Sermon delivered Sunday, May 19, 2013 (The Day of Pentecost) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Acts 2:1-21, Romans 8:14-17, John 14:8-17, 25-27)
On this Day of Pentecost, we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit to the church in Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit is the continuing presence of God in Christ with us, dwelling inside every baptized Christian and guiding the church to continue God’s work in the world.
Before his crucifixion, Jesus promised his followers that God would send them another Advocate after Jesus was no longer physically present with them. We heard this promise in today’s Gospel reading. In chapter 14 of John’s Gospel, Jesus is speaking to his disciples the night before his death and he says to them,
“…I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you… the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (John 14:16-17, 25-27).
The Greek word translated as “Advocate” is parakletos, which can also be translated as “counselor,” “comforter,” and “intercessor.” The original Greek term had legal connotations – a parakletos is something like a defense attorney – one who advocates for you by arguing your case in front of another. The literal meaning of the word parakletos is “one who is called in” – more specifically, one who is called in to assist someone in trouble. When Jesus promises the disciples that the Holy Spirit will be a parakletos for them, it is a word of reassurance. “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid,” he says (John 14:27). In verse 18, which our lectionary leaves out, Jesus says that he will not leave his followers orphaned after he leaves this earth. He reassures the disciples that although they may fear his departure, God will not abandon them. The Holy Spirit will be with them, to assist them when they are in need, to defend them to anyone who may accuse them, to guide and teach them. They need not fear, because the very presence of God will dwell in them, a constant inner companion and guide.
The promise Jesus made to the first disciples he also makes to us. As Christians, we too have the Holy Spirit dwelling in us. Although the biblical accounts differ as to when and how the Holy Spirit comes to people, it is in most cases connected closely with baptism. In some cases, the Holy Spirit comes upon people before they are baptized, as in Acts 10, when the Holy Spirit falls upon the Gentiles while Peter preaches to them, causing Peter to ask, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people, who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” (Acts 10:47). At other places in the book of Acts, Peter and the other disciples promise their new converts that they will receive the Holy Spirit when they are baptized (Acts 2:38), but there are at least a few cases where the Holy Spirit comes to people after their baptism. In Acts 8, the people Philip baptizes in Samaria do not receive the Holy Spirit at their baptism, but only after Peter and John visit and lay hands on them (Acts 8:9-17).
The lack of consistency in the biblical accounts about when and how the Spirit comes to people is testimony to the fact that we cannot know exactly how and when the Spirit will move, nor can we control it. Jesus himself acknowledges this unpredictability of the Spirit, when he says to Nicodemus in chapter 3 of John’s Gospel, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). The Spirit’s dynamic, unconstrained activity breaks down any boundaries we might draw about when and where God is present and pushes us to acknowledge the mystery of God’s movement in the world.
But even if we can’t define exactly how one receives the Holy Spirit, the scriptures testify that all who are baptized do have the Holy Spirit dwelling in them. When we baptize(d) Amelia Anne Suit, Nina Mae Harder, and James Thomas Sullivan (at the 8:45 service this morning), we will say (said) to them that they are “sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever” (BCP 308). The Holy Spirit is the gift of all baptized Christians, living in you and in me and in these newest three members of Christ’s church.
So what does it mean to have the Holy Spirit dwelling in us? First, it means we are – or have the ability to become – holy. Traditionally, the work of the Holy Spirit has been associated with sanctification, the process of making something holy. When the Holy Spirit enters us and lives in us, it begins to transform us in the process that the Eastern Church calls theosis – becoming one with God. As the Holy Spirit unites our lives with the life of Christ in our baptism, in some mysterious way we actually participate in the life of the Trinity. Through the Holy Spirit’s work in us, we too become holy, as God in Christ is holy.
Secondly, having the Holy Spirit dwell in us means that we are capable of amazing things. In today’s Gospel, Jesus says that “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and in fact, will do greater works than these” (John 14:12). Say what? Jesus’s followers will do greater works that Jesus himself? How is that possible? Greater works than healing the sick? Than walking on water? Than raising the dead? We modern people often think of these miraculous acts as unique to Jesus, but the Gospels and the Book of Acts tell us that the disciples also did miraculous works like these. Remember the story of Peter walking out to Jesus on the water? Jesus invites him to come to him on the water, and Peter does so – but about halfway out, he gets scared and starts to sink. When his focus is on Jesus, Peter is indeed able to do the works that Jesus does, but when he is distracted by the strong winds and fear creeps in, his faith falters – and with it, his ability to do miraculous works.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus is constantly reminding his followers of the power of faith – “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed,” he says, “you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17:20). So it’s not surprising that as he prepares to leave them for the last time, he reminds them of this once again: “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and, in fact, will do greater works than these” (John 14:12). Through the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, nothing will be impossible for us.
Even though we as a culture tend to be skeptical about miracles, most of us probably can think of “Spirit-filled” experiences that either we have had ourselves or we have heard about through others that defy rational explanation. It might be a healing that mystified the medical professionals. Or a strong, uncanny sense that we should call someone, only to find out that they too had been feeling a strong draw toward us at that moment. Or it might be the experience of mystical creativity – a song or a poem or a painting that we are sure we did not create, but that “came to us” through the inspiration of the Spirit. Whatever these miraculous, Spirit-filled experiences might be, our faith invites us to embrace them, not to explain them away. And it also invites us to consider what else might be possible if we let go of our fear and opened ourselves to the power of the Holy Spirit working through us. Now, I’m not suggesting that you all go out and try walking on water – at least not without a life jacket! – but I am suggesting that you seriously consider where and how the Spirit is moving you to act, even if it seems crazy and impossible, and to stop pushing those proddings aside. Trust the power of the Holy Spirit that lives in you, and remember the words of Jesus and of the Angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary – that nothing is impossible with God. (Matthew 17:20, Luke 1:37).
On this Day of Pentecost, as we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit, as we welcome three new members of Christ’s Church, as we are reminded of the vast realm of possibility which lies open to us through the power of the Spirit, we say with the writer of Ephesians, “Glory to God whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” (Ephesians 3:20, BCP translation).
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Our shepherd knows what it is to be a sheep
Sermon delivered Sunday, April 21, 2013 (Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (Scripture: Acts 9:36-43, Psalm 23, Revelation 7:9-17, John 10:22-30)
Although today is the Fourth Sunday of Easter, it might also appropriately be referred to as “Good Shepherd Sunday.” On the fourth Sunday of Easter in every year of our three-year lectionary cycle, the readings emphasize the image of God as a shepherd. There is always a reading from chapter 10 of the Gospel of John, where Jesus talks about himself as the good shepherd, and the psalm is always Psalm 23, that most beloved of psalms that proclaims, “The Lord is my shepherd.”
So why do we have a “good shepherd” Sunday in the middle of Easter? The primary image of Easter is of Jesus as a lamb, not a shepherd – Christ the Passover lamb who was sacrificed for us – the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Isn’t it mixing metaphors to talk about Jesus as the shepherd in the season when we proclaim him as the lamb?
Perhaps, but paradox has always been at the heart of the Christian faith. The ability to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas or images in one’s mind at the same time is a particular skill necessary for the Christian life. We proclaim that God is one, but also say there are three persons in the Trinity. We say that Christ has defeated death and sin, and yet both death and sin are still all too prevalent in the world around us. So thinking of Jesus as both the lamb and the shepherd in the same season is right in line with the paradoxical nature of many of our Christian claims. In fact, this apparent mixing of metaphors can serve as an illustration one of the central Christian paradoxes: the claim that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human.
The image of Jesus as the shepherd emphasizes his divinity, while the image of Jesus as lamb emphasizes his humanity. As the shepherd, Jesus is wise and in control, guiding the sheep who otherwise would not know where to find food and water, and protecting them from the dangers of wolves and other predators. As the lamb, Jesus is vulnerable and powerless, experiencing the full depths of human pain and the power of evil as he dies on the cross. Perhaps we could say that on Good Friday, Jesus is the lamb, but after Easter, Jesus is the shepherd. After the Resurrection, we see that Jesus is indeed wise and in control, having overcome death itself to bring new life to “those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death” (Luke 1:79). Having gone before us to prepare the way, the sheep-turned-shepherd now guides us through the pains of death into the well-springs of life.
You might have noticed, as you listened to the readings today, that some of them sounded familiar from their use in our burial liturgy. Psalm 23 is the most obvious one, but actually all of the passages we read from today except the one from Acts are included in our prayer book as appropriate scripture to be read at funerals. Psalm 23 talks about not fearing as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and the promise of dwelling in the house of the Lord forever. The Revelation to John offers a vision of departed souls who have come out of a “great ordeal” gathered before the throne of God and praising him, with the promise that they will no longer hunger and thirst, and that “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 7:17). And in the Gospel passage, Jesus talks about his promise to give those who follow him eternal life. All of these passages speak of death and Christian understandings of the afterlife, but they also share the common thread of the image of God or Jesus as a shepherd.
Why is it that the image of the Good Shepherd speaks to us so deeply in times of death and loss? Perhaps it is because it is comforting to remind ourselves that God is in control, that God guides and directs our lives even when we, like sheep, do not have the understanding to find our own way to the nourishment we need. It is comforting to know that even when it may seem to us that we are passing through a dangerous and threatening place, the shepherd knows where we are going and will guide us safely there.
But our understanding of God as our shepherd has an additional depth of meaning beyond the concept of a strong protector and guide. The passage from Revelation brings the two metaphors together when it asserts that “the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd.” Because the Lord who is our shepherd has also been a sacrificial lamb, he knows intimately not only the streams of life, but also the valleys of death. The shepherd who guides us is also a sheep who has known what it is to be lost and to cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
So when call upon the image of the Good Shepherd as we lay those we love to rest, we are not only invoking the protection and guidance of God, but the empathy of God. We are reminding ourselves at the same time of the omnipotence of God and the vulnerability of God. No matter what the circumstances of the death, whether it be a peaceful death at the end of a long life well lived or the shock of a life cut too short by illness or acts of violence like the bombings in Boston on Monday, the Good Shepherd we call on knows the full range of our human grief. He has been with us in the agony of the slaughtered lamb on Good Friday and he knows the way to the joy of the Resurrection. Because we have a shepherd who has traveled this path before, we can follow him confidently not just through the valley of the shadow of death, but through death itself.
This is why, even as our hearts ache with grief, we can say in the burial liturgy that “even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” We say “alleluia” because we put our trust in the promise of the Resurrection, the promise that, as Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, “if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). To sing “alleluia” even at the grave is a fiercely defiant cry of hope rooted in the full assurance that our shepherd knows what it is to be a sheep.
Although today is the Fourth Sunday of Easter, it might also appropriately be referred to as “Good Shepherd Sunday.” On the fourth Sunday of Easter in every year of our three-year lectionary cycle, the readings emphasize the image of God as a shepherd. There is always a reading from chapter 10 of the Gospel of John, where Jesus talks about himself as the good shepherd, and the psalm is always Psalm 23, that most beloved of psalms that proclaims, “The Lord is my shepherd.”
So why do we have a “good shepherd” Sunday in the middle of Easter? The primary image of Easter is of Jesus as a lamb, not a shepherd – Christ the Passover lamb who was sacrificed for us – the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Isn’t it mixing metaphors to talk about Jesus as the shepherd in the season when we proclaim him as the lamb?
Perhaps, but paradox has always been at the heart of the Christian faith. The ability to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas or images in one’s mind at the same time is a particular skill necessary for the Christian life. We proclaim that God is one, but also say there are three persons in the Trinity. We say that Christ has defeated death and sin, and yet both death and sin are still all too prevalent in the world around us. So thinking of Jesus as both the lamb and the shepherd in the same season is right in line with the paradoxical nature of many of our Christian claims. In fact, this apparent mixing of metaphors can serve as an illustration one of the central Christian paradoxes: the claim that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human.
The image of Jesus as the shepherd emphasizes his divinity, while the image of Jesus as lamb emphasizes his humanity. As the shepherd, Jesus is wise and in control, guiding the sheep who otherwise would not know where to find food and water, and protecting them from the dangers of wolves and other predators. As the lamb, Jesus is vulnerable and powerless, experiencing the full depths of human pain and the power of evil as he dies on the cross. Perhaps we could say that on Good Friday, Jesus is the lamb, but after Easter, Jesus is the shepherd. After the Resurrection, we see that Jesus is indeed wise and in control, having overcome death itself to bring new life to “those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death” (Luke 1:79). Having gone before us to prepare the way, the sheep-turned-shepherd now guides us through the pains of death into the well-springs of life.
You might have noticed, as you listened to the readings today, that some of them sounded familiar from their use in our burial liturgy. Psalm 23 is the most obvious one, but actually all of the passages we read from today except the one from Acts are included in our prayer book as appropriate scripture to be read at funerals. Psalm 23 talks about not fearing as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and the promise of dwelling in the house of the Lord forever. The Revelation to John offers a vision of departed souls who have come out of a “great ordeal” gathered before the throne of God and praising him, with the promise that they will no longer hunger and thirst, and that “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 7:17). And in the Gospel passage, Jesus talks about his promise to give those who follow him eternal life. All of these passages speak of death and Christian understandings of the afterlife, but they also share the common thread of the image of God or Jesus as a shepherd.
Why is it that the image of the Good Shepherd speaks to us so deeply in times of death and loss? Perhaps it is because it is comforting to remind ourselves that God is in control, that God guides and directs our lives even when we, like sheep, do not have the understanding to find our own way to the nourishment we need. It is comforting to know that even when it may seem to us that we are passing through a dangerous and threatening place, the shepherd knows where we are going and will guide us safely there.
