sermon from the 20th sunday after pentecost, october 14 2007

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“Hallelujah! Give praise, you servants of the Lord;
praise the Name of the Lord.” (Psalm 113)

Today I wish to speak about Psalm 113, in your service leaflet, which we have just sung / said together. What does it say to us? What are WE saying when we recite it – when we take its words onto our lips and make its message our own? What are we saying when we sing this Psalm?

First a word about the historical context of this Psalm’s original use – This Psalm, 113, is the first of the great so-called “Hallel Psalms”, or Psalms of Praise. The Hallel Psalms constitute Psalms 113 through 118. The word “Hallelujah” means “Praise the Lord” in Hebrew, and these five Psalms were just that – hymns used by the Jews in praise of the Lord.

This particular Psalm, along with the one after it, 114, were sung by the Jews as the opening ritual at the Passover meal, before the first ritual cup of wine was passed around. As you may remember, the Passover of the Jews was the great feast commemorating the Lord’s deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt. It is fitting therefore that this commemoration of deliverance begins with an exhortation to “Praise the Lord.”

And this exhortation in Psalm 113 is all the more emphatic in that it is THREEFOLD. Translating the “Hallelujah” of the first verse, the Psalm begins: “Praise the Lord! Give praise you servants of the Lord; praise the Name of the Lord.”

As Christians, we will see in this threefold exhortation to “Praise the Lord” a veiled reference to the Holy Trinity. In the knowledge of the truth of God’s Trinity, we know that to praise God is to Praise Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To “Praise the Name of the Lord” is therefore necessarily and mysteriously a unitary yet threefold act.

Likewise as Christians we will take up the Jewish situatedness of this Psalm at the beginning of the Passover meal, before the handing around of the cup of the Passover. We will be aware, today, that we too have sung it at the beginning of our own Passover meal, before the cup of salvation is distributed in our Eucharist. We will remember that at the Passover, the Jews were praising God for bringing them out of slavery in Egypt, and we will see the fulfillment of God’s deliverance of Israel in our own deliverance in and through Christ.

We will remember that just as the Lord fed Israel in the wilderness with Manna from heaven, so in Christ the Lord came down from heaven and fulfilled what the Passover commemorated, giving HIMSELF to us as bread. Jesus ties himself explicitly to Israel’s deliverance from Egypt, and therefore to the Passover in John’s gospel. He says:

“Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and they died. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh” (Jn. 6.49ff).

Therefore today we sing this Psalm at the beginning of the Passover of the Church, in the context of the Holy Eucharist. We three times exhort one another to “Praise the Lord! Give praise, you servants of the Lord; praise the Name of the Lord.” We give glory to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for our own deliverance from slavery in the world – from our slavery to passions and appetites and death. We praise God for delivering us and nourishing us with HIMSELF in the person of Jesus Christ.

Indeed, as the fifth verse of today’s Psalm asks: “Who is like the Lord our God, who sits enthroned on high,” yet who, in the humility of Jesus Christ, has stooped “to behold the heavens and the earth” – who, in Jesus Christ, has taken up our weakness out of the dust, and lifted us poor sinners from the ashes; who in Jesus Christ has set us with the princes of the people he has chosen to be his own possession. For in being united to Jesus, we are united to the only-begotten Son and heir of the Father. For in being united to Jesus, we become the sons and daughters of God, the heirs of God’s kingdom, as St. Paul says in today’s reading from 2 Timothy 2:

“If we have died with him, we will also LIVE with him;
if we endure, we will also REIGN with him.”

Therefore we Praise the Name of the Lord.

….

This way of reading Scripture may seem illegitimate. It may seem like stealing –to take this Psalm and offer it to God as though it were our own prayer, whereas everyone knows it was actually the product of an historical context very far away from us, by a people not our own, namely the Jews – of taking this Psalm as though it came from our own hearts, as though the aspirations, praises, and prayers of the Psalmist were actually our own aspirations, praises, and prayers. As though they were OUR words to God, the product of our own hearts, expressive of our own situatedness in the world, our own life contexts.

But taking Scripture and using it in this way is in fact not only very legitimate indeed, but also NECESSARY, if what we say we believe is TRUE. To read the Bible in this way is to affirm what God has done in Christ – namely, that it is the SAME GOD at once revealed in the Old Testament Law and Prophets, who is now revealed DEFINITIVELY in Jesus Christ; that in Him, the eternal Word of God is made flesh and dwells among us (John 1).

When we take up and use the Old Testament in this way, we affirm that the Word of God is “living and active” (Paul) – that this Psalm, for example, is in fact ultimately neither OUR word, nor the word of the Jews living in Old Testament times, but that it is the WORD OF GOD – the Word of God given TO us, and FOR us, to be used precisely in this way.

