love believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love believes all things; it has faith. Love hopes all things — it includes both faith and hope — but love endures because it is embodied in the eternal nature of God, and it is through love that we are joined to one another and to God. That love of God is eternal — it burns forever, and never consumes the source of its flame.

When you feel week, when you feel inadequate, when you feel you’ve been given a task you can’t possibly even begin to undertake, trust in that love, my friends in Christ; the love that God shows to you and through each of you to each other. It will raise you up from being a member of the Moses Club to being an eternal life-long member of the communion of God: in whose name we pray, Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.+

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Unlikely Heroes

Some have greatness thrust upon them...

Proper 16a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birth stool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.” But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live.

One of my favorite television programs is a British program that is broadcast on PBS — no it’s not Downton Abbey, though I enjoy that one too. No, my real favorite — in fact one I have to number among one of the best TV programs I’ve ever seen — is the series Call the Midwife. If you haven’t seen it, I commend it to you as it is well worth viewing. Just remember to have the box of Kleenex handy. It is powerful and moves me, every episode. The series tells the story of a group of Anglican religious sisters and the lay midwives who work in the impoverished east end of London in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Watching the program has been made all the more poignant to me as I learned that our own dear Monica Stewart — God rest her soul — served as a midwife in London during just that time. I had always known her as a registered nurse working in Harlem at Metropolitan Hospital until she retired, but I didn’t know of her earlier career as a midwife working in London until I read her obituary. She delivered over 8,000 children in her career. Who they are and where, now— who knows? But that’s 8,000 world-changing possibilities in whose coming to be Monica played an important part. Blessings be upon her!

Back to the television series: the thing that moves me most about it is the basic goodness of the characters; none of them are great or famous — although Princess Margaret does appear in one episode — and all of them have their foibles — probably including Princess Margaret — but there is a deep and prevailing goodness about them, a goodness that forms their lives as they go about their work of bringing life and saving lives. Their lives are framed towards the good, even if they sometimes falter; and sometimes they reach greatness. They are unlikely heroes.

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So too are the midwives in today’s reading from the opening chapter of Exodus. Things have changed since Joseph served as Pharaoh’s right-hand man. A new Pharaoh has come along, one with a deep resentment towards the Israelites. For these aliens have prospered in Egypt as the Lord had promised Jacob and Joseph. And so the new Pharaoh institutes a wicked plan to keep their population in check — he orders the midwives to kill all the little boys as they come to birth.

This is a haunting foreshadowing of another order by another wicked king, Herod the Great, an order ironically evaded by another Joseph, with his wife Mary and the child Jesus, by escaping to Egypt rather than from it.

Pharaoh gives his horrifying command, and the midwives respond out of their fear of God; for they fear God more than they fear Pharaoh and they have the courage to disobey the king. These women, whose task in life was to assist in the most natural process possible — a woman giving birth to a child — become unlikely heroes. And as the story continues, more unlikely heroes appear: the Levite’s wife (Moses’ mother), who hides her baby for three months before turning him over to his older sister; and then that sister herself as she places him in the river, in that little ark made from a basket sealed with bitumen and pitch, placing him in the river there — and here’s the big surprise — Pharaoh’s own daughter finds the boy, and even recognizing that he is a Hebrew child whose death has been ordered by her father, she chooses to protect him and have him brought up in her own household — ironically giving him to his own mother to nurse — but also in the end giving him a name, a name that will resound through Jewish history and even up to our day, Moses.

Who would have thought that this unlikely cast of characters — and I hope you will note that all of them are women, young and old — who would have thought that they would be the means by which God’s chosen deliverer of his people would be himself delivered from certain death. Without these women, each and every one of them, the people of Israel would have remained in their slavery in Egypt. These women and their heroism is unexpected and unlikely, but marvelous.

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Perhaps, though, we shouldn’t be so surprised. Heroism is not always what you think it is going to be. Who, after all, turn out to be the real heroes? When it comes to warfare, the great heroes aren’t the generals with their famous names; the heroes are the privates and the corporals and sergeants out on the front line risking their lives in the thick of battle, sometimes losing their lives to save their comrades. And I’ve been around hospitals long enough to know — nothing against doctors, mind you — but many of the real heroes are nurses and EMTs and technicians, the anesthesiologists, the nurses aides — all those others who work, quietly, but sometimes find that they are the ones who end up saving a life.

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In the church as in the world there is plenty of room for heroism — there are, as Saint Paul pointed out to the Romans, many different gifts that differ according to the grace given to each. Not everyone is called to be a hero — yet, who knows when the opportunity for heroism might arise. Those Hebrew midwives studied the art of helping women give birth — a noble task in itself — but they never imagined that they would help save the future savior of Israel. They thought their job was birthing babies — not saving nations.

There is a line in Shakespeare’s play, Twelfth Night: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” It is the same with being a hero: most truly heroic acts are not performed by those who set out to become heroes, but by ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary situations in which a heroic act is required — and who then respond. Who knows when the gift that is given by God according to the grace of God for ministry, for teaching, for exhortation, for generosity, for diligence, or even for cheerfulness — who knows when such gifts might not, given the opportunity, blossom into heroism given the right place and time.

For there are ministers who serve in dangerous circumstances. Priests and ambulance drivers serve on the front line of battle; there are teachers who persist in teaching what they know to be right even when the authorities want to persecute or prosecute them for teaching science when what those authorities want is a dumbed-down refusal to teach what science offers; and there are students like Malala Yousafzai who persist in gaining an education even when there are some who would kill her — who tried to kill her — because they think girls are not supposed to go to school. Those who persist in doing what is right against such opposition are unlikely heroes, but heroes they are.

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One last unlikely hero appears in our readings today — Simon son of Jonah. Who would have thought that a simple fisherman would become one to whom the Lord of heaven would entrust the keys of heaven? Who would have thought that the man who just two weeks ago sank into the water instead of walking on it, when his fears outweighed his faith; that this man who would go on to deny his Lord three times before the rooster crows — who would have thought that this unlikely and wavering candidate could be a hero? Yet when the Spirit descended on that great day of Pentecost, when the Spirit came down on Peter and the apostles, that is just what he did: he is the one that stood up and would go on to face down the High Priest and the authorities and to proclaim the Gospel, even though in the end it brought him to the cross himself, crucified head-down in Rome.

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And so it is for all of us my friends — none of us here are born great. I doubt if any of us will be called to achieve greatness — but, who knows, who among us may have greatness thrust upon us — by being put in the right place at the right time to make use of the gift which we may have thought was purely practical, purely a useful trade, purely a way to make a living, suddenly transformed by the situation in which we find ourselves into something marvelous. Who among us may find some gift transformed into a way to be a hero and perform an act of heroism?

That’s what makes it grace, my friends. To become a hero is not something any of us should expect or even desire. Let us rather hope that if we are ever placed in the position to make such a use of the gifts that God has given us that we will have the courage so to do — to become unlikely heroes. Glory to God, whose power working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.+

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Unexpected Good

God is a well of mercy that never stops flowing...

Proper 15a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Joseph told his brothers, “Do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.… So it was not you who sent me here, but God.”

Some years ago, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book called, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. This was not a book written from the dispassionate standpoint of a scholar and teacher. Rabbi Kushner was dealing with a personal tragedy as well — the death of his own young son. Even had he not experienced such a tragedy in his own family, he would not have needed to look very far to see many examples of bad things happening to good people. All you have to do is turn on the TV news to see plenty of examples of such tragedies. There is a whole subsection of theology dealing with just this question and I could go on and preach a couple of dozen sermons on the topic.

But for today I want to take a different approach and look at a different question, the opposite question: Why do good things happen to bad people? And I do that because of the continuation of the story that we heard this morning from the book of Genesis. We heard the start of Joseph’s story last week — how his brothers, jealous of their father’s affection, were on the point of murdering him; and how a sequence of events led them to sell him into slavery in Egypt. Today we jump almost to the end of his story — in between last week and this Joseph is framed on a charge of sexual misconduct with his boss’s wife, thrown into prison, makes use of his skill as an interpreter of dreams to get out of prison, and more than that, to be raised to a position of high power in Pharaoh’s kingdom. And he uses that power to store up supplies of food for the world-wide famine foretold in Pharaoh’s dreams — a pair of dreams that Joseph is able to interpret as a warning from God that a famine will strike the whole world.

When his brothers arrive, Joseph takes the time to indulge in a bit of payback: in the previous chapter — for they have come to Egypt to beg for food, for the famine is indeed world-wide, but have failed to recognize Joseph as their brother. This gives him an opportunity to play a few mean tricks on them — which, of course, they fully deserve. After that payback he finally chooses to reveal himself to them, in large part because he wants to see his elderly father again, and he knows that the famine is only just beginning and will get much worse. And the lesson he derives from this, is that even though his brothers did a truly terrible thing to him — he now sees that this was God’s way of working; God has taken this very bad thing and made a good thing come out of it. As Joseph would say in the last chapter of Genesis, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people.” So it is that a good thing came out of the actions of bad people; and in the end, even good things for those bad people.

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And that’s the hard part for us to understand. We expect wrongdoers to get punished, not rewarded. We expect bad things to happen to bad people. The problem is that this is a point of view that puts us in the place of God; it puts us in the position of judging others, deciding that they are bad and deserve punishment. And it isn’t really a question of being right or not — that is, it may be perfectly true that the people who we think are be bad are bad, and do deserve to be punished. The problem is that in placing ourselves in the judge’s seat and condemning others, even if we are right, we forget that we too are guilty — perhaps at times even more than those we condemn.

This is one of the hardest teachings of Jesus to wrap our heads around. How many Christian leaders seem to think that their primary task is telling other people how bad they are? How easy it is to forget that a central teaching of the Christian faith is, Do not judge! How easy it is for Christian disciples to consider themselves equal to their master, competent to judge — and even worse, getting on a high horse to decide who is a worthy recipient of God’s mercy.