But our understanding of God as our shepherd has an additional depth of meaning beyond the concept of a strong protector and guide. The passage from Revelation brings the two metaphors together when it asserts that “the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd.” Because the Lord who is our shepherd has also been a sacrificial lamb, he knows intimately not only the streams of life, but also the valleys of death. The shepherd who guides us is also a sheep who has known what it is to be lost and to cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
So when call upon the image of the Good Shepherd as we lay those we love to rest, we are not only invoking the protection and guidance of God, but the empathy of God. We are reminding ourselves at the same time of the omnipotence of God and the vulnerability of God. No matter what the circumstances of the death, whether it be a peaceful death at the end of a long life well lived or the shock of a life cut too short by illness or acts of violence like the bombings in Boston on Monday, the Good Shepherd we call on knows the full range of our human grief. He has been with us in the agony of the slaughtered lamb on Good Friday and he knows the way to the joy of the Resurrection. Because we have a shepherd who has traveled this path before, we can follow him confidently not just through the valley of the shadow of death, but through death itself.
This is why, even as our hearts ache with grief, we can say in the burial liturgy that “even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” We say “alleluia” because we put our trust in the promise of the Resurrection, the promise that, as Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, “if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). To sing “alleluia” even at the grave is a fiercely defiant cry of hope rooted in the full assurance that our shepherd knows what it is to be a sheep.
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Easter Message: God uses the ordinary to mediate the extraordinary
Sermon delivered Easter Day, Sunday, March 31, 2013, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Franklin. TN. (Scripture passages: Year C: Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26; Luke 24:1-12)
To observe Christianity from the outside, filtered through the lens of American culture, it might seem that Christmas is a bigger deal than Easter. After all, we see decorations on homes and town squares, hear Christmas music playing in stores and restaurants, and receive Christmas cards and presents from friends and family. By contrast, the cultural celebration of Easter is much more muted. Sure, you might see a few giant Easter baskets in some neighbors’ yards, but nothing like the total light extravaganza that takes place in December. Though the greeting card companies stock the aisles with Easter cards, they just don’t seem to be as popular as that annual Christmas letter. And when was the last time you heard “Welcome, happy morning” or any other Easter hymn blaring over the loudspeaker at the grocery store? And as far as the secular mascots go, everyone knows that Santa Claus is way cooler (and usually brings way better presents) than the Easter Bunny.
But despite the message sent by our culture, Easter is actually the most important Christian holiday, even more important than Christmas. The Easter message – that Jesus was raised from the dead – is the central claim of Christianity, the core message of our faith. It is also significantly more controversial than the message of Christmas – that Jesus was born. Perhaps the wider culture prefers Christmas to Easter because it is easier to affirm that Jesus was born than to affirm that he was raised from the dead. Even people who do not acknowledge Jesus as the Son of God or the Messiah can accept the historical fact that he existed, and thus, that he was born. But our Easter faith demands something much more challenging of us than an acknowledgement of Jesus’s birth and a respect for his teachings. It demands the proclamation of an outrageous claim – that Jesus has been raised from the dead.
Jesus’s Resurrection is not accepted as historical fact in the way that his birth is because it is not universally acknowledged, nor was it universally experienced. In Peter’s famous speech to the Gentiles in Caesarea that we heard from Acts today, he tells them that “God raised [Jesus] on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people, but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses” (Acts 10:40-41, emphasis added). It certainly would have been a lot easier to “prove” that the Resurrection happened if God had allowed Jesus to appear to all the people rather than only to a select few. But as it is, the evidence for the Resurrection is limited to the experiences of a relatively small number of people, whose testimonies we are asked to accept on faith. And once we have accepted it, we are to join them in their witness, to spread the message of Jesus’s Resurrection and ask others to accept our testimony on faith as well.
So why didn’t God allow Jesus to appear “to all the people” after his Resurrection? If God is all-powerful and desires to bring all people to faith in Christ, why did God not make the Resurrection of Jesus as undeniable as the fact of his birth? Why didn’t he appear to the whole world and prove his triumph over death and the powers of sin? Why would God choose such a messy and inefficient means of delivering such an important message? Although we will never have definitive answers to these questions in this life, this humble means of spreading the news of the Resurrection does seem to be in keeping with what we know of the nature of God through the earthly life of Jesus.
Despite Jewish expectations that the Messiah would overthrow the occupying Roman government and restore the kingdom of Israel, Jesus arrives as a baby, born in the most humble of circumstances, in the ancient near Eastern equivalent of a rest stop, to a poor, virtually unknown family. The star of Bethlehem and the stories of the magi coming from the East notwithstanding, his birth was probably largely unnoticed in the world’s terms. When he began preaching and teaching as an adult, he did not seek fame and power, but traveled humbly on foot in the midst of a community of people from all walks of life, but primarily those who were poor. He taught his disciples that in contrast to the world’s rulers who lord their power over their subjects, it should not be so among his followers. Instead, he taught them that “whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all” (Mark 10:42-45). His “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem before the Passover, which we commemorated last week on Palm Sunday, was not a grand military processional led by a powerful king on a horse ready to lead a revolution against the occupying powers, but a peaceful and joyful celebration led by a peasant riding a donkey. The night before his death, he takes the role of a servant in washing his disciples feet, and he goes willingly to death on the cross, executed in a shameful manner among common criminals. He has no crown but the crown of thorns, no throne but the cross.
And yet, despite the utter humility of his life, we who call ourselves by his name – Christians – have been unable to resist the temptation to use royal and militaristic language to talk about his death and Resurrection, saying that he has “won the victory” over death, and that he now “reigns” in heaven as “king.” We talk about Jesus “conquering” death and the grave, but Jesus himself did not seem to be interested in “conquering” much of anything, but rather in transforming things through mercy, prayer, and service. Even after his Resurrection, Jesus is no more the powerful king some of his disciples wanted him to be than he was before his death.
In Luke’s account of the story, Jesus’s first appearance to the disciples after his Resurrection is on the Road to Emmaus, which comes immediately after the Gospel passage we read today. Although the angels at the tomb appeared in dazzling white clothes, Jesus appears as a regular guy walking down the street, and the disciples don’t even recognize him. It’s not until they sit down to eat together, when he reenacts the four actions of the Last Supper – taking, blessing, breaking, and giving the bread to them – that their eyes are opened and they recognize who he is. After his Resurrection, Jesus is not a regal king riding in as a triumphant conqueror, but a regular guy walking down the road and sharing a meal with his companions – doing the same kind of thing he had always done when he was among them before his death. In his Resurrected life, as in his earthly life, Jesus reminds us that the extraordinary is mediated to us through the ordinary.
Perhaps Jesus did not appear “to all the people” after his Resurrection because the God we know in Christ is not a God who forces himself on others through showy displays of power, but who comes among us humbly and gently, among the outcast and the lowly, in ways that make it easy for those of us expecting power and looking for “triumph” to miss him entirely. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that the Resurrection was not an event that drew universal recognition beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it took place quietly and humbly, in an unmarked tomb, and was witnessed by a small group of unassuming, mostly poor people, and that the news about it spread through the messy and inefficient means of word of mouth. Because in this, we see the truth that Jesus taught us time after time in his early ministry, that God uses the ordinary to mediate the extraordinary.
God used the testimony of regular first-century people to spread the news about the Resurrection, and God continues to use regular people like you and me to spread the message of the Gospel today – because we, too, are called to be witnesses to the Resurrection. Although we were not among those who experienced Jesus in the resurrected flesh in Jerusalem, we have a continual opportunity before us to, like the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, meet the risen Lord in the breaking of the bread. Each time we celebrate the Eucharist, we have an opportunity to encounter the presence of Christ in the elements of the bread and wine. The Resurrection is as extraordinary as the ultimate undoing of the powers of death and sin and as ordinary as bread and wine. It is as distant as an empty tomb in first-century Palestine and as near as the wafer on your tongue. And so, as we carry on the testimony of the apostles that “Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again,” we become witnesses with them to the Resurrection. As we go forth nourished from this table, our experience here enables us to join with them in proclaiming, “Alleluia! Christ is risen!"
To observe Christianity from the outside, filtered through the lens of American culture, it might seem that Christmas is a bigger deal than Easter. After all, we see decorations on homes and town squares, hear Christmas music playing in stores and restaurants, and receive Christmas cards and presents from friends and family. By contrast, the cultural celebration of Easter is much more muted. Sure, you might see a few giant Easter baskets in some neighbors’ yards, but nothing like the total light extravaganza that takes place in December. Though the greeting card companies stock the aisles with Easter cards, they just don’t seem to be as popular as that annual Christmas letter. And when was the last time you heard “Welcome, happy morning” or any other Easter hymn blaring over the loudspeaker at the grocery store? And as far as the secular mascots go, everyone knows that Santa Claus is way cooler (and usually brings way better presents) than the Easter Bunny.
But despite the message sent by our culture, Easter is actually the most important Christian holiday, even more important than Christmas. The Easter message – that Jesus was raised from the dead – is the central claim of Christianity, the core message of our faith. It is also significantly more controversial than the message of Christmas – that Jesus was born. Perhaps the wider culture prefers Christmas to Easter because it is easier to affirm that Jesus was born than to affirm that he was raised from the dead. Even people who do not acknowledge Jesus as the Son of God or the Messiah can accept the historical fact that he existed, and thus, that he was born. But our Easter faith demands something much more challenging of us than an acknowledgement of Jesus’s birth and a respect for his teachings. It demands the proclamation of an outrageous claim – that Jesus has been raised from the dead.
Jesus’s Resurrection is not accepted as historical fact in the way that his birth is because it is not universally acknowledged, nor was it universally experienced. In Peter’s famous speech to the Gentiles in Caesarea that we heard from Acts today, he tells them that “God raised [Jesus] on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people, but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses” (Acts 10:40-41, emphasis added). It certainly would have been a lot easier to “prove” that the Resurrection happened if God had allowed Jesus to appear to all the people rather than only to a select few. But as it is, the evidence for the Resurrection is limited to the experiences of a relatively small number of people, whose testimonies we are asked to accept on faith. And once we have accepted it, we are to join them in their witness, to spread the message of Jesus’s Resurrection and ask others to accept our testimony on faith as well.
So why didn’t God allow Jesus to appear “to all the people” after his Resurrection? If God is all-powerful and desires to bring all people to faith in Christ, why did God not make the Resurrection of Jesus as undeniable as the fact of his birth? Why didn’t he appear to the whole world and prove his triumph over death and the powers of sin? Why would God choose such a messy and inefficient means of delivering such an important message? Although we will never have definitive answers to these questions in this life, this humble means of spreading the news of the Resurrection does seem to be in keeping with what we know of the nature of God through the earthly life of Jesus.
Despite Jewish expectations that the Messiah would overthrow the occupying Roman government and restore the kingdom of Israel, Jesus arrives as a baby, born in the most humble of circumstances, in the ancient near Eastern equivalent of a rest stop, to a poor, virtually unknown family. The star of Bethlehem and the stories of the magi coming from the East notwithstanding, his birth was probably largely unnoticed in the world’s terms. When he began preaching and teaching as an adult, he did not seek fame and power, but traveled humbly on foot in the midst of a community of people from all walks of life, but primarily those who were poor. He taught his disciples that in contrast to the world’s rulers who lord their power over their subjects, it should not be so among his followers. Instead, he taught them that “whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all” (Mark 10:42-45). His “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem before the Passover, which we commemorated last week on Palm Sunday, was not a grand military processional led by a powerful king on a horse ready to lead a revolution against the occupying powers, but a peaceful and joyful celebration led by a peasant riding a donkey. The night before his death, he takes the role of a servant in washing his disciples feet, and he goes willingly to death on the cross, executed in a shameful manner among common criminals. He has no crown but the crown of thorns, no throne but the cross.
And yet, despite the utter humility of his life, we who call ourselves by his name – Christians – have been unable to resist the temptation to use royal and militaristic language to talk about his death and Resurrection, saying that he has “won the victory” over death, and that he now “reigns” in heaven as “king.” We talk about Jesus “conquering” death and the grave, but Jesus himself did not seem to be interested in “conquering” much of anything, but rather in transforming things through mercy, prayer, and service. Even after his Resurrection, Jesus is no more the powerful king some of his disciples wanted him to be than he was before his death.
In Luke’s account of the story, Jesus’s first appearance to the disciples after his Resurrection is on the Road to Emmaus, which comes immediately after the Gospel passage we read today. Although the angels at the tomb appeared in dazzling white clothes, Jesus appears as a regular guy walking down the street, and the disciples don’t even recognize him. It’s not until they sit down to eat together, when he reenacts the four actions of the Last Supper – taking, blessing, breaking, and giving the bread to them – that their eyes are opened and they recognize who he is. After his Resurrection, Jesus is not a regal king riding in as a triumphant conqueror, but a regular guy walking down the road and sharing a meal with his companions – doing the same kind of thing he had always done when he was among them before his death. In his Resurrected life, as in his earthly life, Jesus reminds us that the extraordinary is mediated to us through the ordinary.
Perhaps Jesus did not appear “to all the people” after his Resurrection because the God we know in Christ is not a God who forces himself on others through showy displays of power, but who comes among us humbly and gently, among the outcast and the lowly, in ways that make it easy for those of us expecting power and looking for “triumph” to miss him entirely. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that the Resurrection was not an event that drew universal recognition beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it took place quietly and humbly, in an unmarked tomb, and was witnessed by a small group of unassuming, mostly poor people, and that the news about it spread through the messy and inefficient means of word of mouth. Because in this, we see the truth that Jesus taught us time after time in his early ministry, that God uses the ordinary to mediate the extraordinary.
