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:

“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).

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.

Fearing the things we long for

Sermon delivered Sunday, Nov. 18, 2012 (25th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, Proper 28), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN  (1 Samuel 1:4-20, 1 Samuel 2:1-10, Hebrews 10:11-25, Mark 13:1-8)

The season of Advent is still two weeks away, but the Advent themes of expectant watching and waiting for the coming of Christ – both the remembrance of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem and the anticipation of his Second Coming – have already begun to seep into our liturgy. Have you noticed?

In last week’s collect, we prayed that we might purify ourselves as Christ is pure so that we may be made like him “when he comes again with power and great glory.” Our passage from Ruth (Ruth 4:13-17) told of the birth of Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of David – the lineage through which Jesus would come. (Think of how many Christmas songs refer to Jesse and David!) The passage from Hebrews last week concluded with a pronouncement that Jesus would “appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him” (Hebrews 9:28). As we continue reading in Hebrews today, we hear about the importance of encouraging one another as we see “the Day” – that is, the final judgment, the end times – approaching (Hebrews 10:25).

And today we also hear a story about the birth of a long-expected child: not Jesus just yet, but the prophet Samuel. Samuel is not crucial to the lineage of Jesus like Obed from last week’s reading, but his mother Hannah’s song of praise at his birth bears a striking similarity to the Virgin Mary’s famous song of praise, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), that she sings after the Angel Gabriel tells her she will bear the Christ child. Both women sing of their soul rejoicing in God and exult in God’s power to bring down the proud and raise up the lowly, to turn the world’s social structures upside down and to bring hope and life from unexpected places.

And then in the Gospel passage for today, we’re back to that Second Coming, apocalyptic, end times kind of stuff. Jesus foresees the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and tells the disciples that much conflict and calamity will precede the end times and the renewal of creation. He tells them not to see social and physical upheaval as a sign that the end is near; though there will be wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes and famines, these things are “but the beginning of the birth pangs” (Mark 13:8).

Jesus’s use of birthing imagery is interesting, especially given the focus on birth in the Hebrew Bible passage for today, and the focus on birth that will come with the seasons of Advent and Christmas. Both Hannah and Mary rejoice in the birth of long-awaited sons, but Jesus’s words in Mark remind us of the fear and pain that often accompany birth. Before the joy of welcoming a new person into the world comes the pain of labor, the sweat and tears and blood, the worry about the health and safety of the child, the inner doubts about whether or not we will be capable caretakers of this utterly vulnerable life about to be entrusted to our care. The transition of this broken and sinful world into the promised world to come will be like this, Jesus tells us. The birthing of a new creation will bring the waves of pain and fear that women in labor experience in bringing new life into this world. Just as the birthing process is unpredictable – even with the marvels of modern medicine! – as to when it will begin and how long it will take, so is the birthing of the new creation. Just as the onset of contractions does not necessarily mean that the baby will arrive within minutes, so the pains of the conflict and suffering of this world do not mean that the end is here. Jesus’s use of the metaphor of “birth pangs” conveys the idea that wars, earthquakes, and other disasters will come in waves, like labor pains, each one seemingly unbearable while we are in the midst of it, and leading us to believe that surely things are almost over, but not necessarily immediately bringing forth the new life that we are so eagerly awaiting.

Like the birth of a new child, the coming of the new creation promised by God is something that we may both long for yet fear.

And although childbirth is our dominant metaphor this week, there are many other things in the human experience that we may find ourselves both longing for and fearing at the same time. This week, I asked several friends what they longed for yet feared, and got a variety of responses. One friend said the thing she longed for yet feared was “freedom. For everyone.” A friend in Nebraska who is a hunter said he longed for yet feared “a really big whitetail buck.” Several single friends said they longed for yet feared intimacy, a soulmate, a loving relationship. A friend with three children shared that she longed for yet feared having a fourth child. Other responses included longing for yet fearing a call from God, and longing to be with departed loved ones and friends but fearing death itself.

Looking at the themes that emerged in this survey, I wonder if the root of this archetypal fear of the very thing we desire is a fear of vulnerability, of loss of control. We know that in order to experience love, or to allow for the full flourishing of human life, or to let God into our lives to guide us, we must let go of our need to control outcomes and our desire to protect ourselves from pain and surrender to the power of something bigger than ourselves. And yet, we fear things that are bigger than we are, things that have the power to destroy us. So we hold on all the tighter to those “security blankets” and defense mechanisms that ironically, are actually keeping us from reaching or achieving the things we say we so long for.

Yes, we want that new heaven and new earth where there is no longer any mourning or pain or grief, where God himself will be our companion and comfort, where Christ will be king rather than the powers of this world. But between us and that beatific vision, according to the tradition we’ve been taught, lies the apocalypse, armageddon, the end of the world. Wars, earthquakes, and famines are just the beginning of it, Jesus says. That doesn’t sound like something we want! We want the reign of God on earth, we want peace and an end to humanity’s restless warring and relief from the natural disasters that devastate communities, but we fear the conflict and upheaval that Jesus tells us will inevitably precede it. We long for the new life, but we fear the birthing process.

But the word of hope for us in regard to all the things we long for yet fear, is that Jesus tells us not to be alarmed! Some of Jesus’s most common words in the Scriptures are words of comfort to his followers: “Do not be alarmed. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Do not fear.” Jesus promises to be with us, even to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). Trusting in that promise offers us the possibility of a life freed from the shackles of fear, in which we can experience the love, joy and peace that we so long for. When we encounter conflict or pain, instead of being paralyzed by fear and reacting as if it were the “end of the world” – literally or metaphorically – we can move through the fear and respond in love to whatever is struggling to be born. Rather than turning away from the disasters of our age with a detached fatalism, shrugging our shoulders and saying, “What can you do? Jesus told us that ‘these things must take place,’” we can step in like a calm, collected midwife, seeking to ease the pains of the birth of the new creation by helping with disaster relief, feeding the hungry, and advocating for peace. We can let go of our fear if we trust in God’s promises, opening ourselves to potential pain and conflict because we have full confidence that our ultimate longing will be fulfilled in the embrace of Christ.

Sermon for All Saints' Sunday

Sermon delivered Sunday, Nov. 4, 2012, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, Tenn.
All Saints’ Sunday, Year B (Wis. 3:1-9, Ps. 24, Rev. 21:1-6a, Jn. 11:32-44)

Today is All Saints’ Sunday, the day we commemorate the lives of all the saints who have gone before us, whose lives have been a testament to the power of the Gospel and an example of godly life and faith. All Saints’ Day is one of the seven principle feast days of the church, along with Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension Day, the Day of Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday. These seven days are the most important days in the church year, highlighting what is central to Christian faith and the life of the church.

All Saints’ Day and Trinity Sunday are the only two on the list that do not commemorate a specific event in the life of Jesus, but they also highlight central aspects of Christian faith and tradition. All Saints’ Day celebrates the “communion of saints” that is a central part of our Creed. Without the saints, there would be no church, and though the saints of the church were not Christ himself, their lives bore and continue to bear witness to Christ in the centuries after his earthly existence.

So who are these “saints” that we commemorate today? In popular understanding, a “saint” is someone who is much more “holy” than us regular folk, someone who never makes mistakes, who never or doubts or questions, who is perfect in matters of faith. “Let’s face it, I’m no saint,” people will say as they describe their shortcomings, the implication being that if they were a saint, they would not have these flaws.