We see them do that in today’s gospel reading. A Gentile woman, a Canaanite, approaches Jesus and begs him to cast a demon out of her daughter. And notice that at first Jesus says nothing. Matthew goes out of his way to include that detail: Jesus doesn’t answer her at all. He keeps silent. Is he waiting to see what the disciples will do? Will they intercede and join in her plea for mercy? Will they say to Jesus, Look at this poor woman? Jesus doesn’t have to wait long because they very quickly urge him to send her away because she keeps shouting after them. And at first he confirms their action — for he tells them that he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. Even when the woman comes and kneels before him, and asks for help, he says that it isn’t right to take children’s food and throw it to dogs. But she insists that even the dogs get the scraps — and Jesus acknowledges her great faith and her daughter is healed instantly.

Just as Joseph puts his bad brothers through the ringer — framing them for theft and putting them in prison — before finally revealing himself to them and forgiving them; Jesus puts his disciples to the test, and gives the woman herself a hard time, before relenting and responding in mercy.

And mercy is the point, the point we often miss. Because God is judge, we tend to want him to act like a judge, particularly when we agree with the guilt of those who are accused. We want to see the judge hand down a hard sentence when other people are before the court. We want to see that hard sentence passed, and that the guilty are punished as they deserve — we want bad things to happen to bad people. And so we want to see God act as a stern judge.

Except when we are the ones standing before him. That’s when we want God to be merciful. The problem is that God doesn’t change — God is always just and always merciful. God is always bringing good out of bad. Joseph’s brothers do a terrible thing in trying to kill him and getting him sold into slavery. But God uses that very action to put Joseph in the position to save the lives not only of his brothers but of countless other people, as God gives him the wisdom to understand Pharaoh’s dreams, and to store away enough food to last through the seven-year famine that will afflict the whole world.

Jesus teaches his disciples a lesson about mercy in this gospel we heard today — a lesson about mercy and faith. For recall how just last week he chided Peter, when he sank in the water he tried to walk on: “You of little faith!” Yet here — in front of Peter and the other disciples — he praises this Canaanite woman, this Gentile pagan, without doubt a worshiper of false and foreign gods, he praises her and gives honor to her “great faith.” Imagine how Peter felt at that moment!

Jesus answers the prayer of one who is not among his lost sheep, who is not his child, who is no better than a dog in the household. He does good for one who deserves no good — not because she deserves it but because he is merciful. Mercy is what it is all about. All, as St Paul said, are under disobedience, so that God can show mercy to all. It’s all God’s mercy, grace, and favor that saves us. I’m reminded of a quote from Mark Twain: “When you get to heaven, you will have to leave your dog outside. Admission to Heaven is by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would come in.”

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In his letter to the Romans, Paul the apostle makes that point in big letters. All are placed under disobedience so that God may show mercy to all. There is none perfect, no not one; and yet God causes his sun to shine and the sweet rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike. God is a well of mercy that never stops flowing.

God may have seemed, Paul says, to have turned on his people, his chosen ones, the descendants of Joseph and his brothers, the people of Israel. But Paul insists that their disobedience is temporary and their punishment is temporary, for the very purpose of allowing the good news of salvation through Christ to be extended out beyond that Jewish household to those very Gentiles whom the Israelites think are no better than dogs, unworthy of salvation and doomed to destruction. God is showing mercy to the Gentiles and will do so for Israel in due time. Good things do happen to bad people: for God is merciful. God takes the twisted, broken mess of our lives, what we in our foolishness or our selfishness have spoiled or ruined, and God cleans us up, repairs us, restores us — redeems us.

There is a refrain in the Psalms: his mercy endures forever. Let us give thanks for that at all times — for his mercy endures forever; not seeking God’s judgment, for others or ourselves — for his mercy endures forever; but trusting in God’s mercy — for his mercy endures forever; that even the disobedient and the sinful will find redemption and release — for his mercy endures forever.+

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Brother Against Brother

Envy, jealousy, and littleness of faith...

p14a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Joseph’s brothers said, “Hear comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”

Anyone with experience of a large family will know something about sibling rivalry. But even if you have never experienced it yourself, the Holy Scripture lays out more than enough to satisfy the most insatiable curiosity. Right from the beginning, right from the very first brothers ever to breathe the air of God’s good earth, we find conflict and worse: for Cain killed his brother Abel, striking him down out of jealousy and envy.

Fast forward just a few chapters in Genesis and we find Isaac and his half-brother Ishmael, originally content to play together, soon separated by Isaac’s mother. She is jealous that the son of her servant might inherit along with her son — here it is not the two brothers who are rivals, but their respective mothers!

Isaac will later get payback from his descendant rather than his ancestor, though largely through the machinations of his own wife Rebekah, when his two sons Jacob and Esau set up a rivalry that verges on being as bad as that of Cain and Abel. Jacob cheats his brother out of his inheritance, disguising himself with his mother’s help and deceiving his old, blind father Isaac into giving him his brother’s blessing.

In today’s reading from Genesis we catch up with Jacob some years later. He has settled in Canaan with the large family he has started. And what a family it is! He has four wives — count ‘em, four: Rachel (who died in giving birth to his youngest son, Benjamin) and her sister Leah, and their respective servants Bilhah and Zilpah, and in addition to Benjamin he has eleven other sons and at least one daughter, Dinah — and who knows who is in the kitchen with her!

His favorite son, though, is Joseph, who with Benjamin are the only children born to the his true love Rachel, the one for whom he worked for seven years only to be tricked by his father-in-law into marrying her older sister Leah. (And this is not the only trick to be played on that trickster Jacob before the tale is done! Perhaps this is part of his payback for having cheated his own brother Esau out of his birthright and his blessing.)

In any case, Joseph’s brothers know their father “likes him best” — does anyone remember the Smothers Brothers routine, “Mom always liked you best!” “Lower your voice.” “Mom always liked you best!” — and to make matters worse Jacob broadcasts his favoritism for this teenage boy — giving him a fancy outfit to wear. Think of your own sons and how they might feel if you gave one of them the latest Air Jordans while the rest were stuck with lame tennis shoes or sandals. They might not throw their brother, the one with the fresh kicks, down a pit, but they won’t be happy!

Another thing to note about this fancy outfit is that it is a long outfit, not suited for work: long sleeves mean that Joseph doesn’t have to do yard-work; in many ancient cultures having a long robe with long sleeves meant you were among the upper classes, the royalty who had no hard work to do, who had others to do the hard work for them; they couldn’t be bothered to roll up their sleeves and work themselves. Joseph the tattle-tale — one more strike against him: notice how he informs his father when his brothers are slouching in their work — Joseph is home, spending time around the house, at most sent on errands out checking up on his brothers. And today we see what sets the story in motion — the story that will eventually lead Israel into Egypt, and will set the stage for all that is to come as God’s people are formed in that crucible of slavery and then brought out of it in the Exodus.

But we’re still at the prelude here: Joseph is set for a fall; he’s got three strikes against him, and his brothers simmer with jealousy. To add insult to injury, Joseph is a dreamer. He is also innocent enough to tell his brothers and his father the dreams of them bowing down to him — dreams which for some reason those who planned our lectionary this morning have chosen to omit from our reading — but this is why the brothers refer to Joseph as “this dreamer”! Anyway, the scene is set for sibling rivalry of the most dangerous sort, and his brothers gang up on the boy with the intent first to kill him, and then to sell him into slavery. As we hear by the end of the tale, Joseph is bundled off to Egypt. We’ll hear more about that and the aftermath next week.

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For now I want to focus on the thread that ties together all of this sibling rivalry in the book of Genesis: all that ties it together up through our own time. And that is the sin of envy, manifested as jealousy. From Cain through Sarah through Jacob himself and then on to his sons — and on to every human heart if we are honest — jealousy and envy, wanting what someone else has, is the craving the leads to the biggest part of human misery, whether brother against brother or nation against nation. No one said it better than James the brother of the Lord, in the epistle that bears his name: “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts.” (James 4:2) There can be no doubt that the story of Joseph was close to James’ heart: James is the English form of Jacob, after all. And he begins his letter with an appeal to the Twelve Tribes who were descended from Jacob’s unruly household. So his description of jealousy and envy — sins he saw at work in the early church — is sharp and to the point.

The French philosopher René Girard has developed a theory that jealousy forms the basis of much human behavior. I’m not sure it takes a philosopher to read that from the evidence of human history, but René Girard suggests its mechanism. He calls it mimetic desire — but the old words imitation and jealousy will do just fine. Two children — let’s call them Isaac and Ishmael just to keep it in the family — they are sitting on the floor in the romper room happily playing with their toys; perfectly happy, perfectly content, each of them playing with his toy. But then momma comes in and gives Ishmael a new toy. What happens? Anyone want to guess? Little Isaac, until then perfectly happy with his own toy, now wants to have the toy Ishmael has — and so the war begins!

Of course, it is not always a toy; I wish it were. Sometimes, as with Cain and Abel, it is jealousy of God’s blessing. Sometimes it is a birthright or inheritance. How many families have squabbled over grandma’s kitchen table, and who gets it? Sometimes it is an article of clothing — how many young men have been stabbed or shot in the Bronx because someone wanted their jacket? Sometimes it is a father’s favor. Sometimes it is gold, or oil. Sometimes it is called the Gaza Strip, or East Jerusalem, or the Crimea or the Sudan. Whatever it is, as James said, “You want something and do not have it,” — and so follow murder, theft, war, destruction and death.

How soon we forget the verse that ends, “You do not have because you do not ask.” How much of the world’s goods could be shared instead of being fought over? How many sibling rivalries could be stilled if people would set aside jealousy and envy, and cultivate instead the virtues of charity and generosity — to ask, so that it might be given; to knock, so that the door might be opened.

In our Gospel today, Jesus chides Peter because he starts well in his walk on the water, but then begins to doubt. Let’s be honest — doubt is part of our life: it is hard to trust others, it is hard sometimes to ask someone to share what they have; look, let’s face it, sometimes it is hard to share when you are asked! There is always that fear that there won’t be enough to go around; that if I give of what I have I won’t have enough left for myself.

But my friends, we are not called to doubt, to fear — we are called to faith, to trust in the generosity of God, and to “take heart” in the knowledge that he is with us — we can walk on the water if we trust him! He is the same one who fed thousands in the wilderness, who turned a few loaves into enough food to feed a multitude. How much of the world’s five loaves and fishes could be transformed if Isaac and Ishmael would share instead of fighting? There is no need for envy or jealousy — the products of a world-view that is based on scarcity and desire and envy — when the abundant grace of God is there — for the asking; for the asking, my friends. To have great faith instead of that little, stingy, mean faith — the faith that is hardly faith at all, when abundance is around us. Remember, “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

So let us not fear asking God, asking our brothers or sisters, let us not dwell on jealousy or envy, but trust in the abundance of God, and the good news that God is with us, and can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. To him be the glory, from generation to generation in the church and in Christ Jesus our Lord.