God used the testimony of regular first-century people to spread the news about the Resurrection, and God continues to use regular people like you and me to spread the message of the Gospel today – because we, too, are called to be witnesses to the Resurrection. Although we were not among those who experienced Jesus in the resurrected flesh in Jerusalem, we have a continual opportunity before us to, like the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, meet the risen Lord in the breaking of the bread. Each time we celebrate the Eucharist, we have an opportunity to encounter the presence of Christ in the elements of the bread and wine. The Resurrection is as extraordinary as the ultimate undoing of the powers of death and sin and as ordinary as bread and wine. It is as distant as an empty tomb in first-century Palestine and as near as the wafer on your tongue. And so, as we carry on the testimony of the apostles that “Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again,” we become witnesses with them to the Resurrection. As we go forth nourished from this table, our experience here enables us to join with them in proclaiming, “Alleluia! Christ is risen!"
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Repentance based on love, not fear
Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 24, 2013 (Second Sunday in Lent, Year C), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (Readings: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18, Psalm 27, Philippians 3:17-4:1, Luke 13:31-35)
Culturally, most people’s understanding of repentance probably has something to do with street preachers shaking their fists in judgment, holding up signs condemning the world, yelling at passers-by to “repent or perish!” Calls to repentance like these often come with a threat, a threat that if people do not change their ways, they will face destruction – either in this life or the next. It is a way of calling for change that relies on fear as a motivator – people respond to these calls out of a very real fear that if they do not do what the preacher says, their lives will be miserable and they will go to hell when they die.
However uncomfortable such methods might make us, this way of calling people to repentance is not entirely unbiblical. There are countless stories in the Bible of God threatening people with destruction if they do not change their ways, and actually following through on that threat if they do refuse to change. The texts of the Hebrew Bible tell us that God rained down fire and sulphur on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of their sinfulness (Genesis 19:24), that God drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea because the Pharaoh refused to free the Israelites from slavery (Exodus 14:26-29), and that God dispossessed the Canaanites and other peoples of their lands because of their wickedness (Deuteronomy 9:4-5), just to name a few of the better-known stories.
But this is not the only picture of God we receive in the Bible, a God who calls for change by using threats and fear. Mixed in with that portrayal of God is another image of God as a God who calls for change by humbling himself out of compassion and love. This is the biblical refrain that speaks of a God who turns society’s conventions upside down, who casts down the mighty and lifts up the lowly, who says that the last will be first and the first will be last. And, contrary to popular belief, this image of God does not appear only in the New Testament. It shows up as a constant refrain throughout the Hebrew Bible as well.
Today’s reading from the Hebrew Bible is one example of this image of God as one who motivates and communicates out of humility and love. When Abram doubts God’s promise that he will give the land to Abram’s descendants, God does not respond in anger, condemning Abram for not trusting God’s word. Instead, to prove his point, God radically humbles himself to show Abram just how serious he is about his promise.
When God asks Abram to bring the various animals to him for a sacrifice, he is setting the stage for a traditional way of making a treaty or covenant in ancient Near Eastern culture. This particular method comes out of Hittite culture and would have been the most serious way of making a covenant that Abram would have known. God is using the cultural conventions of Abram’s time to speak to him where he is.
Treaties between two parties who had been at war with one another in the ancient Near East would go something like this: After a war between two groups, the victors would be on the loser’s property, having just defeated them. The victors would offer a treaty to the losers that would consist of various demands: since you all are now under our rule, you must be loyal only to us and serve only us. There would be specific details about the things the losers were and weren’t allowed to do. Then, in order to ratify the treaty, they would take some animals and cut them in two and make the losers walk between the animal pieces while reciting the stipulations of the treaty. The implication was that if the losers did not abide by the stipulations of the treaty, the conquerors would do to them what had been done to the animals! [1]
If this were a story in the “repent or perish” tradition that uses threats and fear as a way to motivate, we would expect God to demand that Abram walk between the pieces to declare his utmost loyalty to God – with the accompanying threat that if Abram did not keep the stipulations of the covenant God was making with him, that God would make him look like the animal pieces. After all, in other parts of the Hebrew Bible, we do hear stories of God threatening destruction to the people if they do not keep the law and his commandments. But that’s not what happens in this story.
In this story, “When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.” (Genesis 15:17). It is not Abram who passes between the pieces, but the very presence of God. Smoke and fire were classic symbols for the appearance of the presence of God: think about Moses and the burning bush, or the pillar of cloud that accompanied the Israelites in the wilderness. In passing between the pieces, God is taking on the role of the weaker party in the covenant; God is playing the role of the “loser.” God could have easily demanded that Abram perform the traditional role of the weaker party in the covenant, and no doubt Abram would have thought this entirely appropriate. But instead, in response to Abram’s doubts, God humbles himself, makes himself vulnerable, in essence saying to Abram, “May I be made like these animal pieces if I do not keep my word to you.”
Fast forward several thousand years, and God’s willingness to humble himself goes a step further. God’s willingness to take human form in the person of Jesus Christ, to live as one of us, and to be willing even to die on the cross, is the ultimate act of divine humility. Like God’s willingness to walk between the animal pieces to show Abram how serious God was about the covenant he was making with Abram, God’s willingness to go to the cross shows us how serious God is about the covenant he makes with us in Jesus Christ. God voluntarily puts himself in a position of human weakness in order to profess his love for us.
These acts of humility and love also serve as calls to repentance – a call to change our ways in the face of a God who is willing to give up everything for us. In this biblical theme, God moves us to repentance not by beating us down and scaring us, but by making himself vulnerable and giving of himself for us. If we truly understand the implications and magnitude of such divine humility, I believe it generates a much more authentic repentance than threats of destruction do. So often, calls for repentance that are based in fear, threat, and judgment produce change motivated by a fearful desire to protect one’s own personal safety rather than an authentic love for God. But when God chooses not to exercise God’s power to destroy, but shows mercy and forgiveness instead, we are naturally moved to a change of heart and a reciprocal loving response. The words of an anonymous 17th century Spanish poem, Soneto a Cristo crucificado, “Sonnet to Christ crucified,” express this point well. As one English translation interprets it, the poet writes,
The poet turns to God not because he fears punishment if he does not, but because Jesus’s life, death, and Resurrection moves him and fills him with gratitude and love. The author of the first letter of John writes that “perfect love drives out all fear” (1 John 4:18). As Christians, I believe our primary call to repentance comes from Christ crucified, an act not of judgment or threats, but of perfect love. In turning our eyes to the cross, we can find the authentic repentance and change of heart and life that we seek during Lent. Perhaps no one has said it better than the great English hymn-writer Isaac Watts:
[1] Information about Hittite vassal treaties from lecture notes from Rebecca Abts Wright’s Old Testament class, fall 2009, The School of Theology at Sewanee: The University of the South.
Culturally, most people’s understanding of repentance probably has something to do with street preachers shaking their fists in judgment, holding up signs condemning the world, yelling at passers-by to “repent or perish!” Calls to repentance like these often come with a threat, a threat that if people do not change their ways, they will face destruction – either in this life or the next. It is a way of calling for change that relies on fear as a motivator – people respond to these calls out of a very real fear that if they do not do what the preacher says, their lives will be miserable and they will go to hell when they die.
However uncomfortable such methods might make us, this way of calling people to repentance is not entirely unbiblical. There are countless stories in the Bible of God threatening people with destruction if they do not change their ways, and actually following through on that threat if they do refuse to change. The texts of the Hebrew Bible tell us that God rained down fire and sulphur on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of their sinfulness (Genesis 19:24), that God drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea because the Pharaoh refused to free the Israelites from slavery (Exodus 14:26-29), and that God dispossessed the Canaanites and other peoples of their lands because of their wickedness (Deuteronomy 9:4-5), just to name a few of the better-known stories.
But this is not the only picture of God we receive in the Bible, a God who calls for change by using threats and fear. Mixed in with that portrayal of God is another image of God as a God who calls for change by humbling himself out of compassion and love. This is the biblical refrain that speaks of a God who turns society’s conventions upside down, who casts down the mighty and lifts up the lowly, who says that the last will be first and the first will be last. And, contrary to popular belief, this image of God does not appear only in the New Testament. It shows up as a constant refrain throughout the Hebrew Bible as well.
Today’s reading from the Hebrew Bible is one example of this image of God as one who motivates and communicates out of humility and love. When Abram doubts God’s promise that he will give the land to Abram’s descendants, God does not respond in anger, condemning Abram for not trusting God’s word. Instead, to prove his point, God radically humbles himself to show Abram just how serious he is about his promise.
When God asks Abram to bring the various animals to him for a sacrifice, he is setting the stage for a traditional way of making a treaty or covenant in ancient Near Eastern culture. This particular method comes out of Hittite culture and would have been the most serious way of making a covenant that Abram would have known. God is using the cultural conventions of Abram’s time to speak to him where he is.
Treaties between two parties who had been at war with one another in the ancient Near East would go something like this: After a war between two groups, the victors would be on the loser’s property, having just defeated them. The victors would offer a treaty to the losers that would consist of various demands: since you all are now under our rule, you must be loyal only to us and serve only us. There would be specific details about the things the losers were and weren’t allowed to do. Then, in order to ratify the treaty, they would take some animals and cut them in two and make the losers walk between the animal pieces while reciting the stipulations of the treaty. The implication was that if the losers did not abide by the stipulations of the treaty, the conquerors would do to them what had been done to the animals! [1]
If this were a story in the “repent or perish” tradition that uses threats and fear as a way to motivate, we would expect God to demand that Abram walk between the pieces to declare his utmost loyalty to God – with the accompanying threat that if Abram did not keep the stipulations of the covenant God was making with him, that God would make him look like the animal pieces. After all, in other parts of the Hebrew Bible, we do hear stories of God threatening destruction to the people if they do not keep the law and his commandments. But that’s not what happens in this story.
In this story, “When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.” (Genesis 15:17). It is not Abram who passes between the pieces, but the very presence of God. Smoke and fire were classic symbols for the appearance of the presence of God: think about Moses and the burning bush, or the pillar of cloud that accompanied the Israelites in the wilderness. In passing between the pieces, God is taking on the role of the weaker party in the covenant; God is playing the role of the “loser.” God could have easily demanded that Abram perform the traditional role of the weaker party in the covenant, and no doubt Abram would have thought this entirely appropriate. But instead, in response to Abram’s doubts, God humbles himself, makes himself vulnerable, in essence saying to Abram, “May I be made like these animal pieces if I do not keep my word to you.”
Fast forward several thousand years, and God’s willingness to humble himself goes a step further. God’s willingness to take human form in the person of Jesus Christ, to live as one of us, and to be willing even to die on the cross, is the ultimate act of divine humility. Like God’s willingness to walk between the animal pieces to show Abram how serious God was about the covenant he was making with Abram, God’s willingness to go to the cross shows us how serious God is about the covenant he makes with us in Jesus Christ. God voluntarily puts himself in a position of human weakness in order to profess his love for us.
These acts of humility and love also serve as calls to repentance – a call to change our ways in the face of a God who is willing to give up everything for us. In this biblical theme, God moves us to repentance not by beating us down and scaring us, but by making himself vulnerable and giving of himself for us. If we truly understand the implications and magnitude of such divine humility, I believe it generates a much more authentic repentance than threats of destruction do. So often, calls for repentance that are based in fear, threat, and judgment produce change motivated by a fearful desire to protect one’s own personal safety rather than an authentic love for God. But when God chooses not to exercise God’s power to destroy, but shows mercy and forgiveness instead, we are naturally moved to a change of heart and a reciprocal loving response. The words of an anonymous 17th century Spanish poem, Soneto a Cristo crucificado, “Sonnet to Christ crucified,” express this point well. As one English translation interprets it, the poet writes,
“I love thee, Lord, but not because
I hope for heaven thereby,
nor yet for fear that loving not
I might for ever die;
but for that thou didst all the world
upon the cross embrace;
for us didst bear the nails and spear,
and manifold disgrace,
and griefs and torments numberless,
and sweat of agony;
e'en death itself; and all for one
who was thine enemy.”
The poet turns to God not because he fears punishment if he does not, but because Jesus’s life, death, and Resurrection moves him and fills him with gratitude and love. The author of the first letter of John writes that “perfect love drives out all fear” (1 John 4:18). As Christians, I believe our primary call to repentance comes from Christ crucified, an act not of judgment or threats, but of perfect love. In turning our eyes to the cross, we can find the authentic repentance and change of heart and life that we seek during Lent. Perhaps no one has said it better than the great English hymn-writer Isaac Watts:
When I survey the wondrous cross
Where the young Prince of Glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride.
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small
Love so amazing, so divine
Demands my soul, my life, my all.
[1] Information about Hittite vassal treaties from lecture notes from Rebecca Abts Wright’s Old Testament class, fall 2009, The School of Theology at Sewanee: The University of the South.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Lent, corporate repentence, and gun violence
Sermon delivered Ash Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 103, 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21).
“Create and make in us new and contrite hearts.” This is what we asked of God in our opening collect a few moments ago. As we enter the season of Lent, the season of penitence and fasting, self-examination and renewal, we hear again that biblical refrain that we’ve heard recently from John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul: God calls us not only to right ritual, but to right intention and right action. Our hearts must be in the right place as we come to worship God, and our actions must reflect the faith we say we have.
This message was not new with John the Baptist and Paul: they were echoing the ancient call of the Hebrew prophets, like the passage from Isaiah that we hear today. “Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high,” God says through Isaiah to the people who observe the right rituals, but “who serve [their] own interest[s] on [their] fast day and oppress all [their] workers” (Isaiah 58:4, 3). And Jesus repeats this theme in the Sermon on the Mount, warning his disciples against doing religious acts for the wrong reasons. Fasting or prayer or almsgiving should be done out of a sincere faith and desire to please God and to grow closer to God, not out of a desire for approval or recognition from one’s peers. “Beware of practicing your piety before others in other to be seen by them,” Jesus says, “for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:1).
The issue here is one of intention and motivation. Those who practice their piety before others in order to be seen by them will have no reward from God not because they have performed religious actions publicly, but because the act of “going public” with their faith has caused their intentions to go astray: they are motivated by a desire to please other people rather than a desire to please God. Their hearts are not in the right place. Their actions become all about them instead of all about God.
