holy cross sermon for epiphany 3 / january 25, 2009

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

Last week we heard the account from the Old Testament of the Lord calling the first of Israel’s great prophets, the prophet Samuel. He was in the temple of the Lord as a child; he “did not yet know the Lord”; and “the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him” (1 Sam. 3.7). But the Lord called to him in the night, and Samuel learned to discern the Lord’s voice, and he answered: “Speak Lord, for your servant hears” (1 Sam. 3.10).

Today the Gospel lesson sets before us the account of the Lord calling Simon and Andrew, James and John. “Now after John [the Baptist] was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel’” (Mark 1.15).

Our lectionary has us hearing this text today, on the heals of our commemoration of the Lord’s Baptism, because the Lord’s baptism marked the beginning of his public life. It meant the end of the era of the Old Testament, and the beginning of the New, the dawning of the Kingdom of God. I have said many times that Jesus is himself the Kingdom of God, because his life, every moment of his life, and every ounce of his being, was given, 100%, to the carrying-out of God’s will. He was the instantiation, the INCARNATION, of the divine will. And so he is not only the King, but he is the Kingdom, the place where God reigns.

We can see, therefore, why he should come onto the scene of history saying, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand…” Because HE HIMSELF is at hand. He has arrived. The world can see him – can see the Kingdom. It – and HE – are THERE. You can lay eyes on him; you can listen to his voice; you can lay hands on him; he can be touched; he can even be killed.

This supreme and preeminent fact of the history of the cosmos demands a response from those who encounter it. The Incarnation of the eternal Word is the axis around which human history now turns – we measure our years by it – it confronts us. God’s presence in the ambit of history is not an object of curiosity. The Lord did not come among us to be studied and scrutinized, he came to CALL US to himself. His presence is an invitation to be accepted or declined, but it cannot be ignored.

And so we return to the voice of the Lord: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; REPENT, AND BELIEVE IN THE GOSPEL.” That is the substance of the Lord’s invitation. He calls us to be his disciples. He calls us to repentance: to stop whatever else it was we were doing, or whatever it is we are inclined to do, and to follow him. The manifestation of the kingdom means that we can no longer find fulfillment, we can no longer earn a living, we can no longer find ourselves, in ANYTHING or ANYONE other than Jesus Christ.

“And passing along by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net in the sea… And Jesus said to them, ‘FOLLOW ME…’ And IMMEDIATELY they left their nets and followed him. And going a little farther, he saw James… and John…. And immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants, and followed him.”

Notice how Saint Mark repeats the word “immediately”. This word draws out attention to the fact that an encounter with the Kingdom, with the incarnate Word, is an encounter with a PERSON. Jesus Christ calls to us. Do discern the will of God, to listen for his voice in our lives, does not mean to consider a set of abstract propositions; much less does it mean to follow a set of rules. Rather it means to answer the call of Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, and Son of Mary. He is many things, but perhaps before anything else, he is a person… a person who loves us, who has come to us, right into the middle of our circumstances, our isolation or our confusion… who calls us by name.

This is the call we will recognize. And throughout the Gospels we see the personal nature of the call of Jesus. Just last Sunday we heard the Lord call Nathaniel, and the personal nature of the Lord’s call – the fact that the Lord KNEW him (Jn. 1.48) – so moved Nathaniel that he confessed Jesus, then and there, to be “the Son of God, the King of Israel” (John 1.49). And perhaps the most moving instance of this in the Gospels is Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the risen Lord at dawn on Easter morning. Mistaking Jesus for the gardener, the anguished Magdalene says “they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him” (Jn. 20.13). And Jesus simply said to her “Mary”, and with joy, she recognizes him.

The Lord calls us each by name. And he calls us anew each day. To each of us he says “Follow me.” And immediately we are faced with a decision. To follow him means that we must trust him. Ultimately to trust him means to trust that he will lead us home, that we will be enfolded in his mercy, in the quiet, unyielding sweep of eternity through the arc of history; that we will be enfolded in his holy incarnation at Bethlehem, and carried on the ebb his passion and death, over history’s visible horizon to the shores of heavenly Zion.