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God of Always More

Not Julia Child, but I Love Lucy

Proper 12a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?

Many things can be said, and many things have been said about God. God is good; God is loving; God is our creator, our redeemer and our sanctifier. But one thing is certain: however much we may say about God, however much we may believe about God, we will always be left at the end of our speech, falling speechless before the indescribable majesty of the greatness and glory of God. And what is true of God’s incomprehensible being is also true of God’s generous giving and doing. Just as we cannot describe all that God is, so to we can never come to the end of the goodness that God has done for us. Our God is the God of Always More. As Saint Paul so beautifully put it in his letter to the Ephesians, “God can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” Such is the overflow of God’s richness, the generosity of God’s outpoured love for us and for all that God has made.

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I want to turn this morning from our focus on the story of the patriarchs that has formed our readings from Genesis over the last weeks. I’m not entirely sure how edifying to our theme would be the tale of Laban’s “bait and switch” with his daughters Leah and Rachel — and the fourteen years that Jacob had to work in order to win his beloved, and her sister and their maids into the bargain! Surely this fits in with the theme of abundance, but not quite in the way I’d like to address it, so we’ll let the story of Four Brides for One Brother rest for another time!

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So let’s turn to Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Paul is someone who knows the amazing power and the extent of God’s grace, and he speaks of it often. Today’s passage is no exception. Not only does God answer our prayers, but God sends his Spirit to help us to pray! How amazing is that! God, through the Spirit, prays for us! When we have worn out our voices with singing and reached the end of our praise, when sorrow has wounded our hearts, when pain, disappointment and doubt have blunted the edge of our faith, God himself, through the Spirit, reaches out to us and into us, penetrating the depths of our hearts and interceding there with sighs too deep for words. For our God is the God of Always More, and even in prayer God does what we in our unworthiness dare not, or in our blindness cannot ask. God prays for us when we can not or dare not pray to him, for our God is the God of Abundance, the God of Always More.

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There is no way around it! That is, technically, what “incomprehensible” means — God is too big to encompass, to grasp, to contain. And our Gospel today brings this message home, in the five parables that form the reading. Both the image of the pearl that is worth as much as the jeweler’s whole stock in trade, and of the catch of fish so full that the fishermen can afford to be picky about the ones they want to keep and throw the other ones away, both of those capture this notion of abundance. But I’d like to focus on the other two parables, leaving in the middle that one about the treasure hidden in the field. I want to turn to the other from those mercantile parables — to the ones in which Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed and to leaven.

Let me note that these two parables are among the most widely misunderstood of all of Jesus’ sayings. So let me, as Ricky Ricardo would say to Lucy, “’Splain them.” The problem is that people want to trim these astounding images down; they want to find rational explanations for them. They don’t want to face that these parables are not just about the growth of the kingdom under the power of God, but the truly stupendous and amazing growth of the kingdom of God to exceed all expectations— God is the God of Always More.

First, let’s look at that mustard seed. Now I can guarantee you, you can plant mustard seeds as much as you want, but they are never going to grow into trees that birds can build nests in. The average mustard bush grows to be about three feet tall. Unless a bird has very low ambitions, you are not going to find birds building nests two feet off the ground. Jesus knows that, and so do the people to whom he tells this parable. The problem is, most of us don’t. We don’t grow mustard, we buy it in little jars. If he were simply talking about how an ordinary plant grows and spreads, and wanted to talk about one that starts small and grows big he would talk about the cedars of Lebanon, much as we might talk about little acorns growing into mighty oak trees. As they used to say when I was in grade school, Even the mighty oak was once a nut like you!

But Jesus isn’t talking about something little becoming big naturally; he isn’t talking about natural growth at all, for instance, how an acorn becomes a mighty oak: he is talking about supernatural growth, a miracle. Hear — if you have ears to hear — hear it the way Jesus meant it: The kingdom of God is as if a man took a tiny mustard seed, knowing it to be a mustard seed, planting it expecting it to grow into a mustard bush about three feet high; and instead, up popped a tree as tall as a house, a mighty tree that birds could nest in. Jesus wants us to know that we are not in the world of ordinary agriculture, but a miraculous world, the world of God’s Always More — this is more like Jack and the Beanstalk than it is about Coleman’s Mustard; Jesus wants us to be surprised. God is the God of always more.

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The same is true with that yeast and flour. Now, this passage is so badly misunderstood that the translators of the Bible that we use in worship have even changed the language to suit their misunderstanding. They talk about this as if it is just ordinary baking, and say that the woman “mixed” the yeast in with three measures of flour: and so, the picture in your mind is of a woman with three cups of flour making bread. But what Matthew’s Gospel actually says is that the woman “hid” the yeast in the flour — just like that other parable, the hidden treasure in the field. She hid the yeast in the flour. The Greek word is related to our modern word “encrypt” — she “encrypted” the yeast — this is yeast that, for whatever reason, the woman wanted to hide! Perhaps some nosey neighbor had been sneaking into her kitchen and she was just protecting her property — who knows? But this is not about ordinary household baking.

And the reason we know this is even clearer when we realize that a “measure” of flour isn’t the measure that you might use to bake a loaf of bread. The “measures” in this passage — the three measures — aren’t cups, — three of which might go to make a loaf of bread. This is the ancient Hebrew seah, three of which make an ephah. You know how in your Bibles in the front how they always have those tables of measures so you can see, like we have of how many cups make a quart — well three seahs make an ephah. And what’s an ephah? A bushel! This is forty-three pounds of flour that this woman hides her yeast in. This is not an ordinary scene of a woman at her kitchen table making Johnnycake — even enough for a parish supper; this is not a tame and homely message about how yeast just works its way through an ordinary loaf. No, what we have here is the story of a woman who for some reason decides to hide her yeast — but she chooses to hide it in the flour-bin: the worst possible place where you could possibly think of hiding your yeast! In short, this is not a scene from “Julia Child” — this is a scene from “I Love Lucy”! This is not about baking a loaf of bread, this is about coming home into your kitchen to discover that the pantry door has exploded and there is a giant mass of dough pouring out and filling the entire kitchen! This is a message about how the kingdom of God spreads — it is that the kingdom of God bursts forth, even if you try to hide it. The Word of God will not be suppressed, because our God is the God of Always More.

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As we prayed in our collect at the beginning of this liturgy, we asked God to increase and multiply his mercy upon us. We need have no doubts that God will. Our God is the God of increase and multiplication. Our God is the God who gives not only wisdom but life and abundance and victory. Our God is not only the God to whom we pray, but who prays for us and with us, who does infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Our God is not simply the ruler of a kingdom that spreads and grows, but of a kingdom that cannot be contained, that will not be limited, that will reach to the ends of space and time, bursting through all boundaries built up by fear or hate, or selfishness, by despair or lack of imagination. Our God is the God of Always More, and we will never know the end of his greatness, his might, his majesty, power and dominion, henceforth and for ever more.

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People Place and Thing

Looking at the big picture of Creation, and hearing how it groans in expectation...

Proper 11a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place — and I did not know it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

After my mother passed away, my youngest sister took up the task of trying to make some orderly sense out of the boxes of loose photographs that my mother had accumulated over the years. Not only were there a number of photos from her own mother and grandmother, but of those taken in my generation — and I was the oldest of six, so there were a lot of photos. There were literally hundreds of them, and it was a challenge to sort through them.

One response to organize such pictures is to divide them up into three familiar categories, at least to begin to get a handle on the task: to sort them into three piles of pictures: people, places, and things. For some pictures, the sorting is easy: the baby pictures, the school pictures, the graduation pictures, first communion, confirmation — those all go into the “people” pile; while the views of the Grand Canyon or the Belvedere Fountain in Central Park go into the “places” category; and the photos that my dad took of his model airplanes are clearly to be numbered among the “things.”

But what do you do with the picture of Mom and Dad standing in front of the Washington Monument? Is that a “people” picture or a “place” picture — or even a “thing” picture if you have a collection of pictures of monuments? How do you categorize something that seems to fit in many different categories?

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This morning’s Scripture readings face us with just such a challenge. At first glance, as with some pictures, it seems to be easy: the reading from Genesis is clearly about Jacob’s experience at the place, about Jacob’s experience of the place that he would come to call Bethel. The reading from Romans is clearly about people, in particular about us as we become children of God. Finally, the reading from Matthew is about the weeds and the wheat and the harvest — all of them things.

But when we look bit closer the categories are not quite as clear as they appear at first. The reading from Genesis is about a place — a place in which Jacob begins by making a pillow out of a stone, lying down to sleep and to dream. Clearly this is no ordinary place, and Jacob recognizes it as the gateway to the house of God — which is what Bethel means in Hebrew.

But in addition to it being about that holy place — there are those things: the stone, to oil, the ladder, the gate; and the people (or perhaps I had better say the personalities) of Jacob, the angels, and the God of Abraham and Isaac — now to become the God of Jacob as well, as he makes with him a covenant of adoption and promises to be with him to keep him wherever he goes. Whatever place he goes to, God will personally be with him.

Which brings us to the second reading, which is clearly about people, and how we are adopted, through the Spirit of God as children of God, as the Spirit leads us to cry out, “Abba! Father!” Yet no sooner does Paul describe the personal aspect of adoption, than he turns around and applies it to a thing — the thingiest thing there is, the whole creation, the very embodiment of thingdom! For what is more a creature than creation? And Paul is bold enough to claim that redemption is not just for people, but for that whole creation; that somehow in God’s good time and place, “the whole creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God!” This is one of the Scriptures I point to whenever people ask me if I believe whether our pets, our animal companions, will share with us in the resurrection. I am also comforted and encouraged by the words of the Psalms. For they not only call upon all things that have breath to praise the Lord — and believe me, if you have a pet cat or dog, you know they have breath! — but also for the trees to clap their hands and even for the hills and mountains to leap for joy. This brings us back to Saint Paul is saying — “the whole creation” must mean “the whole creation” — that is, there is nothing outside God’s grace and redemption, for God hates nothing — no thing — that God has made.

