holy cross, dallas

holy cross sermon for advent 3 / year a / december 12 2010

2010-12-15T01:13:00.000-08:00

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

“Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?”

Today’s Gospel lesson is full of pathos. We hear of St. John the Baptist – the Lord’s cousin, the great and final prophet of the Old Covenant, the one chosen by God to herald the coming of the Messiah. At the end of today’s Gospel, the Lord himself bears witness to John: “Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist;” but he goes on to say, “yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he,” (Matthew 11.11).

Considered with worldly eyes, we find John in today’s Gospel at the lowest point of his life. He has been arrested by Herod, and he is languishing in prison. Soon he will be beheaded to satisfy Herodias’ small-minded hankering for vengeance. He has reached, as it were, the winter of his life, the point of which Bl. John Henry Newman wrote:

The days have come in which they have no pleasure; yet they would hardly be young again, could they be so by wishing it. Life… does not satisfy. Thus the soul is cast forward upon the future, and in proportion as its conscience is clear and its perception keen and true, does it rejoice solemnly that ‘the night is far spent, the day is at hand,’ that there are ‘new heavens and a new earth’ to come, though the former are failing; nay, rather that, because they are failing, it will ‘soon see the King in His beauty,’ and ‘behold the land which is very far off.’ These are feelings for holy men in winter and in age…

John knows that he is in trouble, that his life is in danger. Thus his “soul is cast forward upon the future…” And he sends some of his disciples to Jesus to ask him: “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Matthew 11.3). While considered with worldly eyes, John is at the lowest point of his life; from the vantage point of eternity, John stands at the threshold of his greatest victory.

Knowing what must have been the exemplary clearness of John’s conscience, and the concomitant keenness and truth of its perception, many of the early Fathers and great teachers of the faith considered that so great a saint must have known that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, and they looked for explanations other than wonder or ignorance, for John’s question.

For example, both St. Gregory the Great and St. Jerome suggest that John, knowing that he was about to inhabit the abode of the dead, was asking whether Jesus were he “that is to come” to the underworld to proclaim release to the righteous dead. St. Gregory says that it is “not that [John] doubted that [Jesus] was the Redeemer of the world, but he asks that he may know whether He who in His own person had come into the world, would in His own person descend also to the world below.”

Others of the Fathers suggested that John asked this question for the sake of his disciples. Knowing that the time of his own ministry was at an end, and that his disciples would soon be bereft of him, John sends some of them to Jesus, asking him “Are you he who is to come…” so that they – John’s disciples – might hear from the mouth of Jesus that Jesus was indeed the Christ whom John had announced. St. Hilary of Poitiers, for example, says that “John… is providing not for his own, but his disciples’ ignorance; that they might know that it was no other whom he had proclaimed, he sent them to see His works, that the works might establish what John had spoken; and that they should not look for any other Christ, than Him to whom His works had borne testimony.”

“‘Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?’ And Jesus answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is he who takes no offense at me.’”

I believe the great 20^th century German Theologian, Romano Guardini, has best illuminated John’s context and his question: “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” Guardini writes:

It has been claimed that John did this for the sake of his disciples, that they might hear the confirmation from Jesus’ own lips. Possibly this is true; but it is also possible that John sent to Jesus for his own sake. If he did, it would by no means conflict with his calling. Often, naively, we imagine the illumination of a prophet as a fixed thing, as though he had only to behold, once, in order to know without wavering forever after; as though once gripped by the Spirit, he stood fast for all time. In reality even a prophet’s life is shaken by all storms and saddled with all weaknesses. At times the Spirit hoists him far above the heights of human accomplishment or being; then he beholds, drawing from his vision the power to unhinge history. At other times, the Spirit drops him, and back he plunges headlong into darkness and impotency, like [Elijah] in the desert when he flung himself down beneath a bush and begged for death…. Perhaps John did ask for his own sake; if this is true, what agonizing hours must have shaped that message to Jesus!

And Jesus replies in the affirmative. He is the one who is to come. Look for no other. “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is he who takes no offense at me.” And Jesus bears counter-witness to John: “Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist…”

John’s greatness lies, like that of the Blessed Virgin, in his pointing to the Lord; in saying “Not I; but Jesus.” Mary brings him into the world, and John brings him to the world’s attention. Guardini writes:

It was John’s mission – and greatness – to proclaim the advent of the kingdom. Nor was he in any way unworthy to do so, he who ‘even from his mother’s womb’ was filled with the Holy Spirit. It could only mean that his particular vocation was to lead the way to the promised realm, to direct others to it, but in some special sense to remain without. One is reminded of Moses close to death, standing on Mount Nebo and looking down on the Promised Land. He is not allowed to enter. Not until he has passed through death does he come into the true land of promise. For Moses this was punishment; he had failed in an hour of trial. For John it was not punishment but vocation. Everything in him cried out to be with Christ, in that kingdom of God about to dawn in Messianic abundance, ushering in the new creation. For us its bliss is unimaginable, but for the prophet, who had felt it deeply, it was the object of his most powerful longing. Yet he was not allowed to enter. No psychology, indeed no one who has not personally penetrated deep into the mystery of the divine will, can explain this. This side of death, John was to remain Precursor: herald of the kingdom.

Let us concentrate for a moment on his fate. He lies in prison, a powerless victim of wretched paltriness and fully aware of the death threatening him from Herodias’ hatred. Must not the knowledge of his own greatness have revolted against the apparent senselessness of it all? Surely his darkest hours came then, and with them danger of rebellion and doubt: Can he who allows such things to happen to his servants really be the Messiah?

If it was thus, the heart must overflow at the mystery of love demanding the utmost, yet so gently; so all-knowing in spite of the distance between them, so calmly trusting. Into the depths of John’s lowest hour then would Jesus’ word have been spoken: [“Blessed is he who takes no offense at me.”] The Lord knows his herald; knows his need. The message sent by the mouth of his uncomprehending disciples into the darkness of the dungeon is a divine message.

We share John’s vocation. We stand on the brink of the Lord’s self-disclosure, ever imminent, never yet fulfilled. Our task is to stand with John, rejoicing at the Bridegroom’s voice; and to say with John, “He must increase, but I must decrease,” (John 3.30). And in the darkness of our lives, our vocation is again with John: to receive the Lord’s reassurance: “Blessed is he who takes no offense at me,” and to allow our crowning achievement to be fidelity to his word to the very end.

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

holy cross sermon for pentecost 23 / year c / proper 26 / october 30 2010

2010-11-01T16:23:00.000-07:00

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

“And there was a man named Zacchae’us; he was a chief tax collector, and rich. And he sought to see who Jesus was, but could not, on account of the crowd, because he was small of stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for Jesus was to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchae’us, make haste and come down; for I must stay at your house today.’ So he made haste and came down, and received him joyfully.”

No doubt some of you remember the song from Sunday School: Zacchae’us was a wee-little man, and a wee-little man was he! He climbed up in a sycamore tree, for the Lord he wanted to see! and so forth.

Zacchaeus, we are told, was a tax collector. Tax collectors in the first century were about as popular as they are now.

The Gospel says he was “small of stature.” And this lends vividness to the portrait St. Luke paints of the petty bureaucrat who had grown rich by defrauding people.

But Zaachaeus had heard about Jesus. And now he hears that Jesus is coming to town, that he will be passing by. So this petty, corrupt little bureaucrat goes out into the crowds seeking TO SEE WHO JESUS IS (19.3). But he can’t. He runs up against two obstacles. First, there is a jostling crowd, pushing and elbowing him – a crowd of people like himself who were curious to see this healer about whom they had been reading in the newspaper. Secondly, he runs up against his own smallness of stature. Being “small of stature” is no good in thick crowds of jostling people.

Not wanting to miss the opportunity, Zaachaeus runs ahead (19.4), and climbs a sycamore tree by the road, and waits to see Jesus. And Jesus does pass by. And imagine the shock, maybe the glee, when Zaachaeus sees Jesus stop under the tree and look up at him, and speak his name. “Zaachaeus, make haste and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” Not only does Zaachaeus get to SEE the man he had heard so much about – he gets to talk with him, to listen to him, to be his host – to share his food and his house and, for a night or two, he gets to share his life with Jesus!

But beyond the easy lesson of the general badness of petty bureaucrats who grow rich by defrauding people, and the general goodness of having changes of heart about such things, what is the story of Zaachaeus saying? What does it say to those of us who are not petty bureaucrats, and who are not small of stature?

First of all we should notice what the text says (v. 3): Zacchaeus SOUGHT TO SEE WHO JESUS WAS. This is the center of the spiritual life: seeking to see Jesus, and having an open heart about what and whom you will see at the end of your seeking. Jesus said “seek, and you shall find.” I think we’re prone to read this as though it were a conditional statement: IF you seek, THEN you will find. But that’s not what it says. The mood of the word “seek” is imperative. It’s a COMMAND. SEEK, and you will find. In light of the Lord’s imperative, therefore, Zaachaeus can be seen as answering the summons of the Lord in his heart. Zaachaeus is obeying the inward compulsion of the voice of God. He is SEEKING the Lord. He doesn’t know what the Lord will be like, but he WANTS to know. His heart is open and eager. And we get a sense of his excitement and yearning in Luke. We all have a duty as human beings to search for what is ultimately good, true, and beautiful. We don’t have a duty to attain it – seeing to the attainment is the Lord’s job – but we have a duty to seek, to stir up within ourselves a desire for ultimate reality; and this requires an open mind and an open heart. Often, when we take an honest look inside of ourselves, we will find that we DON’T desire ultimate reality – the good, the true, and the beautiful – that we’re more than willing to settle for much less. When we see that this is so, we can perhaps at least stir up within us the desire to desire ultimate reality. That’s a good first step. It leaves room for the Lord to work.