And if we accept the gift of God’s Word, we will find ourselves mysteriously taken into it, and by being taken into it, we will find ourselves taken into God himself. We will begin to see in the Word of God not just the situation of a long-ago people in a far-off place, but we will see in it the narrative of OUR OWN LIVES. In God’s fidelity and forgiveness to Israel in the midst of ISRAEL’S sickness and suffering and sin, more and more you will see God’s forgiveness and fidelity to YOU in the midst of your own sin and suffering and sickness. As you draw closer to God in the love of Jesus, the Word of God made flesh, you will find your very identity increasingly in HIM, in Jesus, who took on your sin, who became sick and afflicted for your sake. And you will find yourself, with St. Paul, with an increasing certitude that: If I have died with him, I will also live with him; if I endure, I will also reign with him.

Therefore:

“Praise the Lord! Give praise, you servants of the Lord;
praise the Name of the Lord.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

sermon from the feast of the exaltation of the holy cross, september 16 2007

The feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (or Holy Cross Day, as it has come to be called in our culture of brevity) is, of course, our name day -- because we are "the Church of the Holy Cross." The following is the sermon I preached on that day, which we annually transfer to the following Sunday. The Sermon maybe a bit tedious, but I was fascinated by what I discovered in researching it. It constitutes a brief history of relics of the True Cross in general, and of our relic of the True Cross in particular. It concludes with a little bit on the importance of devotion to relics in general, and to relics of the True Cross in particular.


In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today is the feast of the Holy Cross, the name day of our parish. On this day we celebrate the Cross of Jesus, the instrument of our redemption. Today we have carried in procession a small piece of that Cross. Today, first I am going to tell you a little about the history of our relic, then I am going to talk a little bit about the spiritual significance of our relic, about how devotion to the True Cross may be helpful for your faith.

First the history:

After the Lord's Resurrection and Ascension, there remained a Christian community at Jerusalem, which grew rapidly. Until the year a.d. 70, when the Jews revolted against the Romans and Jerusalem was destroyed. In fact, it seems that during the years leading up to a.d. 70 many in the Christian community recognized the deteriorating situation with regard to the Romans and remembered the Lord's words recorded in St. Luke's Gospel: "But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart, and let not those who are out in the country enter it; for these are days of vengeance, to fulfill all that is written." Some scholars suspect that the animosity that seems to have existed later between Jews and Christians, when they returned to Jerusalem, is accounted for by the fact that many Christians HAD fled when they saw Jerusalem surrounded by the armies of Rome, and so unlike many non-Christian Jews, much of the Christian community survived in exile.

In the 130's, the emperor Hadrian turned Jerusalem into a Roman city. He named it Aelia Capitolina, and built a temple to Jupiter on the site of the Jewish temple, and a temple to Venus on the site of Mount Calvary, where the Lord suffered.

Nearly two centuries passed until finally a Christian named Constantine became the Roman emperor. Christianity, which until that time had been outlawed and persecuted, was made lawful by Constantine, and the lands and places sacred to our faith were restored. At that time the Christian community at Jerusalem was led by a Bishop named Macarius. When the church's lands were restored, Macarius pulled down the temple to Venus that Hadrian had built two centuries previously, and Macarius ordered an excavation to be conducted at the site. During the course of this excavation, the site of the Lord's passion was rediscovered, along with the Lord's tomb. Three large crosses were also found, and a sign with the words "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews," written in three languages. We know of these excavations from the writings of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, who was about 12 years old when the excavations and discoveries were made.

About fifty years later, around the year 380, a nun from Europe named Egeria went on Pilgrimage to Jerusalem and wrote about what she saw. Egeria says:

"On Good Friday, at eight o'clock in the morning, the faithful and the monks assemble in the chapel of the Cross (built on a site hard by Calvary), and at this spot the ceremony of the adoration takes place. The bishop is seated on his chair; before him is a table covered with a cloth; the deacons are standing around him. The silver-gilt reliquary is brought and opened and the sacred wood of the Cross, with the Title, is placed on the table. The bishop stretches out his hand over the holy relic, and the deacons keep watch with him while the faithful and the catechumens [file past], one by one, before the table, bow, and kiss the Cross; they touch the Cross and the Title with forehead and eyes, but it is forbidden to touch them with the hands."

In the writings left to us by St. Cyril of Jerusalem this same liturgy is described, but St. Cyril adds an interesting note: that relics of the true cross were distributed at that time to churches throughout Christendom. A very large part of the Cross went from Jerusalem to Rome, to a chapel built by St. Helena, the emperor's mother. That chapel came to be known for its most famous relic, and is today called the Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. It is remains of the seven great pilgrimage basilicas in the city of Rome. In the year 1629 the large relic of the Holy Cross was moved from Santa Croce to St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, where it remains to this day.