This high standard for what it means to be a saint likely is influenced by the Roman Catholic tradition, in which there is a lengthy process for officially canonizing someone as a saint. In this process, the individual’s life is evaluated by church authorities for evidence of his or her holiness of life and correctness of belief, and he or she must be the cause of at least two miracles after his or her death. These criteria certainly lend themselves to an understanding of “saints” as a super-human ideal of perfection. In a sermon on the occasion of the canonization of Elisabeth Ann Seton in 1975, Pope Paul VI said as much: “Being a Saint means being perfect,” he said, “with a perfection that attains the highest level that a human being can reach. A Saint is a human creature fully conformed to the will of God.”

But this understanding of a saint is not the only understanding in Christian history and theology. The creation of a feast day for “all saints” came out of a desire to honor and commemorate all the martyrs in the first few centuries of the church’s existence. A willingness to die for one’s faith instantly earned one the designation of “saint,” regardless of how “perfect” or not he or she was and whether or not he or she had been the vehicle of any miracles. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul often opens his letters to the various churches across the Mediterranean region with the words, “to all the saints” at Corinth, or at Philippi, or at Rome, and in this context he is presumably speaking to all faithful Christians in those places, not just the really holy ones. Despite its focus on those exceptional saints that are canonized by the church, the Roman Catholic tradition also acknowledges this broader definition of a saint as well.

In the Episcopal Church, our understanding of what a “saint” is tends toward this broader use of the term. The Episcopal Dictionary of the Church defines the word “saint” first as simply “a holy person, a faithful Christian, one who shares life in Christ.” It goes on to add that “the term may also indicate one who has formally been canonized or recognized as a saint by church authority.” Although we in the Episcopal Church do honor certain Christians in our liturgical calendar who stand out as particularly praiseworthy examples of Christ-like living, we acknowledge that all of us who share life in Christ through our baptism are part of the “communion of saints” that we refer to each week in the Nicene Creed. And thus, All Saints’ Day becomes a day to remember not just those grand heroes of the faith like the Virgin Mary and Saint Peter and the Apostle Paul, but also the everyday faith heroes of our lives, those who have made Christ known to us by their dedicated lives of faith, prayer, and service.

Most likely, we can all name one or two of these saints. Unless we came to Christian faith solely through an intellectual pursuit, by reading about the faith and deciding to accept it for ourselves, we were likely influenced by other Christians, by friends and family members who already knew the love of God in Christ and shared it with us before we knew or accepted it for ourselves. Maybe it was our parent or uncle or grandmother who took us to church, or the Sunday School teachers who taught us that “Yes, Jesus loves us.” Maybe it was an inspiring mentor who showed us how to live out the faith we felt in our hearts but did not know how to put into action in our lives. Or maybe it was a friend who introduced us to Christianity as an adult, or a stranger who said just the right words to us at just the right moment in our lives to open our hearts to faith in Christ. Whether we came to faith at an early age or later in life, in a gradual process of being raised in the church or through a lighting-from-the-sky conversion experience – or somewhere in between – our paths to faith most likely were influenced by those saints who may never have a “saint’s day” in the Christian liturgical calendar, but who are no less saints than those who do.

On All Saints’ Sunday, we remember God’s promise that death is not the final word, that those saints who have already departed this life continue on in their love and service of God. The beautiful passages we heard from the Wisdom of Solomon and the Revelation to John remind us that “the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God,” and that God will bring about a new creation in which “death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” In the midst of our grief over the departure of those beloved saints who showed us the way of faith, we remember that God’s grace and love are stronger than death. Our Gospel passage from John tells the story of Jesus mourning the death of his friend Lazarus, and then raising him to life again, foreshadowing Jesus’s own eventual Resurrection, through which death was defeated not just for one man, but for all creation. Death, for the Christian, is not the end of the story. In fact, in some ways, for us it is the beginning.

We begin our lives as Christians through the sacrament of baptism, in which we are united with Christ in his death on the cross. Though we usually think of baptism only in the positive terms of new life and rebirth, in baptism we are also initiated into the sufferings of Christ, and into the suffering that may come through following Christ. In baptism, we are indeed “born again,” but the new life into which we are born is the life of Christ, a life in which Good Friday is inseparable from Easter, and in which Easter comes through Good Friday. It is through union with Christ in his death that we attain to union with him in his life. As the Apostle 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). This is the promise of baptism, and the hope of the Christian life. This is the promise to which the lives of the saints bear witness, the promise that, again in the words of the Apostle Paul, “nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39).

And on this day that we are particularly aware of that “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) to the faith who have gone before us, we celebrate the addition of new members of the communion of saints. All Saints’ Sunday is one of four days in the church’s calendar when we initiate new members into the church through the sacrament of baptism. Today, we will renew our own baptismal covenant, and at the 11:00 service, we will welcome Alexandra Sidney Farmer and Andrew Christopher McClure into the church of God through baptism. They will be united with Christ in his death and in the hope of his Resurrection. Their parents and godparents will promise to raise them in the life of the church, that one day they might come to choose the God in Christ who has already chosen them. And we will promise to do all in our power to support them in their life in Christ. Because, as they say, “it takes a village.” Or perhaps – it takes a communion of saints.

Today we see the full circle of that communion of saints. As we give thanks for the witness of mature, fruitful Christian lives, we look expectantly and joyfully to these new disciples who are just beginning to grow in the knowledge and love of Christ. And we pray that we who pledge to support them in their life in Christ would one day be the “saints” that Alexandra and Andrew will remember whose lives bore witness to the power of the Resurrection and who led them to a mature faith in Christ.

Shifting from a human-centered to a God-centered view of the universe

Sermon delivered Sunday, Oct. 21, 2012, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, Tenn.
21 Pentecost, Proper 24, Year B (Job 38:1-7, 34-41; Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b)

As we continue in our reading from Job this Sunday, we get to the part where God finally responds to Job’s cries of despair. And, interestingly enough, God does not directly address any of Job’s complaints or questions about the injustice of Job’s suffering or the senseless suffering in the wider world. Instead, God’s answer to Job is a creation story.

“Why has all this pain come upon me for no reason?” Job cries, “And what about all those orphans and widows starving out there, and all the wars, and the people who exploit and abuse others and get away with it? I demand an answer!”

And God replies, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Can you create lightning and make it rain? Can you provide food for all the creatures of the earth?”

He draws Job’s attention to the intricate workings of the wider world outside of Job’s small realm of existence and reminds Job that Job is not God, nor does the entire world revolve around Job. The story of Job seems to be suggesting that one possible solution to the “problem of evil,” the question of why suffering exists if the world is created by a benevolent God, is to shift our perspective from a human-centered point of view to a God-centered point of view. To “zoom out,” if you will, to see the bigger picture of how all the elements of the natural world fit together in an amazingly intricate and awe-inspiring configuration, of which humans are just one part. It can be humbling but comforting to realize that we are not the center of the universe.

Sewanee biologist David Haskell recently published a book called The Forest Unseen, in which he records his observations of one square meter of forest on the Cumberland Plateau over the course of a year. Although chock-full of scientific facts and figures, his approach is contemplative: his goal is to “search for the universal within the infinitesimally small” in the same way as Tibetan monks see the entire universe within the circular meditation aids called mandalas that they create out of colored sand, or in the same way as the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich saw the divine love and design of God in meditating on a hazelnut.