But Zachaeus could not see Jesus on account of the crowd, and because he was small of stature. There are two impediments to seeing the face of Jesus. One is the opposition of the crowds. The crowds in our day are the culture and the media, the gawkers and gadflies and the murmurers – the people who have indestructible preconceptions about who God is, who the Messiah is, or who he or she should be. These will not create a space for the openhearted seeker. They insist that we stay behind them and let them tell us about the Messiah. And what do they say he is or should be? Very often they claim that he is, or should be, the administrator of a social program, or the leader of a liberation movement of some kind, or a reformer of this or that, the architect of social change. At the very moment when the open-hearted seeker himself comes looking for the face of Jesus, he is shoved back by the foregone conclusions of the skeptics and ideologues, the culture and the media. What we NEED is salvation, but what we get is unbridled sexuality, or healthcare, or financial bailout packages, or the “American dream” itself. We live in a time when it seems like nothing is off limits; nothing is out of bounds; but nothing seems to satisfy.

Like Zachaeus, we are all small of stature when faced with the crowds of murmurers and skeptics, and the relentlessness of cultural propagandizing. We are all jostled and swayed on a daily basis. We all fall back. The truth is that as people of faith, we are all like Zachaeus: small of stature. Our faith is little, and whenever a History Channel program about the “historical Jesus” comes on television around Chrsitmastime, or an article about “the Real Jesus” appears in National Geographic, or a novel like the Da Vinci Code appears, or the next political debate gets going, our faith – that faculty by which we seek to see who Jesus is – our faith gives ground to the jostling of the crowd.

So what are we supposed to do? What did Zaachaeus do? He ran ahead and climbed a tree. He admitted his smallness of stature, and he rose above it. He rose above not only his own smallness, but above the jostling crowd too. He was determined to SEE JESUS FOR HIMSELF, and he would not give way to the crowds. He did not succumb to complacency. He was not deterred, but he PURSUED HIS PERSONAL QUEST FOR THE FACE OF THE LORD. And so must we. We will run up against opposition from the crowds, our faith will be jostled and shoved and elbowed, because we are all small of stature. That’s alright. But we must not give up our quest because of the jostling, and we must not join the crowd. We must SEE JESUS FOR OURSELVES. As the Prophet Isaiah put it: we must seek the Lord while he wills to be found; we must call upon him when he draws near. And we must NOT accept from the skeptics and murmurers a second-hand substitute for faith, we must not allow the crowds to mediate the Messiah’s presence.

For us, this encounter, this struggle, takes place in the heart, as we prayerfully seek Jesus in the Gospels. We seek Jesus when we read the Gospels, and especially when we read them ON OUR KNEES – that is, when we read the Gospels with simple, humble, open-hearted DEVOTION.

When we seek the Lord, when we refuse to be deterred, when we find that place of devout seeking and waiting, above the fray of murmuring and conjecture, suddenly we will find that HE IS THERE. We’ll find ourselves looking on his beautiful countenance. Today’s Gospel says Jesus “was to pass that way.” You may recall another passage where the Lord passed by. In Exodus, Moses asks to see the Lord on Sinai: “Moses said ‘I pray thee, show me thy glory.’ And the Lord said, ‘I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you my name “The Lord”; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,’ said the Lord, ‘you cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live.’ And the Lord said ‘Behold… you shall stand upon the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by… my face shall not be seen.’”

And this is the great mystery of what happened that day in Jericho for Zacchaeus, and what will happen for us when we seek Jesus with faith: No longer does God just pass by. Now he stops. He looks at us, and we look at him. We see the glory of God in the face of Jesus. And when he stops, he says to us: “make haste and come; for I must stay at your house today.”

The vision of the glory of God in the face of Jesus – what was denied to Moses is possible for Zacchaeus – and its possible for all who devoutly and open-heartedly search for ultimate reality by means of faith. Not only are we graced to see the face of God, but even more: God will come to us and lodge with us. He will take up his dwelling place in our hearts. In John’s gospel Jesus says “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”

That’s the significance of the story of Zacchaeus. That’s what Jesus means. “Today salvation has come to this house.” Because Zacchaeus went looking for Jesus with faith and devotion.

Let us pray. Lord give us the faith and devotion of Zacchaeus. Not only his faith and his devotion, but his determination. Let us not be dissuaded by the murmuring crowd of our day, but grant that we may see you in the face of your Son. Come to us and make your home with us, even as you promised.

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

from girard (actually from benoit chantre, but girard agrees)

2010-07-12T11:18:00.000-07:00

The two ages of war could provide a means of sketching out a paradoxical law that is both similar to and different from Bergson's "double frenzy." On one hand, we would have the escalation to extremes, and on the other a return to origins, a "tracing back" of history as [Charles] Peguy said, towards what you call the founding murder. The two movements would be linked: the closer we get to the end, the further back we go. The more history tends towards the worst, the less we will be able to hide the need for a clear discussion of archaic religion.

I've often thought that history is moving backward. I'd guess we're now somewhere in the late 4th / early 5th century AD.

from the dream of gerontius

2010-07-02T12:56:00.000-07:00

ANGEL:

Thy judgment now is near, for we are come / Into the veiled presence of our God.

SOUL:

I hear the voices that I left on earth.

ANGEL:

It is the voice of friends around thy bed, / Who say the 'Subvenite' with the priest. / Hither the echoes come; before the Throne / Stands the great Angel of the Agony, / The same who strengthen’d Him, what time He knelt / Lone in that garden shade, bedew’d with blood. / That Angel best can plead with Him for all / Tormented souls, the dying and the dead."

holy cross sermon for trinity sunday 2010

2010-05-31T13:26:00.000-07:00

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

Today is Trinity Sunday. Trinity Sunday is always the Octave day of Pentecost. This means that Trinity Sunday somehow completes Pentecost, and brings it to a proper conclusion.

Today the Church asks us to consider God the Holy Trinity, and for good reason. Listen to the opening words of the Athanasian Creed – one of the three great Creeds of the first millennium that are the patrimony of all Christians. The Athanasian Creed is the most detailed of the three great statements of the Christian faith. It says this about the Holy Trinity:

“Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith. Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the catholic faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and trinity in Unity; neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.”

The Holy Trinity is one of the two great mysteries at the center of Christian faith (the other centering on the incarnation, how it is that Jesus Christ can be both perfect God and perfect man at one and the same time). In considering the doctrine of the Trinity, it is good to remind ourselves that, as St. Paul says, God dwells in “unapproachable light” (1 Timothy 6.16), and that in consequence, discursive theology can only proceed so far before it falls silent and becomes contemplation – that speculation must give way to worship. It is also important to say, however, that we cannot skip straight way to contemplation, but that we must first pass through the discourse of theology, we must learn what God is worthy of worship. We must also say that that the mysteries of Christian theology are data of faith – they are “givens” (=data) revealed by God himself, .

The Athanasian Creed (BCP p. 864) goes a ways towards laying out what we may say with respect to the Trinity, and explications of Trinitarian theology, per se, have been fruitful in the course of Christian history. But the utter, transcendent mystery of the thing notwithstanding, as the Athanasian Creed says: we worship one God in three persons. And so I would like to give you a small devotional reading of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity: not what it means for God to be a Trinity of persons in Unity of being, but what it means for us to worship such a God.

The great 14^th century English mystic Julian of Norwich experienced a vision in which God revealed himself to her. Julian says the following about her vision:

“And from the time that [the vision] was shown, I desired often to know what our Lord's meaning was. And fifteen years and more afterward I was answered in my spiritual understanding, thus: 'Would you know your Lord's meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Keep yourself therein and you shall know and understand more in the same. But you shall never know nor understand any other thing, forever.

“Thus I was taught that love was our Lord's meaning. And I saw quite clearly in this and in all, that before God made us, he loved us…”

God is all about love. This we know from the first Epistle of St. John, who says it very simply: God is love. Thus we know that whatever else the Holy Trinity may be, the Holy Trinity is love. The Father eternally begets the Son in love, and therefore the Father is eternally Father, and the Son eternally Son, and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from both by being the love that is the act of eternal begetting and eternally being-begotten (cf. Augustine in De Trinitate).

And this is the preeminent way in which God is revealed to us as love: God reveals to us the love that obtains eternally between the three persons of the Godhead: the Father eternally begets the Son in love, and the Son eternally returns the love of his Father. And indeed a consistent theme among the fathers of the Church is that the love that exists between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit. St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest theologians of the Western Church says this:

“…Love proceeds from the lover into the beloved… the Father loves the Son and” the Son loves the Father…… and “the Holy Spirit is the love of the Father into the Son and” of the Son into the Father. [Commentary on the Sentences, Distinction 10]

As Julian of Norwich said: before God made us, he loved us. Before God made you, he loved you. As Psalm 139 says: “Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb; all of them were written in your book…” Another great 14^th century mystic of the Church, Meister Eckhart, describes the inner life of God as a frothing or boiling of love, and he says that we are made by God from the boiling-over of the love that is his inner life. It is God’s nature to create, because his nature is love. As surely – or more surely – as the natural end of the love between a man and a woman is the bringing forth of new life in the procreation of children, so creation itself is the supernatural end of the love that is the inner life of the Holy Trinity. Why did God create us? It is his nature to create. Because he is love.

We see this love of God revealed perfectly in Jesus. Again, First John says “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.” And the life that he gives us to live is the life of love. For this reason the Father sent the Son, to restore us to the union of divine love. And as the Son returns to the Father, the Holy Spirit is sent to us at Pentecost to confirm and conform us in that union of eternal love. This is that for which we were made – and the realization of our purpose, the attainment of the love of God, is the wellspring of our truest happiness, whether we are capable of realizing it or not: the completion of our joy can only be found in God, in our being caught up into the communion-in-love that is the very being of the Holy Trinity.

St. John Chrysostom, a great teacher of the faith from the fourth century, says this:

“The Unity of the Godhead, the Three Persons in One God, is not a barren truth in any sense; the devout consideration of it promotes unity in us. Our Lord's prayer for Christians to the Father is, ‘that they may be one as We are One.’ All love, all harmony, all union, worthy of the Name, is in the knowledge of the Three Persons and One God.”

