Sermon delivered Sunday, May 7, 2017 (Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A), at The Episcopal Church of St. John the Baptist in Aptos, CA, on my first Sunday serving that congregation as rector.
Sermon Text(s): John 10:1-10
“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
Jesus, in using the image of himself as a shepherd, says that he came to give the sheep “abundant life.” He doesn’t say he came just to protect them from the thief, just to keep them alive. He came to give them abundant life – lots of life, more than they already had.
The kind of “life” Jesus is talking about here is more than literal, physical life, more than a beating heart and breath in our lungs. He’s talking about emotional life – lightheartedness, joy, excitement, love, resilience, fulfillment. Jesus came to give us more than breath in our bodies; he came to give us joy in our souls, the kind of joy that is unshaken by the ups and downs of life, an abiding joy that lives deep down, that connects us to the Source of all that is, the Source that tells us, in the words of Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
I can’t think of a more perfect passage of scripture to begin our lives together as priest and people than this line from John’s Gospel about abundant life, because this is what the Church is all about: receiving and celebrating the abundant life that Jesus offers to us.
It’s sort of a personal mantra of mine that people should feel as comfortable in their church as they do in their own living rooms, and what I mean by that is that the church should be just as safe of a space for them as their private home is. It should be a place where they feel completely free to be themselves. Too often, the image people get of “the Church” is that it is a place of judgment, a place where they have to put on a certain face, keep up appearances, be presentable. But I take the view that, as the saying goes, the church is not a club for saints, but a hospital for sinners. It’s a place where we stand before the Almighty God to whom “all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid,” as our Collect for Purity says. It’s a place we come to lay bare the whole truth about ourselves and to reckon with what we find there. For some of us, it’s a lot easier to do that in front of God than in front of other people. But if you’ve ever been to a 12-Step meeting or a support group of any kind, you know that that kind of vulnerability and intimacy, the kind that leads to the healing of wounds and the ability to live your life to the fullest, is possible within the context of a gathering of flawed human beings. And I believe the Church should be about creating those kinds of spaces for people, spaces where people can experience the abundant life that is possible in Christ.
On Wednesday, I shared part of my spiritual journey with the Episcopal Church Women at the luncheon they held to welcome me, and I mentioned that although I was raised in church, I didn’t come to know Christ and commit to follow him until I was a teenager. In the first few years after that “conversion experience,” I listened to a lot of contemporary Christian music. One song I heard during that time, a song by Ginny Owens called “Free,” gave me an image of the kind of life that could be possible for me if I could truly embrace the gift of God’s grace. Nearly 20 years later, I’m still working on letting go enough to truly experience this kind of freedom, but I have tasted moments of it, and I deeply believe this is the kind of abundant life to which Jesus calls us. The song starts with a description of what the author’s life was like before she embraced God’s grace:
Turnin’ molehills into mountains
Makin’ big deals out of small ones
Bearing gifts as if they're burdens --
This is how it's been
Fear of coming out of my shell
Too many things I can't do too well
‘fraid I'll try real hard and I'll fail --
This is how it's been
‘Til the day you pounded on my heart's door,
And you shouted joyfully,
“You're not a slave anymore!
You're free to dance --
Forget about your two left feet!
And you're free to sing ---
Even joyful noise is music to me!
And free to love
'Cause I've given you my love and it's made you free…
Free from worry
Free from envy and denial
Free to live, free to give, free to smile!” [1]
This is what “abundant life” looks like to me: Singing and dancing with abandon because I know I am accepted as I am. Giving freely because I know I have more than enough to share. Radiating love to all around me, drawing from that internal well of joy, unshaken by the ups and downs of this world, that comes from knowing that Christ has given me his love and it’s made me free. I don’t claim to be a perfect picture of that in every moment, but it’s the image I hold in my mind of the kind of life that is possible if I allow God’s grace to work in me.
Because although the world operates out of a mentality of scarcity, hoarding things because we believe there is not enough to go around, the message of the Gospel is one of abundance. In God’s economy, the concept of “scarcity of resources” does not exist. The gift of God in Christ is more love, more grace, more mercy, more soul food than we can possibly consume on our own. In the face of such abundance, we are compelled to share – because as that grace continues to flow into us even after it has filled us up, it overflows out of us to everyone around us. There is so much grace available that we literally cannot keep it all to ourselves. As the psalmist says, “our cup is running over.”
What does this look like in practice? The image of the early church in our passage from Acts 2 this morning gives us an example:
“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.”