Finally, in that reading from Matthew, we appear to be dealing with just such things — the seed, the weeds, the wheat, the harvest — but then Jesus offers an explanation of this parable to the disciples and he immediately brings in places — all places, for the field is the world. He then he tells of those people: the Son of Man and the children of the kingdom and the children of the evil one, and the enemy, and the very angels themselves, the same ones whom Jacob saw ascending and descending upon that ladder.

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So what are we to make of this? What categories can we use? Perhaps the key after all lies in that lesson from Romans. Perhaps what God is trying to tell us this morning is that the categories we create to divide up the world aren’t quite so clear as we think them to be — that we and the angels, and the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky, and the seed of the fields, and the trees of the forest, and the forest itself, and the hills and the valleys and the mountains — indeed that the whole of creation is groaning in the pains of childbirth until now.

Instead of an assortment of little pictures, there’s just one big picture: a view such as perhaps the first man who walked on the moon had, forty-five years ago today, looking back and seeing that the world was not split up into many different things, but is one beautiful thing, hanging there in the sky. The whole creation is awaiting the redemption that is not just our destiny but the destiny of all that God has made.

Perhaps God is saying to us that we are all in this together — that although human beings do hold a special place in God’s creation, as people who are more than mere things, yet we still share the role of creatures, with all of God’s creation. I mentioned pets, our animal companions, but there are others: we usually treat our pets fairly well, but there are others we don’t so well. It does not take a great stretch of imagination to look into the eyes of a captive orangutan, whose young have been stripped from her, sent off to a zoo somewhere — confined now to a cage in a forest in which she once ranged freely, but has now been torn down, burned down so they could plant a plantation for the production of palm kernel oil — it doesn’t take much to look into the depth of those sad, sad eyes of the captive orangutan and ask, What have we done to our fellow creatures? It does not take much of a great stretch of experience — although it seems to be a stretch too far for some — to see the collapsing ice sheets of Antarctica, the disappearing glaciers of northern Europe and Canada and the Alps, the polar bears vainly trying to swim because there is no more ice left for them to climb upon — it is no great stretch to see our profound impact on creation — and, oh, how it groans! It does not take a great stretch of imagination to look at the raging wildfires of the American West, or the smog in China so thick you can cut it with a knife, and not ask yourself, “What have we done?”

Perhaps God is trying to tell us in these powerful lessons — lessons written not only in the pages of Scripture but in the black and white of the world itself — that we do not live in heaven — we are still sleeping here on earth on our stony pillows and our dreams of ladders. And it is time to wake up, and out of our stony griefs to raise up Bethel. To take our part in making this world what God means it to be: God’s world, in which we dwell as guests. Too long have we thought that this world was just a place we could despoil and neglect, because we were headed for a better one up that ladder into the world to come. What does Saint Paul say? The creation has been waiting, waiting with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God? And when we are revealed, what are we revealed to be? Will we be seen as those who did not care, who despoiled and neglected God’s creation; or worse: will some of us be seen as enemies of God’s creation who spread bad seed upon God’s field, so that it brought forth weeds instead of wheat? Is it not written, as you have sown, so shall you reap?

My brothers and sisters, these are sobering questions for us today, far more important than the mere categories of people, places, and things. It is the whole creation — the big picture — of which we form a part, and which we change — for better or for worse — by our actions. We are not called to divide things up, but to pull them together: not to divide, but to unite. God intended humanity to care for creation — pulling it all together. Let us, my friends, be responsible stewards of that which has been committed to our care — and for which — one day — we will be called to render an account.+

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Trust and Obey

Obedience is built on the foundation of trust....

Proper 8a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”

Was ever such a commandment so harsh and cruel been given? Was ever a commandment so harsh and cruel ever heard? Was ever a commandment so harsh and cruel ever obeyed?

These are the questions that form in my mind as I hear the truly frightening commandment of God to Abraham in this morning’s continuation of our reading from the book of Genesis. You will recall that just last week Abraham had received another cruel command — the one from his wife Sarah. She had told Abraham to send the woman Hagar and the son she had borne to him out into the wilderness, there to die but for the intervention of God who revealed the well of water in the desert to revive the woman and her child. God had comforted Abraham before he sent Hagar and Ishmael out to the wilderness, promising him that they would survive, and that while the boy would become a great nation, it was to be through Isaac that Abraham would be reckoned as the father of many.

And now, out of the blue, God orders Abraham to that very son Isaac, the very son through whom, just last week, he promised that Abraham’s descendants would be numbered — to take his son Isaac out into the wilderness and to offer him as a sacrifice on the mountain that God would show. So my questions: Was ever such a cruel and harsh commandment ever given, ever heard, or ever obeyed?

For Abraham is ready to obey. He doesn’t argue with God the way he argued with him about the people of the city of Sodom, for whom he showed concern and care when God told him that the whole population of that wicked city would be destroyed. Abraham complained that God should not kill the innocent along with the guilty; and God finally agreed that if Abraham could find just ten innocent people in that wicked city God would spare it.

Yet when God gives this horrifying and cruel command, that Abraham is to kill his own innocent son, Abraham doesn’t blink an eye. He gets up early the next morning, saddles his donkey and takes his son along with two servants — and the firewood, the knife, and the fire! And then throughout the scene that follows, through the questions of his young son, even through to the raising of the knife, Abraham does not hesitate or falter. It is only the angel of the Lord calling to him out of heaven that stops him, and then he finds the ram caught in the thicket to offer in sacrifice instead of his son.

So let us look again at those questions. Was ever such a harsh command ever given? Well, I think we’ve already answered that one if we look at last week’s reading from Genesis. Sarah told Abraham to cast out Hagar and Ishmael. This was a harsh command in and of itself, especially considering that it was Sarah who had given Hagar to Abraham to start with, for the very purpose of bearing him this son. So, to look to the second question, how did Abraham receive this hard command about Hagar and Ishmael? He wasn’t happy. The Scripture records that “the matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son.” Sending that woman and small child out into the desert, even with a water bag, is a horrible thing to do. Before God reassured him, Abraham would know there was every chance that they would not survive, they would die of thirst — as indeed they would have had it not been for God’s promise that the boy would survive, and the provision of water in the desert.

And that final detail offers us the beginnings of an answer to the last question, Was ever such a harsh commandment obeyed? Abraham sends Hagar and Ishmael out into the desert because he trusts God to keep the promise that God has made to him — for God had told him that the boy would survive and I will make of him a great nation, too. And so it is as well with the commandment God gives Abraham in this morning’s passage. Because God had promised Abraham — just last week — that his posterity would be numbered through Isaac — God had promised that this son would live and grow to manhood and marry and have children — and that those children would have children, until the descendants of Abraham — through Isaac — would be more numerous than the sand on the seashore or the stars of the heavens. Abraham obeys the commandment of God because he trusts the promise of God. Trust comes first, then obedience; or perhaps it would be better to say that obedience is built on the foundation of trust. Abraham knows that God is faithful, that God keeps the promises that God has made — and in this case, although he doesn’t have the foggiest idea how God is going to do it, he knows that God will do something to allow his son Isaac to survive and grow up and marry and have children whose children shall be numbered as his — Abraham’s — offspring.

Abraham is so sure of this, that notice two things: First, he tells the servants who accompany him to the mountain where God has told him to sacrifice Isaac, “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.” “And then we will come back to you” — not “I will come back to you” but “we will come back to you.” Second, when the boy Isaac asks where the sacrificial offering is, Abraham responds, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering.” “God himself will provide.” Abraham’s trust is so great that even when they come to the place of sacrifice, even when he reaches out his hand for the knife, he trusts that God will provide — and God does provide.

Abraham trusts God, and that is the basis of his righteousness and his obedience — not his own strength or his own virtue, but his belief, his trust, in the nature of God — who is supremely trustworthy and keeps every promise God has made. After all, Abraham has seen God’s righteousness at work — God offered to spare the wicked city of Sodom if Abraham could find two handfuls of righteous people. God kept the promise that Abraham and Sarah would have a child in their old age — remember, they were in their 90s — but they did. God kept the promise, and she bore him that son, Isaac. Abraham knows that God will not make promises and then take them back. He trusts, and then he obeys.

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And so ought we to do, and for the same reason. We have experienced the blessings of God in our lives; we have heard the voice of God speaking in our hearts and guiding us on the right way; and though we have known times when the command of God was hard, we have also known that the mercy of God is great. More than that, there are many of us here I’m sure, like those Romans to whom Paul the apostle wrote, can look back on parts of our lives when we were not obedient to God but were obedient to the demands of our own lower nature. There were times when instead of raising our eyes to the hills we allowed ourselves to wander through the valley of the shadow of death. Yet even then, and even there, God was with us like a good Shepherd leading us up out of that valley into the light upon the heights.

Somehow even in the depths and darkness a small spark of hope and faith and trust was kindled, and the grace of God helped grow that little spark into a flame, and by its light God led us out. That spark of trust allowed us to realign our obedience from slavery to sin towards service to God — whose service is perfect freedom.

So let us join our voices with that of Abraham, in the sure and certain hope and trust in our Lord, the God of the promise made and the promise kept, the God whom we obey because we know that the Lord has provided, that the Lord provides, and that on the mount of the Lord, the Lord shall provide.+

Lost and Found

Blessed are those who thirst for God, the living God...

Proper 7a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG Sarah saw Ishmael, the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had born to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son.”

Before I begin my sermon today I want to note that the Hebrew Scripture readings that we will be hearing over the next months up to Advent mark a departure from the old prayer book lectionary. We have been using the new Revised Common Lectionary for some years now, but this is the first year in which are hearing the alternate track of readings from the Old Testament — most of them never read in worship before, which is why the revisers thought it was about time for us to hear them; and I hope you agree. Now to the sermon proper.

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In the gospel today Jesus talks about the strife that will come to a household between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and various arrangements of in-laws. I’m sure we’ve all been there at one point or another. When we look at the passage from Genesis, however, we encounter an even more painful situation. We picked up the story in the middle of things, so let me back up just a bit.