The people Isaiah addresses are caught in this sin of self-absorption: they observe the fasts because they want to win favor with God, but they ignore God’s commands to care for the poor and to deal justly with others because of their desires for power or money. Both their business practices and their religious practices are entirely self-centered. Their only concern is securing a place for themselves, both on earth and in heaven.
Fasting is intended to be an act of personal sacrifice, a way of emptying ourselves in order to open ourselves more fully to God. This meaning is negated if the person fasting continues to behave in a manner incongruent with the commandment of God to love our neighbors as ourselves. A real sacrifice of self, God says through the prophet Isaiah, is to give of yourself in service to others, to share your bread with the hungry, to clothe the naked, to work for justice and free the oppressed. Not only must there be right intentions, but right actions must flow from them. We must show, as John the Baptist would put it, “fruits worthy of repentance” (Luke 3:8).
The season of Lent invites us to take a step back from our regular routines and examine our own intentions and actions. Am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Am I giving of myself in the fast that God chooses, a fast that leads not to self-absorption, but self-giving? Has my worship become empty and rote, devoid of heart-filled sincerity? Am I at peace with the ways I am practicing my faith and living it out in my life?
But the self-examination of Lent invites us to go even further, looking beyond our individual lives. The discipline of Lent is a corporate as well as an individual one. We could ask the same questions of our life together as a church: not just am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance, but are we, as St. Paul’s, as the Diocese of Tennessee, as the Episcopal Church, bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Are we practicing the fast of self-giving rather than self-absorption? Is our worship heartfelt and sincere? Are we satisfied with how we are practicing our faith together and living it out in service to our community, the nation, and the world?
But it doesn’t stop there. We are also invited to consider, as we expand the circle of our concern even wider, the corporate sins and shortcomings of the country and culture in which we live. In the litany of penitence that we will pray together in a few moments, we confess not just ways that we as individual Christians have sinned and ways the Church has sinned, but systemic sins rooted in our wider culture: “Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people… Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts… our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty.” This “our” is much bigger than you or me or all of us in this church combined. It is an “our” that resonates with the wider American culture: our materialism that values things over people, our individualism that leads us to believe we need to care only for ourselves and our families and not for the wider community, and our obsession with violence that desensitizes us to the image of God in all people.
If you read the announcements in the February newsletter and last week’s Take-Out about our upcoming Lenten series on Thursday nights, you know that our adult Lenten program this year will be on the topic of gun violence. You may have wondered, as you read that announcement, what this subject has to do with Lent. I believe that the prevalence of gun violence in our country at this time is a corporate sin that we are called to grapple with, and it is in the Lenten spirit of self-examination and “taking stock” of ourselves that we will consider this issue in our Lenten study this year.
Gun violence is by no means the only corporate or systemic sin in our country, but we will focus on this one because of its immediacy in our national discourse at the moment. In the seven short months that I have been with you at St. Paul’s, there have been three mass shootings in the U.S. that have made major media coverage: the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado in July, the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in August, and the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut in December. Although mass shootings are nothing new in this country, the frequency and intensity with which they happened last year has led many people, including me, to take note and begin to ask questions about why these things are happening, and about what it says about our culture. After the shootings in Newtown, the Episcopal bishops of Connecticut called for their diocese to spend the season of Lent this year in “a time of discernment and action on how all of us can best work to overcome the death-dealing culture of violence that seems to be so prevalent in our society at this time.” This is an appropriate topic to explore during Lent, a time set aside for reflection and self-examination, and a time during which we reflect on the ways in which another “death-dealing culture of violence,” in first century Palestine, led to the death of our Lord. My prayer is that these discussions will help each of us discern what part we are called to play in “loosing the bonds of injustice” (Isaiah 58:6) that leave too many parents childless and too many children motherless and fatherless.
And as we do this, I pray that we are mindful of another one of our confessions from today’s litany: “for all false judgments, for uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors, and for our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us.” There can and will be very different views amongst us about the best way to address the issue of gun violence, especially considering the ways this issue has been highly politicized. Our study will attempt to offer a balanced presentation of the issue and encourage honest dialogue between those of you with different perspectives, a dialogue that will attempt to dismantle those false judgments and prejudices that we may have toward those whose views differ from ours.
On Ash Wednesday, we are invited us to remember and contemplate our own mortality and the fragility of human life. During this season of Lent, my prayer is that we as individuals and as a community will examine our priorities and the intentions behind our actions, and take stock of what is really important in the life of faith. Whether each of you do that through participation in the Lenten study or through examining and contemplating other issues or concerns that are more pressing and relevant in your life right now, the underlying theme of our work this season is the same: to consider how we are called to live out our faith authentically in the world, in such a way that we contribute to God’s work of bringing justice and freedom to all. Through our Lenten fast, whatever form that may take for each of us, may we all seek a deeper knowledge of the heart of God and bear fruits of authentic repentance.
“Create and make in us new and contrite hearts.” This is what we asked of God in our opening collect a few moments ago. As we enter the season of Lent, the season of penitence and fasting, self-examination and renewal, we hear again that biblical refrain that we’ve heard recently from John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul: God calls us not only to right ritual, but to right intention and right action. Our hearts must be in the right place as we come to worship God, and our actions must reflect the faith we say we have.
This message was not new with John the Baptist and Paul: they were echoing the ancient call of the Hebrew prophets, like the passage from Isaiah that we hear today. “Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high,” God says through Isaiah to the people who observe the right rituals, but “who serve [their] own interest[s] on [their] fast day and oppress all [their] workers” (Isaiah 58:4, 3). And Jesus repeats this theme in the Sermon on the Mount, warning his disciples against doing religious acts for the wrong reasons. Fasting or prayer or almsgiving should be done out of a sincere faith and desire to please God and to grow closer to God, not out of a desire for approval or recognition from one’s peers. “Beware of practicing your piety before others in other to be seen by them,” Jesus says, “for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:1).
The issue here is one of intention and motivation. Those who practice their piety before others in order to be seen by them will have no reward from God not because they have performed religious actions publicly, but because the act of “going public” with their faith has caused their intentions to go astray: they are motivated by a desire to please other people rather than a desire to please God. Their hearts are not in the right place. Their actions become all about them instead of all about God.
The people Isaiah addresses are caught in this sin of self-absorption: they observe the fasts because they want to win favor with God, but they ignore God’s commands to care for the poor and to deal justly with others because of their desires for power or money. Both their business practices and their religious practices are entirely self-centered. Their only concern is securing a place for themselves, both on earth and in heaven.
Fasting is intended to be an act of personal sacrifice, a way of emptying ourselves in order to open ourselves more fully to God. This meaning is negated if the person fasting continues to behave in a manner incongruent with the commandment of God to love our neighbors as ourselves. A real sacrifice of self, God says through the prophet Isaiah, is to give of yourself in service to others, to share your bread with the hungry, to clothe the naked, to work for justice and free the oppressed. Not only must there be right intentions, but right actions must flow from them. We must show, as John the Baptist would put it, “fruits worthy of repentance” (Luke 3:8).
The season of Lent invites us to take a step back from our regular routines and examine our own intentions and actions. Am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Am I giving of myself in the fast that God chooses, a fast that leads not to self-absorption, but self-giving? Has my worship become empty and rote, devoid of heart-filled sincerity? Am I at peace with the ways I am practicing my faith and living it out in my life?
But the self-examination of Lent invites us to go even further, looking beyond our individual lives. The discipline of Lent is a corporate as well as an individual one. We could ask the same questions of our life together as a church: not just am I bearing fruits worthy of repentance, but are we, as St. Paul’s, as the Diocese of Tennessee, as the Episcopal Church, bearing fruits worthy of repentance? Are we practicing the fast of self-giving rather than self-absorption? Is our worship heartfelt and sincere? Are we satisfied with how we are practicing our faith together and living it out in service to our community, the nation, and the world?
But it doesn’t stop there. We are also invited to consider, as we expand the circle of our concern even wider, the corporate sins and shortcomings of the country and culture in which we live. In the litany of penitence that we will pray together in a few moments, we confess not just ways that we as individual Christians have sinned and ways the Church has sinned, but systemic sins rooted in our wider culture: “Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people… Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts… our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty.” This “our” is much bigger than you or me or all of us in this church combined. It is an “our” that resonates with the wider American culture: our materialism that values things over people, our individualism that leads us to believe we need to care only for ourselves and our families and not for the wider community, and our obsession with violence that desensitizes us to the image of God in all people.
If you read the announcements in the February newsletter and last week’s Take-Out about our upcoming Lenten series on Thursday nights, you know that our adult Lenten program this year will be on the topic of gun violence. You may have wondered, as you read that announcement, what this subject has to do with Lent. I believe that the prevalence of gun violence in our country at this time is a corporate sin that we are called to grapple with, and it is in the Lenten spirit of self-examination and “taking stock” of ourselves that we will consider this issue in our Lenten study this year.
Gun violence is by no means the only corporate or systemic sin in our country, but we will focus on this one because of its immediacy in our national discourse at the moment. In the seven short months that I have been with you at St. Paul’s, there have been three mass shootings in the U.S. that have made major media coverage: the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado in July, the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in August, and the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut in December. Although mass shootings are nothing new in this country, the frequency and intensity with which they happened last year has led many people, including me, to take note and begin to ask questions about why these things are happening, and about what it says about our culture. After the shootings in Newtown, the Episcopal bishops of Connecticut called for their diocese to spend the season of Lent this year in “a time of discernment and action on how all of us can best work to overcome the death-dealing culture of violence that seems to be so prevalent in our society at this time.” This is an appropriate topic to explore during Lent, a time set aside for reflection and self-examination, and a time during which we reflect on the ways in which another “death-dealing culture of violence,” in first century Palestine, led to the death of our Lord. My prayer is that these discussions will help each of us discern what part we are called to play in “loosing the bonds of injustice” (Isaiah 58:6) that leave too many parents childless and too many children motherless and fatherless.
And as we do this, I pray that we are mindful of another one of our confessions from today’s litany: “for all false judgments, for uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors, and for our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us.” There can and will be very different views amongst us about the best way to address the issue of gun violence, especially considering the ways this issue has been highly politicized. Our study will attempt to offer a balanced presentation of the issue and encourage honest dialogue between those of you with different perspectives, a dialogue that will attempt to dismantle those false judgments and prejudices that we may have toward those whose views differ from ours.
On Ash Wednesday, we are invited us to remember and contemplate our own mortality and the fragility of human life. During this season of Lent, my prayer is that we as individuals and as a community will examine our priorities and the intentions behind our actions, and take stock of what is really important in the life of faith. Whether each of you do that through participation in the Lenten study or through examining and contemplating other issues or concerns that are more pressing and relevant in your life right now, the underlying theme of our work this season is the same: to consider how we are called to live out our faith authentically in the world, in such a way that we contribute to God’s work of bringing justice and freedom to all. Through our Lenten fast, whatever form that may take for each of us, may we all seek a deeper knowledge of the heart of God and bear fruits of authentic repentance.
Sunday, February 03, 2013
They'll know we are Christians by our love
Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 3, 2013 (Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany, Year C) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Franklin, TN. (Scripture for the day: Jeremiah 1:4-10, Psalm 71:1-6, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, Luke 4:21-30)
The passage about love from 1 Corinthians 13 that we heard today is familiar to Christians and non-Christians alike for its eloquent statement of the attributes of genuine love. But although we hear it most often at weddings, the Apostle Paul was not writing specifically about romantic love or marriage when he wrote it.
This passage actually comes directly after Paul’s discussion of spiritual gifts and of the oneness of the church as the body of Christ in chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, which we heard last week and the week before. At the end of last week’s reading, after describing the various gifts and vocations given to people in the church: apostles, teachers, miracle-workers, healers, the ability to speak in tongues, Paul exhorts the people to “strive for the greater gifts.” “What greater gifts?” you may have wondered. Which of the gifts Paul just listed does he consider to be the greatest? The confusion comes due to an unfortunate choice of the editors of the lectionary to stop the passage there. The second half of that verse goes on to say, “And I will show you a still more excellent way,” and then Paul launches into the reflection on love in our passage for today. The flow of Paul’s message really continues seamlessly from the last verses of chapter 12 into the first verses of chapter 13, so let me read those for you together, so you get a sense of the flow. After Paul has just listed the variety of gifts given by God to the church, and pointed out that not all people have all of these gifts, he goes on to say:
“But strive for the greater gifts, and I will show you a still more excellent way: If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith [these are all spiritual gifts Paul was just talking about], so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 12:29-13:2).
Can you hear what Paul is trying to say here? The “greater gifts” he was referring to at the end of our reading from chapter 12 last week were not the gifts of working miracles or being an apostle or speaking in tongues. The “greater gifts” are “faith, hope, and love – and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13). All the seemingly impressive spiritual gifts in the world are worthless if the person using them does not have love in his or her heart. Paul is echoing a biblical theme we heard recently from John the Baptist during Advent: intentions matter. The spirit in which you do things matters. Our faith is ultimately a matter of the heart. No matter how many gifts we have been given by God, if we do not use them in a loving manner, they are utterly worthless.
So as we continue to consider, during this season of Epiphany, how we might make Christ manifest in the world, Paul takes us a step further than he did two weeks ago when he first introduced the idea of spiritual gifts. Yes, the unique gifts and talents that we each have can be used to make Christ known to the world, but one sure way that all of us can make Christ known is to love – and to love in a very particular kind of way, with a selfless, giving love that has at its heart a concern for the well-being of others. That kind of love, that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13, is the ultimate spiritual gift by which we make the presence of Christ known to the world.
It’s like the refrain to that song you may know from your days in church camp or youth group: “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” That’s essentially what Paul is saying here: it is not the things we do, but how we do them, that testifies to our faith in Christ. They’ll know we are Christians not by what we do, but by how we love.