That intangible, internal sense of abundance can be translated into an experience of external abundance as well. The church is meant to be a place where we all share what we have to make sure that the needs of all are met. To the extent that we do that, the church community itself becomes a sacrament – “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” as the Book of Common Prayer defines it (BCP 857). And as with all sacraments, both aspects must be there for it to be truly sacred – the outward sign is meaningless without the inward grace, and the inward grace is meaningless if it does not manifest in an outward sign.
So as we come together today as priest and people, I pray that our lives together will be sacramental: manifesting through outward and visible signs the inward and spiritual grace that we know through our relationship with Jesus Christ. I pray that our community will be known as one of abundance – abundant life, abundant gratitude, abundant compassion, abundant giving. Through our gratefulness for the abundance of God’s grace, I pray that we too, like the early church, will distribute our plenty to any among us who have need – and I hope we’ll sing and dance with abandon while we’re doing it.
[1] Ginny Owens, "Free," from the album Without Condition. ℗ 1999 Sony Music Entertainment Inc.
Showing posts with label abundance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label abundance. Show all posts
Sunday, May 7, 2017
Sunday, October 23, 2016
Giving with right intentions
Sermon delivered Sunday, Oct. 23, 2016 (23rd Sunday After Pentecost (Proper 25, Year C, Track 2)) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church in Oakland, CA.
Sermon Text(s): Sirach 35:12-17, Luke 18:9-14
A few weeks ago, when we kicked off our stewardship campaign for 2017, we considered the difference between giving out of a sense of obligation, out of a sense that we “owe” someone something verses giving freely out of a sense of joy, in gratitude for the many blessings we have received from God. Our readings this week invite us to continue to explore that theme of “right intentions” with regards to our giving.
No matter what aspect of spirituality you’re looking at, intention is important. In fact, Jesus and the Old Testament prophets emphasize intention so much that one could argue that in religious practice, one’s intentions are even more important that the actions he or she performs. Despite the wisdom of the classic axiom “actions speak louder than words,” it is also true that “actions are judged by intentions.” While all the words in the world mean nothing if we don’t put them into practice, it is also true that all the wonderful actions in the world also mean nothing if they are done with the wrong intentions. Prophets always emphasize this because they know that one of the worst dangers of religious life is the possibility for internal deception, of being convinced you are “righteous” because you do all the right things when internally, your heart is rotten to the core.
Take the Pharisee in today’s Gospel reading, for instance. He is a textbook example of “a good religious man,” if one measured him by his actions only. He fasts twice a week, he tithes, he goes to the Temple to pray and make offerings. But the glimpse into his inner thoughts that we receive in the parable shows us that he’s doing these things for the wrong reasons. His prayer is all about how much better he is than others. Even as he’s thanking God, an religiously praiseworthy action, he’s continuing to feed the sin of pride: “Dear God, I thank you that I am not like other people.”
Jesus tells us that this man’s prayer is not acceptable to God. The tax collector who is aware of his own sinfulness goes home “justified,” but the Pharisee does not. Why? Because you don’t get to thank God for your arrogance or your pride or your sense of superiority. You can’t thank God for those things because God didn’t actually give you any of those things. They are of your own making. Hence the scriptures tell us that this parable was aimed at those who “trusted in themselves that they were righteous,” rather than trusting in God, acknowledging that everything they had was a gift from God, and allowing that realization to humble them.
In our first reading from the book of Sirach, we are encouraged to “give to the Most High as he has given to you, and as generously as you can afford,” but almost in the same breath we are warned against “offering God a bribe”:
“Do not offer him a bribe, for he will not accept it
and do not rely on a dishonest sacrifice;
for the Lord is the judge,
and with him there is no partiality.” (Sirach 35:14-15)
In other words, you can’t buy God’s favor. Not only can you not “pay” God for the blessings you receive, as Naaman, the commander of the Aramean army, tried to do in our reading from 2 Kings a few weeks ago, but you also can’t get God to do what you want by passing him a wad of cash under the table. God shows no “partiality” in the sense that he doesn’t treat people who give lots of money any differently than he treats people who give very little. God’s grace, God’s love, and God’s mercy are freely available to all. They can’t be bought and they can’t be manipulated.
So yes, we should “give to the Most High as he has given to [us], and as generously as [we] can afford,” but not so we can consider ourselves better than others, or because we want to be praised by others, or because we don’t want to owe God anything or in order to try to get what we want out of God. If we are giving for any of those reasons, even though our outward actions look respectable, we’re actually not giving with the right intention. Instead, we should be giving as an act of generosity, as a means to share the blessings we have been given, as a spiritual practice to help us lessen our attachments to physical things.