Our small relic of the True Cross came from Rome, and was given to a member of this parish named George Hawley during 1950's by a Melkite Catholic priest named Philip Salmone. It had been given to Father Philip in Rome in 1900 by Cardinal Rampola, a Vatican official duringh the pontificate of Pope Leo XIII.
….
The Protestant reformer John Calvin famously said that if all the supposed relics of the True Cross were collected together, you could make a battleship from them. This calumny was met head on by a pious Frenchmen named de Fleury in the 1870's. De Fleury made a catalog and took measurements of all known relics of the True Cross, and found that, supposing the True Cross to have been three or four meters tall, with a cross beam about two meters long, the volume of all known relics would not come to one third the volume of True Cross. Moreover, in the 1990's, a man named William Ziehr published the results of his microscopic analysis of four of the larger relics of the True Cross, from churches in Pisa, Florence, Paris, and Rome (whence our relic came). Ziehr discovered that all of the relics he examined came from olive wood.

How likely is it that the little bits of wood at our church today came from the Holy Cross on which the Lord suffered and died for our sins? On purely historical and documentary grounds, it is quite likely that our relic came from that piece of wood discovered in Jerusalem by Bishop Macarius during the reign of Constantine. How likely is the veracity of THAT story? Even laying aside the fact that the story comes to us from such people as St. Cyril of Jerusalem, who was alive at that time and in that place, there is no real reason for Catholic Christians to DOUBT the veracity of the story. We believe in the providence of God. And we know that he has in the past seen to it that the relics of his promise have not been lost. The ark of the covenant was lost from the time of the Prophet Samuel until King David found it near Bethlehem, at Kiriath-Jiarim, and brought it back to Jerusalem. Why should it surprise us if the Holy Cross, the instrument of the New Covenant, was hidden for a time until God saw to it that it was re-discovered at Jerusalem, that pieces of it were sent to Rome, even as faith in YHWH was spreading throughout the gentile world? It's the sort of thing God does.

But what's the point of all this? Does it really make a difference whether these relics are authentic? Can we not believe in Jesus without them? Sure. We can. But relics (and images too) ASSIST our faith. They are tokens and reminders that God did not just make us spirits, but gave us BODIES too, and that the work of redemption is not just about the salvation of disembodied souls, but rather much more mysteriously and wonderfully, God means to save our bodies too. That deliverance from disease and PHYSICAL death and rot is a part of what God has in store for us. These physical objects remind us that the word became FLESH – that Jesus Christ was a MAN, with all that being a man means – that could be seen, and handled, that he ate and drank, that for our sins, he was nailed to a tree and died, and THAT body that hung from THAT wood, was raised up, and that even at this moment, Jesus Christ reigns in the FLESH – that his blood and bones and heart and kidneys have been GLORIFIED and exalted to the right hand of the Father, and that THIS redemption, as much carnal as it is spiritual, is what God promises to us. As we gaze on these relics, we can say in the words of Job: "I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then FROM MY FLESH I shall see God."

Unlike John Calvin, who wrote in a spirit of skepticism and calumny about the wood of the Cross being enough to comprise an entire ship, a few decades after the True Cross was discovered in Jerusalem by Bishop Macarius, my old friend St. Augustine wrote with a heart full of FAITH on the same theme. St. Augustine said that living in the world, amid grief, and suffering, and sin and sickness, is like being on a storm-tossed sea. He said:

Now by this very journey through the sea of life, we are exposed to waves and tempests; and we therefore need to be in a ship. For if there are perils for those in the ship, without the ship there is certain destruction. For no matter how strong the arms of someone who swims in the open sea, yet in time he is carried away and sunk – he is mastered by the greatness of the waves. We therefore need to be in the ship – to be carried in the wood, so that we can cross this sea. And this Wood in which our weakness is carried is the Cross of the Lord, by which we are signed, and delivered from the dangerous tempests of the world. We are exposed to the violence of the waves; but he who helps us is God.

[Augustine Sermon XXV – talking about Matthew 14.24.]

Let us pray.

Lord by your cross and passion you have redeemed us. Give us faith to believe in the work of redemption, which you wrought in your Son's blood on the precious wood of the Holy Cross. Grant Lord that our faith in you may be strengthened by the relics of that wood which, through your merciful providence, you have allowed to come to us. May the work accomplished by means of that wood become a reality in our bodies and souls, that at the last day we may see our Redeemer standing upon the earth, and that with him we may find our home in your glorious presence forever.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.