But as it was for Mary Magdalene, for Nathaniel, for Simon Peter and Andrew and James and John, it begins by our listening for his voice. It begins with vigilance and daily prayer. Peter and Andrew had their nets, James and John had their father Zebedee, and so too we have a thousand preoccupations and commitments, and a part of repentance means the reordering of our priorities, and a reconstruction of the hierarchies of our lives in the light of our confession of faith in the Gospel.

Jesus Christ alone is our salvation, our only hope, our light and our peace. Apart from him there is only confusion, disorder, and ultimately death. But he is the way, the truth and the life. And to each of us he says “Follow me.”

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

holy cross sermon for epiphany 2 / january 18, 2009

I Have Heard You Calling in the Night: Listening for the Lord's Voice

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

Today’s readings set before us accounts of what was called in Latin, vocatio, or vocation: the Lord’s call in the life of the believer.

In the Old Testament lesson we read about the call of the boy Samuel, who would grow up to become the first great prophet of Israel, and who would anoint Israel’s first kings, Saul and David.

The passage begins by saying that “the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. And the word of the Lord was rare in those days; and there was no frequent vision.” And we learn that even the old priest’s, Eli’s, “eyesight had begun to grow dim.”

The lesson to be drawn from this passage is that even when you find yourself in a time of desolation or spiritual draught, it is important to serve the Lord anyway.

I often think that we are in such a time now. There seems to be plenty of desolation and confusion in the Church, and especially in the world, and there is certainly “no frequent vision.” Yet like Samuel, even though we are in the midst of such a time, our task is to “minister to the Lord” – to serve him with assiduity and dedication within the context in which the Lord has placed us, and in fidelity to what has been handed down to us.

The passage says that “the lamp of God had not yet gone out and Samuel was lying down within the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was.” It is hard not to see in this passage a foreshadowing of the presence of God within his Church – not just spiritually, but his Eucharistic presence in our tabernacles, indicated by the perpetual burning of the sanctuary lamp.

One lesson to draw from this passage, is that despite the fact that the Lord may at times SEEM to have abandoned us, though he seems to be silent, he is in fact always with us, that indeed sometimes we experience his presence AS absence, for any number of reasons. But the fact is that he has promised never to fail or forsake us (cf. Heb. 13.5).

We do well to remember as well that very often in the midst of what seem to us to be times of desolation – such as, for example, the current “economic crisis”, which is affecting many of us, we can very easily jump to the conclusion that God has forsaken us, or that God has allowed catastrophe to come upon us, or that he has fallen down on his main job which is to protect us from this kind of thing. But this kind of attitude – into which we are all prone to fall – betrays a latent tendency to idolatry in our hearts.

If when our money or our material circumstances forsake us, and we conclude that THE LORD has forsaken us, what does that mean about what we thought of the Lord? It means that we had misidentified him with those things that we now find diminished. So desolation can be a tearing down of idols, an invitation from the Lord to examine our priorities, to ask who or what REALLY has ruled us: who or what had really hitherto been our Lord?

But the lamp of God, and his tabernacle, should be a constant reminder that “the Lord is with us; the God of Jacob is our stronghold” (Psalm 46.7). I sometimes walk or drive by the church at night, when all the lights are out, and I look in the window out there, and see the flame of the sanctuary lamp flickering in the darkness. In fact, the darkness only serves to make it seem brighter. Its there all the time, but when the church is lit up by all this artificial light, you don’t really notice it. But when its dark, when there’s no other light, it can fill your vision, and draw out the otherwise unnoticed or unremarkable contours of your surroundings.

The Lord is like that. We should remember the Lord calling Elijah at Horeb, that the Lord “was not in wind… not in the earthquake… not in the fire”; but was in the stillness and silence. “And when Eli'jah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out” (1 Kings 19.13).