Whether describing the atomic physics behind the consistent hexagonal shape of snowflakes or the ways in which plants warn other plants about approaching insect predators by sending out chemical signals, Haskell’s meditations make fascinating scientific insights about the interconnectedness of all life accessible to a general audience. Although Haskell speaks of the inner workings of cells and organisms evolving through natural selection, not of God “tilting the waterskins of the heavens” to make it rain, his meditations on the greater workings of the universe put things in perspective for me in a similar way to what I think the story of Job intends to communicate in imagining God’s response to Job as an account of creation. Meditating on the wonders of creation reminds us that we are part of something much bigger than any of our individual lives.

Other authors of biblical texts turn to creation narratives in times of suffering as well. The “Song of the Three Young Men,” one of the canticles optional for use at Morning Prayer, is a passage from the Old Testament Book of Daniel that appears in the Greek version of the text but not the Hebrew. It details the song sung by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abendego after they are thrown in the fiery furnace for refusing to worship the golden image created by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Significantly, their song in a moment of persecution and near-death is an extensive meditation on creation and a call for all creation to praise and worship the Lord:

“Glorify the Lord, every shower of rain and fall of dew, all winds and fire and heat,” they sing. “Storm clouds and thunderbolts, glorify the Lord, praise him and highly exalt him forever… Glorify the Lord, O mountains and hills and all that grows upon the earth… O springs of water, seas and streams, O whales and all that move in the waters. All birds of the air, glorify the Lord, praise him and highly exalt him forever.”(BCP 88-89)

In the face of possible death, they sing about the glories of creation. They recognize that the vastness of creation over which God is sovereign is much bigger than their individual lives and that the created order will continue to give glory to God, whether or not they personally survive to continue to give witness to him.

Many of the psalms also recount beautiful creation narratives, sometimes in the midst of a lament or struggle with God’s apparent absence or silence. Today’s psalm, 104, is a song entirely of thanksgiving and praise, with no verses of lament, but taken within the entire corpus of the psalms as a whole, they represent a body of poetic literature that both cries out to God in times of despair and finds hope through remembering and recounting the sacred stories of Israel’s history and recalling God’s creation of the world. During times of suffering, when, like Job, we wonder where God is and cannot feel his presence, we remember the places we’ve seen and experienced God in the past to find comfort – and creation or the natural world around us seems to be one of the primary places that many people, both ancients and moderns, find testament to God’s presence.

Meditating on creation can be comforting because it relieves us of any notion that it is our job to rule the world, to manage or control or “fix” things. Although we see many things that may seem wrong or broken with the world, we are reminded that that “God is God and we are not,” and that can be a very liberating thought for those of us who sometimes feel like Atlas, holding the weight of the world on our shoulders.

Meditating on creation can also help us to see that what may seem evil or horrific from one perspective might actually be quite magnificent and awe-inspiring when seen in the greater scheme of things. Watching a lion devour a gazelle might seem to be cruel, and certainly that moment is one of great suffering for the gazelle, but in the death of the gazelle comes nourishment for the lion. And the lion’s eventual death will provide nourishment for vultures or other birds of prey. Nothing is wasted. The energy bound up in each of these living creatures will not cease to exist, but be transformed, serving another purpose in the great cycle of life that many cultures and religions regard as sacred.

In leading a recent Quiet Day (9/28/12, at St. Mary's Sewanee) on the Song of the Three Young Men, that canticle of creation from Morning Prayer, Episcopal priest and author Barbara Cawthorne Crafton commented on the peace that comes from spending time meditating on creation. “The more time we spend with plants and animals, the more at peace we will be with our own end,” she said. Observing the cycle of life reminds us that, as we say on Ash Wednesday, we are dust and to dust we shall return.

God answers Job’s cries of despair with a song of creation because an awareness of our own mortality and our place in the great cycle of life has the potential to bring great comfort. And there is some indication in the text that Job does find comfort in reflecting on these things.

Although most translations of the final chapter of Job, which we will read in the lectionary next week, say that Job responds to God’s speech by repenting, by apologizing and “taking back” everything he’d said before, Hebrew Bible scholar Rebecca Abts Wright suggests a different translation. She is convinced that Job never repents, since he has done nothing wrong of which to repent – and even God acknowledges this in the final chapter when he says that Job has spoken truth about God while Job’s friends have not. Instead, she points out that the root of the Hebrew word translated as “repent,” while it can mean “to change the mind,” is never used in calls for people to repent elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. The root also means “to comfort,” and indeed, that same word is translated as “comfort” just a few verses later when Job’s relatives come to him and comfort him after the ordeal is over. Wright suggests that rather than translating the final verse of Job’s response to God’s speech as “therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes,” it could more accurately be translated as “therefore, I melt away and am comforted concerning dust and ashes.”

There’s a very different message there if she is correct. In Wright’s interpretation, the message is not that Job gets put in his place for questioning God and submits after receiving a divine “smack down.” Instead, after being reminded of the vastness of God’s creation and his small place in the grand scheme of things, he finally “lets go,” so to speak – that’s what I hear in the “melt away” part – and is “comforted concerning dust and ashes” – he is comforted about the fact of his own mortality and the human condition. He is reminded that he is dust and to dust he shall return, and he is “at peace with his own end.” He is comforted knowing that God is in control of the universe, and that God has heard his cries of pain, even if he does not understand the reasons for his suffering.

So perhaps the next time you find yourself struggling with something difficult, you might remember God’s answer to Job from the whirlwind and take a step outside to contemplate the movement of an ant on the pavement or the intricacies of the veins of the leaves on the trees around you. Step out of your mind for a moment and contemplate the bigger picture of God’s wondrous creation. Cultivating a sense of awe and respect for creation over time may bring you deepening waves of peace and a holy sense of connectedness with all life.

Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?

Sermon delivered Sunday, Oct. 7, 2012 (19th Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 22B), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, Tenn. (Job 1:1, 2:1-10)

“Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10)

Job’s question is a poignant one, coming from a man who had experienced unspeakable loss. Our lectionary passage leaves out most of the first chapter of Job, which describes the loss of Job’s livestock and the death of his servants and all ten of his children. Then Job is stricken with a painful illness. Things are so bad that his wife comes to the conclusion it would be better to die than to continue to live with the suffering Job is experiencing, and encourages Job to curse God and die.

But Job refuses, continuing to accept God’s sovereignty over his life. “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21), he says when he learns of the death of his children. “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” he asks (Job 2:10), in response to his wife’s words of anger and despair.

This question could be the “topic sentence” of the entire Book of Job: Are human beings willing to receive the good at the hand of God and not to receive the bad? It is the question that Satan, or “the Accuser,” asks in the heavenly court. “Of course Job is faithful and upright,” he says to God, “It’s easy for people to be faithful and give praise to God when things are going well for them. But what about when things are tough? How much will they love you then?”

The entire “game” that the Accuser plays with Job is an experiment to answer that very question: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” Will Job continue to be in faithful relationship with God even when his comfortable life is stripped away from him?

Now, before we go any further, let me say a word about the disturbing opening of this story. What kind of God, you might ask, would agree to let all these calamities befall an innocent person just to win a “bet,” if you will, with an unruly angel? Does God also send death and destruction upon us intentionally, just to see if we’ll cave under the pressure? Are the suffering of our lives a result of God making a similar bargain with the Accuser?