There is a popular feeling these days that dogma is unpleasant. That is merely a cause for rancor and division among people. That if we could just get rid of believing-in-stuff, we would all be able to get along. Nothing could be further from the Christian truth. True solidarity, true communion, true fellowship, togetherness, fraternity – this is a gift given to us in the gift of God’s own life. And conversely, all feelings of solidarity and community apart from God ultimately prove chimerical.

The three-personed God wants to draw us in, to seduce us, to share with us the inner life of eternal love and mutual self-giving that he is. That is the meaning of this day: That God loves us; that his love is such that he was unwilling that we should be separated from him, unwilling that we should die in our sin. So he sends his only Son, whom he loves, to reveal his love by giving his life for us and to us. And then he sends us his Spirit, the very Love that constitutes the eternal and mutual self-giving relationship of Father and Son, the very Love that is itself God – he sends us the Spirit to teach us, to bring is self-disclosure to our remembrance, and to confirm us in what is the proper possession of the Father and the Son, as Jesus says in today’s Gospel: the Spirit of Truth “will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” We have been given the Holy Spirit to teach and confirm us in divine love, in the life of God himself. And by the way, God’s is not a weak love that is content to let us have what we think we want. As I have often said, God’s motto is NOT “live and let live.” No. God loves us too much to leave us alone. Scripture says that this God-who-is-Love is a CONSUMING FIRE. As Fr. Tom Hopko has said, this God-who-is-Love is a God who disciplines his children, wounds and flees from his lover, prunes his vineyard, burns his gold, and smashes his vessels. God’s message to us is, “die to yourself, that you may have life in me.” His love for us will pierce and burn us through, it will purge us of those things that keep us from blessedness, from life and peace and joy in union with him. If only we will let it. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God – but God never forces himself on anyone.

Again, St. Chrysostom writes:

“What, therefore, is the point we are taught, the one chief lesson which the Church would inculcate on us this day? We live under the dispensation of the Spirit, and it is, I think, this—that if we would live in the Spirit, would wait and pray for and seek His guidance, it will bring us more and more to the love of Christ, as revealed to us so fully in the Gospels. There we read of Him; we hear Him, as it were, and see Him; He is manifested to us as the Son of Man, our example, our advocate, the Sacrifice for us; in His parables and precepts, in His miracles of mercy, and His daily life, we have Him, as it were, before us; it is to the love of Him, and obedience to Him, to His likeness, the Holy Spirit must conform our unruly wills and affections.”

In your prayer life, invite the Holy Spirit to come to you. Ask God that you may live in the Spirit and by this power. Seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to confirm you in what is God’s own possession, namely his love. Turn meekly to God, without pretension, looking on Christ in love and gratitude, contrition and humility – the humility borne of facing yourself honestly, of taking stock of your life and offering it to God, and trusting Him to work in you in whatever ways are necessary to effect your blessedness – that you may be brought at the last to the blessedness of communion in the inner life of God, the eternal love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

worthy is the lamb

2010-05-27T20:38:00.000-07:00

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away." And he who sat upon the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new.... It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the fountain of the water of life without payment. He who conquers shall have this heritage, and I will be his God and he shall be my son."

sermon for pentecost / year c / may 23, 2010

2010-05-23T10:35:00.000-07:00

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

Today is the feast of Pentecost, fifty days after Easter, when the Lord rose victorious from the dead. In the book of Acts, St. Luke describes the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Twelve, the event we remember today:

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit…” (Acts 2.1-4)

Jesus called this gift, this “baptism” of the Holy Spirit, “the promise of the Father” – and he had told the Twelve to expect it, and prayerfully to wait for it in Jerusalem. Moreover, Acts tells us what the Twelve DID once they had received the Holy Spirit:

“[They] began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and wondered, saying, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language? Par'thians and Medes and E'lamites and residents of Mesopota'mia, Judea and Cappado'cia, Pontus and Asia, Phryg'ia and Pamphyl'ia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyre'ne, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.’” (Acts 4.4-11)

What – or who – is the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Holy Trinity. This we know. Yet what does it mean to say that? Scripture speaks of the Holy Spirit as “the paraclete”, from the Greek word “parakletos”, which is often translated the advocate, the counselor, the comforter, or the helper. But all of these words describe essentially the operations of the Holy Spirit – what the Holy Spirit DOES for us. Namely, he advocates for us, he counsels us, comforts, and helps us.

We say in the creed that we believe that the Holy Spirit is himself God – God of the same divinity – the same “godness” as the Father and the Son; that he is “the Lord, the giver of life” and that he is sent to us by the Father and the Son, and that we rightly worship and glorify the Holy Spirit with the same worship and glory that we give to the Father and the Son.

I think St. Augustine of Hippo has the most helpful clarification of who the Holy Spirit is. In his great work “On the Trinity”, St. Augustine says that “the Holy Spirit is [that] unutterable communion of the Father and the Son” and that the Holy Spirit is “the love by which the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father.”

To receive the Holy Spirit is therefore to receive the “unutterable communion of the Father and the Son”. It is to receive “the love by which the Father loves the Son and the Son love the Father.” To receive the Holy Spirit means to receive within ourselves the abiding and divine communion that is the same thing as the very life of God. And in this regard, let us remember that the word for spirit in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, also means “life” and “breath”. So there are three terms, really, for that which we receive from the Lord, three terms naming a single reality: (1) the Holy Spirit, which is (2) the eternally abiding communion-in-love of Father and Son that is (3) the very life of God.

For us to receive the Holy Spirit therefore means for us to receive divine life, the eternal communion, the mutual delight, of the three persons of the Godhead. It is quite a gift. To understand this mystery of Pentecost enables us to draw further implications about Christ’s gift of life in the Spirit. In 2008 Pope Benedict addressed 400,000 young people gathered for World Youth Day in Australia. He said:

“Love is the sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit! Ideas or voices which lack love – even if they seem sophisticated or knowledgeable – cannot be ‘of the Spirit’. Furthermore, love has a particular trait: far from being indulgent or fickle, it has a task or purpose to fulfill: to abide. By its nature love is enduring. Again… we catch a further glimpse of how much the Holy Spirit offers our world: love which dispels uncertainty; love which overcomes the fear of betrayal; love which carries eternity within [itself]; the true love which draws us into a unity that abides!”

The gift of the Holy Spirit is a gift of intimacy with God and with one another, a gift which dispels fear, and opens the mysteries of God to our understanding. But how do we receive this gift from God? Well, all who have been baptized have received the Holy Spirit sacramentally – objectively – in their baptism. Likewise, the sacrament of Confirmation objectively “confirms”, actualizes, seals, and brings to fulfillment the gift of the Holy Spirit in Baptism.

But gifts must not only be given, they must be received as well. And here we must cooperate with the work that God has done in our lives. He works outside of us and apart from us, but we must cooperate with his work to see it bear fruit in our lives. The one thing that God cannot do is violate our freedom. And so we must pray – asking God to renew in us the gift of his Spirit; we must cultivate within ourselves dispositions that are susceptive to the gift of the Holy Spirit; and we must exercise our wills and act in ways that are congruous with the Spirit’s initiatives. This means loving God, loving our neighbors and even our enemies; it means we must have a joyful heart and countenance in all circumstances, remembering all that we have been given in Christ; we must be peacemakers and witnesses of peace, never intentionally harming anyone for any reason; we must be patient when we are ourselves afflicted or maligned or abused; we must be kind to everyone; we must dwell on what is good and practice it in all we do; we must be faithful to Christ, obeying the mandates of the Gospel and keeping the Church’s moral law; we must be gentle with all men, particularly those who are weak or suffering or disadvantaged; and we must exercise self-control, never allowing fear or jealousy or anger or vanity or our sensual appetites to dictate our actions to us (cf. Galatians 5.22f).

Lastly, we must remember to do what the apostles did on the day of Pentecost: proclaim the mighty works of God in Christ (Acts 4.11). And we must proclaim this good news with the way we live – as unashamed and conspicuous disciples of Jesus – and also with our SPEECH. We must be willing to share our faith in Christ with others, with those in our lives who are hungry for meaning or direction, or who are sorrowful or who feel lost. But in order to be able to share the mighty works of God in Christ, we must first know what these works are. So we have a duty to inform ourselves, not only by reading and re-reading, and marinating in holy Scripture, but also by looking at our own lives and reminding ourselves (or maybe realizing for the first time) how God has made known his deliverance in our own personal histories, the particular ways we have known his mercy, and asking forgiveness for our failures to acknowledge it and to cooperate with it.

This is how we participate in God’s action within the world, in calling all people into the communion of his love. This was his purpose from the beginning; this was why he called Abraham, gave the law, sent the prophets, elected Mary, and sent his Son to live and die as one of us: in order to reconcile the whole world to himself. We are called to God in Christ, and we have been filled with his own life-giving Spirit, so that we may participate in his saving action within the world, and ourselves be caught up in the abiding unity of the one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

a prayer from the syrian clementine liturgy

2010-05-12T09:50:00.000-07:00

O God, you are the unsearchable abyss of peace, the ineffable sea of love, the fountain of blessings, and the bestower of affection, you send peace to those who will receive it; open to us this day the sea of your love, and water us with plenteous streams from the riches of your grace, and from the most sweet springs of your benignity. Make us children of quietness, and heirs of peace. Enkindle in us the fire of your love; sow in us your fear; strengthen our weakness by your power; bind us closely to you and to each other in one firm and indissoluble bond of unity. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

from friedrich holderlin -- the poet du jour in father brown town

2010-05-07T10:04:00.000-07:00

From Holderlin's great poem Patmos:

Jesus Christ. This latter now I wish

To sing, like Hercules or the island which

Was held and saved, refreshing

The neighbouring one with cool sea waves drawn

From ocean's desert, the vast, Peleus. But that's

Impossible. Differently it is a fate. More marvellous.

More rich to sing. Immeasurable

The fable ever since. And now

I wish to sing the journey of the nobles to

Jerusalem, and anguish wandering at Canossa,

And Heinrich himself. If only

My very courage does not expose me. This first we

Must understand. For like morning air are the names

Since Christ. Become dreams. Fall on the heart

Like error, and killing, if one does not

Consider what they are and understand.

