holy cross sermon for easter 5 / may 10 2009

Our Lady of light and life, pray for us! (From here.)

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

Today’s readings set before us the great mystery at the center of our faith: the mystery of love, and the great commandment of Christ: that we love one another as he has loved us.

There is perhaps a seeming incongruity in the commandment to love: namely that it is a commandment. How can love be undertaken in obedience? This apparent incongruity arises from our aptitude to misconstrue love as a sentiment, as something purely touching our affections, our FEELINGS.

But while love does indeed touch our feelings, while it does dispose us to feel a certain way toward the object of our love, yet this feeling is a symptom of love and does not constitute love itself.

Indeed the love that is enjoined on us as Christians persists through whatever we feel. And we know that our feelings can be fickle, that we are prone variously and at times to feelings of elation, satisfaction, disappointment, despondency, and everything else. Yet obedience to Christ’s commandment to love is possible no matter how we feel. In the Epistle reading, St. John says “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren” (v. 16).

We learn what true love is through the contemplation of Christ. When we consider Jesus, his life and his death for us, we come to know what it is truly to love. We come to see the connection between love and life – that love is the gift of life; and likewise how “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love abides in death” (v. 14) – and so why it is that “any one who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (v. 15). Because love is the gift of life for the beloved. “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us.”

So likewise we see the reason for the Church’s otherwise puzzlingly dogged devotion to LIFE wherever she finds it, her persistent proclamation of the dignity of every human person, no matter who they are, no matter how good or wicked, no matter how sick or malformed, and no matter how apparently hopeless a person’s situation may be. The unchanging truth of the Gospel, to which we bear witness, is that every person has a God-given dignity, integrity, and beauty, and that the gift of life is to be cherished and defended wherever we find it, from conception until natural death. Because “by this we know love,” that God has given us life – even the life of his only and eternal Son.

Here too we see the Church’s lament at the cultural situation of our day, where we find love having grown cold, and where all to often we see a cynical disregard for the gift of life and the dignity of the human person. Before we congratulate ourselves on being enlightened, modern people, we should remember that there have been more people killed in war in the last century than in all the wars of the rest of human history put together. Mothers and fathers kill their own children in the womb. Young people speak of murder with truly horrifying nonchalance. Movies, music, and magazines celebrate death and violence. Fashionable clothing is emblazoned with skulls and images of violence and invective. Our culture begins to think of euthanasia as a convenient way to rid ourselves of the elderly and the infirm, the lives of whom we have so devalued, or who have so devalued their own lives, as to be unable to see them as anything but problems to be solved by death. We have a criminal justice system that is very often more interested in getting convictions and being “tough on crime” than it is concerned with honestly pursuing justice. Right here in Dallas, thanks to the efforts of our District Attorney, Craig Watkins, over 20 men have been exonerated through DNA evidence that was not available – or that was simply not admitted – at the time when cases went to trial. Some of them spent 20 years or more in prison for crimes they did not commit. Some were on death row. How many innocent people have we executed over the years? Why does this not bother us more?

“But if any one has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth.” (1 John 3.17f).

In order truly to love, one must cultivate an open heart; one must come to Christ with an open heart. The Lord spoke through the prophet Ezekiel, saying that in the days of Messiah, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36.26). Jesus Christ is the one whose heart was truly open, the one who loved God perfectly and completely, who held on to the promises of God, to his eternal communion with the Father, no matter what the world hurled at him, through slander and abuse, through derision and scorn, through being scourged and beaten and nailed to a tree, through his three hours of bleeding and suffocation, Jesus showed us what loving communion with the Father looks like; he showed us the Father’s gift of life, and he empowers us to receive and to offer that same divine life, to ransom the world from its enthrallment to suffering and corruption and death. Through his denunciation and the heartbreaking cries of “Crucify him! Crucify him!” – even as he was being nailed up, the Lord announced the dignity of human nature, and his gift of divine life, in the conviction of his prayer, “Father, forgive them.”

Through the oblation of the cross, the gift of divine life was poured out on all flesh. That is what the gift of the Holy Spirit means – the gift of God’s own inner life, the gift of eternal and mutual communion-in-love of Father and Son. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you. I will not leave you desolate; [but] I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me; because I live, you will live also. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” (Jn. 14.15ff).

In Christ alone we not only learn what love is, but we receive the power to love others, as God has loved us, and to bear witness, in our own time and place, to the love and mercy of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

holy cross sermon for easter 4 / may 3 2009

The above 4th century image is from the Catacombs of Peter and Marcellinus in Rome. It depicts Jesus with the iconographic attributes of Orpheus -- the Phrygian cap, the lyre, etc.