In my understanding of God, the answers to those questions are “no” and “no.” It is helpful to understand that the Book of Job was never intended to describe actual events that happened to a real person. Hebrew Bible scholar Rebecca Abts Wright describes the book of Job as the ancient equivalent of a “Dr. Seuss” story, a story meant to illustrate a particular question or topic through creative imagination. The story of Job describes a perfect man with a perfect family in a made up land (no one knows where “the land of Uz” is) with a made-up name (“Job” is not a Semitic or Hebrew name, or a name common to any of the surrounding cultures). This is the ancient Near Eastern equivalent of a story about the Whos down in Whoville. The description of Job is a kind of stereotype of perfection that does not exist completely in real life. But the author of the story posits the existence of this hypothetical “perfect” person to explore a significant theological question: Is it possible to remain faithful to God in the midst of unexplainable suffering, suffering which we have done nothing to deserve?

The story of Job is something like a parable, through which we are invited to consider our own lives of faith. Are we “fair-weather” friends of God, happy to praise him when things are going well, but quick to curse him when they are not? Are we like the seed in Jesus’s parable of the sower (Luke 8:4-15) that was sown on rock, who receive the Word with joy when we first hear it, but when troubles arise, we fall away?

Reading this passage from Job at this particular point in time, I cannot help but think of the response of the Sikh community in Wisconsin to the shootings at their place of worship two months ago. Despite enduring the horror of a violent attack during a worship service and losing six members of their community, the Sikh community has responded with love and compassion, continuing to be at prayer and to encourage one another to remain in chardi kala, a state of optimism and high spirits that is central to the Sikh faith. My friend Valarie Kaur, a third-generation Sikh American from California and a nationally-known interfaith activist, went to Milwaukee to be with the community in the days and weeks after the shootings. She gathered first-hand stories from the people there and began sharing them through op-ed pieces, blog entries, Facebook posts and tweets.

One of the most powerful stories she shared was that of Santokh Singh, a 50-year-old man from India who came to the U.S. to serve the community in Milwaukee as a granthi, a devotional singer who recites prayers from scripture in Sikh worship services. In the attack on the gurdwara in August, he survived two gunshot wounds to the stomach. In reflecting on the shooting, Santokh said, “I have no hate for the gunman. What happened was done by God. How can I wish ill upon the gunman if it is God’s will?”

“The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)

In the face of unspeakable loss, the Sikh community in Wisconsin, like Job, has affirmed an acceptance of God’s sovereignty in their lives. “Whatever God gives, we receive with grace,” says a Sikh prayer. Turning to prayer for solace in the days and weeks after the shooting, Sikhs received the gut-wrenching pain of their loss as a gift from God. “One does not turn away a gift, or bury it, or rage against it, but receive it with an open heart,” Valarie wrote in an article for The Washington Post, describing the community’s theological response to the tragedy.

“Shall we receive the good at the hand of God but not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10)

But Job’s acceptance of his fate and his poignant words of faith and trust are not the whole story. In this book of 42 chapters, Job’s strong statements of trust and acceptance of God’s will appear only in the first two chapters. From chapter three onwards, Job begins to lament his loss. He says it would be better if he had never been born, and question God’s justice at allowing such pain to come into his life.

“Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me,” he says. “I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes” (Job 3:25-26). This is a far cry from the calm acceptance of his fate and peaceful worship and blessing of God that he expressed when he first lost his children and livestock. After the loss has a chance to sink in more deeply, the raw pain seeps out, perhaps even against his will, since Job was a deeply pious man who most likely would have wanted to remain in chardi kala, as the Sikhs would put it, optimistic and faithful despite his sufferings. But the pain was too much.

And it is too much for some members of the Sikh community in Milwaukee as well. Not all members of the community are able to trust that the shootings were a part of God’s will with as much peace and grace as Santokh Singh. Valarie also shared stories of members of the community who continue to see images of their loved ones lying on the floor in pools of blood, who continue to hear the gunshots in their dreams, who cannot sleep at night. The trauma of the shootings strips away their sense of peace and violates their most sacred space.

“Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes” (Job 3:25-26).

So what are we to do when we are unable to stay in chardi kala? When the pain and grief are simply too much, when we cannot honestly thank God for this supposed “gift” that he gives?

Well, we can do what Job does. Job expresses his anger, his frustration, his despair, and his pain to God. He does not give in to the temptation to beat himself up, to agree with the unhelpful suggestions of his friends that surely God must be punishing him for some sin he has committed. No, Job maintains his sense of integrity by insisting on his own innocence, and in questioning God’s justice in allowing innocent people to suffer.

But in all this, Job never curses God, as his wife suggests. He still acknowledges that God is in control, even if he doesn’t like it! He makes his complaints about how God is running the world known, and at the end of it all God actually affirms Job’s response over the response of Job’s friends, who support traditional wisdom in saying that God rewards those who are righteous and brings suffering upon those who are wicked. In the last chapter of the book of Job, in a passage you won’t see in the lectionary when we get to this section at the end of October, God scolds Job’s friends, saying, “My wrath is kindled against you, …for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7).

Accepting God’s will and God’s sovereignty over our lives does not mean denying the feelings of frustration, grief, anger, and despair that well up within us when inexplicable suffering comes to us. With Job, we can say, “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21), but still cry out in pain. With the Sikh community in Milwaukee, we can say, “Whatever God gives, we receive with grace,” but still acknowledge when the grief is too much to bear – and seek help from friends, family, and professional counselors to get us through. And we can be gentle with ourselves in that place of both/and, of faith and doubt, gratitude and despair, because the important part is that we stay in relationship with God – not that we say nice things about God or always like God and never question God – but that we are in authentic relationship with God – a God who knows something about the depths of inexplicable pain, whose desire to be in authentic relationship with us led him to death on a cross.

For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ

Homily delivered at the monthly healing service at St. Paul's Franklin.

“For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ” (2 Cor. 1:5).

As we gather today in this service of healing, we remember that we are not alone in our pain and our struggles. God himself in Christ has experienced the gut-wrenching pain of a violent death on the cross, and has experienced what it is like to wrestle with the dread of pain and suffering. The night before his crucifixion, Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, “My Father, if it possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want” (Matt. 26:39). Although the Gospel of John portrays Jesus as calmly accepting his fate, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all describe Jesus struggling in anguish the night before his death, wishing that things could be otherwise. His prayer gives voice to a universal human cry: “Dear God, please save me!” – from pain, from suffering, and from death.

But pain, suffering, and death are unavoidable in this world: even Jesus did not get to bypass them in this life. And Jesus never promises his followers that their lives will be easy and painless; in fact, he warns them that following him may bring more pain and suffering into their lives, from a human perspective. But the consolation that we have through Christ that the Apostle Paul writes about is the knowledge that pain, suffering, and death do not have the final word. Although Jesus’s prayer to have the cup of suffering removed from him was not answered, the suffering and death that he endured did not defeat and destroy him. “On the third day, he rose again,” (Nicene Creed) and “rising from the grave, destroyed death, and made the whole creation new” (Eucharistic Prayer D, BCP 374).

God has answered that universal human cry to “save us” from pain, from suffering, and from death. As believers in Christ, through our baptism we have been united with Christ in his death – and in his sufferings – but also in his resurrection. As Paul writes in Romans 6, “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).

The ultimate healing of humanity has already occurred in the transformation and transfiguration of mortal flesh into the eternal life of the Resurrection in Jesus Christ – and through our baptism we already begin to participate in that transformed life, the full flourishing of which we await at Christ’s Second Coming and the Resurrection of all. This hope for full participation in the Resurrected life is why we can say in our burial service, “Even at the grave we make our song, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” The consolation we have in Christ is not one that denies the anguish of suffering, but looks for its transformation into the life-giving power of the Resurrection.

“For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ” (2 Cor. 1:5). “For 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).

A call to be in community with "the poor"

Sermon delivered Sunday, Sept. 9, 2012, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Franklin, Tenn.