And how we love flows directly out of our faith, for, as the first letter of John puts it, “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Our model for love is found in a God who was willing to take on our humanity, to suffer with us, a God who “came that we might have life, and might have it abundantly” (John 10:10).
This divine love often stands in contrast to much of human love, which can carry with it selfish desires for security and control. People can and do justify any number of sinful actions based on their love for something or someone. The community who sought to throw Jesus off a cliff in today’s Gospel reading probably did so out of a love for their religious tradition that they thought Jesus was challenging or disrespecting. The intense attachments that we develop to things or people that we love can lead us to lash out against anything that seems to threaten them. But as with the crowd in Nazareth, our intense attachment to those things we love can sometimes blind us to the presence of God among us. When we want to cling tightly, God sometimes asks us to let go. When we want to save ourselves and those we love, God tells us that we must lose our lives in order to save them.
And so what might first have seemed like a fairly easy task – all we have to do to make Christ known to the world is to love – suddenly becomes an even more difficult task than using the spiritual gifts we have been given. Paul’s message in chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians both simplifies and intensifies his message about the essentials of life in Christian community. “All you need is love,” yes, but the love that he describes is in essence a picture of divine love – the kind of love that we see in Christ but which we see less frequently in ourselves.
As Christians, we are called to imitate and model this kind of love in our lives. But it is important to keep in mind, as we strive to do this, that although we are members of the body of Christ, we are not Christ himself! As limited, finite human beings, we will not be able to manifest fully and completely the selfless, giving love of Christ that Paul describes. And Paul acknowledges this: in our current state of being, he says, we see “through a glass, darkly,” and know “only in part” – the fullness of God’s glory and love and God’s great design for all humanity will not be known to any of us until the next age. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to try – it just means we should be gentle with ourselves and with our neighbors when we fall short of living up to the ideal picture of love in 1 Corinthians 13.
And the good news is that, as Paul describes it, the ability to love like this is a gift – the “greatest” of spiritual gifts. We do not have to, nor are we likely to be able to, love this unselfishly of our own willpower. It is one of those things which, like the vows we make at our baptism, we can only promise to do “with God’s help.” Such love is a true gift of the Spirit, and, as with all things of the Spirit, it requires intentional prayer to cultivate. May we all open ourselves to the work of the Spirit, so that, with God’s help, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.
The passage about love from 1 Corinthians 13 that we heard today is familiar to Christians and non-Christians alike for its eloquent statement of the attributes of genuine love. But although we hear it most often at weddings, the Apostle Paul was not writing specifically about romantic love or marriage when he wrote it.
This passage actually comes directly after Paul’s discussion of spiritual gifts and of the oneness of the church as the body of Christ in chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, which we heard last week and the week before. At the end of last week’s reading, after describing the various gifts and vocations given to people in the church: apostles, teachers, miracle-workers, healers, the ability to speak in tongues, Paul exhorts the people to “strive for the greater gifts.” “What greater gifts?” you may have wondered. Which of the gifts Paul just listed does he consider to be the greatest? The confusion comes due to an unfortunate choice of the editors of the lectionary to stop the passage there. The second half of that verse goes on to say, “And I will show you a still more excellent way,” and then Paul launches into the reflection on love in our passage for today. The flow of Paul’s message really continues seamlessly from the last verses of chapter 12 into the first verses of chapter 13, so let me read those for you together, so you get a sense of the flow. After Paul has just listed the variety of gifts given by God to the church, and pointed out that not all people have all of these gifts, he goes on to say:
“But strive for the greater gifts, and I will show you a still more excellent way: If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith [these are all spiritual gifts Paul was just talking about], so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 12:29-13:2).
Can you hear what Paul is trying to say here? The “greater gifts” he was referring to at the end of our reading from chapter 12 last week were not the gifts of working miracles or being an apostle or speaking in tongues. The “greater gifts” are “faith, hope, and love – and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13). All the seemingly impressive spiritual gifts in the world are worthless if the person using them does not have love in his or her heart. Paul is echoing a biblical theme we heard recently from John the Baptist during Advent: intentions matter. The spirit in which you do things matters. Our faith is ultimately a matter of the heart. No matter how many gifts we have been given by God, if we do not use them in a loving manner, they are utterly worthless.
So as we continue to consider, during this season of Epiphany, how we might make Christ manifest in the world, Paul takes us a step further than he did two weeks ago when he first introduced the idea of spiritual gifts. Yes, the unique gifts and talents that we each have can be used to make Christ known to the world, but one sure way that all of us can make Christ known is to love – and to love in a very particular kind of way, with a selfless, giving love that has at its heart a concern for the well-being of others. That kind of love, that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13, is the ultimate spiritual gift by which we make the presence of Christ known to the world.
It’s like the refrain to that song you may know from your days in church camp or youth group: “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” That’s essentially what Paul is saying here: it is not the things we do, but how we do them, that testifies to our faith in Christ. They’ll know we are Christians not by what we do, but by how we love.
And how we love flows directly out of our faith, for, as the first letter of John puts it, “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Our model for love is found in a God who was willing to take on our humanity, to suffer with us, a God who “came that we might have life, and might have it abundantly” (John 10:10).
This divine love often stands in contrast to much of human love, which can carry with it selfish desires for security and control. People can and do justify any number of sinful actions based on their love for something or someone. The community who sought to throw Jesus off a cliff in today’s Gospel reading probably did so out of a love for their religious tradition that they thought Jesus was challenging or disrespecting. The intense attachments that we develop to things or people that we love can lead us to lash out against anything that seems to threaten them. But as with the crowd in Nazareth, our intense attachment to those things we love can sometimes blind us to the presence of God among us. When we want to cling tightly, God sometimes asks us to let go. When we want to save ourselves and those we love, God tells us that we must lose our lives in order to save them.
And so what might first have seemed like a fairly easy task – all we have to do to make Christ known to the world is to love – suddenly becomes an even more difficult task than using the spiritual gifts we have been given. Paul’s message in chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians both simplifies and intensifies his message about the essentials of life in Christian community. “All you need is love,” yes, but the love that he describes is in essence a picture of divine love – the kind of love that we see in Christ but which we see less frequently in ourselves.
As Christians, we are called to imitate and model this kind of love in our lives. But it is important to keep in mind, as we strive to do this, that although we are members of the body of Christ, we are not Christ himself! As limited, finite human beings, we will not be able to manifest fully and completely the selfless, giving love of Christ that Paul describes. And Paul acknowledges this: in our current state of being, he says, we see “through a glass, darkly,” and know “only in part” – the fullness of God’s glory and love and God’s great design for all humanity will not be known to any of us until the next age. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to try – it just means we should be gentle with ourselves and with our neighbors when we fall short of living up to the ideal picture of love in 1 Corinthians 13.
And the good news is that, as Paul describes it, the ability to love like this is a gift – the “greatest” of spiritual gifts. We do not have to, nor are we likely to be able to, love this unselfishly of our own willpower. It is one of those things which, like the vows we make at our baptism, we can only promise to do “with God’s help.” Such love is a true gift of the Spirit, and, as with all things of the Spirit, it requires intentional prayer to cultivate. May we all open ourselves to the work of the Spirit, so that, with God’s help, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
The manifestation of Christ to the world through us
Sermon delivered Sunday, Jan. 20, 2013 (Second Sunday After the Epiphany, Year C) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (Isaiah 62:1-5, Psalm 36:5-10, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, John 2:1-11)
The theme of the season of Epiphany is the manifestation of Christ to the world – the revelation of Jesus’s identity as the Son of God and the Messiah. The passages from the Gospels that we read during this season all describe events that revealed Jesus’s identity to those around him.
We began with the Feast Day of the Epiphany, when the star of Bethlehem made the birth of Christ known to the world and drew recognition from kings in the East. We then moved to Jesus’s baptism, which in all of the Gospels is a significant turning point in Jesus’s life, the moment when the heavens are opened and God declares Jesus to be his Son. Following Jesus’s baptism, we hear stories about his healing and teaching ministry in Galilee, with an emphasis on the “firsts” – his first teaching in the synagogue in his hometown, his first healing, the calling of his first disciples – the things that first revealed who he was to the people around him and began the movement of his followers that eventually became the Church. The story we heard today is of his first public miracle, according to John’s Gospel: changing the water into wine at the wedding in Cana.
The season always concludes on the Last Sunday of the Epiphany with the story of the Transfiguration – the ultimate revelation of Jesus’s identity on the mountaintop, with bright light and clouds and a booming voice from heaven proclaiming, “This is my Son; listen to him!” The season of Epiphany is “book ended” with two great divine revelations of Jesus’s identity: God speaks and declares Jesus his Son at the beginning of his ministry, at his baptism, and right before the end of his ministry, at the Transfiguration. The Transfiguration is the last major event of Jesus’s ministry in Galilee, before he heads to Jerusalem for what will be the last days of his earthly life and his journey to the cross – the themes we shift to exploring during Lent.
But the season of Epiphany is not only about remembering the ways Christ revealed his identity and made himself known during his earthly ministry. It is also about calling us to consider the ways we make Christ known in the world today, through our lives. The collect for today asks that God’s people “may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, that he may be known, worshiped and obeyed to the ends of the earth,” and the Epiphany blessing at the end of the service says, “May Christ the Son of God be manifest in you, that your lives may be a light to the world.”
The number of people in history who had a chance to actually encounter Jesus in the flesh and receive revelation of his identity directly from him is incredibly small in comparison with the number of Christians who have lived and died in the thousands of years after his earthly ministry. All of those Christians had to encounter Christ not directly in the first-century person of Jesus of Nazareth, but in the lives of those who sought to follow him in their own day. And until Jesus comes again and we have another opportunity to experience him directly on this earth, we will continue to experience him primarily as he lives in the lives of his followers today.
Of course, the Scriptures do serve as another primary vehicle through which Christ is made known, but for many people who do not read the Bible, our lives will be the only thing they have to reveal Christ to them. As the saying goes, “Be careful how you live. You may be the only Bible some people will ever read.” Or, as the 16th century mystic Teresa of Avila put it, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours, yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion is to look out to the earth, yours are the feet by which He is to go about doing good and yours are the hands by which He is to bless us now.” In other words, it is up to us, the church, the body of Christ, to manifest Christ to the world, to make him known and call others to love and to follow him.
This task can seem daunting or stressful if we do not remember the wisdom that the Apostle Paul left for us in his writings on spiritual gifts, such as our passage from 1 Corinthians today. Paul says that “there are a variety of gifts, but the same Spirit, and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone” (1 Cor. 12:4-6). In other words, we all have gifts from God that we can use to make Christ known in the world. Our gifts may be different – in fact, they will be different – from the gifts of our neighbors, but that is ok – in fact, it is part of God’s great design. Later in chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, Paul uses the metaphor of the body to illustrate this. The church is the “body of Christ,” and going with that metaphor, he says, “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?” (1 Cor. 12:17). We need all the parts of the body to be whole, and each part contributes something different but essential to the well-being of the body.
So how can someone figure out what his or her spiritual gifts are? Paul gives us a list in this passage of some spiritual gifts: the gifts of wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, working miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, tongues, and the interpretation of tongues. In Romans 12, he lists other gifts as well: ministry, exhortation, giving, leadership, compassion. There are a variety of “spiritual gifts assessment tools” out there, tests that you can take that will try to help you place your particular tendencies and preferences into one or more of the biblical lists of spiritual gifts, but it’s important to realize that the biblical lists of “spiritual gifts” are not exhaustive; people do have other gifts that do not appear on any lists in Scripture, and those gifts can also be used for the purpose of making Christ known to the world. The spiritual gifts inventory that we use in the Faith Leader program here at St. Paul’s adds in several gifts that are not explicitly mentioned in Scripture, but which the authors of that program felt are certainly gifts from God, such as the gift of administrative skill, artistry, music, and even humor. Spiritual gifts inventories can be limiting, though, and perhaps the best way to discern what your spiritual gifts are is to think about the things that come most easily to you and bring you the most fulfillment.
Though our popular culture places a higher value on things one has to work hard for or struggle for, the things we are gifted in are precisely those things that are not difficult or onerous for us to do. We often downplay these skills in our lives, either because we think they must come easily to everyone, or because we think they are not valuable if we haven’t had to “work hard” on them. “Oh, that’s nothing,” we’ll say when someone compliments us on a skill that we have. “If I can do it, anyone can do it.” But that is not necessarily true!
I remember when my eyes were first opened to this truth. During my second year of college, I was feeling a bit guilty for becoming an English major, because it seemed too “easy” and “fun” for my whole “job” to be reading great literature and writing papers on it. I thought the science majors were all working much harder than I was. And then one day I was having a conversation with one of my good friends who was a biology major, and she said, “I just don’t know how you English majors do it. I can’t imagine writing all those papers all the time.”
“What?” I said. “But that’s no big deal. That’s easy stuff! You’re the one slaving away in the lab and doing math and working with numbers and stuff! That’s the really hard work!”
“Easy??” She replied. “I hate reading, and writing papers is a chore for me. I’d much rather do a problem set in biology any day than write a paper on a piece of literature!”
It was the first time I realized that what came easily to me and brought me enjoyment did not do so for everyone. And it helped me to feel less guilty for doing what came easily to me, because I realized that in doing what I enjoyed, I was using the gifts God had given me – just as my science-major friend was using the gifts God had given her.
After we have discerned what our spiritual gifts are, it is important to remember the purpose for which they are given to us. In our passage from 1 Corinthians, Paul says that spiritual gifts are given “for the common good” of the church (1 Cor. 12:7). The author of the letter to the Ephesians elaborates on this by saying that spiritual gifts are given “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12-13). In other words, our spiritual gifts are given to us for the purpose of making Christ manifest in the world, and we should use them in accordance with that purpose – not for building ourselves up, but for building up the body of Christ.