But the attentive man saw

The face of God,

At that time, when over the mystery of the vine

They sat together, at the hour of the communal meal,

And in his great soul, carefully choosing, the Lord

Pronounced death, and the ultimate love, for never

He could find words enough

To say about kindness, then, and to affirm the affirmative. But his light

was

Death. For niggardly is the wrath of the world.

Yet this he recognized. All is good. Thereupon he died.

But nevertheless, bowed down, the friends at the very last

Before God saw the denier's presence, as when

A century bends, thoughtfully, in

The joy of truth,

Yet they were sad, now that the evening had come. For to

Be pure is a skill, a life that has a heart, in

The presence of such a face, and outlasts the middle,

But much is to be avoided. Too much

Of love, though, where there is idolatry,

Is dangerous, strikes home most. But those men were loath

To part from the face of the Lord

And from their homeland. Inborn

Like fire in iron was this, and beside them

Walked, like a plague, the loved one's shadow.

Therefore he sent them

The Spirit, and mightily trembled

The house and God's thunder-storms rolled

Distantly rumbling, creating men, as when dragon's teeth, of glorious fate....

holy cross sermon for easter sunday

2010-04-05T09:55:00.001-07:00

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

“When they went in, they did not find the body.” (Luke 24.3) “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Corinthians 15.20)

Today is the memory of an event, the re-presentation of an event: the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Two thousand years ago, in a tomb hollowed out of the rock of a hillside outside Jerusalem, Jesus rose from the dead. He is alive and reigns forever at the right-hand of Power.

When the myrrh-bearing women went to the tomb around dawn on the first day of the week, they found the stone rolled away and the tomb empty; and they found themselves in the company of angels who asked them a question: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” (Luke 24.5) This is a question we might well ask ourselves. Why do we seek the living among the dead?

It is fitting that the resurrection of Jesus should have taken place in the secret anonymity of the tomb, a place of darkness, without witnesses, the place where we hide from ourselves the victims of the violence out of which we construct our personal and social histories and our self-determination.

The resurrection of Jesus does not belong to the domain of history. As with his conception in the dark silence of Mary’s womb, sealed by her virginity, so too now his resurrection in the darkness and silence of the tomb sealed by a stone, heaven and earth are joined and man is reconciled to God. We must not say, as some do, that because the resurrection of Jesus is properly ahistorical that it therefore did not happen, that this story is an invention meant to give life meaning, or to give credence to a new ideology. The resurrection is an eternal event, localized historically, taking place in darkness, silence, and anonymity, but now the wellspring of all shape, all wholeness, all light and life.

As Hans Urs von Balthasar has said, “as if weariness… and the uttermost decay of power were melting at creation’s outer edge, were beginning to flow, because flowing is perhaps a sign and a likeness of weariness which can no longer contain itself, because everything that is strong and solid must in the end dissolve into water. But hadn’t it - in the beginning - also been born from water? And is this wellspring in the chaos, this trickling weariness, not the beginning of a new creation?”

“Why do you seek the living among the dead?”

Christ is risen from the dead, and we must find a new place in our hearts, in our lives, for the story of his resurrection. The motto of our diocese is “We are resurrection people” – which has always sounded trite to me, but which must now be true. We must find a place for this truth within us; we must appropriate it by faith. We ARE resurrection people.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, who by his own admission, tried and failed to believe the resurrection, said: “Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a LIFE. Here you have a narrative, don’t take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it.” (“Culture and Value” p. 33) I realize that this point is prone to misunderstanding, so let me be clear: Jesus rose from the dead. He was murdered; his body was placed in a tomb; and on the morning of the third day, the tomb was empty; not because his body had been stolen, but because Jesus, in the flesh, rose from the dead.

Let us not forget that this was the confession around which the earliest Christians organized themselves and recognized one another, and that it remains so to the present day. Christ is raised from the dead. Every one of the apostles (except one, who died of old age) chose to be tortured and murdered rather than deny this claim.

Christ is raised from the dead. But we cannot hear this with the same attitude we bring to our listening to the daily news on CNN. We cannot read this story like we read a newspaper. If we do, and if it matters to us, we will either become fundamentalists, or kibitzing heretics. This is not that kind of story. We must “make a quite different place in [our lives] for it.”

Christ has been raised from the dead. How then are we to receive this news? It must be planted, like a seed, in our hearts, in our lives, there to be nourished and watered until it springs up within us, bearing the fruits of divine life, until we become merciful, loving, witnesses of peace, who hunger and thirst for righteousness. And if it is to be planted in our hearts, that means that we must till the soil of our hearts; we must cleanse and purify ourselves. If the seed of divine life is to grow within us and bear fruit, we must confess our sins.

Let us remind ourselves of the reality of what we are here to remember. Christ has been raised from the dead. He was dead, but he is now alive forever. What DOES this mean for us? What does it mean for YOU?

When the risen Lord appeared to the disciples in the upper room, when Thomas was not there, they later said to him, “We have seen the Lord.” It is in the light of the resurrection that the IDENTITY of Jesus becomes manifest to those who have followed him. He is the Christ, the One long-awaited by the people of God, the anointed; he is the Son of God. He is the Lord.

When the earliest disciples called Jesus “the Lord” in the light of Easter morning, they were making a bold claim. They were using the same word for this man that the Old Testament had used for the one God, who created the heavens and the earth. Well, therefore, is he confessed as Lord in the light of the resurrection, when the fruit of his death springs up from the earth, on the eighth day, after the Sabbath-rest of God, when (now) the creation is at last complete, and God has been joined to man in an indissoluble union of flesh.

The Lord is risen indeed. And we must make a new place for this news, for this risen life, within ourselves. It must make a difference to us. He must not simply be “God” or “the Paragon”, or the “great teacher”, but he must be “MY Lord and MY God” (John 20.28). Being his disciple must no longer be a cultural association, for his death and resurrection have destroyed the very possibility of self-determination, of inventing for ourselves new histories out of our striving. If he is to be MY Lord, that means that his story must become MY story; my origin and my destination must be in him; my fulfillment, my joy, my peace, and the object of all my desiring must be in him; the shape and direction of my life – the WAY that I live – must be centered and formed by him, with him, in him, and for him.

Von Balthasar said, “In the future, all shape must arise out of [the] gaping void [of his tomb], all wholeness must draw its strength from [his] creating wounds.” From the scars in his hands and feet and side, which have become tokens of the victory Jesus has won once and for all, two thousand years ago. But that same victory must now take place WITHIN ME. Christ must conquer me if I am to belong to him.

Either he will be my Lord, either I will belong to him and live for him, or I will belong to the grave over which he has triumphed, to the old world destined for judgment, under bondage, a fugitive slave of the gods of Egypt, forever lost among the dead.

The Lord is risen indeed. “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” Do not approach the resurrection of Christ as you approach other events of the past. Make an entirely different place for it in your life.

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

happy easter

2010-04-04T07:52:00.000-07:00

The time has come that we have longed for; what greater or better work can be found than to proclaim the might of our risen Lord? Bursting open the doors of the grave, he has displayed to us the glorious banner of his resurrection. Through him the sons of light are born to life eternal; the courts of the kingdom of heaven are opened to believers; and by the law of a blessed intercourse, earthly and heavenly things are interchanged. For by the cross of Christ we have all been redeemed from death, and by his resurrection the life of us all has risen again. While he has assumed our mortal nature, we acknowledge him as the God of majesty; and in the glory of the godhead we confess him God and man: who by dying destroyed our death, and by rising again restored our life, - even Jesus Christ our Lord.

holy cross sermon for palm sunday / year c / 2010

2010-03-28T17:31:00.000-07:00

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

We have come to another Palm Sunday, and so we have come to the gateway of another Holy Week. Year by year I am struck by the misrecognition that characterizes this liturgy, wherein we begin by hailing Jesus as the Messiah who “comes in the name of the Lord” – and we end with the hopes and expectations we have placed in Jesus transformed into derision and the certainty of only one thing: this cannot be the Messiah.

Of course we know that he is. And the juxtaposition of the two Gospel readings we have heard today is meant to drive home the point that the Christ does not conform to our expectations. In the first Gospel, from the liturgy of the palms at the beginning, Jesus rides into Jerusalem with “the multitude of the disciples” rejoicing and praising God with a loud voice (Luke 19.37). But the jubilation of the crowds, with which we began, stands in stark contrast to the silence of the cross, which we have now heard, and in stark contrast to the silence of “his acquaintances and the women who had followed him from Galilee,” standing at a distance and seeing these things.

What links the two parts of today’s liturgy is the sign of the cross we make at every mass at the words “blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” When I was in seminary it was fashionable among people sensitive to feminist concerns to change the wording of the Benedictus to “blessed is THE ONE who comes in the name of the Lord,” so as not to leave women out of the blessedness. But the truth is that there is only ONE who is blessed because there is only ONE who comes in the name of the Lord, and the same crowds who meet Jesus with this acclamation as he rides into Jerusalem, will clamor for his crucifixion, and wag their heads at his death. The misrecognition of the blessed one, who comes in the name of the Lord, is alive and well today.

But what can be said now, at the foot of the cross? God has spoken in the person of his eternal Word, and there is, in a sense, nothing left to say. “…The blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen or can see”, to whom belong honor and eternal dominion (1 Timothy 6.15f) – THIS God has revealed himself on the cross. For hearts open to the initiative and operation of grace, for those who follow him, who receive him, who believe in his name, there is really nothing left to say. And so his acquaintances and the women who had followed him stand in silence and LOOK. (Luke 23.49).