When I was about 16 years old, I started reading the Bible for the first time. Sure, I’d grown up in church – my parents took my sister and me to the local Lutheran church every Sunday – and I’d heard scripture passages read out loud in the service every week, but until I was 16, I don’t think I’d ever actually opened a Bible. When I “got saved” at a youth rally sponsored by a friend’s Southern Baptist church, I came home with a pamphlet of materials about how to nurture my new life in Christ that instructed me to read and study various scripture passages. So I asked my mother, “Um, do you have, like, a Bible I could borrow?” She gave me a small, pocket-sized paperback copy she’d been given in a Sunday School class years ago, and I began to explore, reading voraciously through the New Testament.

But as I read, I began to get a bit uneasy, because the picture I began to get of Jesus didn’t match up very closely with what I’d seen and experienced in church. I noticed that Jesus had spent his ministry being with people considered to be on the margins of his society, but I didn’t see many Christians around me doing similar things in our society. Sure, I had learned through church that being a Christian had something to do with “being a good person” and “helping the less fortunate,” but donating our used clothes to the area thrift store and taking some canned goods to the food pantry didn’t seem to be the same as what I saw Jesus doing in the stories in the Bible: actually being with people – ministering to their needs, yes, but more significantly, being with them, knowing them, loving them. I had never actually met a single person who had benefitted from any of the items my family or church had donated over the years. “The poor” were not part of our church; they were somewhere “out there,” and certainly not “one of us.”

Our passage from the letter of James this morning (James 2:1-17) is about what happens when “the poor” actually show up in church, when they don’t stay safely “out there,” hidden behind the back doors of distribution centers or in alleys beside shelters. It’s about what happens when “the poor” cease to be an abstract statistic and become real people in our midst. It’s about what happens when a person who is exhausted from spending his days sleeping on park benches in the blazing sun because it is too dangerous to sleep at night shuffles in to church and sits down in the back pew. How do those who claim to believe in and follow “our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” respond? Do they clutch their purses a little closer? Wrap their arms protectively around their children? Edge uncomfortably away?

James’s words about the sin of partiality and favoritism in the church ring just as true today as they did in the first and second centuries. There seems to be something innate in human societies that leads them to favor the “haves” over the “have nots.” Despite the fact that Jesus spent his ministry caring for and being with those on the margins of society, and despite the centuries-old Jewish tradition of God’s favor and care for the poor that we heard echoed in our passage from Proverbs this morning, the earliest churches – just like churches today – became stratified and segregated according to socioeconomic status. And even in the churches that were or are socioeconomically diverse, those with the most money often wield the most power and command the most respect. Churches might give lip service to Jesus’s teachings about the impossibility of serving God and money (Matthew 6:24) and the teachings in 1 Timothy about the love of money being the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10), but in practice the person “with gold rings and in fine clothes” is often treated better than the “poor person in dirty clothes,” just as the letter of James describes.

Encountering these scriptures for the first time at age 16 and observing some of these dynamics in the churches around me began to open my heart to a deep sense of call to ministry with those on the margins of society, but it wasn’t until nearly 10 years later, while I was living in the Boston area for graduate school, that I began to act on that sense of call.

Through the Episcopal church I was attending at the time, I heard about an outdoor worship service for homeless people in Cambridge, called simply, “The Outdoor Church.” It was an offshoot of a larger gathering in downtown Boston called “common cathedral” that had been started by an Episcopal priest about 10 years before. The rector at my parish went down once a month to the Outdoor Church to help with the service and to share in fellowship with the community there. I remember being in a Christian formation class on a Monday after one of his Sundays at the Outdoor Church and being captivated by his descriptions of his experiences there the previous day. “It really felt like church,” he said.

Not too long after that, I began volunteering weekly with the Outdoor Church. My priest’s words resonated deeply with my own experience: it did indeed “feel like church,” like what I imagined the church was supposed to be. I felt I had finally found a community whose way of life seemed to mirror what Jesus did in the Gospels: being with those on the margins of society, offering them not just care for their physical needs (which we did in the form of sandwiches and socks and jackets), but a sense of belonging and community.

It was through my encounters with the people in that community that I learned how damaging the unspoken concern with appearances in churches can be. Many churches will never have to deal with the hypothetical issue the letter of James presents because no “poor person in dirty clothes” would feel comfortable even walking through the doors of their church. Many people on the streets think they are not “presentable” enough or “worthy” enough to attend church. They worry about how they look or how they smell, and fear of rejection keeps them far from the doors of any church. Simply saying “our church welcomes all people” is not enough to counteract unspoken cultural norms that dictate that people arrive for church clean and nicely dressed, nor does it outweigh the palpable uncomfortable vibe that homeless people can often sense from people in traditional churches if they show up for a regular Sunday service. Communities like the Outdoor Church – and our own Church in the Yard [C.I.T.Y.] here in Nashville – attempt to respond to this dynamic by taking the church to people where they are, on the streets, instead of waiting for “them” to come to “us.” The United Church of Christ minister I worked with at the Outdoor Church used to say that our mission was to “take the church to people who either cannot or will not reach it on their own.”

The Outdoor Church really “felt like church,” I think, because it was a gathering where people were accepted just as they were, where there were no acts of favoritism or preference shown to those who had money over those who did not. It was a community where there were no pressures or expectations to look or act a certain way, but where all people were seen and treated as beloved children of God.

And in that community of faith and belonging, people’s bodily needs were met as well. After Eucharist, we served a meal – just like they do at Church in the Yard. We did not simply say to our brothers and sisters who lack daily food, “Go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill,” but we shared a meal with them and helped them find snow boots or jackets when they needed them.

The faith in that community was not the “faith by itself” with no works that James criticizes, but a lively and robust faith manifested in the actions of the members of the community toward one another. The selfless giving and works of faith flowed not just from the people making the sandwiches and donating the jackets, but from our homeless parishioners as well. Our street friends would often make small monetary donations to the Outdoor Church, or give back to us in other ways. I remember a small Latino man in Harvard Square with whom we shared sandwiches every week as he sold his handiwork as a street vendor. Although he spoke almost no English, one of our volunteers was fluent in Spanish and was able to translate for us. His situation was dismal: he had somehow managed to come to the U.S. without the proper paperwork, traveling with friends or relatives and not understanding the legal situation he was getting himself into. He had expected to be able to return to his family in Latin America, but now realized he was unable to leave or to get a job due to his undocumented status, so for the time being he was hand-making beaded items and selling them on the street. Those items were the only source of income he had, but one week he presented to each of us ministers a small, hand-made dreamcatcher, decorated with feathers and beads. “Because you help me,” he said to us in English. I have kept it by my bedside ever since.

Churches whose focus is on the so-called “social gospel” – feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and other “acts of mercy” – often are criticized by so-called “evangelical” Christians for neglecting to “share the Gospel” with those whose physical needs they meet. “Social Gospel” Christians like this passage from James that argues that “faith without works is dead,” while evangelicals prefer Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith… it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”

This tension between faith and works and what role “sharing our faith” should play in our outreach work is a constant point of contention between Christians on different ends of this spectrum. A fellow student in one of my religion classes at Furman University once said during a class discussion of the life and work of Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa that “if you feed the poor but don’t tell them about Jesus, it’s like a slap in the face.” I remember thinking that I believed the exact opposite – that the “slap in the face” would be to tell people about Jesus but not provide for their basic needs. But reflecting on this tension now, I don’t think that either extreme is the authentic Christian way. Neither the street corner preacher handing out tracts or the food pantry handing out canned goods is fully living out the Christian call to be in community with the poor. Both approaches require little interaction between the “ministers” and the people they say they are trying to reach. The problem comes largely when we think of “the poor” as an abstract group that we need to do something to rather than fellow human beings and fellow people of faith we need to be in relationship with. We think we need to “give to the poor,” never considering that they have much to give to us. We think we need to “share the Gospel” with others, never considering that the people with whom we aim to share our faith might already know quite a bit about God and be able to teach us something about faith.