In recent weeks I’ve been sharing with the folks at the 8:00 contemplative mass some writings on generosity from Sharon Salzburg, a contemplative teacher in the Buddhist tradition. She talks about how in traditional Buddhist teaching, as it came to us out of India and then through East Asia, generosity comes first in the sequence of instruction. Before you can learn about meditation, before you can learn about ethics or morality, you must learn about generosity. It is the foundation upon which all the other teachings are based. But in the U.S., when Buddhism is taught, meditation practice usually comes first, and generosity is often tacked on as an afterthought or appendix. We tend do the same thing in the church: worship, biblical studies, prayer, education about Christian history, all these things come before stewardship and giving and get much more attention in most churches. As a culture, money and financial giving is something we don’t like to talk about very much. Perhaps this is because as a culture, we Americans value “wanting, getting, and hoarding,” as Sharon Salzburg puts it, much more than generosity and sharing.
American society measures our value by how much we have, and this translates into the world of philanthropy by valuing people for how much they can give. The biggest donors are given the most attention, the most status, the most privileges. But the spiritual practice of generosity has nothing to do with comparing ourselves to others, and everything to do with cultivating an interior spiritual state that allows us to let go of our attachments. Jesus’s example of the Pharisee at the temple is a perfect illustration of this: focusing on how what we give compares to what others give takes us away from the spiritual practice of generosity and into the sins of pride, jealousy, and resentment. And Jesus was clear in other places that attachment to one’s wealth prevents us from entering the kingdom of heaven, as in the case of the rich man who cannot bring himself to obey Jesus’s command to sell all he had and give to the poor, but instead “went away grieving, for he had many possessions” (Matthew 19:22). Jesus uses this man as an example, telling his followers, “Truly I tell you… it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24). Why is that so? Because of the dangers of attachment to one’s physical possessions and the false sense of security that wealth can present.
True generosity actually has nothing to do with how much we have to give based on any objective standards. As Salzburg puts it, “Generosity allies itself with an inner feeling of abundance – the feeling that we have enough to share.” This inner feeling of abundance can be present in rich or poor people alike, just as an inner feeling of lack or scarcity can also be present in rich or poor people alike. “There are wealthy people who… find it difficult to give despite their external abundance. There are economically poor people who are very generous even though from the outside they seem to have nothing to give.” In the Christian tradition we see this truth illustrated in the story from Luke 21 about a poor widow who drops two small coins into the temple treasury and is praised for giving more than the wealthy who put in large sums (Luke 21:1-4). Salzburg writes that “[o]ne of the great joys that come from cultivating generosity is the understanding that no matter how much we have by the world’s standards, if we know that we have enough, we can always give something.”
She goes on to talk about how to develop this sense of inner abundance. She says that in her own spiritual practice, she has used this question to help her cultivate it: “What do I really need, right now, in this moment, in order to be happy?” Although the world will tell us we need a new this or a different that – maybe the latest technological gadget or a larger home or a romantic partner or a vacation – always something other than what we have right now, in reality we often need very little beyond what is right in front of us to be happy. Acknowledging that can help us to cultivate that sense of inner abundance that allows generosity to flow freely and releases us from the deadly grasp of attachment and desire. There will always be something shinier and more attractive out there luring us away from where true happiness can be found. The key is being able to recognize that as human beings we have an endless capacity for disappointment and an insatiable desire that will never be fulfilled, and not let those grasping, desperate parts of ourselves to control us. To remember that a sense of inner abundance really has no connection to how much we actually have in objective reality. Because human beings also have an endless capacity for contentment and joy in the present moment. Of being happy where we are, with what we have, and having a sense that we not only have enough, we have enough to share.
Sermon Text(s): Sirach 35:12-17, Luke 18:9-14
A few weeks ago, when we kicked off our stewardship campaign for 2017, we considered the difference between giving out of a sense of obligation, out of a sense that we “owe” someone something verses giving freely out of a sense of joy, in gratitude for the many blessings we have received from God. Our readings this week invite us to continue to explore that theme of “right intentions” with regards to our giving.
No matter what aspect of spirituality you’re looking at, intention is important. In fact, Jesus and the Old Testament prophets emphasize intention so much that one could argue that in religious practice, one’s intentions are even more important that the actions he or she performs. Despite the wisdom of the classic axiom “actions speak louder than words,” it is also true that “actions are judged by intentions.” While all the words in the world mean nothing if we don’t put them into practice, it is also true that all the wonderful actions in the world also mean nothing if they are done with the wrong intentions. Prophets always emphasize this because they know that one of the worst dangers of religious life is the possibility for internal deception, of being convinced you are “righteous” because you do all the right things when internally, your heart is rotten to the core.