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

In today’s Gospel lesson, the Lord tells the apostles that he is the “good shepherd”. The idea of the good shepherd has been a very popular one in the Christian imagination, almost from the very beginning. There are very ancient murals and mosaics from the catacombs depicting the Lord in this way. Indeed many of the ancient Romans saw a reflection, however pale, of Christ in the myth of Orpheus; and many scholars and art historians have noticed strong affinities between the iconography of Christ and of Orpheus. In at least one fourth century mural from the catacombs, the Lord is depicted AS Orpheus.

Its little wonder. In mythology, Orpheus was a great poet and singer. So enticing was his voice that even wild animals were tamed at the sound of it, and would follow him with docility. Perhaps the greatest part of the Orpheus myth was the story of his descent into Hades in search of his wife Eurydice, who had been bitten by a snake and died. Orpheus is said to have secured Eurydice’s release from the dead by the power of his singing; but he lost her again because he failed to obey the condition laid down by the gods that he not look back at her until they had again reached the land of the living.

Its no wonder that at the dawn of Roman Christianity, in the Church’s earliest days, pagans who converted to faith in Christ discerned something Orphic in the Gospel narratives. In the passage just before today’s Gospel reading, for example, the Lord introduces the figure of the sheep, the shepherd, and the sheepfold, and he says, “The sheep hear [the Shepherd’s] voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice” (Jn. 10.3-4).

The Lord is here referring to the experience of spiritual awakening and illumination. Jesus is saying that those who belong to him, those who are on the side of love, as he is love; those whose hearts are open, as his heart is open; those who find themselves awakened to the thirst for God – they recognize in Jesus, in his person, the object of their most profound desire. “Cor ad cor loquitur” – “heart speaking to heart” – or as the Psalmist puts it, deep calling to deep in the thundering of God’s cataracts (Ps. 42.7).

Christ’s song entices those whose hearts are open, those who have made their hearts vulnerable to the wounding of love. We know the voice of the Lord to be the call of love because of what Jesus goes on to say in today’s reading: “I am the good Shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (Jn. 10.11). As he says elsewhere – a verse we all know well – there is no greater love than “that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15.13).

After Jesus is betrayed, as he stands before Pilate, as he is about to lay down his life for his friends, he returns to the theme of his own hearing his voice. Pilate asks Jesus whether he is a king, and Jesus replies, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born and for this I have come into the world: to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice” (Jn. 18.38). And Pilate, in a moment of world-weary and hard-hearted cynicism, asks that famous rhetorical question, a question that echoes down the corridors of our own self-consciousness: “What is truth?”

The devotees of Orpheus knew better than Pilate. The story of Orpheus’ pursuit of Eurydice into the land of the dead speaks of a fundamental intuition in the heart of man: that the hold of death over the beloved devastates love’s peace – that love rages against the power of death, love’s most bitter enemy. But an air of melancholy hangs over the story of Orpheus, because he fails; in the end he loses Eurydice forever. Orpheus was under the power of the gods, and the power of the gods proved stronger than Orpheus’ love for Eurydice.

But when Christ descends to the dead in search of his Bride, in search of humanity, he descends there as the Lord of Lords, the one “to whom all things in heaven, on earth, and under the earth bow and obey” (BCP prayer at Unction), the one who startles the nations, and at whose voice kings shut their mouths (cf. Isaiah 52.15). Unlike Orpheus, Christ is not compelled by the power of the gods, but rather announces that their dominion has been destroyed by the power of the Father’s love, the victory of Christ crucified.[1]

This is what the Lord is talking about in today’s Gospel reading: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep…. I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.”

Finally, it must be said, that unlike the story of Orpheus, which was mere myth, the Gospel is true. It is about a man, a person. It is about Jesus Christ, who is real, who really died, and really rose; who is alive forever, and who calls to our hearts. This is why it is so important to cultivate prayer, to practice prayer daily. Because prayer is the language of the heart, the place in which we listen for the Lord’s voice; as the Lord revealed to the Seer of the Apocalypse: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him...” (Rev. 3.20).

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

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[1] This is the meaning of the otherwise obscure passage from 1 Peter 3.18-20: “For Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit; in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey, when God's patience waited in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water.” “The spirits in prison” are the evil spirits (i.e. the gods) of the underworld, bound by God in Tartarus for their disobedience “in former times”. Cf. 2 Peter 2.4.