The kind of church the letter of James is calling us to be is one where we engage in the mutuality of community, not the inequality of donor and receiver. We are to come together across classes as one body in Christ, and to share with each other whatever we have to share – be it money or faith or skills or knowledge – because everyone has something to contribute to the body of Christ. It is out of that foundation – of recognizing our equality in the eyes of God and the unique contribution of each person to the church and the world – that we move toward providing for one another’s needs in the way that James describes. When we know one another, we won’t be able to not care about the plight of our neighbor, because we will be to each other not abstract statistics or problems to be solved, but brothers and sisters in Christ.

An exegesis of John 6:35, 41-51 - Jesus as the bread of life and the new Passover lamb

Sermon delivered Sunday, Aug. 12, 2012 at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Franklin, Tenn.

Two weeks ago, we began reading through chapter 6 of the Gospel of John in our lectionary, with the story of the feeding of the five thousand. Last week, some of the people who were fed followed Jesus to Capernaum and started asking him questions about who he was and what they must do to follow God. Jesus says that they must believe in him as the one whom God has sent, and tells them that he is the bread of life.

This week, we pick up the story with the people’s reactions to Jesus’s comments. “What on earth is this guy talking about?” they ask each other. “What does he mean, he’s the ‘bread of life’? And how can he have ‘come down from heaven’ when we know who his parents are?” It doesn’t make much sense to them – and it doesn’t make much sense to some of the disciples, either. Later in chapter six, after Jesus finishes talking about how he’s going to give his flesh as bread for the world and people must eat his flesh and drink his blood in order to have eternal life, the author of John’s Gospel tells us that “from this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” (John 6:66)

These teachings from Jesus about eating his flesh and drinking his blood lose some of their “shock value” on us because we are used to hearing similar language each week in the Eucharist. The bread is the “body of Christ, the bread of heaven,” and the wine is “the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” These words are probably familiar and non-threatening, maybe even comforting, for most of us, and since we hear this passage from John’s Gospel with a knowledge and understanding of the Eucharist, these words about eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood may seem metaphorical and benign.

But even within the context of the Eucharist, language about eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood has been controversial in the history of the church. One of the earliest accusations against the followers of Jesus after his death was that they were cannibals – because they spoke of eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood. There were even rumors that Christians sacrificed babies to provide the flesh and blood for their cannibalistic rituals. The mistaken belief that Christians were taking part in such inhumane and abhorrent practices was used to justify persecution of Christians in the first few centuries after Jesus’s death. Although that particular controversy is likely over – I highly doubt that any non-Christians today perceive us as cannibals – the language of eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood still sparks debate among Christians – between those who believe that the consecrated elements of bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus and those who believe that the bread and wine are just symbols for Jesus’s body and blood.

But why is the central ritual of Christianity one that has to do with eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood? The short answer is because Christians believe this is what Jesus commanded his followers to do – to remember the last meal that he shared with his disciples, when he told them that the bread was his body and the wine was his blood.

But why did Jesus do such a thing? And why was he already talking about himself as the bread of life and his flesh as bread for the world in the middle of his ministry in Galilee? The key is found in the Jewish festival of Passover.

Those of you who were here two weeks ago may remember that Passover is very important to the theological claim the author of John’s Gospel is making about Jesus: that Jesus is the Messiah and the new Passover lamb. We looked at the ways in which John’s version of the story of the feeding of the five thousand portrayed Jesus as the Messiah, and I told you that I’d be talking more about Jesus as the Passover lamb in a few weeks. Jesus’s words in today’s passage from John’s Gospel about giving his flesh as bread for the world make more sense in connection with the Passover imagery that is so strong in the Gospel of John.

Passover is the Jewish religious festival that celebrates the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. You may remember the stories from the Hebrew Bible: while Moses was trying to convince the Pharaoh to free the Israelites, God brings a series of plagues on the land of Egypt as a way of showing the Pharaoh that Moses was serious and was indeed speaking the Word of God. The final plague was a slaughter of all the firstborn of Egypt – people and livestock alike. Before this horrific event happened, God instructed the Israelites to sacrifice lambs and to spread their blood on the doorframes of their households. The name “Passover” comes from the fact that this blood served a sign to God so that he would “pass over” those households with the blood on the doors and not kill anyone inside; the blood of the lamb was a protection against the power of death that overshadowed the land of Egypt. After all the firstborn of Egypt are struck dead, the Pharaoh finally agrees to free the Israelites. When he changes his mind and pursues them into the desert, he and his entire army are killed in the Red Sea while the Israelites pass through on dry land. Chapter 12 of the Book of Exodus details God’s command to the people of Israel to commemorate that day as a perpetual ordinance, with specific instructions about how to celebrate the Passover – to kill a lamb and eat it with bitter herbs and unleavened bread.

All four Gospel accounts tell us that Jesus died in Jerusalem, sometime during the weeklong observances surrounding Passover. But while Matthew, Mark, and Luke all indicate that Jesus ate the Passover meal with his disciples the night before his death, in John’s Gospel, Jesus’s last supper with his disciples is not a Passover meal, but takes place the day before the Passover. In John’s version, on Passover, Jesus is not sharing a meal with his friends, but dying on the cross, crucified at exactly the same time that the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in preparation for the Passover meal. Thus John’s Gospel makes a powerful theological point: Jesus is the new Passover lamb whose sacrifice saves us from death. Just as the blood of the lambs saved the Israelites from the plague of the firstborn in Egypt, the blood of Christ shed at his death saves us from death once and for all.

This theology is reflected in our Eucharistic liturgy. When we say, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast,” we are affirming that Jesus is the Passover lamb whose flesh and blood we are about to eat. This is where Christian imagery about Jesus as the “lamb of God” comes from – it all points back to Passover.

Now, at this point, you might be asking, “So what? Why is this connection with Passover important to us as twenty-first century Christians?”

Most Christians in the world today trace their heritage to the Gentile group in the early church who were not part of the “in crowd” of Jesus’s first, Jewish followers. From that perspective, the fact the central ritual of our faith, the Eucharist, has its roots in the Jewish festival of Passover might not look so wonderful at first. After all, the whole story of Passover is about God choosing the Israelites and rejecting the Egyptians – about Jews being “in” and Gentiles being “out.” This sharp delineation between “us” and “them” was so strong in first-century Judaism that many Jews who had chosen to follow Jesus as the Messiah had a very hard time accepting the message of people like Paul, who believed that God’s will was for the community of Christ-followers to include all people, Jews and non-Jews alike.

There is certainly potential for Passover to be a triumphalist celebration of God being on “our side” and a rejoicing in the destruction of another people, and those of us of Gentile heritage who were once on the “other side” of that story should be particularly sensitive to the potential for our Eucharist to convey a similarly exclusive message, affirming that we and not others are God’s chosen people. But there are strong correctives to this perspective in both Jewish and Christian tradition.