We’re prone to missing the call of God in our lives because we cannot hear him over the din of our circumstances. And things can get so bad that when our circumstances begin to fail, we are apt to conclude that the Lord himself has failed. We can be a “foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but see not, who have ears, but hear not” (Jer. 5.21). We are often like Samuel, who, according to today’s reading, “did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.” And one wonders whether it wasn’t precisely because Eli was physically blind that he had such keen spiritual sight, and was able to open Samuel’s heart: “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak Lord, for thy servant hears.’”

If you want to hear the voice of the Lord calling you, you have got to learn to listen for it. The way to listen for the voice of the Lord calling to you is first of all to be quiet; to enter into the silence of your heart, and to close your eyes to the light that reflects so insanely off of the material world with which we are surrounded every day. As today’s Psalm puts it: to meditate on the Lord “in the night watches” – in darkness and silence.

This is not as easy as it sounds. I would encourage you, some time this week, to go to a place where you cannot be disturbed, and to pray. Ask the Lord to speak to you, to open your heart, and to call to you, as he called to Samuel and to Nathaniel. And then close your eyes, and be silent for five minutes. Do nothing but listen in your heart. Just five minutes. You will see how hard it is. But do it. And do it again. Make a habit of doing it.

By degrees the Lord will open your heart, and open the eyes of your spirit, until one day “you will see the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.” What a thought! That our mortal nature is capable of perceiving such a sight! But it is. We were made to see it. We are restless until we see it.

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

sermon for the first sunday after the epiphany: the baptism of our lord

Preached at the Church of the Holy Cross, January 11, 2008. By Father Will Brown

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

Happy Epiphany. Last Tuesday was the feast of the Epiphany, and shortly after the Epiphany, within its “octave”, the Church sets before our minds the Baptism of the Lord.

In the Nicene Creed we say that we believe in “one baptism for the forgiveness of sins”. The Church teaches that Jesus had no sin. So why was he baptized? It was not until I was in college that it occurred to me to ask this question. And when I asked it, I was given a rather poor answer by a well-meaning priest, who told me that maybe Jesus didn’t know who he was until his baptism, and that this was kind of his way of figuring things out for himself, a kind of coming-of-age experience.

Part of the problem with this answer is that it ignores the Scriptural data. In St. Matthew’s account of the Lord’s baptism, John the Baptist tries to prevent Jesus from being baptized. John is flabbergasted, and says to Jesus: “I need to be baptized by YOU, and do you come to ME?” (Matt. 3.14). And Jesus answers John: “Let it be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness” (v. 15).

The plentitude of God’s righteousness is part and parcel of the manifestation of the Kingdom of God, which as I have said time and again, is Jesus himself . What is happening in the mystery of the Baptism of Jesus, and the reason the Church presents it to us during the Epiphany Octave, is that the identity of Jesus is being disclosed for the first time: it is the beginning of his public life and his public ministry as the Messiah. For when Jesus comes up from the water, “he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove; and a voice from heaven [saying] “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased.”

And so Jesus is identified, in the sight of all “the people”, as the plentitude of righteousness and so the fulfillment of God’s promises through the prophets. “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased.”

In today’s reading from Isaiah, for example, we hear one such prophetic messianic expectation: “Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him”. And in today’s Psalm we hear another: “He will say to me, ‘You are my Father, my God and the rock of my salvation.’ I will make him my firstborn and higher than the kings of the earth.”

The episode of Jesus’s Baptism is there first of all to bear witness to him as the one of whom Isaiah and the Psalmist and the other prophets were speaking of in hope with respect to God’s promise of deliverance and the establishment of a kingdom of justice and peace. At Jesus’s baptism, he is revealed to be this long-awaited “fulfillment of all righteousness”.

But there is a diachronic dimension to the Lord’s Baptism: It serves as an example for us to imitate. For now, a part of our comportment and conformity to the “measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4.13) – a part of our growing into the shape of his life, death, and resurrection, is our going down into the waters of Baptism not merely in obedience to him, but in IMITATION of him.