As I’m sure you recall, Abraham and Sarah had grown to old age without having a child of their own; but Sarah, knowing how important it was for Abraham to have a son to carry on his name, had encouraged him to father a child with her slave-woman, Hagar. Then God enters the situation and blesses Abraham and Sarah with a child of their own, even in their old age. And that’s when the trouble starts — as we see in the passage we heard this morning. Sarah insists that Abraham cast out this slave and her son; and Abraham, after being reassured by God that all will be well, complies with Sarah and sends Hagar and young Ishmael out into the wilderness with bread and water.

There in due course the mother and the boy run out of water, and Hagar, at her wit’s end — thinking that they are doomed to die of thirst but unwilling to watch her child die — leaves the boy under a bush and goes off some distance away to wait for the inevitable. Weeping, she lifts up her voice to God, and the boy cries, too — and God hears and answers, and assures Hagar, as he had Abraham, that this boy will not die but he too will become a great nation. And so, as God has done so many times before, God provides water in the wilderness, opening Hagar’s eyes to see the well of water.

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Whenever I encounter this passage — including this first time as part of our Sunday worship — I find I feel a great deal of sympathy for Hagar, and that Sarah does not come off well. And the visual image that comes to mind is of Syrian refugees escaping from the horror of the very uncivil war going on in their country; most especially the women and their children, dusty and ragged and thirsty. I picture Hagar and her little boy looking like that: covered with dust, perishing of thirst, out in a sunny wilderness; and I ask myself, Why didn’t God help them as soon as they set out from Abraham’s tent? Why let them run out of water first, and get to the point almost of dying? Why let Hagar descend into such a pit of anguish that she could leave her child under a bush to die, out of her pitiable inability to watch the tragedy of his death unfold?

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And the answer is that you have to be lost before you can be found. You have to go without something before you know how much you need something. Now, this is so obviously true about ordinary things that it has become proverbial: I don’t know how many of you have heard the proverb, “Hunger makes the best appetizer,” but it’s true; nothing makes food taste better than being really hungry. And it’s the people who live in the desert who know how valuable water is; who know because they thirst what that thirst-quenching drink does to you — satisfying you the way nothing else can. They also know how hard water is to come by in these days of global warming — I just saw on a documentary last week that there is a town in Yemen used to have to dig wells 80 meters deep to reach water; now they have to dig ten times as deep, to 800 meters, and will soon have to dig to a thousand — that’s two-thirds of a mile! That’s a long way to walk for a drink, let alone having to dig — it’s as far from as from here on up to Bedford Park Avenue. Not many of us would like to walk, on a sunny 98-degree day from here to Bedford Park just to get a drink of water — imagine having to dig straight down that far to find some; and then for the well to run dry!

Now, to put this into the theological framework that the authors of the lectionary no doubt intended: it is those who know their need of God who will find God. It is those who thirst for the living God who will find God springing forth into the desert of their lives.

People who are full of themselves, satisfied with wealth and happiness in life without a care in the world, are not likely to give God much of a thought — perhaps this is why Jesus said that it was so hard for the rich to be saved! But those who have trouble in life, those who thirst after righteousness or hunger for justice, are comforted in the knowledge that God will hear and answer them — but not before they experience that hunger and that thirst, hunger and thirst that develop an appetite for God.

And this is in large part why Jesus tells his disciples that he has not come to bring peace to the earth. He has come to stir things up, to put us in the position of having to make choices — sometimes, perhaps often, hard choices. He lays before us the choice between the easy smooth way, and the hard and difficult way; and offers us the chance to choose the wide highway to perdition rather than the strait and narrow path that leads to everlasting life.

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It is not that Jesus is saying we will need to seek out sorrow or difficulty. These things will come if we are living a Christian life; for being a Christian, one devoted to the teachings of Christ, one willing to respond to the demands of the cross, one willing to be crucified with him as he was crucified for us — that will cost you some trouble, perhaps in your family or with your friends, who would rather you join them on that easy-peasy path that they have chosen. But the hard road that is the gospel of Christ — and it too has a proverb to remember it by: “No cross, no crown” — or as Jesus says in today’s reading from Matthew, “Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” In God’s cosmic lost and found you have to be lost before you can be found, or as the great old hymn says, blind before you see. You have to wander for a while in the desert before you realize how much God means to you — and look, as to wandering in the desert, all the best people did it! Moses and Elijah and Hagar and John the Baptist and even Jesus himself all spent their time in the desert — and that is where they found the miracle of God’s grace.

Jesus reassures us — as God reassured Abraham — even as he promises him and us difficulties. He reassures us by promising us that however bad things get God will not abandon us, for we are very dear to God, of much more value than a whole flock of sparrows — and if God keeps an eye on them how much more surely will God keep an eye on you, on me, on all of us who have come to know him — who have been lost in this wicked world — but have come to know how much we need our Lord and our God. And who know that whenever we have reached out for God, whenever we have raised our voices, we have found God ready to help, showing us the well of water that was there all along — but which, in our grief, blinded by our tears, we had not seen.

We have taken up the cross and wandered into the desert of this life, but we have found the well of water, starting with the baptismal water into which we were baptized into his death so that, just as he was raised from the dead, so we too might walk in newness of life. He who lost everything for us, who gave himself up to the death of the cross, has redeemed us and found us — the lost has been found.

Thanks be to God for the thirst for God, that leads us to these plentiful waters of grace. To him be the glory, henceforth and for evermore.

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Image of God

...the mystery of what it means to be human, and the glory of what it means to be divine, find their perfection in Jesus Christ...

SJF • Trinity Sunday A 2014 • Tobias S Haller BSG
God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness...”

And so it begins... We heard this morning the unfolding of the beginning of all things, the creation of the world and all that is in it, as recorded in the first chapter and the first verse of the second chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis. In this powerful vision of creation, God is portrayed as a master architect — as in William Blake’s famous illustration: God sets his compass on the face of the deep. Blake — a master craftsman himself — portrays God as the supreme Master Craftsman, the heavenly architect at work.

So too, the language of this creation story echoes the building of the earthly temple. This is fitting. For just as the temple was God’s symbolic dwelling, all of creation is a habitation for the Most High. Of course, as Solomon would later say when he built the temple in Jerusalem, even heaven and the highest heaven can not contain the greatness of God, how much less this earthly temple. Yet we know that God does visit these earthly habitations — in ways that will become clear, I hope, in a moment.

In the cosmic temple described in Genesis, the dome is the roof of the sky, and its foundation is the earth. The waters are gathered together into one place, into just such a basin as was featured in the temple in Jerusalem, a huge bronze basin in which the priests would wash before they entered the inner courts. The vegetation reflects the decoration of the temple, the walls and columns, carved with fruit, vines and branches. The great lights of the sun and moon are like the huge bronze lamp-stands that stood in the temple court. Then, to provide the multitude of sacrifices, all the living creatures are created. Thus the temple is almost complete, ready for the worship of God.

I say, almost complete. What is missing? Well, in most temples of the ancient near east, in the innermost portion, in the shrine of the holy of holies, you would find an image of the God that the people worshiped, to whom the temple was dedicated. And this is where we come in. As you know, God forbade the Israelites making and worshiping graven images; and in the temple in Jerusalem, in the Holy of Holies, there was no image of God — but instead, the ark of the covenant and the cherubim who served as the throne of the invisible God.

But in the cosmic temple described in Genesis, God does create an image, a likeness, to represent God, and to take its place at the center of creation, in the holy of holies. God creates humanity.

This tells us that the author of Genesis understood humanity as the crowning achievement of creation, but even more, to be an image or likeness of God. It is as much as to say, If you want to know what God is like, look at human beings.

Now, this doesn’t mean that God has a head or two arms and two legs. And we also have to acknowledge, especially given the rest of Genesis, to say nothing of Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and all the rest, that we are to look to the best of humanity — humanity as it is meant to be at its best — if we want to gain an idea of God’s nature. So what are people like at their best: and how do we reflect the image of God?

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We find an answer to this question in the closing words from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” Grace, love and communion: these three qualities of God, reflected in humanity, are facets of God’s image and likeness; and these facets, like the persons of the Holy Trinity itself, are related and connected, much as the human and divine natures are interconnected in the person of Jesus Christ. What’s more, the mystery of what it means to be human, and the glory of what it means to be divine, find their perfection in Jesus Christ; he is the true image and likeness untarnished by sin: revealing humanity as all that humanity is meant to be, when God created us in the first place. It is in the Incarnation of Christ that we will find the place where the human and divine meet, as the hymn says, “God in man made manifest.”

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First comes the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. What is grace? We tend to think of grace as being about style, decorum, elegance. We say someone is “graceful” when they move well. But the grace of God, especially of God in Christ, is about the gift of God and the giving of God, the stooping down and emptying out of the Son of God, the graceful descent from the throne at the Father’s right hand, the choice to come to us, to be with us as one of us, the graceful condescension of Emmanuel — God with us — when the power of God leapt down into the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the infinite reality of the creator of all that was became, as one old poet so beautifully put it, “compassed in little space.” This is the grace of Jesus Christ, like the grace of the most perfect high-board diver who leaps from the highest point and spins and plummets but then enters the water with only a tiny splash! This is the grace that is a gift: a gift to you and a gift to me, that the Son of God, should for our sake, take our nature upon himself, as naturally as a man or woman puts on a garment perfectly tailored for them — because it was for this reason that God made us in his image in the first place: that one day God might put on our nature with such a perfect fit. This is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

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Next comes the love of God the Father. And John the Evangelist is the great exponent of God’s love; it is a theme he takes up again and again. It is he who assures us that God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but have everlasting life. He continues, that God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved. As John said, In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. So once again, John helps us to see that God’s very being is tied up with the Incarnation, the sending down of the Son of God to be with us, in order to save us. As Jesus said in John’s Gospel, There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. And this is what God did for us, in Christ, giving himself to save us, even from ourselves.

And as John continues in his First Epistle: “Since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” You can’t see God — God is invisible — but when we love each other, giving of ourselves for each other, we become so much like him, that the original image and likeness he bestowed upon us in creation begins to glimmer through the stains of sin that we accumulate in our earthly life. Every act of love, every “sending” of ourselves, every stepping aside to honor and serve another, is a reflection of God’s very being. Such is the love of God the Father, who sent his Son to save us.