What then is the word of the cross? It is a silent word. It is a word best apprehended – ONLY apprehended – by those who can SHUT UP and LOOK. The eloquence of God’s silence can be understood only by a heart that is itself capable of silence. The word of the cross is thereby first, for us, a word of judgment. We should be convicted by this silence when, in all honesty, we find ourselves more often than not among the very talkative: the council that interrogates Jesus, Pilate and Herod who question him, the derisive soldiers, the jeering crowds. But now, looking on this silent and dead Jesus, can we recognize the King of kings? If we peel off the many layers of religious discourse and preconceptions each of us has caked around his consciousness, can we gaze on this corpse, with the centurion of St. Matthew’s Gospel, and confess him truly to be the Son of God? (Matthew 27.54)

We cannot stand patiently in silence because we lack courage, we will not submit to the judgment of the King’s silence. As we come to Golgotha we begin to suspect the truth of what Jesus reveals. All along, from the silence within Mary’s womb to the silence of the cross and the sepulcher, Jesus of Nazareth has revealed this “blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen or can see.” The fact that this God would reveal himself thus should frighten us, because it means our judgment and the condemnation of our world. Standing there, looking at the cross in silence, with an open heart, means having to admit the absolute worthlessness of what we hold dear – of our ways, our values, our possessions, our notions, our politics, our projects, jobs, titles. Because HERE, at Golgotha, we see how the immortal, all-powerful God is revealed in the world.

Hearing what God has to say means being willing to plead guilty, to be judged, to be stripped. At the cross, if we are willing, the words of Jesus we cite in consolation with respect to others, may finally find a place in our own hearts: to be divine within the world means being poor, naked, homeless, meek; it is to mourn, to hunger and thirst, to be merciful, to be pure, always and only to pursue peace, to be persecuted, to be reviled, misunderstood, maligned and slandered, and ultimately it means to be dead. That’s what it means to be divine in this world.

But who wants to admit that? Who wants to accept it? Hardly anyone did in Jesus’ day, and I think hardly anyone does in ours. The very next verse after the end of the Gospel from the liturgy of the palms, says “when [Jesus] drew near and saw the city he wept over it, saying, ‘Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes.’” (Luke 19.41f)

What darkens our vision are the things we wish to hold onto, and smuggle into the kingdom. As Franny said to Zooey in J.D. Salinger’s novel, we lack “the courage to be an absolute nobody.” If it weren’t so, we would rejoice in every circumstance, we would give thanks and praise to God with every breath, and we would gladly forsake everything to follow Jesus. Rather than finding the counsels of Christian perfection impossible, we would find them easy and light.

The Gospel is perspicuous for those whose hearts are pure, with eyes to see and ears to hear, but all too often it remains impenetrable to us, because of the hardness of our hearts. We cling so tightly to our desires, our predispositions, our little programs of resentment and petty hatreds, and we lack the courage to be an absolute nobody. But on Easter morning, which is just one week away, we will learn that peace is made “by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1.20), and in no other way.

With this in mind, I urge you all to come to each of the liturgies of the great Three Days, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. St. Paul said, “The saying is sure: If we have died with him, we shall also live with him; if we endure, we shall also reign with him,” (2 Timothy 2.11) and the liturgies of this week are how we endure with him together as a community, and in the communion of the Catholic Church, year by year. It is the means by which Jesus makes the way of his suffering and death mystically present to his bride and his body, the Church, whose members we are.

But more than this, and by means of this, I urge you to make room for the reality of the Gospel in your life. In the secrecy of your heart stand and look on the cross in silence. Take time to do this, with a quiet mind, abandoning your preconceptions. Sit quietly and behold your victorious king, who comes to you in this humility and abnegation, and ask yourself what the reality of the cross – the reality of divine life in this world – what it means for you and for your life in this world.

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

holy cross sermon for the last sunday after the epiphany, 2010

2010-02-18T14:29:00.000-08:00

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

Today’s readings speak to us of the glory of the Lord, and of the encounter of the Lord’s disciples with his glory. The Gospel reading from St. Luke is the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus. What I am going to say is a little challenging, so put on your thinking caps. To get us thinking in the right direction, I am going to ask (and suggest and answer to) the question: why does the Lord hide his glory, revealing it only to a few, and in brief glimpses?

St. Luke says that Jesus goes up on a mountain to pray. This is something we see Jesus doing from time to time in the Gospels. Pope Benedict, in his book “Jesus of Nazareth” says that in these discreet Gospel episodes where we see Jesus up on a mountain, usually alone, in prayer – we catch a very brief, dim glimpse of the eternal communion of mutual delight that Jesus shares with the Father, which constitutes the very essence of God himself, the inner life of God, the love that St. John says God IS.

But in the story of the Transfiguration, Jesus does not go up onto a mountain “by himself” (cf. Matt. 14.23), but takes with him Peter, James, and John – the most inner circle of his disciples. And Luke says that “as he was praying, the appearance of his countenance was altered, and his raiment became dazzling white. And behold, two men talked with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his departure, which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem.” (Luke 9.29ff)

Here we have the crux of the Transfiguration story, from which it takes its name: “the appearance of [Jesus’] countenance was altered, and his raiment became dazzling white.” And Moses, the giver of the Law, and Elijah, representative of the prophetic witness of the Old Covenant, appear “in glory” and speak about Jesus’ death on the cross.

What is happening here? Each year, on the last Sunday before the beginning of Lent, the Church sets this text before us. This year we hear the version from St. Luke’s Gospel; last year we heard St. Mark’s version; and next year we will hear St. Matthew’s. What does the Church wish us to see in the Transfiguration on this last Sunday before the season of Lent?

St. Maximus the Confessor – a great teacher of the faith who lived in the 600’s – wrote about the message and meaning of the Transfiguration. He said (in Chapters on Knowledge):

To those who apply themselves with the utmost zeal to the divine Scriptures the Word as Lord appears under two forms: first, a general and public sight not reserved to a small number of which it is said, “He had no form or comeliness that we should look at him”; the second [form under which the Lord appears to those who apply themselves to the divine Scriptures] is more hidden, and accessible to a small number, to those who have already become as Peter, James, and John, the holy apostles before whom the Lord was transfigured in a glory overpowering the senses, in which "he is beautiful in appearance before the sons of men." Of these two forms, the first is fitting for beginners, the second is proportioned to those who have become perfect in knowledge, insofar as this is attainable. The former is the image of the first coming of the Lord to which the letter of the Gospel refers and which purifies by sufferings those who are in the stage of striving. The latter is a prefiguring of the second and glorious coming in which is understood the Spirit. It transfigures the [disciples] by wisdom with a view toward their deification. By this transfiguration of the Word in them, they behold with unveiled faces the Lord's glory.

This is what we are after. And this is the singular purpose of Lent. Our goal, the goal of all our spiritual striving, is the vision of the Lord with unveiled face, in his glory. We must desire this, because this is the experience of eternal blessedness. This is what will be “going on” in heaven: the unclouded perception of “the king in his beauty”. (Isaiah 33.17) And to discover a DESIRE for this in ourselves is to discover the cornerstone of salvation. And so we have to foster this desire in ourselves, and when we find it, even fleetingly, we have to run after it, nourish it, and coax it to grow. And this is the life of Christian devotion, and it is broadly speaking the point of Lent.

The perception of the “king in his beauty” is what the story of the Transfiguration is all about. Yet what is its “content”? What can we say about this vision? We may certainly say that it is the perception of the hidden glory of God – a glory that often – usually – remains hidden from many of Jesus’ own disciples, a glory that seems prone to be caught only in glimpses and for brief moments in this life, even for the greatest saints. But even if it is a glory that remains hidden, we can yet come to know it. For, as St. Paul says, “it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” (2 Cor. 4.6)

So why does God hide his glory? I think it is because of his great mercy toward us, because our nature could not bear the sudden disclosure of the Lord’s glory. We would be undone. We read in the Old Testament today of Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai, where he had encountered the Lord. Exodus says “when Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him.” (Ex. 34.30) But when Moses was on the mountain, when he asked to see the Lord’s glory, the Lord told him “No,” – “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you my name `The LORD'; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live.” (Ex. 33.19f) And the Lord hid Moses in the cleft of the rock and made his glory to pass by, and allowed Moses to see him from behind.

So it remains for us. The Lord is with us even now, particularly in the tabernacle, veiled under the species of bread, yet we are separated even from his presence there by veils – literally: there is a veil over the ciborium that holds the consecrated hosts, and a veil that covers the tabernacle itself. The Lord “sits among us silently and secretly. When we approach Him, we know it only by faith; and when He manifests Himself to us, it is without our being able to realize to ourselves that manifestation.” (JH Newman in Sermon 1: Worship, A Preparation for Christ’s Coming)

Yet why? What is it about the Lord’s glory, and its sudden disclosure that means the undoing of worldly nature? Why can even the very pure only bear it, at best, in brief glimpses? Our Archbishop of Canterubry, Rowan Williams, has said “The hidden glory is not simply an arbitrary paradox or simply a consequence of the impossibility of God appearing as God in the created order: it is the outworking in finite form of the eternal self-yielding, self-hiding… of the Son before the Father, the Son who does not will to be 'visible' except as the living act of the Father.” (from Theology in the Face of Jesus) In other words, the disclosure of the Lord’s glory is the disclosure of the mystery of divine love. We can’t bear it because we are wrapped up in the world’s “system” of carefully managed egoism. To be ready to encounter the Lord’s glory we must first be absolutely willing to be “decentered” and dispossessed of self. And that prospect, if we are honest, is a terrifying one. It requires perfect trust.

As the believer begins to be free of self-absorption, s/he begins to see a little of what might be thinkable about a God wholly free of self-interest. Such a God is, on the one hand, free to be present without self-protection or reserve in any place, including the places most remote from 'heaven': he can be in the hell of suffering and abandonment without loss of self, since the divine self is utterly invested in the other; and on the other hand, such a God cannot be conceived as an eternal individual self, but as a life lived eternally in that 'investment' in the other. Thus the believer perceives what I have called the interiority and integrity of God, the resource and solidity of divine life: what is indestructibly solid in God is this life-in-the-other. To see the freedom of God to be in the cross is to see glory, because it is to see how God's utterly non-negotiable presence and action can be real in the physical body of the tortured and dying Jesus.