On an ontological level though, all of this leaves unanswered the conundrum about the purpose of Baptism. If it is FOR the forgiveness of sins, and if Jesus is without sin, then why is he being baptized? Is it merely an example for us, or does it actually DO something? Might it not have been easier for Jesus simply to have said to the disciples, “Look guys; you need to be baptized into my death to be forgiven – I don’t need it, because I’m me, sinless, etc.”

The truth is that there is a paradoxical reversal at work in this mystery, for rather than being purified by the waters of the earth, the Lord is in fact purifying the waters with his body, and making them capable of regeneration. It is the waters of the earth that are receiving baptism at the hands of the Lord, when he goes down into them, not the other way around.

The ancients had seen in the waters’ depths, an only dimly-understood domain of dark power, capable of wrecking ships, drowning men, and flooding entire countries. But from now on, with, through, and in Christ, the waters of the earth will be the condition of possibility for our regeneration and deliverance. Our being “renewed” by the power of God, and capable of communion with him, and so of deliverance and fulfillment.

The Fathers of the Church saw in this mystery the fulfillment of OT prophecies, as for example when the Psalmist speaks of the Lord “dividing the sea” and “shattering the heads of the dragons upon the waters” (Psalm 74.12). This is a prophetic trope that emerges repeatedly in the Old Testament – how “in that day” (cf. Joel 3.18), when God’s righteousness appears, God’s chosen will go down into the waters and fight against and kill the evil that dwells there (cf. e.g. Job. 26.12).

It is as though, in the Baptism of the Lord, God speaks again as he did at the first: “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures” (Gen. 1.20), only now, rather than dolphins and sharks, in Jesus Christ , the waters bring forth sons and daughters.

That is the real truth of Jesus’s baptism: by a kind of spiritual synecdoche, it means that the Lord has entered into his creation, has taken our flesh, brought light to the darkness, wrought healing through weakness, bestowed riches by means of poverty, and brought what was dead to life. The good news of the mystery of the Lord’s baptism is that what hitherto held violent sway over us has now, by and in the power of Christ, been renewed and made into something salutary. So we have no longer to be afraid. Nothing in this world can harm us, but everything – the physical world, our life-circumstances, whatever they are, our enemies, the powers that oppose us and try to drag us down, EVERYTHING has become a means to our salvation in Jesus Christ.

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

more on hilaire belloc...

From 1906 to 1910 he was a Liberal Party Member of Parliament for Salford South, but swiftly became disillusioned with party politics. During one campaign speech he was asked by a heckler if he was a "papist". Retrieving his rosary from his pocket he responded, "Sir, so far as possible I hear Mass each day and I go to my knees and tell these beads each night. If that offends you, then I pray God may spare me the indignity of representing you in Parliament." The crowd cheered and Belloc won the election.

Via wikipedia.

mory's to go on indefinite hiatus

This is honestly one of the saddest things. My time at Yale was largely a very happy time. I honestly grew to love the University and its traditions and institutions. My memories of countless meals with friends at Mory's are some of the happiest. The notion that Mory's is "elitist" is ridiculous, particularly when it is accused of elitism by Yale students. It is one of the most egalitarian institutions at Yale. The truth is probably just that many Yale people are angry at the preppy culture that made Yale great in the 19th and 20th centuries, they hate broiled calf's liver, and they can't be bothered to put on a tie. These things often go hand in hand.

I hope that they at least publicize the recipe for Baker's Soup should the worst happen.

The picture above is from one of my last dinners at Mory's.

holy cross christmas eve sermon 2008

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

Every year at Christmas the television and the print media are filled with stories trying to get at the “truth” of the Christmas story. They address topics like “the historical Jesus”, and they try to scrape away the centuries of pious mythology, to salvage the nuggets of whatever might be empirically or historically verifiable from the elaborately mythologized Gospel narratives. There are whole cottage industries devoted to this scraping and pruning of the narratives, and most Biblical scholars at prominent universities and seminaries are hired precisely because they have demonstrated themselves to be adept wielders of the pruning hook of scientific standards and empirical benchmarks.