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Which brings us to the “communion” or “fellowship” of the Holy Spirit. Of all human love, the love that Christians show to one another, which finds its perfection in the communion of the church, is a revelation of God to the world. John again gives us Jesus’ word on this: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” The harmony of the church reflects the harmony of heaven; the unity of the church reflects the unity of God, and the loving fellowship and communion of the church reflects the being of God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Communion, whether the communion shared by the persons of the Holy Trinity, or the communion shared by individual Christians or by Christian churches, does not mean that everyone is exactly the same. Right in the middle of our west rose window you can see the old emblem of the Trinity: and it affirms the truth that while we believe the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God — yet we do not, as the Athanasian creed put it, believe in three Gods, but one God. At the same time, the Father is not the Son, nor is the Son the Holy Spirit. The Three in One and One in Three are united without confusion, but I’m afraid that when preachers start to talk about it they begin get a little confused, and so it’s probably something best not to talk too much about. But you can look at it — you can behold it, there, and in each other, as we reflect the Holy Trinity, God with us, in us, and through us.

This is the great mystery at the heart of the Christian faith. But as I say talking about it has gotten many a preacher into trouble. So I’ll stop while I’m ahead, and remind us that Jesus promised that Christians would be known by our love, not by our doctrine! Instead let me point us back to the primary lesson I hope you will carry away with you this morning.

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That is, that God made us in his image. That God made us to be like him. That God made us to be filled with the generous grace that suffers for the sake of the beloved. That God made us to be filled with the love that gives without reservation or qualification. And that God made us to be in communion with each other, joined in the bonds of affection through the instrument of God’s unity. May we be One in Christ as Christ is One with God the Father and the Holy Spirit. And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all now and forever more.

Second-Hand People

The disciples were an heirloom from the Father to Jesus, vessels precious containing the word...

SJF • Easter 7a • Tobias Haller BSG
Jesus said, “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.”

One of the peculiarities of John’s Gospel is that his account of the Last Supper contains no mention of the Holy Eucharist. Rather, John is the only evangelist to record the startling act of humility, when Jesus rose from the table and washed the disciples’ feet. But John’s account is also unusual because it is so much longer than that of the other evangelists. As Deacon Cusano reminded us last week, John’s Gospel retelling of the Last Supper includes four and half chapters of teaching and prayer. In this long discourse, Jesus reveals why he came to be among us. These chapters have a timeless quality, as they appear to describe the future, but they also reflect the eternal. It is as if Jesus is both looking forward to his Passion but also looking back upon that Passion, and even upon struggles of the early church, by which the church would come to share in his sufferings. It is as though he is looking back from a time long after his Resurrection — from an eternal perspective, from a God’s-eye-view.

There are even moments, as in today’s portion, in which Jesus refers to himself in the third person — as if he were talking about someone else: “This is eternal life,” he says, “that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

On top of that, there is an almost hypnotic quality to the language in these chapters — the repetition of phrases, their inversion and weaving together, in a wonderful vision of the interconnectedness of the Father and the Son, knit together in the Spirit, folding the disciples into the unity of God himself: “all mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.... so that they may be one, as we are one.” It is as if all of time and space, humanity and divinity, were displayed on a great silken tapestry being shaken out before us, held up on display, then folded and refolded, tucking all of history, all of the cosmos, into a small space, four and a half chapters in the middle of the Gospel according to Saint John.

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One of the things Jesus makes clear in this reflective and prayerful meditation is that the disciples were not his originally. As he says, they belonged to the Father, and were in the world. I noted in my sermon a few weeks ago, that it was God who chose those who would become followers of Jesus, those God deemed precious. And God committed these chosen disciples to his Son. Jesus had them second-hand.

Anyone who comes from a large family knows about second-hand and hand-me-downs. Actually, since my younger brother outgrew me and soon was bigger and taller than me, I actually experienced a few cases of hand-me-ups! But they were still second-hand.

Usually such second-hand hand-me-downs are forced by economy and practicality. When you don’t have much money, getting some more wear out of someone else’s clothes can help a family pinch a penny until Abraham Lincoln weeps. And I can readily admit that in my early days living in New York City as a struggling artist, I made more than one trip to Goodwill both for clothing and for furniture — and I wasn’t making a donation! I also was savvy enough to take advantage of the Thursday evening “set your unwanted furniture out on the street for collection” that still turns New York City streets into a kind of free-for-all flea market where one person’s refuse becomes another’s living room furniture! I’ve still got a floor lamp over at the rectory that I rescued from the clutches of the sanitation department over forty years ago.

But there is another kind of second-hand that is far more important and valuable than even the greatest curb-side flea-market discovery: and that is the precious inheritance that a father or a mother passes on to their children. I’m sure most of us here have some kind of heirloom from a parent or a grandparent, an uncle or an aunt — perhaps not some valuable by worldly standards, but important to us. In my office downstairs I have on the wall a porcelain plate with Raphael’s “Madonna and Child” on it. It belonged to my mother, and she gave it to me as an inheritance. It probably is not worth much by the standards of AntiquesRoadshow, but it means a great deal to me.

Most of you probably have some such item, perhaps also not worth much in the worldly marketplace, even if you would never think of parting with it. That’s because its value to you as a family treasure is so much more important than its value may be as a worldly treasure. (I do wonder, sometimes, when someone on Antiques Roadshow learns that the treasured vase that momma left them isn’t carnival glass, but a Tiffany worth tens of thousands of dollars, as you can see the wheels beginning to click behind their eyes, calculating the value of this keepsake versus its possible value of cash on the barrelhead, and how much longer it is going to stay on momma’s dresser. Because it’s no longer a vase; it’s a vahse!”)

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But, vases and vahses aside, God’s gift is much more precious than any heirloom, valued for sentiment or even for its cash value. What the Father gives to Jesus is precious — precious to God and so infinitely precious; for the Father gives Jesus the disciples, chosen out of that worldly world to be the beginning of a new family, the human family, the family we call the Church. They are the heirloom vessels, chosen to be the means by which the family of God will grow, through the preaching of the Gospel. The Father presents them to Jesus his Son, and from that moment on they belong to Jesus, and he puts them to immediate use, filling these vessels with the Word — which also comes second hand; as he said in our Gospel today, God gave the word to him, and he passes the word on to the disciples. As he said to the Father, “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.”

These disciples, though second-hand, are second-hand from God: they are heirlooms of the precious kind, and they are given for a purpose. They are not just pretty pictures to hang on a wall, attractive furnishings to brighten up the corner of a room. No, my friends, they are chosen and precious vessels — vessels designed by the Creator, who presented them to his Son, to bear his message — to carry that word, that saving word, his saving message, the words God gave to him, that he committed unto them — to the rest of a waiting world.

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We are poised today, on this Seventh Sunday of Easter, between the observances of the Ascension of Jesus and that of Pentecost, next Sunday. After the Ascension, the apostles, those chosen vessels, were dumfounded; they stood there looking up into heaven with open mouths like so many vases or urns. We hear their names recited out again, names to be repeated to the end of time, these chosen eleven, and then the angel gives them the charge to go back to Jerusalem, and wait for the Spirit. There they will await the fulfillment of their purpose, the fulfillment of what they were designed for, what they were meant for, what they were chosen for. For on Pentecost, the Holy Spirit will come upon them, and fill those chosen vessels. The fire of God will fire that ceramic and make it strong enough to bear the days that are to come, the days of stress, the days of trouble, the days of persecution. God will give them the power to testify and proclaim, God will fill them to the brim with many languages so that they can bear the saving message to the world’s four quarters, to all of the people of the world, and enlarge the family of God, sharing with them in a precious inheritance.

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And you know what? We are second-hand people too. Because we received the message from those who got it first hand, from those apostles and evangelists who stood staring up on a hillside looking after Jesus as he ascended into heaven; but then returned to Jerusalem to await the coming Spirit; who, when the Spirit came, were filled with power to spread the word abroad.

We second-hand Christians, members of Christ’s family, have received the most precious inheritance imaginable — the word of salvation itself — we aren’t just vases, we are vahses, we are full of the Spirit and the message of salvation.

And you know what? We’re not going to take it to Antiques Road Show. We’re not putting it up on eBay. We’ve got a better way to share the gift, through the power of the Spirit. We too, with the disciples, can proclaim the way to eternal life of which Jesus spoke that night in the upper room: that all the world may know the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom God has sent.

So let us not, at the end of our worship today, simply stand staring with open mouths, even though we’ve all been singing. Let us go forth, having been filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, to do the work God has given us to do, to the glory of his Name, that all may be one in him, even as God is One: God the Father Almighty, his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who with the Holy Spirit, is worthy of all honor and glory for ever and ever.+

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Heavenly Architecture

We are still on the Way, not quite ready for the Truth and the Life, until polished and dressed as living stones for the heavenly dwelling.

SJF • Easter 5a 2014 • Tobias S Haller BSG
Let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

It is difficult for us, living in a nominally Christian country, to imagine what it was like for the earliest believers in Christ. They were a tiny minority wherever they went in the Jewish or the Roman world. Among the Jews, themselves a minority in the Empire, the Christians were an even smaller sub-group, put upon and persecuted from the very first. In today’s passage from Acts we witness the end that befell one of them, Stephen, a young Christian whose death was partly the doing of another young man, Saul. This Saul, this persecutor of the church, would later undergo a powerful conversion, and change more than his name, becoming one of its greatest champions, but also a victim of the persecutions against it.

Christians in those early days got it from both sides: opposition from many of the Jewish leaders, but from the Gentile pagans as well. Compared with the Empire’s pagan religions — from worship of the Emperor to worship of the ancient deities of Rome and Greece and Egypt, to the emerging mystery religions — the Christians were a pitiful few and far between. To get a sense today of what it was like to be Christian in those days, you would have to go to someplace like Saudi Arabia or Iran or Northeast Nigeria, where Christians are not only a minority, but are restricted and in some cases persecuted or killed.

The other thing it is hard for us to understand is based on the fact that in our culture being a Christian is respectable. Politicians today can wear their religion on their sleeve — or on their lapel — without fear. I am old enough to remember when John F Kennedy had to make up excuses for his being a Roman Catholic; but the issue barely came up with John Kerry — remember him? And the Mormon religion only came up as a footnote with Mitt Romney — remember him?