Take the Pharisee in today’s Gospel reading, for instance. He is a textbook example of “a good religious man,” if one measured him by his actions only. He fasts twice a week, he tithes, he goes to the Temple to pray and make offerings. But the glimpse into his inner thoughts that we receive in the parable shows us that he’s doing these things for the wrong reasons. His prayer is all about how much better he is than others. Even as he’s thanking God, an religiously praiseworthy action, he’s continuing to feed the sin of pride: “Dear God, I thank you that I am not like other people.”
Jesus tells us that this man’s prayer is not acceptable to God. The tax collector who is aware of his own sinfulness goes home “justified,” but the Pharisee does not. Why? Because you don’t get to thank God for your arrogance or your pride or your sense of superiority. You can’t thank God for those things because God didn’t actually give you any of those things. They are of your own making. Hence the scriptures tell us that this parable was aimed at those who “trusted in themselves that they were righteous,” rather than trusting in God, acknowledging that everything they had was a gift from God, and allowing that realization to humble them.
In our first reading from the book of Sirach, we are encouraged to “give to the Most High as he has given to you, and as generously as you can afford,” but almost in the same breath we are warned against “offering God a bribe”:
“Do not offer him a bribe, for he will not accept it
and do not rely on a dishonest sacrifice;
for the Lord is the judge,
and with him there is no partiality.” (Sirach 35:14-15)
In other words, you can’t buy God’s favor. Not only can you not “pay” God for the blessings you receive, as Naaman, the commander of the Aramean army, tried to do in our reading from 2 Kings a few weeks ago, but you also can’t get God to do what you want by passing him a wad of cash under the table. God shows no “partiality” in the sense that he doesn’t treat people who give lots of money any differently than he treats people who give very little. God’s grace, God’s love, and God’s mercy are freely available to all. They can’t be bought and they can’t be manipulated.
So yes, we should “give to the Most High as he has given to [us], and as generously as [we] can afford,” but not so we can consider ourselves better than others, or because we want to be praised by others, or because we don’t want to owe God anything or in order to try to get what we want out of God. If we are giving for any of those reasons, even though our outward actions look respectable, we’re actually not giving with the right intention. Instead, we should be giving as an act of generosity, as a means to share the blessings we have been given, as a spiritual practice to help us lessen our attachments to physical things.
In recent weeks I’ve been sharing with the folks at the 8:00 contemplative mass some writings on generosity from Sharon Salzburg, a contemplative teacher in the Buddhist tradition. She talks about how in traditional Buddhist teaching, as it came to us out of India and then through East Asia, generosity comes first in the sequence of instruction. Before you can learn about meditation, before you can learn about ethics or morality, you must learn about generosity. It is the foundation upon which all the other teachings are based. But in the U.S., when Buddhism is taught, meditation practice usually comes first, and generosity is often tacked on as an afterthought or appendix. We tend do the same thing in the church: worship, biblical studies, prayer, education about Christian history, all these things come before stewardship and giving and get much more attention in most churches. As a culture, money and financial giving is something we don’t like to talk about very much. Perhaps this is because as a culture, we Americans value “wanting, getting, and hoarding,” as Sharon Salzburg puts it, much more than generosity and sharing.
American society measures our value by how much we have, and this translates into the world of philanthropy by valuing people for how much they can give. The biggest donors are given the most attention, the most status, the most privileges. But the spiritual practice of generosity has nothing to do with comparing ourselves to others, and everything to do with cultivating an interior spiritual state that allows us to let go of our attachments. Jesus’s example of the Pharisee at the temple is a perfect illustration of this: focusing on how what we give compares to what others give takes us away from the spiritual practice of generosity and into the sins of pride, jealousy, and resentment. And Jesus was clear in other places that attachment to one’s wealth prevents us from entering the kingdom of heaven, as in the case of the rich man who cannot bring himself to obey Jesus’s command to sell all he had and give to the poor, but instead “went away grieving, for he had many possessions” (Matthew 19:22). Jesus uses this man as an example, telling his followers, “Truly I tell you… it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24). Why is that so? Because of the dangers of attachment to one’s physical possessions and the false sense of security that wealth can present.