That is why the Lord’s transfiguration is perennially held before us on the last Sunday before Lent: because we are entering into the preparation that leads to the cross, and through it to Easter morning. If we are to reach Easter morning and its glory, we must understand that it is hidden behind “the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations” (Isaiah 25.7), death itself – that God’s glory is to be found by, with, and in the tortured, dying, and dead Jesus.

As this realization is lived-out in the lives of the faithful, it is inevitably a painful and fearful process, but one nevertheless undergirded by a deep peace that transcends circumstance. At the end of today’s Gospel reading, we have an intimation of that: “a cloud came and overshadowed [the disciples]; and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. And a voice came out of the cloud, saying, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’ And when the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone.”

Having come to some knowledge of the glory of the Lord, let us stir up within ourselves a willingness to enter the cloud, trusting in the Lord’s mercy and loving-kindness, and let us attend to the voice of God in the darkness of the cloud bearing witness to his Son. And knowing that the cloud will dissipate and the darkness be turned to light, let us press on with boldness to find Jesus alone.

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

the ordination of a priest

2010-02-18T14:22:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday I had the extraordinary privilege of preaching at the ordination to the priesthood of Fr. Michael Cover, a great friend from seminary. Here is what I said, and a picture of Fr. Michael at the moment he became a priest. My head is barely visible on the right.

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

First of all, I want to say what an honor it was for me when Michael asked if I would preach today – and I want to thank him, and to thank all of you.

I would like to begin by posing this question: what are priests for? Priests do all sorts of things, as I’ve learned in the few years that I have been one. Priests visit and minister to people at every stage of life, from the delivery room to the deathbed; they share in every joy and every sorrow of human existence. They visit nursing homes and prisons, they give out alms to the needy and food to the hungry, and sometimes they have the sad task of turning away the hungry and needy when the alms and the food run out. Priests pray and teach; they lead people in worshiping God; they counsel sinners. It never occurred to me as I was preparing for ordination, but priests also become intimately acquainted with the tediousness of life. Priests manage and administer and host. They make photocopies and prepare budgets; they cook meals and mix drinks; they sweep floors, arrange furniture, change light bulbs, polish silver – and a million other things that run the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous.

These are all aspects of a normal priest’s existence. But what are priests FOR? After all, one doesn’t have to be a priest to visit the sick, to give out alms and food, to run photocopiers or mix drinks. Our Prayer Book also makes it clear that you don’t HAVE TO be a priest to anoint the sick, preside at a wedding, or hear a confession (though, its true, you must be a priest to absolve the penitent). Under some circumstances a deacon or a layman may even minister communion to the faithful. But there is one thing that only a priest may do, from the earliest days of Christianity to today, and that is the central fact and the central act of Christian life: only a priest may offer the Eucharistic Sacrifice of the Lord’s body and blood. THAT is what a priest is for. As Jesus said, to “do THIS in memory of me.” Dom Gregory Dix put it very well. He asked:

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.

THAT is what a priest is for. That is why his hands are anointed and that is the task to which he is set: as the Lord himself said, to “do THIS in memory of me.” And this action is the wellspring of grace from which flows everything else, every other facet of Christian ministry, for laymen and clergy alike: the acceptable offering of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ to the Father for the remission of sins.

From this fact we may draw an important inference, and it is this: PRIESTHOOD DOES NOT BELONG TO MICHAEL COVER. It does not belong to Will Brown, or to Paul Lambert or to Pope Benedict. Priesthood belongs to Jesus Christ, and to him alone, because he alone among human beings offered himself acceptably to the Father – with every ounce of his being, with every breath he took, at every moment of his existence, the life and death of Jesus was perfectly conformed to his loving communion with the Father. And this means that he lived a life and died a death that was perfectly empowered by the Holy Spirit because, as St. Augustine says, “the Holy Spirit IS [that] unutterable communion of the Father and the Son…. [And] In order, therefore, that the communion of [Father and Son] may be signified from a name which is suitable to both, the Holy Spirit is called the gift of both. And this Trinity is one God, alone, good, great, eternal, omnipotent; itself its own unity, deity, greatness, goodness, eternity, omnipotence.” (De Trinitate, Book V, Ch. 11)

And this in turn is why we will invoke the Holy Spirit – when we sing Veni Creator Spiritus, and through the laying on of apostolic hands – because it is only by the Holy Spirit that “the love by which the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father” (ibid. Book XV, Ch. 19) may be ineffably demonstrated; and THIS is the job of the priest at every mass: To show forth this eternal, divine, all-powerful love, which bubbles out (cf. Meister Eckhart) from the inner life of the Holy Trinity in an ecstasy of creation and redemption.

Priesthood belongs to Jesus Christ alone because Jesus Christ demonstrated this ecstatic, all-conquering love ALONE – for three hours, amid darkness and earthquake, at the place of a skull. In this place, on the highest, thinnest pinnacle of creation, Jesus, in his theanthropic solitude, cut off even from the tightest bonds of the love of his all-holy Mother, Jesus Christ broke the power of selfishness, envy, violence, corruption and rot; and there, from the depths of his woundedness, in water and blood, drove out the ruler of this world and demonstrated himself to be the earth’s Judge and the Lord of heaven. Here, on the nuptial bed of the cross, Jesus opened a new way for us, through his sacred heart, to the communion of mutual delight that is his alone, forever and by right, together with the Father.

It is this power acceptably to offer the body and blood of Jesus, which breaks down the dividing walls of hostility (Eph. 2.14) erected by human pride – it is this power of the cross that is being given to Michael today – the power to celebrate the memory of God’s only Son, to show forth the sacrifice of his death (cf. BCP p. 400) for the sins of the whole world, to proclaim his resurrection from the dead and his ascension in the flesh to the right hand of power. Today Michael is being given the power and the authority, in short, to celebrate the mass, to offer to the Father the substantial and inexhaustible contents of the mystery of our faith, the body and blood of his only Son – crucified, died, risen, glorified and reigning forever – and so perpetually to make known to the people who belong to God the all-conquering power of his love.

Michael, I want to leave you with three things. First, I want to exhort you to let your marriage be Eucharistic. Love your wife, and remember that your union with her, as the apostle says, demonstrates the mystery of our redemption (Eph. 5.25); that she shares your priesthood in a unique way, in virtue of the sacramental union of your flesh; and that there is perhaps no better way for you to demonstrate God’s love for his children than by your love for your wife. Let your marriage, your love for one another, be sustained and empowered by the marriage of divine nature and human nature in the one flesh of Jesus Christ, offered acceptably to the Father on the nuptial bed of the cross.

Secondly, I want to exhort you to let your whole priestly life be Eucharistic. Let everything you do – all the sublimities, tediousnesses and absurdities of priestly life and pastoral work – let it all be sustained and empowered by the body and blood of Jesus Christ, offered acceptably to the Father for the remission of sins. For the sake of Jesus, hold the people of God in your heart. Share their joys and allow yourself to be afflicted by their sufferings. Hold them all in prayer – the living and the dead. Remember them at God’s altar, breathe their names into the chalice of Christ’s blood. Live the difficult circumstances of God’s people as their brother; sincerely suffer them in your heart. Draw them, in the power of your Master, out of their anonymity and fear. Acquaint yourself with them and call them by name to walk in safety along the paths of life, to be found again when they become lost, to be loved, and to receive salvation as the supreme gift of God’s love. God has promised to his Church not hirelings, but shepherds after his own heart (Jer. 3.15). And his heart has been made known to us in the sacred heart of his only Son Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd and our great High Priest. Allow your priestly life to be Eucharistic. (cf. JP2 in Pastores Dabo Vobis)

Thirdly, I want you always to remember that this mystery of God’s love is the TRUTH. It is the Gospel. It is to this truth that the whole economy of the Catholic Church bears witness. The blood of the martyrs cries out from the earth to proclaim this truth. When our Lord stood before Pilate he said, “For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.” (John 18.37) Attend to this truth. Listen for his voice in your study, in your life of prayer, in your adoration of our Lord’s sacramental presence. Give your voice, your pen, your hands, always in loving obedience and faithful service of this truth. Let your priestly ministry perpetually deepen into this truth. In this culture of clever incredulity, and in a Church that has in many ways conformed itself to this clever incredulity, suffer no denial of this truth. Allow yourself to be regarded as a fool for the sake of this truth. Live for this truth. Die for this truth.

And remember the words of the apostle, whose ministry you have now come by grace to share, who said: “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” (1 Cor. 2.2ff)

So to God most holy in his divine majesty of trinity-in-unity, to Jesus Christ our Lord and God, made man and crucified for us, to blessed Mary, ever-virgin, from whose glorious purity he took flesh, and to the entire company of the saints in heaven, be everlasting praise, honor, power, and glory, from every creature on earth, and unto us sinners may there be full remission of all our sins, through the blood of Christ’s cross, throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.

holy cross sermon for year c epiphany 3 / January 24 2010

2010-01-26T07:11:00.000-08:00

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

“If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” (1 Cor. 12.27)

In today’s epistle reading, St. Paul expounds the principle of interdependence that is a hallmark of life in the communion of Christ. This is a theme that is currently being taken up, in a very public way, by the Anglican Communion – the worldwide communion of churches of which the Episcopal Church in the USA and the Diocese of Dallas (and therefore Holy Cross, and therefore you and I) are members.

On Sundays before mass here at Holy Cross, in the parish hall, we are looking at the text of the recently-released Anglican Covenant, which attempts to enunciate in a concrete way some the principles of interdependence to which St. Paul speaks throughout his epistles, and particularly in 1 Corinthians, as we have heard today. Anglicans have not done a particularly good job of living-out these principles in recent years, and our very public – and very scandalous – divisions and lawsuits are evidence of that failure.