Some aspects of Jewish tradition have broadened the theme of Passover celebrations to be not just about the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, but a celebration of and praying for the freedom and liberation of all people. There is an entire movement among modern-day Jews of hosting “freedom seders” or “liberation seders,” which are interfaith or multicultural Passover meals designed to celebrate all those who fight against oppression and injustice.

In the Christian tradition, there is a strong precedent to viewing the Eucharist as a meal in which we commemorate not only our own deliverance from death through Christ, but the redemption of the whole world. This theology is expressed beautifully in our Eucharistic Prayer D, the most ancient Eucharistic prayer in our prayer book and one that is also used, with slight variations, in Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. It affirms that “rising from the grave, [Jesus] destroyed death, and made the whole creation new.” Not “made us new” or “saved those who believe in him,” but “made the whole creation new.”

Jesus says in John’s Gospel that he will give his flesh as bread for the world, not just for the community of Israel or for a chosen group of his followers. The “Passover” we celebrate in the Eucharist is like those modern Jewish “freedom seders” – a celebration of our redemption from death and an expression of faith in the power of God to liberate all people from all forms of oppression and violence.

An exegesis of the feeding of the five thousand in John's Gospel

Sermon delivered July 29, 2012 at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Franklin, Tenn.

You may have noticed that we’ve made a little shift this morning in our Gospel reading. For the past seven weeks, we’ve been hearing texts from the Gospel of Mark, but today we switch to the Gospel of John. For the next five weeks, we will read sequentially through chapter 6 of the Gospel of John. (If you want a preview of coming attractions, you might go home and read through all of John 6, which really is one continuous unit, even though we’ll only read short excerpts from it each week in the lectionary.)

So why the switch to John? Well, we’re starting with the story of the feeding of the five thousand today, which is where we had arrived in Mark’s Gospel last week, but the lectionary skipped over that story in Mark and gave it to us this week in John. I suspect the framers of the lectionary preferred John’s version because the story is more robust theologically in John. The feeding of the five thousand and the discourse that follows it about Jesus as the bread of life are at the heart of the message of John’s Gospel.

So what is that message? In order to understand what the author of the Gospel of John is trying to tell us about Jesus, we need to try to hear the story from the perspective of the first-century Jewish Christians who preserved it.

To our modern Western ears, the most striking aspect of this story is probably the “supernatural” element in it, the physical impossibility of five thousand men eating their fill from only five loaves of bread and two fish. I have often heard Christians say that the fact that Jesus performed miracles like the feeding of the five thousand and walking on water distinguishes him from other religious figures and is “proof” that he was God and not just a wise teacher or prophet.

The problem with this argument is that the early Jewish Christian communities who wrote and preserved this story would not have viewed the performance of miracles as evidence that someone was divine. Moses, Elijah, Elisha, and other prophets of the Hebrew tradition all are said to have done things that we modern Westerners would consider “miracles,” and yet Jewish tradition never claimed that they were God. Favored by God and acting on God’s behalf, yes, but not God himself in the flesh, as later Christian tradition came to claim about Jesus.

Miracle stories were common in Jesus’s time about all sorts of religious figures, and miracle stories as such would not have set Jesus apart as any more special than the next holy man. What set him apart was the fact that his followers believed he was the Messiah, the prophet chosen by God to redeem and restore the kingdom of Israel. That is what the author of John’s Gospel is telling us in this story, not that “Jesus must be God because he can break the laws of physics.”

What would have been most striking to the first tellers and hearers of this story would not have been its supernatural elements, but the theological claims it made about Jesus. First-century Jewish Christian hearers of this story would immediately recognize echoes of other sacred stories they knew well: the story of God feeding the Israelites in the wilderness with manna, the bread from heaven; or the story of the widow who shared her last handful of meal and oil with the prophet Elijah and it miraculously lasted until the end of the drought (1 Kings 17:1-16); or the story of the prophet Elisha instructing a servant to share twenty barley loaves and some fresh ears of grain with one hundred men. Though the servant asks, “How can I set this before a hundred people?” somehow they all eat and are filled and yet have some left over (2 Kings 4:42-44).

At the same time as they recognized the similarities to those stories, the first hearers of this story also would have been struck by how much greater the scale was in this story: though Elisha fed one hundred men with twenty barley loaves, Jesus fed five thousand men with only five barley loaves. They would have understood immediately the author’s intent: to convince the hearer that Jesus was even greater than the most highly revered miracle workers and prophets in Israel’s history.

The first hearers of this story also would have noted its setting, near the time of the Jewish religious festival of Passover. Although this story appears in all four Gospels, John is the only one that mentions that detail. For the author of the Gospel of John, Passover is extremely important to the theological claim he is making about Jesus: that Jesus is the Messiah and the new Passover lamb.

Passover was the season of the year when messianic expectation and hope was the strongest: it was believed that the Messiah would come during Passover. Jesus’s actions of blessing the bread, breaking it and then distributing it echo the actions of the host at a Passover meal, and gathering up the leftover fragments was also common at the end of a Passover meal. By telling us that Jesus served as host of a miraculous Passover-like meal, the author of John’s Gospel is calling to mind a banquet of abundance like the messianic banquet foretold by the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 25:6), thus depicting Jesus as the Messiah. The reaction of the crowd acknowledges this claim: “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world” (John 6:14), they say after participating in this meal. But John shows us right away that Jesus will not be the kind of Messiah the people were expecting: a king who would overthrow the Roman political powers who were occupying the land of Israel at that time. Instead, Jesus withdraws to the mountain by himself when he realizes that the people want to make him king (John 6:15). As he will say to Pilate before his execution, Jesus’s kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).

The claim that Jesus is the new Passover lamb will not be made fully until the end of John’s Gospel, with Jesus’s death, but there are allusions to it in the second half of chapter 6, when Jesus begins talking about himself as the bread of life, but we’ll look at that more carefully in a few weeks.

Finally, I believe that in addition to making theological claims about Jesus’s identity, stories about Jesus’s miracles also offer us a message about how we are to live our lives in faith. The story of the feeding of the five thousand invites us to trust in God’s ability to, as the saying goes, “Make a way where there is no way,” and also calls us to move beyond responding to immediate needs to creating spaces for community.

Since the Gospels do not tell us that the crowds that Jesus fed were starving or unable to buy their own food, it seems that the message in this story is not as simple as “feed people when they are hungry or in need,” because we don’t know for sure that these people were hungry or in need. That fact, to me, makes it all the more significant that Jesus chooses to feed them all, and together. In doing so, Jesus broke down barriers in a culture where, under normal circumstances, your place in society determined who you were allowed to eat with. Some of the other versions of this story tell us that disciples assume that it would be reasonable to send the people back to town to take care of their own needs, but Jesus resists what would have been the natural inclination of the people to go about their separate ways, eating only with those who were considered socially appropriate, and instead creates a space for community between unlikely parties, right there on the hillside. Before the disciples knew what was happening, strangers were breaking bread with strangers and beginning to form a community together over a shared meal.

The deeper miracle in the feeding of the five thousand, I would suggest, was not the fact that people were fed, but that they ate together, and in doing so were offered a living glimpse of the kingdom of God: a community where society’s divisions are broken down and God’s love is more than enough to meet everyone’s needs. So the message for us, I think, is that as those who seek to follow Christ, we are called not just to respond to immediate needs, but to offer this world a similar glimpse of that kingdom where faith in God’s abundance frees us for a loving embrace of all.

How do we discern the will of God?

My first sermon at St. Paul's, delivered on Sunday, July 15, 2012 (the Seventh Sunday After Pentecost).