During this season of Epiphany, I invite you to take time to look around you and observe the ways in which your fellow parishioners, friends, and family are making Christ known in the world through using their gifts, and let them know that you notice. That last part is key – don’t just make silent observations in your head, but actually tell them what you see! This is a twist on the usual call for self-examination, but instead of asking you to think about your use of your own gifts, I’m asking you to notice them in others precisely because of how difficult it often is to acknowledge our own gifts. My prayer is that as you begin to notice how others are using their gifts and hold that up for them, those around you will notice the ways you are using your gifts and hold that up for you. In this way, we can join together in “building up the body of Christ,” in supporting one another in our work for the “common good” of the church: to manifest the light and love of Christ to the world.
The theme of the season of Epiphany is the manifestation of Christ to the world – the revelation of Jesus’s identity as the Son of God and the Messiah. The passages from the Gospels that we read during this season all describe events that revealed Jesus’s identity to those around him.
We began with the Feast Day of the Epiphany, when the star of Bethlehem made the birth of Christ known to the world and drew recognition from kings in the East. We then moved to Jesus’s baptism, which in all of the Gospels is a significant turning point in Jesus’s life, the moment when the heavens are opened and God declares Jesus to be his Son. Following Jesus’s baptism, we hear stories about his healing and teaching ministry in Galilee, with an emphasis on the “firsts” – his first teaching in the synagogue in his hometown, his first healing, the calling of his first disciples – the things that first revealed who he was to the people around him and began the movement of his followers that eventually became the Church. The story we heard today is of his first public miracle, according to John’s Gospel: changing the water into wine at the wedding in Cana.
The season always concludes on the Last Sunday of the Epiphany with the story of the Transfiguration – the ultimate revelation of Jesus’s identity on the mountaintop, with bright light and clouds and a booming voice from heaven proclaiming, “This is my Son; listen to him!” The season of Epiphany is “book ended” with two great divine revelations of Jesus’s identity: God speaks and declares Jesus his Son at the beginning of his ministry, at his baptism, and right before the end of his ministry, at the Transfiguration. The Transfiguration is the last major event of Jesus’s ministry in Galilee, before he heads to Jerusalem for what will be the last days of his earthly life and his journey to the cross – the themes we shift to exploring during Lent.
But the season of Epiphany is not only about remembering the ways Christ revealed his identity and made himself known during his earthly ministry. It is also about calling us to consider the ways we make Christ known in the world today, through our lives. The collect for today asks that God’s people “may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, that he may be known, worshiped and obeyed to the ends of the earth,” and the Epiphany blessing at the end of the service says, “May Christ the Son of God be manifest in you, that your lives may be a light to the world.”
The number of people in history who had a chance to actually encounter Jesus in the flesh and receive revelation of his identity directly from him is incredibly small in comparison with the number of Christians who have lived and died in the thousands of years after his earthly ministry. All of those Christians had to encounter Christ not directly in the first-century person of Jesus of Nazareth, but in the lives of those who sought to follow him in their own day. And until Jesus comes again and we have another opportunity to experience him directly on this earth, we will continue to experience him primarily as he lives in the lives of his followers today.
Of course, the Scriptures do serve as another primary vehicle through which Christ is made known, but for many people who do not read the Bible, our lives will be the only thing they have to reveal Christ to them. As the saying goes, “Be careful how you live. You may be the only Bible some people will ever read.” Or, as the 16th century mystic Teresa of Avila put it, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours, yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion is to look out to the earth, yours are the feet by which He is to go about doing good and yours are the hands by which He is to bless us now.” In other words, it is up to us, the church, the body of Christ, to manifest Christ to the world, to make him known and call others to love and to follow him.
This task can seem daunting or stressful if we do not remember the wisdom that the Apostle Paul left for us in his writings on spiritual gifts, such as our passage from 1 Corinthians today. Paul says that “there are a variety of gifts, but the same Spirit, and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone” (1 Cor. 12:4-6). In other words, we all have gifts from God that we can use to make Christ known in the world. Our gifts may be different – in fact, they will be different – from the gifts of our neighbors, but that is ok – in fact, it is part of God’s great design. Later in chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, Paul uses the metaphor of the body to illustrate this. The church is the “body of Christ,” and going with that metaphor, he says, “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?” (1 Cor. 12:17). We need all the parts of the body to be whole, and each part contributes something different but essential to the well-being of the body.
So how can someone figure out what his or her spiritual gifts are? Paul gives us a list in this passage of some spiritual gifts: the gifts of wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, working miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, tongues, and the interpretation of tongues. In Romans 12, he lists other gifts as well: ministry, exhortation, giving, leadership, compassion. There are a variety of “spiritual gifts assessment tools” out there, tests that you can take that will try to help you place your particular tendencies and preferences into one or more of the biblical lists of spiritual gifts, but it’s important to realize that the biblical lists of “spiritual gifts” are not exhaustive; people do have other gifts that do not appear on any lists in Scripture, and those gifts can also be used for the purpose of making Christ known to the world. The spiritual gifts inventory that we use in the Faith Leader program here at St. Paul’s adds in several gifts that are not explicitly mentioned in Scripture, but which the authors of that program felt are certainly gifts from God, such as the gift of administrative skill, artistry, music, and even humor. Spiritual gifts inventories can be limiting, though, and perhaps the best way to discern what your spiritual gifts are is to think about the things that come most easily to you and bring you the most fulfillment.
Though our popular culture places a higher value on things one has to work hard for or struggle for, the things we are gifted in are precisely those things that are not difficult or onerous for us to do. We often downplay these skills in our lives, either because we think they must come easily to everyone, or because we think they are not valuable if we haven’t had to “work hard” on them. “Oh, that’s nothing,” we’ll say when someone compliments us on a skill that we have. “If I can do it, anyone can do it.” But that is not necessarily true!
I remember when my eyes were first opened to this truth. During my second year of college, I was feeling a bit guilty for becoming an English major, because it seemed too “easy” and “fun” for my whole “job” to be reading great literature and writing papers on it. I thought the science majors were all working much harder than I was. And then one day I was having a conversation with one of my good friends who was a biology major, and she said, “I just don’t know how you English majors do it. I can’t imagine writing all those papers all the time.”
“What?” I said. “But that’s no big deal. That’s easy stuff! You’re the one slaving away in the lab and doing math and working with numbers and stuff! That’s the really hard work!”
“Easy??” She replied. “I hate reading, and writing papers is a chore for me. I’d much rather do a problem set in biology any day than write a paper on a piece of literature!”
It was the first time I realized that what came easily to me and brought me enjoyment did not do so for everyone. And it helped me to feel less guilty for doing what came easily to me, because I realized that in doing what I enjoyed, I was using the gifts God had given me – just as my science-major friend was using the gifts God had given her.
After we have discerned what our spiritual gifts are, it is important to remember the purpose for which they are given to us. In our passage from 1 Corinthians, Paul says that spiritual gifts are given “for the common good” of the church (1 Cor. 12:7). The author of the letter to the Ephesians elaborates on this by saying that spiritual gifts are given “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12-13). In other words, our spiritual gifts are given to us for the purpose of making Christ manifest in the world, and we should use them in accordance with that purpose – not for building ourselves up, but for building up the body of Christ.
During this season of Epiphany, I invite you to take time to look around you and observe the ways in which your fellow parishioners, friends, and family are making Christ known in the world through using their gifts, and let them know that you notice. That last part is key – don’t just make silent observations in your head, but actually tell them what you see! This is a twist on the usual call for self-examination, but instead of asking you to think about your use of your own gifts, I’m asking you to notice them in others precisely because of how difficult it often is to acknowledge our own gifts. My prayer is that as you begin to notice how others are using their gifts and hold that up for them, those around you will notice the ways you are using your gifts and hold that up for you. In this way, we can join together in “building up the body of Christ,” in supporting one another in our work for the “common good” of the church: to manifest the light and love of Christ to the world.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Reading Scripture with people of other faiths
Sermon delivered Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013 (Thursday in the Week of the Epiphany) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN, during a Eucharist in which members of the Sikh community in Nashville were invited to be present to observe and/or participate in our worship, as part of an on-going interfaith dialogue. The scriptures appointed by the Daily Eucharistic Lectionary for this day were: Isaiah 65:1-9; Psalm 147; 1 John 4:19-5:4; and Luke 4:14-22.
It is an interesting spiritual practice to read the sacred texts of your religion with people of a different religion. When I have done this in the past, I always come away with new perspectives and insights that I don’t think I would have been able to see without the presence and perspective of my partners in dialogue.
There are inevitably excited exclamations over the similarities we find between our texts and the texts of others: at a recent clergy interfaith scripture study circle here in Nashville, some Christian pastors were describing the story in Matthew 25 – where Jesus says that whoever has fed the hungry, cared for the sick, visited those in prison, has done these things to Jesus himself – when an imam of one of the local Muslim communities cried out excitedly, “Yes, we have it too! Almost exactly the same story! That in serving others, in serving the poor, you are serving God himself.”
Given what I know about the Sikh faith, I might be bold enough to guess that our Sikh brothers and sisters with us here tonight may have found themselves nodding with recognition at some of the themes that emerged in our sacred texts for this evening: To love God we must love one another and obey the commandments that God gives us. If someone says they love God but treats their brother or sister unkindly, they are not truly loving God. And Jesus’s words in the Gospel today might have sounded like something Guru Nanak would have said: God’s spirit sends us out to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, freedom to the oppressed. It is a wonderful and exciting thing to hear the Word of God as you know it proclaimed through another religion’s texts. “Yes, we have that one, too!” we say, delighting to see God’s truth showing up in ways we had no idea it was showing up, to people we didn’t know were hearing it.
It is especially delightful to experience this when there are other parts of our sacred texts that would say it is not so, that God does not show up in other religions. Tonight we also read some texts that emphasize God’s unique and exclusive relationship with the people of Israel. The psalm appointed for today ended with the proclamation that God “declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and his judgments to Israel. He has not done so to any other nation; to them he has not revealed his judgments” (Psalm 147:20-21). In contrast to the delight we feel when we encounter similarities in the messages of our sacred texts, it is often uncomfortable to read texts like these in “mixed company.” How many of you felt comfortable saying these words just now while you knew there were people sitting with you who were not part of the nation or spiritual lineage of Israel? “God has only revealed himself to us, not you,” we basically just said to the Sikhs. And then we followed it with, “Hallelujah!”
The more exclusive parts of our tradition can be uncomfortable for us to address in interfaith settings. The temptation is to water things down, to only present the more inclusive parts of our tradition to those we are in dialogue with. But if we do that, we are only allowing our neighbors to see part of the picture. I believe that authentic dialogue happens only when we bring our whole selves and our whole traditions to the conversation – the open and the closed parts of ourselves and our traditions, our delights and the things that make us uncomfortable.
Unlike Sikhism, Christianity is at its heart a missionary religion: a religion that instructs its followers to actively seek converts. Jesus told his followers to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19-20). We call it the “Great Commission,” and it shapes how we understand our mission and purpose as Christians: we are called by God to share the good news of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ – that after being killed by the authorities, Jesus rose from the dead and inaugurated the start of a new creation that offers life and hope to the world. The New Testament contains many passages that insist that in order to receive salvation, one must believe in and follow Jesus. And so some Christians are convinced that no matter how many similarities we might find between Christianity and the ethical teachings of other religions, ultimately none of those similarities matter if the people of those other faiths do not ultimately decide to follow Jesus.
I have a friend named Valarie who grew up as a Sikh in central California surrounded by Christians who held this perspective. For years, she heard from friends and even teachers in school that she would go to hell if she did not accept Jesus as her Savior. These experiences were disturbing to her, but she always thought that these Christians were misinterpreting their own religion, that they were taking it to an extreme or denying the message of love and acceptance of all people that she believed was at the heart of all religions, since her Sikh faith had taught her that this was so. And then, as an adult, she actually read the New Testament scriptures for herself, during her time at Harvard Divinity School, where she and I were classmates.
When she read the Christian scriptures, she suddenly understood why all those friends and teachers had felt so urgently the need to convert her to Christianity. She read passages that said that those who do not believe in or accept Jesus are condemned. Even books like 1 John, which we read from tonight, that contain very inclusive passages like, “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,” (1 John 4:7) also go on to say things like, “Whoever has the Son [that is, Jesus] has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:12). She was deeply disturbed, because she realized that Christianity did not have the same respect for all religious paths written into its sacred texts as her own Sikh faith did.
And so she called me, her Christian friend who was at the time just beginning to discern a call to the priesthood, to ask me how I understood these texts. “Now I understand why they wanted to convert me,” she said to me. “They were just doing what the book says!” She saw that these Christians were not acting out of an intentional mean-spiritedness, but were attempting to be faithful to the teachings of their own religion. She wanted to know how I as a Christian could advocate for a more open perspective, given the content of my sacred texts.
My answer -- and it is just my answer, not the answer of all Christians -- as I have come to articulate it over the years, has to do with different theological motifs in Scripture and in Christian tradition. I believe there are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible and the Christian tradition. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies. The other motif asserts that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32). I believe it is up to each one of us, both as individuals and collectively as a church, to choose which motif we will privilege over the other as we interpret scripture.
Because I am part of a Christian denomination that recognizes reason and experience in addition to Scripture and tradition as valid ingredients in crafting a theological perspective, I bring my own experiences with interfaith dialogue and interfaith friendships to the way I read the sacred texts. I cannot deny that I have seen God working in and through people of other religious traditions and that I have heard God’s word through the sacred texts of other traditions as well. I am reminded of what Jesus said to the Roman solider who came to him to ask him to heal his servant who was ill. “In all of Israel I have not found such faith!” Jesus says (Matthew 8:10), acknowledging in this “outsider,” who was most likely a practitioner of pagan Roman beliefs, a more authentic faith than many in Jesus’s own religious community. As I have met and gotten to know faithful Jews, Muslims, Baha’is, Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists through years of interfaith dialogue, I have often been moved to say, “Not even in the church have I found such faith!” I often see in my brothers and sisters of other religions a devotion and connection with God that equals or surpasses what I have seen in fellow Christians.