People today can be public about their faith, but in the early days of the church it was clearly not so, as our readings from Acts and First Peter show. As far as the majority — pagan or Jewish — was concerned, the Christians were a dangerous minority, a cult with strange ideas that went against everything that society held in high esteem. Many of the Jews of the Greek and Roman cities were upstanding citizens, many of them were leaders of commerce, and the Greek and Roman leaders of the territories wanted above all to keep the peace, and the wheels of commerce turning. These Christians, their opponents would say, were turning the world upside down. “They say that the poor should be treated as well as the rich — even that it is blessèd to be poor. What an idea! They claim that God came among us in the person of a convicted felon, a trouble-maker — a man who was executed for treason against the Emperor; and what’s more, they claim that this disreputable traitor, this rebel against all that is decent and civil was raised from the dead! I mean, really! What will they be telling us next? that we should join them?!” And so these pious upright citizens hounded the apostles from town to town, stirring up opposition against them, those people, those weird, strange cult-like people who were turning their world upside down.

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It is to address exactly this situation that Peter writes his first letter, offering good advice for those who are being persecuted for their beliefs. He tells the Christian believers to turn to Jesus — and to do so with the innocence and purity and naturalness of a newborn child reaching for its mother’s breast, to be held, protected, rocked and nourished. Don’t worry about being rejected — those who reject you now rejected Jesus before: and look! He, the stone rejected by the builders, has become the cornerstone of a new spiritual house, into which you are being incorporated like living stones. Yes, it’s true you were once no people — you were nobodies — but now you are God’s own people, and that makes you somebody!

The simple truth of all of this is that God has indeed turned the world upside down — and inside out! As Jesus’ own mother had sung at the beginning, when she heard the word of his Incarnation, “God has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly and meek. ”

And what could be more upside down and inside out than the resurrection itself? God has brought his own beloved Son out of the darkness of death and into the marvelous light of new life, rolling away the stone and turning the tomb that held him inside out. So too each Christian, is blessed and baptized and forgiven and freed from the death of sin. And no matter how lowly your estate before, you have become a member of a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. No wonder the civic leaders of the status quo were worried about this new religion; no wonder the authorities wanted to clamp down on this new faith; the Gospel is nothing less than revolutionary!

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And the revolution continues for each Christian believer, if not at the scale of the worldly society, then at least for each and every one of us as we engage in our own struggles with the pressures each of us faces. For Christ turns each and every one of us, and our own personal worlds, upside down and inside out.

God, it seems, puts his people through a good bit of a tumble in this life. And we might well ask, Why? If Jesus loves us so much; if, as he says in today’s Gospel that he is going to prepare a place for us, and he will come and get us, why doesn’t he just do so and take us now? In a rapture — all of us, right now! Why the wait? Why do we go through this earthly life at all if what we are really meant for is heaven?

Well, Peter has already given us the answer. We are like newborns in the faith — our eyes closed and happily nursing on the spiritual milk of Mother Church, provided to us, and helping us to grow; but we are still in the process of growth into salvation, as Peter calls it. Only God knows when we will be ready for him to come to take us to our everlasting home. Sometimes indeed God seems to take people too soon, while there are others for whom, it seems, God holds back. But preparation is needed, and God is the preparer.

This is why Peter uses the image of a building: the stones for the building — which is to say, us — have to be cut and polished and fit into the places that God the heavenly Architect intends for them. And such preparation and such building takes time.

On the twenty-eighth will be the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone for this church. This church didn’t just plop down fully made, unpacked out of a cardboard box and set up; it had to be built; a foundation had to be dug; stones had to be laid to hold up the rest of the building.

There’s a TV show on the Science Channel called “Strip the City” — I don’t know if any of you have seen it. But they make use of computer animation to peel away the outsides of buildings, and even of the streets — rolling them back like carpet to show the subways, and the plumbing, and the sewers and everything the lies underneath. It’s amazing: cities aren’t just from the ground up; they go down, down, down. And in fact it’s the stuff below that nourishes the city: that’s where the water comes from, that’s where the electricity comes from; that’s where people travel to and from their work. There’s a whole lot there, underneath — the foundation.

And for us something else is in that foundation. For us, that foundation is Jesus Christ; who was buried — remember — he was buried, he was put below, he descended into Hell, so that he could hold up a whole new world. Imagine the great building that this new world is: those who have gone before rest on that firm foundation of Jesus Christ, and other stones laid down rank by rank, like the Apostles. They rest on Christ, and then the next generation and the next, building and building this spiritual temple — into which we too will be added when our time comes, God’s time — not ours. He is the architect, we are the stones. God will take us when he knows that we have been tumbled enough through life to have our edges smoothed, our rough spots worn down, when we have been cut to shape and formed for the purpose God has for us.

But we are not quite ready yet. You may recall that famous line from a movie a few years back, when Jack Nicholson confronts Tom Cruise, who says he wants to know the truth. Nicholson snarls, “Truth! You can’t handle the truth!” Well, we face an even greater Truth; the one who is the Truth, and the Way, and the Life. And we know that that is true. But we are not yet quite ready to face the Living God in all his majesty and awe; we are still in our spiritual infancy, still incompletely formed and polished.

It is not that Jesus is not ready for us, but that we are not ready for him. We are still in the process of being shaped and formed for the proper fit in his temple on high. All our life is part of that preparation — a school of hard knocks sometimes, but also the school of God’s mercy. All our life is preparation. And when the time comes — God’s time, not ours — as that wonderful old hymn puts it, after “many a blow and biting sculpture” has “polished well those stones elect” we will find ourselves — one day — “in our places now compacted by the heavenly Architect.”

The time will come, beloved, when we close our eyes one last time on this earth, and Christ takes us by the hand to lead us to be with him where he is. The time will come when the pains and sorrows and challenges of being chiseled and battered and polished will be well worth it. When the heavenly Architect slips us into place in his temple in the heavenly city, we will see just why he has shaped us in the way he did, so that we could be all that he intends us to be: living stones for his spiritual temple — for ever. And in Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest, we will bask forever in the radiancy of glory, and the bliss beyond compare.+

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Over My Dead Body!

The shepherd and the gate...

SJF • Easter 4a 2014 • Tobias S Haller BSG

Peter wrote, He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.

We continue our Easter exploration of the teaching of the apostle Peter this week as he takes up an image with which he had heard Jesus describe himself: the Good Shepherd. This is one of the most popular images of Jesus — literally: there are hundreds of stained glass windows and statues and paintings of Jesus portrayed as the Good Shepherd. I can’t even remember the last time I was in a church that didn’t have at least one image of the Good Shepherd. And we have one here at St. James — you may not see it very often because it is around the corner in the transept; but take a moment, perhaps later after worship, to come around the side and see our picture of Jesus the Good Shepherd in stained glass. The oldest known image of Jesus, in fact, is an image of Jesus painted on the walls of one of the ancient catacombs, showing him as a young man with a lamb over his shoulders, gently bearing it home — one of the oldest images.

We tend to think of the shepherd’s life in just this way: spending the lonely days and nights chasing after fluffy lambs, sitting on the hillside in a sunny afternoon as the sheep graze contentedly, playing on a pipe and drowsing as the bees buzz and hum around the flowers: just the kind of job where snoozing the day away seems just about right: a low-stress job!

What gets lost in this imagery, however, is the reality of just how hard and dangerous it is to be a shepherd. Not only are there thieves and bandits to contend with (as our Gospel text this morning reminds us) but also wolves and lions and bears and other wild beasts who would snatch up a young sheep for a tasty meal.

We sang David’s shepherd song today, in a musical version of that belovèd Twenty-third Psalm. You may recall that when King Saul told David that he was just a boy and no match for the Philistine giant Goliath, young David answered, “Your servant used to keep sheep for his father; and whenever a lion or a bear came, and took a lamb from the flock, I went after it and struck it down, rescuing the lamb from its mouth; and if it turned against me, I would catch it by the jaw, strike it down, and kill it. Your servant has killed both lions and bears; and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, for he has defied the armies of the living God.” Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

So David knew just what was involved in being a shepherd. Above all he knew that it was no easy-peasy, lazy-hazy, laid-back way of life. It was hard; it was dangerous. If we look closely at David’s beloved Psalm 23, we find it filled with danger and strife. In fact, it is because of all the danger and strife that the comforting parts of the Psalm are there — for who needs to be comforted when he’s already comfortable? Look at the perils described in this Psalm: the valley of the shadow of death, the enemies before whom the table is set, the rod and staff which aren’t just for show, but for striking down the foe and giving strength to the weak, and even that wounded head anointed with oil.

So being a shepherd is no easy task; it rates high on the scale of hazardous work — something which Peter the fisherman would also have appreciated. For fishing is also not just sitting dozing by a stream with a can of worms at one’s side and the line tied around your toe to wake you up when there’s a nibble. Commercial fishing — for that is what Peter and James and John and Andrew were involved in — commercial fishing is one of the most dangerous professions in the world. There was a TV show about it, that they had to amend the filming of because two of the fishermen were killed in the course of doing the series. Fishing has always been one of the most dangerous jobs you could undertake — on the stormy sea of Galilee in Peter’s day or the stormy North Atlantic today. Peter knew perfectly well that a fisherman might lose his life when a storm swamped his boat and swept him overboard. He also knew that he might risk his life to catch fish, but no fisherman would lay down his life for the sake of the fish themselves! He wasn’t there to save them; he was there to catch them! But on the other hand, a shepherd might well be called upon to lay down his life for the sheep — to lose life and limb to protect them by fighting the thieves, the bandits, the lions or wolves or bears, or whoever might seek the life of that flock.