True generosity actually has nothing to do with how much we have to give based on any objective standards. As Salzburg puts it, “Generosity allies itself with an inner feeling of abundance – the feeling that we have enough to share.” This inner feeling of abundance can be present in rich or poor people alike, just as an inner feeling of lack or scarcity can also be present in rich or poor people alike. “There are wealthy people who… find it difficult to give despite their external abundance. There are economically poor people who are very generous even though from the outside they seem to have nothing to give.” In the Christian tradition we see this truth illustrated in the story from Luke 21 about a poor widow who drops two small coins into the temple treasury and is praised for giving more than the wealthy who put in large sums (Luke 21:1-4). Salzburg writes that “[o]ne of the great joys that come from cultivating generosity is the understanding that no matter how much we have by the world’s standards, if we know that we have enough, we can always give something.”
She goes on to talk about how to develop this sense of inner abundance. She says that in her own spiritual practice, she has used this question to help her cultivate it: “What do I really need, right now, in this moment, in order to be happy?” Although the world will tell us we need a new this or a different that – maybe the latest technological gadget or a larger home or a romantic partner or a vacation – always something other than what we have right now, in reality we often need very little beyond what is right in front of us to be happy. Acknowledging that can help us to cultivate that sense of inner abundance that allows generosity to flow freely and releases us from the deadly grasp of attachment and desire. There will always be something shinier and more attractive out there luring us away from where true happiness can be found. The key is being able to recognize that as human beings we have an endless capacity for disappointment and an insatiable desire that will never be fulfilled, and not let those grasping, desperate parts of ourselves to control us. To remember that a sense of inner abundance really has no connection to how much we actually have in objective reality. Because human beings also have an endless capacity for contentment and joy in the present moment. Of being happy where we are, with what we have, and having a sense that we not only have enough, we have enough to share.
Saturday, April 19, 2014
Easter Message: God goes beyond what would have been "enough" to lavish abundant blessings on us
Sermon delivered Saturday, April 19, 2014 (The Great Vigil of Easter, Year A) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN.
Tonight we gather for one of the most ancient liturgies in the church. Although celebrating Easter on Sunday morning became the main Easter observance in Western churches after the Reformation, the custom of celebrating Easter with a vigil on Saturday night is much earlier, dating back to at least the 3rd century. When we gather for the Easter Vigil, we are celebrating Christ’s resurrection as some of our most ancient forefathers and foremothers did. As we say their prayers and sing their songs, they become our songs as well, no matter how long ago the texts were written. In the liturgy, time collapses, and no matter how many centuries have passed between the events we remember and our present time, we experience them as if they are happening now. Today, tonight, “this is the night that Christ broke the bonds of death and hell and rose victorious from the grave.”
This custom of retelling the sacred stories of our history as if they were happening now, as if we were participants in the story, is even more ancient than the Easter Vigil service itself. In fact, it’s something we inherited from our Jewish brothers and sisters. Every year on Passover, the Jewish community gathers to remember the story of God’s deliverance of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, one of the foundational stories of the Jewish tradition. As they gather around the table for the seder dinner, the traditional liturgy of Passover, the youngest child present has the honor of asking the loaded question: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” This question comes in the middle of the re-telling of the Passover story, which is told as if it happened to the people present. The leader of the seder says, “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord our God took us out from there with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm.” [1] Passover is not just about remembering an event that happened to some other people a long, long time ago. It is about reliving that event, experiencing it as if it happened to them, as if it happened this night, so that the ancient story of their ancestors becomes their story, so that they become one with their forefathers and foremothers.
And tonight, in the Easter Vigil, we celebrate our own version of Passover. Jesus died during the time of the Passover in Jerusalem, and his death took on added religious significance to his Jewish followers because it occurred during that most sacred holiday. Although our English word “Easter” bears no resemblance to “Passover,” in most languages the word for “Passover” and the word for “Easter” are linguistically related, if not identical. The Latin word for the holiday we celebrate this weekend is Pascha, and Eastern Orthodox Christians still talk about celebrating “Pascha” rather than “Easter.”
The Passover imagery is vivid and plentiful in our liturgy tonight – we open by declaring that this is “the Passover of the Lord,” in which “our Lord Jesus Christ passed over from death to life” (BCP 285), and the exsultet, that wonderful ancient hymn at the beginning of this service, declares this is both the night that God brought the children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt and the night that Christ rose from the dead (BCP 287). Of the nine readings we hear from the Hebrew Bible during the Liturgy of the Word, the only reading that is not optional, that must be included if you are going to do an Easter Vigil service, is the story of the Exodus, of Israel’s deliverance at the Red Sea – the story of Passover (BCP 288). A clergy colleague of mine who was raised Jewish says that, in essence, the Easter Vigil is our Passover seder! [2]
In this liturgy, we too declare that this night is different from all other nights. We too remember the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But we add another way this night is different from all other nights: “This is the night that Christ broke the bonds of death and hell and rose victorious from the grave” (BCP 287).