And although as a Christian I do believe that salvation comes to the world through Jesus Christ, I understand that to occur ultimately on a cosmic and communal level that transcends the individual, personal level. Although some Christians insist that in order to be “saved” and go to heaven, each individual person must accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and if not, they will suffer in hell for all eternity, I prefer another strain in Christian tradition which asserts that has Jesus in essence transformed the very creation itself, an act that is not contingent upon the intellectual belief systems of particular individuals. We are still called to put our faith in Jesus and to follow his teachings, and we still encourage and invite others to do so as well, but the salvation of the world is not contingent upon whether we do or not: the salvation of the world has already been accomplished by Christ, and in the task of evangelizing we are calling people to tap into that cosmic redemption that is already inherent in every aspect of creation. For me as a Christian, interfaith dialogue is an opportunity to recognize and celebrate all the ways in the redemptive work of Christ is moving and present in all of God’s people.
It is an interesting spiritual practice to read the sacred texts of your religion with people of a different religion. When I have done this in the past, I always come away with new perspectives and insights that I don’t think I would have been able to see without the presence and perspective of my partners in dialogue.
There are inevitably excited exclamations over the similarities we find between our texts and the texts of others: at a recent clergy interfaith scripture study circle here in Nashville, some Christian pastors were describing the story in Matthew 25 – where Jesus says that whoever has fed the hungry, cared for the sick, visited those in prison, has done these things to Jesus himself – when an imam of one of the local Muslim communities cried out excitedly, “Yes, we have it too! Almost exactly the same story! That in serving others, in serving the poor, you are serving God himself.”
Given what I know about the Sikh faith, I might be bold enough to guess that our Sikh brothers and sisters with us here tonight may have found themselves nodding with recognition at some of the themes that emerged in our sacred texts for this evening: To love God we must love one another and obey the commandments that God gives us. If someone says they love God but treats their brother or sister unkindly, they are not truly loving God. And Jesus’s words in the Gospel today might have sounded like something Guru Nanak would have said: God’s spirit sends us out to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, freedom to the oppressed. It is a wonderful and exciting thing to hear the Word of God as you know it proclaimed through another religion’s texts. “Yes, we have that one, too!” we say, delighting to see God’s truth showing up in ways we had no idea it was showing up, to people we didn’t know were hearing it.
It is especially delightful to experience this when there are other parts of our sacred texts that would say it is not so, that God does not show up in other religions. Tonight we also read some texts that emphasize God’s unique and exclusive relationship with the people of Israel. The psalm appointed for today ended with the proclamation that God “declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and his judgments to Israel. He has not done so to any other nation; to them he has not revealed his judgments” (Psalm 147:20-21). In contrast to the delight we feel when we encounter similarities in the messages of our sacred texts, it is often uncomfortable to read texts like these in “mixed company.” How many of you felt comfortable saying these words just now while you knew there were people sitting with you who were not part of the nation or spiritual lineage of Israel? “God has only revealed himself to us, not you,” we basically just said to the Sikhs. And then we followed it with, “Hallelujah!”
The more exclusive parts of our tradition can be uncomfortable for us to address in interfaith settings. The temptation is to water things down, to only present the more inclusive parts of our tradition to those we are in dialogue with. But if we do that, we are only allowing our neighbors to see part of the picture. I believe that authentic dialogue happens only when we bring our whole selves and our whole traditions to the conversation – the open and the closed parts of ourselves and our traditions, our delights and the things that make us uncomfortable.
Unlike Sikhism, Christianity is at its heart a missionary religion: a religion that instructs its followers to actively seek converts. Jesus told his followers to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19-20). We call it the “Great Commission,” and it shapes how we understand our mission and purpose as Christians: we are called by God to share the good news of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ – that after being killed by the authorities, Jesus rose from the dead and inaugurated the start of a new creation that offers life and hope to the world. The New Testament contains many passages that insist that in order to receive salvation, one must believe in and follow Jesus. And so some Christians are convinced that no matter how many similarities we might find between Christianity and the ethical teachings of other religions, ultimately none of those similarities matter if the people of those other faiths do not ultimately decide to follow Jesus.
I have a friend named Valarie who grew up as a Sikh in central California surrounded by Christians who held this perspective. For years, she heard from friends and even teachers in school that she would go to hell if she did not accept Jesus as her Savior. These experiences were disturbing to her, but she always thought that these Christians were misinterpreting their own religion, that they were taking it to an extreme or denying the message of love and acceptance of all people that she believed was at the heart of all religions, since her Sikh faith had taught her that this was so. And then, as an adult, she actually read the New Testament scriptures for herself, during her time at Harvard Divinity School, where she and I were classmates.
When she read the Christian scriptures, she suddenly understood why all those friends and teachers had felt so urgently the need to convert her to Christianity. She read passages that said that those who do not believe in or accept Jesus are condemned. Even books like 1 John, which we read from tonight, that contain very inclusive passages like, “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,” (1 John 4:7) also go on to say things like, “Whoever has the Son [that is, Jesus] has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:12). She was deeply disturbed, because she realized that Christianity did not have the same respect for all religious paths written into its sacred texts as her own Sikh faith did.
And so she called me, her Christian friend who was at the time just beginning to discern a call to the priesthood, to ask me how I understood these texts. “Now I understand why they wanted to convert me,” she said to me. “They were just doing what the book says!” She saw that these Christians were not acting out of an intentional mean-spiritedness, but were attempting to be faithful to the teachings of their own religion. She wanted to know how I as a Christian could advocate for a more open perspective, given the content of my sacred texts.
My answer -- and it is just my answer, not the answer of all Christians -- as I have come to articulate it over the years, has to do with different theological motifs in Scripture and in Christian tradition. I believe there are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible and the Christian tradition. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies. The other motif asserts that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32). I believe it is up to each one of us, both as individuals and collectively as a church, to choose which motif we will privilege over the other as we interpret scripture.
Because I am part of a Christian denomination that recognizes reason and experience in addition to Scripture and tradition as valid ingredients in crafting a theological perspective, I bring my own experiences with interfaith dialogue and interfaith friendships to the way I read the sacred texts. I cannot deny that I have seen God working in and through people of other religious traditions and that I have heard God’s word through the sacred texts of other traditions as well. I am reminded of what Jesus said to the Roman solider who came to him to ask him to heal his servant who was ill. “In all of Israel I have not found such faith!” Jesus says (Matthew 8:10), acknowledging in this “outsider,” who was most likely a practitioner of pagan Roman beliefs, a more authentic faith than many in Jesus’s own religious community. As I have met and gotten to know faithful Jews, Muslims, Baha’is, Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists through years of interfaith dialogue, I have often been moved to say, “Not even in the church have I found such faith!” I often see in my brothers and sisters of other religions a devotion and connection with God that equals or surpasses what I have seen in fellow Christians.
And although as a Christian I do believe that salvation comes to the world through Jesus Christ, I understand that to occur ultimately on a cosmic and communal level that transcends the individual, personal level. Although some Christians insist that in order to be “saved” and go to heaven, each individual person must accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and if not, they will suffer in hell for all eternity, I prefer another strain in Christian tradition which asserts that has Jesus in essence transformed the very creation itself, an act that is not contingent upon the intellectual belief systems of particular individuals. We are still called to put our faith in Jesus and to follow his teachings, and we still encourage and invite others to do so as well, but the salvation of the world is not contingent upon whether we do or not: the salvation of the world has already been accomplished by Christ, and in the task of evangelizing we are calling people to tap into that cosmic redemption that is already inherent in every aspect of creation. For me as a Christian, interfaith dialogue is an opportunity to recognize and celebrate all the ways in the redemptive work of Christ is moving and present in all of God’s people.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Sermon for Sunday, Dec. 30, 2012 (First Sunday After Christmas, Year C: Isaiah 61:10-62:3, Psalm 147, Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7, John 1:1-18). I was sick on Dec. 30 and did not get to deliver this sermon publicly, but I publish it here in written form for the edification of any who might come across it.
On this First Sunday After Christmas, we hear a very different version of the Christmas story than the one we heard on Christmas Eve. Rather than shepherds and angels and a family sent to the stable because there was no room for them at the inn, we hear John’s version of “the beginning” of Jesus’s story, a beginning that began not in Bethlehem, but at the beginning of all time, before the creation of the world. John’s account is a cosmic creation story, a magnificent theological poem about the very essence of the Divine breaking into the depths of our world: “the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14).
And in this artistic proclamation of the origins of the Christ, the author of John’s Gospel gives us what I believe to be one of the most powerful summaries of the Christian message in all of Scripture:
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5).
In that one sentence lies the heart of the Gospel: the power of light over darkness, of love over hate, of life over death. Jesus’s Resurrection is the ultimate expression of this truth. Death itself could not extinguish the light that came into the world with the birth of Christ, and it continues to shine through all the ages, despite countless attempts and threats to extinguish it.
This is the heart of the Gospel, the Good News that we proclaim as Christians: that nothing will be able to extinguish the light of God that shines in all creation. The Apostle Paul said in his letter to the Romans that he was convinced “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38). This is the message we are called as Christians to proclaim to a broken and hurting world: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). And we are called to proclaim this message precisely during those times when we cannot see the light, when all seems to be darkness, when the world around us tells us there is no joy, no hope, and no love.
In the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut two weeks ago, many people around the country have questioned how they could go on with Christmas preparations and celebrations in the midst of such unspeakable loss.
One of my colleagues from seminary told me that a sermon preparation resource she reads sent out a message to their subscribers suggesting that they not light the “Candle of Joy” for the Third Sunday of Advent this year, given the deep dissonance many would feel in proclaiming a Sunday of “joy” just two days after such a horrific event.
In the news coverage of the observation of Christmas in Newtown this year, reporters talked to people gathered at makeshift memorials, keeping vigil beside twenty-six candles kept lit all night from Christmas Eve through Christmas morning. Some said it felt too sad to be Christmas this year. One woman said it had taken her longer than usual to finish her preparations for Christmas. “I just felt like my heart wasn’t in it,” she said. Another man said he felt celebrating Christmas at all was inappropriate, given the town’s grief. “Christmas shouldn’t even be happening,” he said. “Life has changed as we know it.”
But it is precisely during those times when the darkness seems to have won, when our hearts just aren’t into the proclamations of joy, when we do not know how we can possibly affirm the goodness of the world and the goodness of God’s providence, that we most need to do so. To not light that Advent candle of Joy on December 16 would have been to affirm the truth of the world rather than the truth of the Gospel. To not celebrate Christmas Eve on December 24 would have been to say that the darkness had overcome the light.
Monsignor Bob Weiss, pastor of St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Newtown, encouraged his parish that there was still reason to celebrate Christmas in Newtown, even after he and the community spent the week before Christmas burying eight children from their parish, sometimes conducting two children’s funerals in one day. In the midst of what was surely one of the darkest weeks in the history of that church, Weiss wrote these words to the parish in his annual Christmas message:
This is a difficult task, to be sure, and I dare say it would be impossible for any one person to do. But the good news is that none of us is called to carry the light of Christ alone. We are part of a community of faith, the Church, which is the very Body of Christ, which will go on proclaiming the good news of the Gospel even when we as individuals are not able to proclaim it ourselves. When we fall into despair and find ourselves quite literally unable to say the words of faith, when we have no will power to pray, and when we can affirm nothing but the existence of the darkness around us, the corporate prayer of the Church goes on in endless praise of the One who is the Light even in the midst of the darkness.
What a relief it is to experience the corporate and communal nature of our faith! When we cannot see the light ourselves, we come to church to allow others to hold it up for us. When we cannot find the words to pray, we allow the community to pray for us until we are able to join in again. We are able to carry the light of Christ through the darkness only to the degree in which we are willing to carry one another through the difficult times.
And, thanks be to God, the truth of the Gospel does not depend on our emotional state of being. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it,” whether or not we believe that is true, whether or not our hearts are in it when we say that statement. Trusting in the truth of the Gospel, a truth that comes from outside ourselves, we continue to say it, even when the world around us screams that the light has gone out. We light the candles of joy, faith, hope, and love even when the world says there is no joy, faith, hope and love. We sing songs of praise and joy even in the midst of great loss. “Even at the grave we make our song, ‘Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia’” (BCP 499). We do so because we are an Easter people. We do so because at the center of our faith lies the proclamation of a Truth that is greater than the truth of the world: “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
On this First Sunday After Christmas, we hear a very different version of the Christmas story than the one we heard on Christmas Eve. Rather than shepherds and angels and a family sent to the stable because there was no room for them at the inn, we hear John’s version of “the beginning” of Jesus’s story, a beginning that began not in Bethlehem, but at the beginning of all time, before the creation of the world. John’s account is a cosmic creation story, a magnificent theological poem about the very essence of the Divine breaking into the depths of our world: “the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14).
And in this artistic proclamation of the origins of the Christ, the author of John’s Gospel gives us what I believe to be one of the most powerful summaries of the Christian message in all of Scripture:
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5).
In that one sentence lies the heart of the Gospel: the power of light over darkness, of love over hate, of life over death. Jesus’s Resurrection is the ultimate expression of this truth. Death itself could not extinguish the light that came into the world with the birth of Christ, and it continues to shine through all the ages, despite countless attempts and threats to extinguish it.
This is the heart of the Gospel, the Good News that we proclaim as Christians: that nothing will be able to extinguish the light of God that shines in all creation. The Apostle Paul said in his letter to the Romans that he was convinced “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38). This is the message we are called as Christians to proclaim to a broken and hurting world: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). And we are called to proclaim this message precisely during those times when we cannot see the light, when all seems to be darkness, when the world around us tells us there is no joy, no hope, and no love.