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Being a shepherd, then, is a risky business, a rough line of work. And our Gospel reading this morning shows us just how rough and risky with another surprising image. Note that in the second half of the gospel passage, Jesus doesn’t describe himself as a shepherd but as “I am the gate,” he says. “Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.” This is odd, isn’t it? If you think so, you aren’t the only one. We’re used to seeing Jesus portrayed as a shepherd, but not as the gate of the sheepfold. Years ago pastor George Adam Smith was on a tour of the holy land. This was quite an extensive tour, and it hit all the backwater spots not usually visited today. One afternoon he stopped at a shady oasis, rarely visited by outsiders. Off to one side was a perfect Near Eastern sheepfold, such as has existed for thousands of years: it’s a low enclosure about so high, square, with an opening on one side — but no gate. The sheep were all in the fold, resting in the heat of the afternoon, and there was an ancient Arab shepherd sitting outside by the opening. Smith called for the tour interpreter and said, “Ask him where the gate for the sheepfold is.” The interpreter asked the question, and the old shepherd looked up at the curious visitors, and then smiled a knowing smile — revealing that he had more wrinkles than teeth. He spoke a few words in the local dialect, and smiled again, as the interpreter translated. He said, “I am the gate for the sheep. When I have brought them in, I sit here, and watch that none goes out. At night I sleep in the doorway, so if a sheep tries to go out it must pass over me, and if a wolf tries to get in it must pass over my body. I am the gate.” And Pastor Smith learned a lesson he would long remember.

For Jesus is the gate of our sheepfold. He watches over us day and night, protecting us from harm and preventing us from wandering. He will not allow a thief or a bandit to get past him, nor a wolf or lion or bear. He will block their way, and say, “You’ll get to my sheep over my dead body!” And that’s not a threat, it’s a promise!

For Jesus did lay down his life for us — for you, for me. He bore our sins, as Peter said, bore them in his body on the cross, so that, we, free from sins, might live for righteousness. We were gone astray like silly sheep, wandering off in search of greener pastures but finding ourselves lost in the middle of the desert — and he found us laid us on his shoulder and gently brought us home. He put us in our sheepfold, and laid himself down in the opening, to keep us safe within, and to keep out the thieves and the bandits. And when the wild beasts of sin and fear and despair came stalking by that gate, he set himself between them and us. His rod and his staff took the form of a cross on that hill outside the city gates, a rod and a staff set crosswise, upon which he suffered and died in the presence of his enemies, upon which he entered into the valley of the shadow of death — for us, for us, my beloved brothers and sisters. He set that table before us on the night before he died, in the presence of his enemies, and ours — which for us was our own sin and waywardness.

And not for us alone. For there where he was lifted high upon the cross he could call the whole world to himself — he, the gate of the sheepfold. He, the way out of the valley of the shadow and into the pasture of the beautiful sunlight of God; He, the way out of the desert of sin and into the fields beside which the waters gently flow, the still waters whose still surface is as clear as glass. He is the gate of the sheep, of all the sheep who hear his voice and come to him, raised high upon the cross in all of his woundedness so that all might see him from afar, and come, and be healed by his wounds, and then enter the sheepfold. Jesus came that we might have life, and have it abundantly — and he gave his life for us, for our sake, placing himself between us and our sins.

We enter into life because of his death and resurrection; they stand between us and the thieving banditry of sin, the wild beasts of fear and wrong, and the foolishness of our own wandering. He is the gate, he is the shepherd.

So let us, beloved, this Eastertide and always, give thanks for our Good Shepherd, who calls us to him, each by name, and leads us in and out of pasture; who laid down his life for us; who rose again from the dead and who now lives in us, and we in him, the shepherd and guardian of our souls, forever and ever.

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Sit Down and Eat Your Supper

Jesus give us the real instruments of unity...

SJF • Easter 3a 2014 • Tobias S Haller BSG
Those who welcomed the message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.

Last week we heard part of Saint Peter’s first sermon, delivered on the day of Pentecost, and today we hear the conclusion, and more importantly, the results. What you have here might be described as the first “altar call” — the crowd is cut to the quick by Peter’s ardent testimony, and about three thousand of them are added to the flock in baptism.

But there is more: as the Book of Acts makes clear, this is not the end, but the beginning of the story. The text continues: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” This is literally a “cast of thousands” for the performance that is about to begin, which is the ongoing life of the church as a new body of the faithful. And what is important to note here is that they are not just faithful to God, but to each other. They are no longer simply a crowd of individuals, but a congregation, an assembly, a church. What holds them together, what unifies them, is their one faith in the one Lord through the one baptism. And their unity is strengthened and reinforced by the disciplines they practice as the body of Christ.

These instruments of unity are familiar to us: we use the words that summarize them at every baptism, and when we recite the Baptismal Covenant as we did two weeks ago on Easter. The members of the church not only devote themselves to God, but to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers.

You all know the Christmas carol, that goes, “I saw three ships come sailing in on Christmas day in the morning,” right? Well I’d like to point out that the earliest believers, and believers since, are united by means of three ships: leadership, fellowship, and worship.

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First of all, the believers acknowledge the apostles’ leadership. As Acts records, they turn “to Peter and to the other apostles” with an earnest question; after being told what a mess they are in, they naturally ask, “Brothers, what should we do?” And they heed their advice, their witness, their teaching, the testimony from these eyewitnesses, testimony that has been passed down through the ages. And as I said last week, that testimony is this: Christ is alive! In him we have forgiveness of sins — all our sins, whatever they may be — and we have a new life in the Spirit. That’s it, the short form of the Christian faith, as handed down from the beginning until now, and as it will be handed down until the coming of the Lord in glory, to judge both the living and the dead. Christ is alive.

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Out of this strong leadership and teaching of the apostles, there arises almost at once the second instrument of unity: fellowship. The first thing the people do — those three thousand — is to get baptized — all washed with the same baptismal water, united with Christ in a death like his, in order to live in the life which is his, the life of the church, which is his body. And this fellowship takes surprising forms: these people will go on to share their property with each other, the better-off helping those in need. They spend much more time together than they ever had before. As Peter says in the Epistle, looking back on this newly baptized community: “Now that you have purified your souls by obedience to the truth” — that is, now that you are reborn in Christ — “you have genuine mutual love.” They are a community bound in fellowship.

And then, of course, comes worship. The new community of faith is unified by the instruments of prayer and the breaking of the bread in which Christ is made known and makes himself known from Emmaus onward even to this day. These new believers discover that in giving thanks and praising God and sitting at the table together, they share in this great mystery of Christ’s presence with them, the Holy Communion of his Body and Blood, of his and their — and our — Savior.

This is how the church began, and this is how the church is called to continue, united through these three instruments, sailing the seas of this world in these three ships — the leadership and teaching of the apostles’ and their successors — which is the body of the faithful, lay and ordained; in the fellowship of that gathered community that transcends time and space; and in the worship that offers and shares the broken bread and the cup of wine, with the prayer of thanksgiving.

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These three aspects of leadership, fellowship and worship are summed up in our gospel this morning. When Jesus meets the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, he takes the leadership that is his by right; he teaches them about himself, leading them into an understanding of the Scripture as they walk along, as he relates it to all that has happened. He then stays with them in fellowship, accepting their invitation as the day draws to a close and night comes on, to be with them, to stay with them a little longer; and in doing so he draws them even closer together in fellowship. And finally, as he breaks the bread — in what would ordinarily have been just an act of fellowship but which has been raised by Jesus into an act of worship — he makes himself known to them, even as he vanishes from their sight, perhaps leaving behind his knowing smile, the warmth of his presence, and the knowledge of his love.

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Would it were always so! For there are some who reject this way to unity in Christ; some who don’t book passage on these three ships but try to take another way — and insist on others taking it too! Instead of accepting the imperishable presence of God whom we meet in communion and fellowship with each other, some still want to have their own way, refusing to share in the leadership of the church because of disagreements over one thing or another, refusing the offered hand of fellowship because they don’t approve of the one who offers it, and worst of all refusing to worship together because of these divisions and dissensions.

No doubt you have heard or read of the disagreements that have gone on in the Anglican Communion over the last twenty years. Some go so far as to say that the Communion has fallen apart. Well, I say, Don’t believe everything you hear! While there are some — even a handful of folks here in our own country — angry enough to try to vote others off the island (as if they could!), there are many others, the vast majority of others, who are on record as saying they do not approve of such a movement. More importantly, in the long run, they trust — I hope we all trust — that Christ will prevail. The majority of the leaders of the Anglican Communion will heed Christ’s commandment to be one in him, not seeking unity in manmade political structures or elaborate compromises, but in the comprehensive instruments of unity that Christ himself gave us: shared leadership, committed fellowship, and communal worship.

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Some people, even at the level of a parish, refuse to share in prayer and fellowship with those with whom they disagree. What would Jesus do in a case like this? A number of things spring to mind. I can well imagine him saying, as he said long ago, “Who are you to judge your brother? Who are you to place heavy loads on others that you are not willing to bear? Who are you to bar the way to the kingdom of heaven even though you do not enter yourself?” But I can also imagine Jesus saying something that many an irrate parent has said to his or her unruly children: “Sit down and eat your supper!”

For in this case the supper is not mere earthly food. Nor is it our supper — it is his, the Lord’s Supper. This is the supper of Christ’s death, the meal which it took his death to feed us, his Body given for us, his Blood shed for us, by which we are not merely nourished, but saved. Through him we have come, as Peter wrote, to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that our faith and hope might be set on God, not on our poor efforts, but on his gift. His sacrificial leadership has led us to this table. His willing to be with us ensures his presence with us in fellowship. And his gift of himself has blessed us with the opportunity to worship. The three ships have come to this safe harbor, to this destination: here where we gather. Here at this table he makes himself known to us in the breaking of the bread. He has told us to cease our strife — to take and eat, to take and drink, together; to sit down and have our supper.

To reject each other here, my friends, is to reject him. To reject each other, to judge each other, is to dismantle the church for which he died, for which he was raised from the dead. To reject each other is to undo Easter, to rob the Last Supper of its power, to put Jesus back in the tomb, to seal it with the stone of judgment, and earn thereby our own justified condemnation.

How much better, to do as Christ commands: to take and eat, to take and drink, to love each other as he loved us, serving one another rather than judging one another.

How much better to remain united in him through the three ships whose sails, when filled with the wind of the Holy Spirit, can bear us to the safe harbor of his peace. Pray, my sisters and brothers, that we and all the faithful throughout the world, may set aside our disagreements, our judgments, our divisions, and remain united in him, who has committed to us this task of leadership, this community of fellowship, and this call to worship him, who is the savior and redeemer of the world, even Jesus Christ our Lord.

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