In Jesus’s Resurrection, in his defeat of the powers of our greatest enemy, death, his earliest Jewish followers saw an echo of that ancient Passover story – the deliverance from their enemies at the Red Sea. The early church declared the Easter Vigil to be the most appropriate time for baptisms not only because at Easter we recall the Resurrection and we are joined to Christ’s resurrected life through our baptism, but because baptism symbolizes a movement from slavery to freedom through water – an echo of that ancient Passover story. Just as the Israelites came out of slavery in Egypt into freedom in the Promised Land by passing through the waters of the Red Sea, so the newly baptized move from slavery to sin into freedom in the new life of Christ through the waters of baptism. In baptizing Megan and Anders tonight, we join them to the stream of God’s redemptive work that flows from the Exodus to the Resurrection and on to this day. The layers of meaning enfold over one another as we pour symbols upon symbols in this liturgy, in an attempt to give words to what is ultimately beyond the bounds of human language – the abundant mercy and love of God.
In the Passover seder, there is a famous liturgical poem, a hymn, that is sung after the re-telling of the story of the exodus. It is called, in Hebrew, dayenu, a word that is translated as “it would have been sufficient for us” or “it would have been enough.” One by one, the people recall the various stages of the exodus story, after each one saying that “it would have been enough” if God had stopped there – if God had only brought us out of Egypt, that would had been enough. If God had only split the Red Sea, that would have been enough. If God had only sustained us in the wilderness with manna, that would have been enough. If God had only given us the Torah, the Jewish law, that would have been enough. If God had only led us into the Promised Land, that would have been enough. This hymn emphasizes how abundant God’s mercies are – because even though any one of these great acts of deliverance would have been “enough,” God continually goes beyond what is merely “sufficient” to lavish his love and mercy on us. God wants us not to just survive, but to thrive, to use an old cliché. Or as Jesus says in the Gospel of John, he came that we might have life, and might have it more abundantly (John 10:10).
The clergy colleague I spoke of earlier who was raised Jewish has written a Christian version of the Dayenu, which seems appropriate to share with you at this Easter Vigil, which is in so many ways the liturgical descendant of the Passover seder:
“If only God had come to be with us, it would have been enough.
If only God became human, the Word made flesh. If only through Jesus God entered creation so that by his presence he might bless it, it would have been enough.
If only Jesus taught us and healed us and fulfilled the Law in Love, it would have been enough.
If only he’d died, if only he stretched out his arms of love on the cross, if only Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, it would have been enough.
If only he rose again, if only he left a pile of linens in an empty tomb. If only he denied death the final word and changed forever the life we live here and now, it would have been enough.
If only he sent us the Spirit to be a comforter and advocate and to lead us into all truth, it would have been enough.
If only he ascended, drawing our humanness back to God, leading the way for us, it would have been enough.
If only he made a way for us all to be adopted as daughters and sons, if only he led us all through the waters to be joined to him, our hope and our calling, and to be joined to one another, it would have been enough. Dayenu. It would have been enough.” [3]
For each one of those statements, of course, there is a still more wonderful action of God for us to celebrate, a way in which God went the extra mile, so to speak, to come even closer to us and draw us closer to one another, bringing even more blessings and joy into our lives. And although the litany must stop somewhere, in fact it never really stops. There are always more ways to say “dayenu” – it would have been enough – and to experience gratitude for the abundance in our lives.
So what is your “dayenu” this Easter season? If only God had _______, it would have been enough? In what ways has God gone beyond what would have been “enough” in your life to lavish you with abundant blessings?
In the church, we are pretty good about observing the season of Lent, but we often forget that Easter is not just a day, but an entire season. While we have 40 days of Lent to reflect on our mortality and repent of our sins, we have 50 days of Easter to celebrate the joy of the Resurrection! We’re all familiar with the tradition of taking on a Lenten discipline, but what if we started a new tradition and during the Great 50 Days of Easter, we took on an “Easter joy”? What if we committed to spend the next 50 days – from now until Pentecost, which is on June 8 this year – doing things that that bring us joy, and intentionally bringing to mind all the ways in which we are abundantly blessed, all the ways in which God has gone beyond what would have been enough in our lives?