In the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut two weeks ago, many people around the country have questioned how they could go on with Christmas preparations and celebrations in the midst of such unspeakable loss.
One of my colleagues from seminary told me that a sermon preparation resource she reads sent out a message to their subscribers suggesting that they not light the “Candle of Joy” for the Third Sunday of Advent this year, given the deep dissonance many would feel in proclaiming a Sunday of “joy” just two days after such a horrific event.
In the news coverage of the observation of Christmas in Newtown this year, reporters talked to people gathered at makeshift memorials, keeping vigil beside twenty-six candles kept lit all night from Christmas Eve through Christmas morning. Some said it felt too sad to be Christmas this year. One woman said it had taken her longer than usual to finish her preparations for Christmas. “I just felt like my heart wasn’t in it,” she said. Another man said he felt celebrating Christmas at all was inappropriate, given the town’s grief. “Christmas shouldn’t even be happening,” he said. “Life has changed as we know it.”
But it is precisely during those times when the darkness seems to have won, when our hearts just aren’t into the proclamations of joy, when we do not know how we can possibly affirm the goodness of the world and the goodness of God’s providence, that we most need to do so. To not light that Advent candle of Joy on December 16 would have been to affirm the truth of the world rather than the truth of the Gospel. To not celebrate Christmas Eve on December 24 would have been to say that the darkness had overcome the light.
Monsignor Bob Weiss, pastor of St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Newtown, encouraged his parish that there was still reason to celebrate Christmas in Newtown, even after he and the community spent the week before Christmas burying eight children from their parish, sometimes conducting two children’s funerals in one day. In the midst of what was surely one of the darkest weeks in the history of that church, Weiss wrote these words to the parish in his annual Christmas message:
“I have been asked so often how do we celebrate Christmas this year. I believe that we celebrate it in its truest sense, putting aside all the secularity and simply sitting in silence and praying that the hope, healing and peace promised to us by Christ will be given to us in abundance… We need to know that even in these darkest hours, there is still light, light that is brighter than that great star over Bethlehem, which will take us to the place where we need to be… it will take us to the heart of Christ who will heal our brokenness, remove our anger and hurt and fill us with the peace and strength we need to not just move forward but to reclaim the life that is ours as a community in Christ Jesus.”The only time we let the light go out in our churches is on Good Friday – in a symbolic recreation of the darkness of the crucifixion, when the disciples thought the light really had gone out, when that light of the world that John’s Gospel speaks of was, for a time, absent. But the light did come back – it burst forth from the tomb in the body of the Resurrected Christ and set ablaze the light that the church has carried ever since, through times of deepest darkness. In the Church, we are an Easter people, a Resurrection people. Except for the one liturgical exception of Good Friday, no matter what else is going on in the world around us, we come to church to see the light. Our calling as Christians is to carry that light even when the darkness creeps in around us and we are certain it will extinguish the light.
This is a difficult task, to be sure, and I dare say it would be impossible for any one person to do. But the good news is that none of us is called to carry the light of Christ alone. We are part of a community of faith, the Church, which is the very Body of Christ, which will go on proclaiming the good news of the Gospel even when we as individuals are not able to proclaim it ourselves. When we fall into despair and find ourselves quite literally unable to say the words of faith, when we have no will power to pray, and when we can affirm nothing but the existence of the darkness around us, the corporate prayer of the Church goes on in endless praise of the One who is the Light even in the midst of the darkness.
What a relief it is to experience the corporate and communal nature of our faith! When we cannot see the light ourselves, we come to church to allow others to hold it up for us. When we cannot find the words to pray, we allow the community to pray for us until we are able to join in again. We are able to carry the light of Christ through the darkness only to the degree in which we are willing to carry one another through the difficult times.
And, thanks be to God, the truth of the Gospel does not depend on our emotional state of being. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it,” whether or not we believe that is true, whether or not our hearts are in it when we say that statement. Trusting in the truth of the Gospel, a truth that comes from outside ourselves, we continue to say it, even when the world around us screams that the light has gone out. We light the candles of joy, faith, hope, and love even when the world says there is no joy, faith, hope and love. We sing songs of praise and joy even in the midst of great loss. “Even at the grave we make our song, ‘Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia’” (BCP 499). We do so because we are an Easter people. We do so because at the center of our faith lies the proclamation of a Truth that is greater than the truth of the world: “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Bear fruits worthy of repentance
Sermon delivered Sunday, Dec. 16, 2012 (Third Sunday of Advent, Year C), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Zephaniah 3:14-20, Isaiah 12:2-6, Philippians 4:4-7, Luke 3:7-18).
Although today is the Third Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of “joy,” and much of the scripture we heard today calls us to rejoice in the grace and love of God, we haven’t completely lost the Advent theme of repentance. In today’s Gospel reading, John the Baptist tells the people who come to him asking to be baptized that they must “bear fruits worthy of repentance.” His message is that all people need to repent, even those who are sure they are already part of God’s chosen people who have found favor with God.
Against any within the Jewish faith who might have felt that their lineage as sons and daughters of Abraham entitled them to a sort of “free pass” at the last judgment, who might have thought that they were worthy just by virtue of the fact that they were part of God’s “chosen people,” John reminds them that they must also live an authentic life of faith that bears visible fruit in their actions. Being a son or daughter of Abraham means nothing, John says, if your life does not bear witness to God’s justice and love.
According to John, bearing fruit is the standard by which we will be judged, not our membership within a particular religious community. We will be judged not by what we’ve said we believed, but by the testimony of our hearts and our lives.
I’m sure that at some point in your life you’ve heard someone comment on the good deeds and sound life of someone who professes no faith at all. The statement usually goes something like this: “I know some atheists who are better Christians than most Christians I know!” What they are pointing to is the issue of bearing fruit. They see many people who say they believe in Christ judging others, saying one thing and doing another, going to church on Sunday but engaging in corrupt business practices or questionable moral behavior during the week – while they see many people who say they have no religious faith feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, visiting the sick, working for justice – the very things Christians are called to do. And so, they sigh and say with frustration, “Some atheists are better Christians than most Christians I know!”
That’s actually a very biblical statement. It’s essentially what John the Baptist was saying to the first-century Jewish community, and what Jesus would wind up saying to them as well. “Tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you,” Jesus says to the religious leaders of his day (Matthew 21:31). In other words, the supposedly “unfaithful” can actually be more faithful than the faithful at times. This is why the prophets continually remind us that bearing fruit is of utmost importance.
But lest we think that “bearing fruit” is simply a matter of doing the right things, the prophets also remind us that doing the right things without the right intentions is equally as empty as trusting in the fact that you were born into the “right” religious community. “Bear fruits worthy of repentance,” John the Baptist says. Repentance is a matter of the heart, of the inner orientation and intentions underlying our actions. Not only is it not enough to be children of Abraham, but it is also not enough to observe the right rituals if our hearts are not in the right place.
“For you have no delight in sacrifice,” writes the psalmist, “if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:16-17). The prophet Amos brings this word of God to the people: “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them… but let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:21-22, 24). The prophet Hosea said God desires mercy, not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6), and Jesus quoted this in his teachings.
In all these passages, the issue is not that the rituals themselves were bad – the people believed God had commanded them to do them – but that the people were doing them without the proper intentions in their hearts, and their lives were not bearing the proper fruit. The apostle Paul echoed this theme in his first letter to the Corinthians, when he insisted that without love – without one’s heart being in the right place – all the most praiseworthy actions on behalf of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ were utterly worthless. “If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing,” he wrote (1 Corinthians 13:2). This is a common theme, from the earliest of the Hebrew prophets all the way through the New Testament. Although our faith engages our heads – in our assent to certain beliefs or doctrines – and our hands and feet – in our actions in the world – at the end of the day, the life of faith is ultimately a matter of the heart.
This is why we pray the Collect for Purity at the beginning of every Eucharist: “Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your Holy Name, through Christ our Lord.” We acknowledge that, as the book of 1 Samuel puts it, “The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). We might appear to be doing all the “right” things here, being in church, participating in a ritual that we believe Jesus commanded his followers to continue in his name, but if our hearts are not in the right place, our actions will not please God. And so we pray for God’s assistance in orienting ourselves toward God and cleansing our hearts of any sin within them so that our worship of God may be an authentic expression of love and praise.
The word “Advent,” from which this season of the church year takes its name, means “coming,” and the early church fathers spoke of three “advents” in the Christian religion: the first coming of Christ, in his birth at Bethlehem in the first century which we will commemorate at Christmas, the second coming of Christ to judge the world at the end of time, and the daily coming of Christ into the hearts of individual believers. Without that third advent, the first and second advents won’t have much meaning to us. In the season of Advent, we do not only remember what has already been and wait for what is to come, but celebrate what currently is: the presence of Christ with us every day in the hearts of believers around the world.
“Let every heart prepare him room,” says the Christmas hymn “Joy to the World,” and that is indeed the work of Advent, the work of examining our hearts and opening them to receive the coming of Christ that is available to us every day. In this way, John the Baptist’s calls to repentance are not incongruous with our theme of joy for this Third Sunday of Advent, for it is through the heart-cleansing work of repentance that we might discover the joy of the daily coming of Christ into our lives.
Although today is the Third Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of “joy,” and much of the scripture we heard today calls us to rejoice in the grace and love of God, we haven’t completely lost the Advent theme of repentance. In today’s Gospel reading, John the Baptist tells the people who come to him asking to be baptized that they must “bear fruits worthy of repentance.” His message is that all people need to repent, even those who are sure they are already part of God’s chosen people who have found favor with God.
Against any within the Jewish faith who might have felt that their lineage as sons and daughters of Abraham entitled them to a sort of “free pass” at the last judgment, who might have thought that they were worthy just by virtue of the fact that they were part of God’s “chosen people,” John reminds them that they must also live an authentic life of faith that bears visible fruit in their actions. Being a son or daughter of Abraham means nothing, John says, if your life does not bear witness to God’s justice and love.
According to John, bearing fruit is the standard by which we will be judged, not our membership within a particular religious community. We will be judged not by what we’ve said we believed, but by the testimony of our hearts and our lives.
I’m sure that at some point in your life you’ve heard someone comment on the good deeds and sound life of someone who professes no faith at all. The statement usually goes something like this: “I know some atheists who are better Christians than most Christians I know!” What they are pointing to is the issue of bearing fruit. They see many people who say they believe in Christ judging others, saying one thing and doing another, going to church on Sunday but engaging in corrupt business practices or questionable moral behavior during the week – while they see many people who say they have no religious faith feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, visiting the sick, working for justice – the very things Christians are called to do. And so, they sigh and say with frustration, “Some atheists are better Christians than most Christians I know!”
That’s actually a very biblical statement. It’s essentially what John the Baptist was saying to the first-century Jewish community, and what Jesus would wind up saying to them as well. “Tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you,” Jesus says to the religious leaders of his day (Matthew 21:31). In other words, the supposedly “unfaithful” can actually be more faithful than the faithful at times. This is why the prophets continually remind us that bearing fruit is of utmost importance.
But lest we think that “bearing fruit” is simply a matter of doing the right things, the prophets also remind us that doing the right things without the right intentions is equally as empty as trusting in the fact that you were born into the “right” religious community. “Bear fruits worthy of repentance,” John the Baptist says. Repentance is a matter of the heart, of the inner orientation and intentions underlying our actions. Not only is it not enough to be children of Abraham, but it is also not enough to observe the right rituals if our hearts are not in the right place.
“For you have no delight in sacrifice,” writes the psalmist, “if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:16-17). The prophet Amos brings this word of God to the people: “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them… but let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:21-22, 24). The prophet Hosea said God desires mercy, not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6), and Jesus quoted this in his teachings.
In all these passages, the issue is not that the rituals themselves were bad – the people believed God had commanded them to do them – but that the people were doing them without the proper intentions in their hearts, and their lives were not bearing the proper fruit. The apostle Paul echoed this theme in his first letter to the Corinthians, when he insisted that without love – without one’s heart being in the right place – all the most praiseworthy actions on behalf of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ were utterly worthless. “If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing,” he wrote (1 Corinthians 13:2). This is a common theme, from the earliest of the Hebrew prophets all the way through the New Testament. Although our faith engages our heads – in our assent to certain beliefs or doctrines – and our hands and feet – in our actions in the world – at the end of the day, the life of faith is ultimately a matter of the heart.
This is why we pray the Collect for Purity at the beginning of every Eucharist: “Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your Holy Name, through Christ our Lord.” We acknowledge that, as the book of 1 Samuel puts it, “The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). We might appear to be doing all the “right” things here, being in church, participating in a ritual that we believe Jesus commanded his followers to continue in his name, but if our hearts are not in the right place, our actions will not please God. And so we pray for God’s assistance in orienting ourselves toward God and cleansing our hearts of any sin within them so that our worship of God may be an authentic expression of love and praise.
The word “Advent,” from which this season of the church year takes its name, means “coming,” and the early church fathers spoke of three “advents” in the Christian religion: the first coming of Christ, in his birth at Bethlehem in the first century which we will commemorate at Christmas, the second coming of Christ to judge the world at the end of time, and the daily coming of Christ into the hearts of individual believers. Without that third advent, the first and second advents won’t have much meaning to us. In the season of Advent, we do not only remember what has already been and wait for what is to come, but celebrate what currently is: the presence of Christ with us every day in the hearts of believers around the world.
“Let every heart prepare him room,” says the Christmas hymn “Joy to the World,” and that is indeed the work of Advent, the work of examining our hearts and opening them to receive the coming of Christ that is available to us every day. In this way, John the Baptist’s calls to repentance are not incongruous with our theme of joy for this Third Sunday of Advent, for it is through the heart-cleansing work of repentance that we might discover the joy of the daily coming of Christ into our lives.
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