The church at Corinth, in Paul’s day, suffered from divisions and conflict too, and therefore Paul’s letters to the Corinthians make particularly helpful reading for us. In the opening verses of the section of 1 Corinthians we heard today, Paul reminds us of the objective unity that we share in the Body of Christ: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are ONE body, so it is with Christ. For by ONE Spirit we were all baptized into ONE body -- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free -- and all were made to drink of ONE Spirit.” (1 Cor. 12.12-13)

The unity of the one Catholic Church – and our “commUNION” in that Body – has its source in the inner life of God. As we say in the Nicene Creed: “We believe in ONE God…” And this solitary fact is what separated the earliest Christians, and our elder brothers in faith, the Jews, from the majority of the world’s peoples, who believed in many gods. Elsewhere in 1 Corinthians Paul makes this point more explicitly: “for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” (1 Cor. 8.6) We have our very being – our existence – only from and in the one God. And our calling, our destiny, our salvation, consists in our emergent conformity to the likeness of God in this and every other respect – a conformity that is God’s gift to us through the outpouring of the one Holy Spirit of God.

The very first paragraph of the Anglican Covenant makes this point explicitly, and points out that this emergent conformity to the likeness of the one God is not an abstraction. It takes concrete and tangible form in the life of the Church. Our interdependence in the communion of the Church is therefore not something coincidental; it is not merely a pleasant byproduct of being a Christian, something that just happens, expressing itself in an ability to get along with one another. It is rather a discipline, something we must work-at as individuals and groups within the one Body. It is a task that is not always pleasant, but requires humility, patience, longsuffering, forbearance, and a willingness now always to get one’s own way. But this work is important because it is the only way by which we approach salvation itself – the beatific communion that is nothing less and nothing other than the inner life of God himself.

The Anglican Covenant, drawing, among other things, on 1 Corinthians, puts it this way:

God has called us into communion in Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 1.9). This communion has been “revealed to us” by the Son as being the very divine life of God the Trinity…. St John makes it clear that the communion of life in the Church participates in the communion which is the divine life itself, the life of the Trinity. This life is not a reality remote from us, but one that has been “seen” and “testified to” by the apostles and their followers: “for in the communion of the Church we share in the divine life”[1]. This life of the One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, shapes and displays itself through the very existence and ordering of the Church.

Therefore, to return to the biotic metaphor St. Paul uses in today’s epistle: no part of the body can say to another, “I have no need of you.” (1 Cor. 12.21) To do so is to turn away from the only way to the everlasting life that is the one God’s proper self-possession, and his gift to us in his one Son, Jesus Christ.

After having said that our interdependence in the communion Christ’s Body is no mere abstraction, it begins to sound rather abstract. So what does it mean, in concrete terms? It means self-emptying humility – and so it means, again, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, who emptied himself in great humility, and empowers us to do the same. Again concretely, this means that we must be willing to forsake anything and everything for the sake of Jesus and the communion that is ours in him. As he himself has said, “whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14.33)

It is important to say that when the Lord says that we must renounce “all” things, he means just that. We must be willing to leave everything to follow him to the communion of divine life that is our inheritance in him. This means, first of all, that we must renounce sin. But the point is that any created thing may become sin if we allow it to become an impediment to our communion in Christ. At every level of our life together, we must be willing to abandon things we hold dear – possessions and even relationships, and particularly our opinions and agendas – for the sake of our divine calling to communion in Christ.

It was the Corinthians’ refusal to do this that earned them a very stern rebuke from St. Paul with respect to their presuming to approach the blessed sacrament– the source and summit of our communion in Christ – in a state of selfish alienation from one another. Paul says, “Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks WITHOUT DISCERNING THE BODY eats and drinks judgment upon himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves truly, we should not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are chastened so that we may not be condemned along with the world. So then, my brethren, when you come together to eat, wait for one another…” (1 Cor. 11.28ff)

The do-it-yourself culture of self-sufficiency and rugged individualism on which America feeds, runs absolutely counter to the teaching of the Gospel on this point (and many others). We will be saved TOGETHER, or we will not be saved. And the culture of American self-sufficiency manifests itself under pious, religious guises as well: in the American tendency to “church shop” – to look for a community of faith that meshes with our own opinions and agendas or aesthetic sensibilities; or as in the case the Episcopal Church generally, to cling more tenaciously to our own understanding of justice (or this or that) than we cling to the brothers and sisters to whom God has called us into communion. But let us be clear: there is no justice apart from communion; there is no peace apart from communion; there is no goodness apart from communion; there is no SALVATION apart from communion – because all of these things come to us by, with, and in Jesus Christ alone, because they belong properly and only to him who has received them from his Father.

In the communion of God’s inner-life, bestowed on us in Jesus Christ, and made living and active by the power of the Holy Spirit, we learn the difficult lesson that communion is a discipline of love, and that, as St. Paul says, “love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Cor. 13.4ff) And so must we, for the sake of love, and so for the sake of our communion.

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

holy cross sermon for year c epiphay 2 / january 17 2010

2010-01-26T07:10:00.000-08:00

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

Today’s Gospel speaks to us of the Lord’s first miracle at a wedding in the town of Cana, in Galilee. This story has been cited in the Anglican marriage ritual for almost 500 years. In the marriage ritual in the definitive edition of the Book of Common Prayer – that of 1662 – the priest says to the congregation that marriage “is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man's innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church; which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee.” We teach therefore that Christ’s presence and first miracle at a wedding renew, fulfill, and make holy the intentional joining-together of men and women in marriage, which God ordained and established in the creation of the world.

This significance of the wedding-at-cana story resides on the surface of Scripture, as it were, and is discerned through, as is often the case, through the lens of the how the Church prays liturgically. That is to say: the hallowing of Christian marriage by Christ is there in Scripture, but reading Scripture through the lens of the Church’s common prayer enables us to see what Scripture means. This is often the way it works.

I would like to talk about three other aspects of the wedding-at-cana story: Firstly as a manifestation of Christ’s power; secondly the role of Mary in the story and what we can learn from her role; and thirdly how this story points to Christ himself, the bridegroom of our souls.

First, the Gospel reading is perfectly explicit that this story relates a miracle: Jesus turns water into wine. But this is not a magic trick, and Jesus is not a magician. Today’s Gospel concludes by saying that by means of this miracle – or “sign” as St. John calls it – Jesus “manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” (John 2.11)

Jesus’ sign is a multivalent, prophetic, and poetic thing; and by working this sign, Jesus invites those with eyes to see and ears to hear to believe in him, to understand that he is the anointed of God, who has come to save those who believe in his name: he manifests his glory to his disciples.

Throughout the Old Testament, the prophets had used an abundance of wine as a symbol marking God’s promised deliverance, which was to be accomplished by his anointed – “he who is coming into the world” (John 11.27). The Lord speaks through the prophet Joel, saying “you shall know that I am the LORD your God, who dwell in Zion, my holy mountain. And Jerusalem shall be holy and strangers shall never again pass through it. And in that day the mountains shall drip sweet wine” (Joel 3.17-18); likewise Amos says, “Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when the plowman shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it” (Amos 9.13).

And so Jesus’ emergence onto the seen, the first manifestation of his glory, is in the abundance of wine foretold by the prophets as a sign of God’s vindication of his people. “…And his disciples believed in him.”

Secondly, we ought also to note who instigates this manifestation of Christ’s glory. The Gospel says “…the mother of Jesus was there… [and] when the wine failed, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’” (vv. 1&3) It is Mary who presents the situation’s deficit to Jesus, because of her great faith in the promises of God, fulfilled in her divine Son. And here we should discern a deeper truth: that because Jesus takes flesh from the Virgin – because he takes his human nature from her – it is she who presents to him our brokennesses and deficiencies, in whatever particular form they take in each of our lives. And when we find our humanness depleted, as each of us do from time to time and in a myriad of ways, we should not hesitate to bring our weariness to the Virgin Mother.

Why is this so? Because when we grow weary with toil, when we are hard-pressed with affliction, there is very often a corresponding temptation to unbelief. Satan whispers in our ear at such times that God does not see, or that he does not care, or that he does not exist. The problems with which we are beset as a result of living a human life in this world are accompanied by a deficit of faith as well. But Jesus said “Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and never doubt… [then] even if you say to this mountain, `Be taken up and cast into the sea,' it will be done” (Matthew 21.21); “if you have faith… nothing will be impossible to you” (Matthew 17.20).

When we grow weary and our faith falters, we should fly to Mary and ride the coat-tails of her faith, the faith of the one who, as Scripture says, “BELIEVED that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken… from the Lord” (Luke 1.45) – the therefore who brings who presents our broken humanity to God, but who does so with faith in his power to heal.

When we speak the name of Mary with devotion, she speaks the name of Jesus in return. And on this score, we should notice her final words in this Gospel reading – her final words to “the servants”, but also to us: “Do whatever [Jesus] tells you” (John 2.5). We must be not only hearers of God’s word, but doers (James 1.22). So will we bring ourselves to a place where the glory of Christ can be manifest to us and in us as well.

Thirdly, lastly, and most importantly, this is a love story, a marriage story; and as such it points to the reality that conjugal love has represented from the creation of the world: the marriage of divine nature and human nature that took place in the incarnation of the Word, the person of Jesus himself. In him God took to himself a bride – our broken humanness. In him God loved us. In him God lived and died and rose again for us.

Saint Augustine says, “What marvel, if [Jesus] went to that house to a marriage, Who came into this world to a marriage. For here [Jesus] has his spouse whom he redeemed with his own blood, to whom he gave the pledge of the Spirit, and whom he united to himself in the womb of the Virgin. For the Word is the Bridegroom, and human flesh the bride, and both together are one Son of God and Son of man. [The] womb of the Virgin Mary is his chamber, from which he went for as a bridegroom.”

Therefore let us be friends of the Bridegroom. Let us, with St. John the Baptist, stand and hear him, rejoicing greatly at his voice, that this joy of ours may be full. Let our apprehension of the Lord be accompanied and assisted by the faith of Mary. Let us, at her command, with the servants of the feast, “do whatever Jesus tells us” – that we may be disciples to whom he manifests his glory, empowered to go into the world believing in him; so that as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so may our God rejoice over us (cf. Isaiah 62.5).