We just might begin to re-tell the story of Easter as if it had happened to us personally. We might experience the resurrection as if it were happening now. We might live into the story so completely that it would become our story. We might become aware in new ways of our mystical union with Christ’s death and resurrection in our baptism. And in the liturgy each week, we might say with ever-deepening appreciation:
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
(The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
---
[1] English Haggadah Text With Instructional Guide, http://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/pesach_cdo/aid/661624/jewish/English-Haggadah.htm Accessed 14 April 2014.
[2] The Rev. Jenna Faith Strizak, associate rector at Holy Trinity Parish in Decatur, GA.
[3] The Rev. Jenna Faith Strizak, “a sermon for the feast of all saints (year c), with baptisms,” November 3, 2013, Holy Trinity [Episcopal] Parish, Decatur, Ga. http://graceandgrits.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/a-sermon-for-the-feast-of-all-saints-year-c-with-baptisms/ Accessed online 8 April 2014.
Tonight we gather for one of the most ancient liturgies in the church. Although celebrating Easter on Sunday morning became the main Easter observance in Western churches after the Reformation, the custom of celebrating Easter with a vigil on Saturday night is much earlier, dating back to at least the 3rd century. When we gather for the Easter Vigil, we are celebrating Christ’s resurrection as some of our most ancient forefathers and foremothers did. As we say their prayers and sing their songs, they become our songs as well, no matter how long ago the texts were written. In the liturgy, time collapses, and no matter how many centuries have passed between the events we remember and our present time, we experience them as if they are happening now. Today, tonight, “this is the night that Christ broke the bonds of death and hell and rose victorious from the grave.”
This custom of retelling the sacred stories of our history as if they were happening now, as if we were participants in the story, is even more ancient than the Easter Vigil service itself. In fact, it’s something we inherited from our Jewish brothers and sisters. Every year on Passover, the Jewish community gathers to remember the story of God’s deliverance of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, one of the foundational stories of the Jewish tradition. As they gather around the table for the seder dinner, the traditional liturgy of Passover, the youngest child present has the honor of asking the loaded question: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” This question comes in the middle of the re-telling of the Passover story, which is told as if it happened to the people present. The leader of the seder says, “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord our God took us out from there with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm.” [1] Passover is not just about remembering an event that happened to some other people a long, long time ago. It is about reliving that event, experiencing it as if it happened to them, as if it happened this night, so that the ancient story of their ancestors becomes their story, so that they become one with their forefathers and foremothers.
And tonight, in the Easter Vigil, we celebrate our own version of Passover. Jesus died during the time of the Passover in Jerusalem, and his death took on added religious significance to his Jewish followers because it occurred during that most sacred holiday. Although our English word “Easter” bears no resemblance to “Passover,” in most languages the word for “Passover” and the word for “Easter” are linguistically related, if not identical. The Latin word for the holiday we celebrate this weekend is Pascha, and Eastern Orthodox Christians still talk about celebrating “Pascha” rather than “Easter.”
The Passover imagery is vivid and plentiful in our liturgy tonight – we open by declaring that this is “the Passover of the Lord,” in which “our Lord Jesus Christ passed over from death to life” (BCP 285), and the exsultet, that wonderful ancient hymn at the beginning of this service, declares this is both the night that God brought the children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt and the night that Christ rose from the dead (BCP 287). Of the nine readings we hear from the Hebrew Bible during the Liturgy of the Word, the only reading that is not optional, that must be included if you are going to do an Easter Vigil service, is the story of the Exodus, of Israel’s deliverance at the Red Sea – the story of Passover (BCP 288). A clergy colleague of mine who was raised Jewish says that, in essence, the Easter Vigil is our Passover seder! [2]
In this liturgy, we too declare that this night is different from all other nights. We too remember the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But we add another way this night is different from all other nights: “This is the night that Christ broke the bonds of death and hell and rose victorious from the grave” (BCP 287).
In Jesus’s Resurrection, in his defeat of the powers of our greatest enemy, death, his earliest Jewish followers saw an echo of that ancient Passover story – the deliverance from their enemies at the Red Sea. The early church declared the Easter Vigil to be the most appropriate time for baptisms not only because at Easter we recall the Resurrection and we are joined to Christ’s resurrected life through our baptism, but because baptism symbolizes a movement from slavery to freedom through water – an echo of that ancient Passover story. Just as the Israelites came out of slavery in Egypt into freedom in the Promised Land by passing through the waters of the Red Sea, so the newly baptized move from slavery to sin into freedom in the new life of Christ through the waters of baptism. In baptizing Megan and Anders tonight, we join them to the stream of God’s redemptive work that flows from the Exodus to the Resurrection and on to this day. The layers of meaning enfold over one another as we pour symbols upon symbols in this liturgy, in an attempt to give words to what is ultimately beyond the bounds of human language – the abundant mercy and love of God.