But that is not what Christmas is about. Several nights ago, in a moment of acute romanticism, I purchased “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and watched it. It’s a wonderful little cartoon, and I highly recommend it. It recounts Charlie Brown’s frustration with the commercialism and abstraction into which the celebration of Christmas has descended in Western culture. This, indeed, is the perennial concern of many of us, particularly those of us who are prone to sentimentalism. Charlie Brown goes around looking for the true meaning of Christmas, and he’s frustrated at every turn. Finally in a moment of exasperation, he cries out “Isn’t there anybody who can tell me what Christmas is all about?” And then Linus says very quietly and straightforwardly: “I can tell you what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.” Linus asks for lights and a microphone, and he proceeds to read the Gospel lesson from this mass:

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyre'ni-us was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, (because he was of the house and lineage of David,) to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

And Linus concludes: “That is what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

We are not here to remember something that can be placed under a microscope or laid-bear before the critical scrutiny of the unimaginative. We are here to commemorate and to re-enact a myth, something that was and is and will always be totally and completely impossible. It is somehow fitting that Linus, an unreal, one dimensional, cartoon character, should be the one to remind us of what is most real and most true. For virgins do not conceive. Almighty God, whom the whole world cannot contain, is not laid in a manger. God does not grow up. God is certainly not nailed to a tree. And dead men do not live again. It is IMPOSSIBLE …Yet this is our teaching. This is our faith. This is the TRUTH. We believe and confess what is “most impossible”.

[Cf. Angelus Silesius:
"The most impossible is possible
With your arrow you cannot reach the sun,
With mine I can sweep under my fire the eternal sun.”]

The great Anglican lay-poet W.H. Auden saw the great impossibility of salvation, and he wrote a poem about it called “For the Time Being” –

Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.

Where is that Law for which we broke our own,
Where now that Justice for which Flesh resigned
Her hereditary right to passion, Mind
His will to absolute power? Gone. Gone.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own?

The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

We, who must die, do not seek what is possible; for what is possible is telluric, “of the earth” – it is mundane, and it cannot save us. We who must die demand a MIRACLE. We DEMAND the impossible. Why? Because we want to be SAVED, and salvation is not possible.

But we believe and confess that the impossible is nevertheless ACTUAL. Virgins do not conceive. And yet a Virgin conceived. God Almighty is totally beyond our ken, out of reach; we are cut off from Heaven. Yet the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth – and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.

That is the MIRACLE of Christmas – the miracle of our Christian faith – the impossibility of the ACTUAL in the narrative of salvation (for with God, NOTHING will be impossible): “to YOU is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”

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

hilaire belloc

In light of the barrage of distressing and at times cataclysmic economic news and prognosticating, I have renewed my interest in Agrarianism, which was born in me in part because I was occasionally, but regularly, exposed to farm life as a child, and partly probably because of a streak of Southern chauvinism awakened in me through my reading of Fugitive poetry, New Criticism (very much still the critical assumptions informing those who taught literature at Sewanee when I was there), and Agrarian essays in college. This recipe has lately and naturally been supplemented by Communitarian and Distributist sources in 19th and 20th century Catholic intellectual history.

To shuck it all down to the cob (to use an Agrarian metaphor), this has all led me this morning to the Wikipedia entry on Hilaire Belloc. I thought this quote was hilarious:

A great disappointment in his life was his failure to gain a fellowship at All Souls College in Oxford. This failure may have been caused in part by his producing a small statue of the Virgin and placing it before him on the table during the interview for the fellowship.

Which would lead me to conclude: who needs them anyway? But I know a little of the disappointment of not winning an All Souls fellowship. That happened to a very talented friend, who was indeed very disappointed.