So what am I supposed to do?

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you were asking that question? Perhaps you had a difficult decision to make at home. Perhaps the expectations of a supervisor were unclear. Perhaps you struggled with a difficult moral decision and you didn’t know how to decide what was the “right” thing to do. You may have found yourself asking yourself or God, “So what am I supposed to do – in this situation, with this information, with this person or group of people?”

Perhaps at times like those, our opening collect this morning might be helpful. It asks God that we “may know and understand what things [we] ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them.” The first thing we can do when we are unsure of what we are supposed to do is to pray, to ask for God’s guidance on the matter.

Now, that sounds nice, but if you’re like me, perhaps you’re wondering how exactly we will know for sure what God’s answers to our prayers for guidance are. Should we expect a bolt of lighting? A voice from the sky? A sign or uncanny coincidence that tells us that something is “meant to be”?

Or might it perhaps be more subtle: a certain inner tug on the heart, an intuition, a “gut feeling” that tells us we should do a certain thing?

The biblical figures we encounter in the scripture today all struggled in some way with what they “ought” to do:

- David set out to bring the ark of the Lord to Jerusalem because he believed it was God’s will for him to do so, but what our lectionary leaves out from the reading is that along the way, one of the men who was driving the cart with the ark on it was struck dead after touching the ark. After that, David was afraid to bring the ark to Jerusalem, so he left it at the house of Obed-edom. Our reading picks up again after David has decided it is safe to continue bringing the ark to Jerusalem because things have gone well for the house of Obed-edom while the ark was there. But in that in between time, there was a struggle for him about what he “ought” to do – should he bring this sacred object that apparently had the power to destroy people at whim into the midst of the city he was building to be the center of power of his empire? Ultimately, he is convinced that God indeed does want the ark in Jerusalem and so he takes it there.

- The author of Ephesians boldly asserts that he knows God’s will for all creation: “with wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will… a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him.” He says all these things quite confidently, but in fact they represent his perspective on a struggle in the early church about what they “ought” to do in spreading the message about Jesus – was the message only for other Jews, or could non-Jews be brought in to the community as well? The author of Ephesians, writing in the tradition of the Apostle Paul, believes it is God’s will for the message to spread to all people – both Jews and Gentiles.

- King Herod’s struggle with what he “ought” to do is perhaps the most obvious one: when Herodias’s daughter asked for the head of John the Baptist, Herod was “deeply grieved” because he believed John to be a “righteous and holy man” and did not want to kill him, but he gave in to the girl’s request out of a sense of duty – he felt he “ought” to keep his word to her. In doing so, he allowed a sense of duty and pride to override his deeper sense of what was right.

Herod’s story is a good example of the fact that not everything we feel we “ought” to do is of God or in accordance with God’s will. Sometimes, like Herod, we feel we “ought” to do things out of a sense of duty, even if we think the action is wrong. Or we might feel we “ought” to do things because other people expect or want us to do them, even if we don’t want to do them ourselves. So how can we tell whether a sense that we “ought” to do something is motivated by the proddings of the Spirit or a guilt trip from the demands of the world?

These are not new questions. The church has struggled since its earliest days to discern the will of God for the community and to live it out, and we still struggle to know what we “ought” to do as a church today. These questions are at the heart of what we ask ourselves whenever we gather as a church – whether in the local parish, at the diocesan level, or as a whole body at the General Convention.

Through the centuries, Christians have come up with different ways to answer these questions, with criteria or guidelines for discerning God’s will and for determining whether a desire to do something is of God or not.

One of the most common answers is that the will of God must be discerned in community. Any individual who believes God is calling him or her to do something should take it to the community to benefit from their collective wisdom, or at least to a spiritual director or confidant who can help the person discern whether the direction they are feeling pulled in is of God or not.

In doing so, the community or spiritual director may ask the individual to look at the potential fruits of that decision. Will it bring greater peace to that person’s life? Will it bring him or her closer to God? Jesus pointed out to his disciples that healthy trees bear good fruit, while unhealthy ones do not, using this metaphor to apply to people: “by their fruits you will know them.” The same can be applied to any of our individual or communal decisions. How will this decision potentially affect us and those in our community? Do those potential results seem in line with what we think God would want for us?

And, of course, as a community rooted in the Scriptures, we also will ask what guidance we can find in the Bible on the matter, although this can be a tricky one, since we have to wade through centuries of layered meanings, cultural and historical contexts, and translations to truly understand what the biblical text is saying about any given matter. And the biblical texts do not always speak with one voice on an issue. There are many tensions between seemingly different perspective and theological approaches represented in the Bible, since they were written by different authors and over a long period of time. Still, as a church we affirm that the Scriptures were inspired by God and that God continues to speak to us through them, and so we seek to root our decision-making in the witness of the Bible.

Ultimately, though, I think it is important to remind ourselves that however many “tests” we may apply to our feelings about any given decision, we cannot ever fully know the will of God in this life. The Apostle Paul says that “now we see through a glass darkly, but then we will see face to face.” The questions and uncertainties that we have in this life about the ways of a God much bigger than we are will have to wait for the next life to be completely resolved.

And this need not lead us to despair, for although part of the work of the church is to discern and do the work of God in the world, the other part of our work – and really the first and most important part of our work – is simply to praise and worship the Almighty God whose mysteries are beyond human understanding. In the Jewish tradition, each copy of the Talmud, the collection of writings and commentary on the scriptures, begins on page 2, leaving the first page blank to remind the reader of all that we do not know or understand about God.

Christians have at times been rather smug about thinking we have God all figured out because we believe God was incarnate in Jesus – so we have an actual human being we can read about and learn from and after we’ve done all that, we’ve pretty much got God all figured out. But how much do we really even understand Jesus? The early church ran itself in circles and shed all kinds of blood arguing over exactly how they should make sense of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and what it meant for the world. And surely the mystery of Christ’s indwelling in us by the Holy Spirit through our baptism is beyond our human understanding! Perhaps we could take a lesson from our Jewish brothers and sisters and leave a little blank space at the beginning of our volumes of theology, our attempts to speak in words what is ultimately unspeakable.

So how do we know what we ought to do? How do we, as a community, discern the will of God for us? Well, we pray – turning the matter over to God and waiting for a revelation or some sense of inner clarity – but we also engage our reason, turning to the scriptures and the community of the church. We “test the spirits” of revelation based on this tradition that has been both received and reshaped by the body of faithful Christians throughout the history of the church. We look at the potential fruits of our decisions. And we do the best we can with the knowledge and insights we have – all the while remaining open to the possibility that we might make the wrong decision, but trusting that God’s grace and mercy will catch and redirect us if we do.

I hope it is in this spirit that we can view the decisions of the church, both those decisions that we make for our life together here at St. Paul’s and the decisions that were made over the past two weeks by the General Convention. Whether we feel that St. Paul’s or the Episcopal Church is doing what it “ought” to do or not, we might remind ourselves that our own sense of what we “ought” to do might not be God’s sense of what we “ought” to do, and that even if we are certain we are doing God’s will, we have no guarantees that that is actually the case! By their fruits we will know them, perhaps, but even in our judgment of the fruits of our decisions, we are seeing through a glass darkly.

But no matter whether we have discerned God’s will for us correctly or not, we can trust that, as Thomas Merton famously wrote, God will “lead us by the right path though we may know nothing about it.” In other words, God’s the one really in control here, whether we realize it or not. Sometimes the best thing for us to do when we feel confused about what we “ought” to do is to return to that blank first page and rest in that.