In the Passover seder, there is a famous liturgical poem, a hymn, that is sung after the re-telling of the story of the exodus. It is called, in Hebrew, dayenu, a word that is translated as “it would have been sufficient for us” or “it would have been enough.” One by one, the people recall the various stages of the exodus story, after each one saying that “it would have been enough” if God had stopped there – if God had only brought us out of Egypt, that would had been enough. If God had only split the Red Sea, that would have been enough. If God had only sustained us in the wilderness with manna, that would have been enough. If God had only given us the Torah, the Jewish law, that would have been enough. If God had only led us into the Promised Land, that would have been enough. This hymn emphasizes how abundant God’s mercies are – because even though any one of these great acts of deliverance would have been “enough,” God continually goes beyond what is merely “sufficient” to lavish his love and mercy on us. God wants us not to just survive, but to thrive, to use an old cliché. Or as Jesus says in the Gospel of John, he came that we might have life, and might have it more abundantly (John 10:10).
The clergy colleague I spoke of earlier who was raised Jewish has written a Christian version of the Dayenu, which seems appropriate to share with you at this Easter Vigil, which is in so many ways the liturgical descendant of the Passover seder:
“If only God had come to be with us, it would have been enough.
If only God became human, the Word made flesh. If only through Jesus God entered creation so that by his presence he might bless it, it would have been enough.
If only Jesus taught us and healed us and fulfilled the Law in Love, it would have been enough.
If only he’d died, if only he stretched out his arms of love on the cross, if only Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, it would have been enough.
If only he rose again, if only he left a pile of linens in an empty tomb. If only he denied death the final word and changed forever the life we live here and now, it would have been enough.
If only he sent us the Spirit to be a comforter and advocate and to lead us into all truth, it would have been enough.
If only he ascended, drawing our humanness back to God, leading the way for us, it would have been enough.
If only he made a way for us all to be adopted as daughters and sons, if only he led us all through the waters to be joined to him, our hope and our calling, and to be joined to one another, it would have been enough. Dayenu. It would have been enough.” [3]
For each one of those statements, of course, there is a still more wonderful action of God for us to celebrate, a way in which God went the extra mile, so to speak, to come even closer to us and draw us closer to one another, bringing even more blessings and joy into our lives. And although the litany must stop somewhere, in fact it never really stops. There are always more ways to say “dayenu” – it would have been enough – and to experience gratitude for the abundance in our lives.
So what is your “dayenu” this Easter season? If only God had _______, it would have been enough? In what ways has God gone beyond what would have been “enough” in your life to lavish you with abundant blessings?
In the church, we are pretty good about observing the season of Lent, but we often forget that Easter is not just a day, but an entire season. While we have 40 days of Lent to reflect on our mortality and repent of our sins, we have 50 days of Easter to celebrate the joy of the Resurrection! We’re all familiar with the tradition of taking on a Lenten discipline, but what if we started a new tradition and during the Great 50 Days of Easter, we took on an “Easter joy”? What if we committed to spend the next 50 days – from now until Pentecost, which is on June 8 this year – doing things that that bring us joy, and intentionally bringing to mind all the ways in which we are abundantly blessed, all the ways in which God has gone beyond what would have been enough in our lives?
We just might begin to re-tell the story of Easter as if it had happened to us personally. We might experience the resurrection as if it were happening now. We might live into the story so completely that it would become our story. We might become aware in new ways of our mystical union with Christ’s death and resurrection in our baptism. And in the liturgy each week, we might say with ever-deepening appreciation:
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
(The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
---
[1] English Haggadah Text With Instructional Guide, http://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/pesach_cdo/aid/661624/jewish/English-Haggadah.htm Accessed 14 April 2014.
[2] The Rev. Jenna Faith Strizak, associate rector at Holy Trinity Parish in Decatur, GA.
[3] The Rev. Jenna Faith Strizak, “a sermon for the feast of all saints (year c), with baptisms,” November 3, 2013, Holy Trinity [Episcopal] Parish, Decatur, Ga. http://graceandgrits.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/a-sermon-for-the-feast-of-all-saints-year-c-with-baptisms/ Accessed online 8 April 2014.
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