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

holy cross sermon for the second sunday after the epiphany / january 17 2010

2010-01-19T08:21:00.000-08:00

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

advent responsory

2009-12-22T08:07:00.000-08:00

I look from afar: and lo, I see the power of God coming, and a cloud covering the whole earth. Go ye out to meet him and say: tell us, art thou he that should come to reign over thy people Israel?

High and low, rich and poor, One with another, go ye out to meet him and say: Hear, O thou shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a sheep:

Tell us, art thou he that should come?

Stir up thy strength, O Lord, and come to reign over thy people Israel.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.

I look from afar: and lo, I see the power of God coming, and a cloud covering the whole earth. Go ye out to meet him and say: tell us, art thou he that should come to reign over thy people Israel?

from pope benedict's encyclical spe salvi - saved through hope

2009-12-12T20:07:00.001-08:00

Paragraph 37. Read the whole thing here.

We can try to limit suffering, to fight against it, but we cannot eliminate it. It is when we attempt to avoid suffering by withdrawing from anything that might involve hurt, when we try to spare ourselves the effort and pain of pursuing truth, love, and goodness, that we drift into a life of emptiness, in which there may be almost no pain, but the dark sensation of meaninglessness and abandonment is all the greater. It is not by sidestepping or fleeing from suffering that we are healed, but rather by our capacity for accepting it, maturing through it and finding meaning through union with Christ, who suffered with infinite love. In this context, I would like to quote a passage from a letter written by the Vietnamese martyr Paul Le-Bao-Tinh († 1857) which illustrates this transformation of suffering through the power of hope springing from faith. “I, Paul, in chains for the name of Christ, wish to relate to you the trials besetting me daily, in order that you may be inflamed with love for God and join with me in his praises, for his mercy is for ever (Ps 136 [135]). The prison here is a true image of everlasting Hell: to cruel tortures of every kind—shackles, iron chains, manacles—are added hatred, vengeance, calumnies, obscene speech, quarrels, evil acts, swearing, curses, as well as anguish and grief. But the God who once freed the three children from the fiery furnace is with me always; he has delivered me from these tribulations and made them sweet, for his mercy is for ever. In the midst of these torments, which usually terrify others, I am, by the grace of God, full of joy and gladness, because I am not alone —Christ is with me ... How am I to bear with the spectacle, as each day I see emperors, mandarins, and their retinue blaspheming your holy name, O Lord, who are enthroned above the Cherubim and Seraphim? (cf. Ps 80:1 [79:2]). Behold, the pagans have trodden your Cross underfoot! Where is your glory? As I see all this, I would, in the ardent love I have for you, prefer to be torn limb from limb and to die as a witness to your love. O Lord, show your power, save me, sustain me, that in my infirmity your power may be shown and may be glorified before the nations ... Beloved brothers, as you hear all these things may you give endless thanks in joy to God, from whom every good proceeds; bless the Lord with me, for his mercy is for ever ... I write these things to you in order that your faith and mine may be united. In the midst of this storm I cast my anchor towards the throne of God, the anchor that is the lively hope in my heart”[28]. This is a letter from “Hell”. It lays bare all the horror of a concentration camp, where to the torments inflicted by tyrants upon their victims is added the outbreak of evil in the victims themselves, such that they in turn become further instruments of their persecutors' cruelty. This is indeed a letter from Hell, but it also reveals the truth of the Psalm text: “If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I sink to the nether world, you are present there ... If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall hide me, and night shall be my light' —for you darkness itself is not dark, and night shines as the day; darkness and light are the same” (Ps 139 [138]:8-12; cf. also Ps 23 [22]:4). Christ descended into “Hell” and is therefore close to those cast into it, transforming their darkness into light. Suffering and torment is still terrible and well- nigh unbearable. Yet the star of hope has risen—the anchor of the heart reaches the very throne of God. Instead of evil being unleashed within man, the light shines victorious: suffering—without ceasing to be suffering—becomes, despite everything, a hymn of praise.

newman apocalyptic

2009-11-22T15:43:00.000-08:00

From Parochial and Plain Sermons:

YEAR after year, as it passes, brings us the same warnings again and again, and none perhaps more impressive than those with which it comes to us at this season. The very frost and cold, rain and gloom, which now befall us, forebode the last dreary days of the world, and in religious hearts raise the thought of them. The year is worn out: spring, summer, autumn, each in turn, have brought their gifts and done their utmost; but they are over, and the end is come. All is past and gone, all has failed, all has sated; we are tired of the past; we would not have the seasons longer; and the austere weather which succeeds, though ungrateful to the body, is in tone with our feelings, and acceptable. Such is the frame of mind which befits the end of the year; and such the frame of mind which comes alike on good and bad at the end of life. The days have come in which they have no pleasure; yet they would hardly be young again, could they be so by wishing it. Life is well enough in its way; but it does not satisfy. Thus the soul is cast forward upon the future, and in proportion as its conscience is clear and its perception keen and true, does it rejoice solemnly that "the night is far spent, the day is at hand," that there are "new heavens and a new earth" to come, though the former are failing; nay, rather that, because they are failing, it will "soon see the King in His beauty," and "behold the land which is very far off." These are feelings for holy men in winter and in age, waiting, in some dejection perhaps, but with comfort on the whole, and calmly though earnestly, for the Advent of Christ.

pope benedict on augustine on the holy spirit

2009-11-07T12:06:00.000-08:00

From a sermon preached by Pope Benedict at World Youth Day, (July 19) 2008. Read the whole thing here.

Augustine’s second insight – the Holy Spirit as abiding love – comes from his study of the First Letter of Saint John. John tells us that ‘God is love’ (1 Jn 4:16). Augustine suggests that while these words refer to the Trinity as a whole they express a particular characteristic of the Holy Spirit. Reflecting on the lasting nature of love - “whoever abides in love remains in God and God in him” (ibid.) - he wondered: is it love or the Holy Spirit which grants the abiding? This is the conclusion he reaches: “The Holy Spirit makes us remain in God and God in us; yet it is love that effects this. The Spirit therefore is God as love!” (De Trinitate, 15.17.31). It is a beautiful explanation: God shares himself as love in the Holy Spirit. What further understanding might we gain from this insight? Love is the sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit! Ideas or voices which lack love – even if they seem sophisticated or knowledgeable – cannot be ‘of the Spirit’ [Job 32.7ff: “I said, `Let days speak, and many years teach wisdom.' But it is the spirit in a man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand”]. Furthermore, love has a particular trait: far from being indulgent or fickle, it has a task or purpose to fulfill: to abide. By its nature love is enduring. Again, dear friends, we catch a further glimpse of how much the Holy Spirit offers our world: love which dispels uncertainty; love which overcomes the fear of betrayal; love which carries eternity within; the true love which draws us into a unity that abides!

from origen's commentary on the gospel of saint matthew / book ii (fragment)

2009-10-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

I have often said that the liberal and the fundamentalist approaches to biblical criticism are two sides of the same coin. To (mis)appropriate something Girard has said (on science and apocalypse, quoted here recently): "In both cases, the Christian text is interpreted as having already said its last word; it is there behind us, not in front of us." Origen has the following incisive bit on the proper handling of the Word of God which, as the author of Hebrews famously says, "is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart" (Heb. 4.12).

The Unity and Harmony of Scripture

Blessed are the peacemakers.... (Matthew 5:9) To the man who is a peacemaker in either sense there is in the Divine oracles nothing crooked or perverse, for they are all plain to those who understand. (Proverbs 8:8-9) And because to such an one there is nothing crooked or perverse, he sees therefore abundance of peace in all the Scriptures, even in those which seem to be at conflict, and in contradiction with one another. And likewise he becomes a third peacemaker as he demonstrates that that which appears to others to be a conflict in the Scriptures is no conflict, and exhibits their concord and peace, whether of the Old Scriptures with the New, or of the Law with the Prophets, or of the Gospels with the Apostolic Scriptures, or of the Apostolic Scriptures with each other. For, also, according to the Preacher, all the Scriptures are words of the wise like goads, and as nails firmly fixed which were given by agreement from one shepherd; (Ecclesiastes 12:11) and there is nothing superfluous in them. But the Word is the one Shepherd of things rational which may have an appearance of discord to those who have not ears to hear, but are truly at perfect concord. For as the different chords of the psalter or the lyre, each of which gives forth a certain sound of its own which seems unlike the sound of another chord, are thought by a man who is not musical and ignorant of the principle of musical harmony, to be inharmonious, because of the dissimilarity of the sounds, so those who are not skilled in hearing the harmony of God in the sacred Scriptures think that the Old is not in harmony with the New, or the Prophets with the Law, or the Gospels with one another, or the Apostle with the Gospel, or with himself, or with the other Apostles. But he who comes instructed in the music of God, being a man wise in word and deed, and, on this account, like another David— which is, by interpretation, skilful with the hand— will bring out the sound of the music of God, having learned from this at the right time to strike the chords, now the chords of the Law, now the Gospel chords in harmony with them, and again the Prophetic chords, and, when reason demands it, the Apostolic chords which are in harmony with the Prophetic, and likewise the Apostolic with those of the Gospels. For he knows that all the Scripture is the one perfect and harmonised instrument of God, which from different sounds gives forth one saving voice to those willing to learn, which stops and restrains every working of an evil spirit, just as the music of David laid to rest the evil spirit in Saul, which also was choking him. (1 Samuel 16:14) You see, then, that he is in the third place a peacemaker, who sees in accordance with the Scripture the peace of it all, and implants this peace in those who rightly seek and make nice distinctions in a genuine spirit.

holy cross sermon for pentecost 21 / year b / proper 25 october 25 2009

2009-10-26T08:45:00.001-07:00

Mark 10.46-52

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

Today’s readings set before us the mystery of suffering, sin and salvation. In the Old Testament reading, from the prophet Isaiah, we hear how we can come to experience separation from God. In the first verses of the reading, the prophet writes: “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, or his ear dull, that it cannot hear; but YOUR INIQUITIES have made a separation between you and your God, and YOUR SINS have hid his face from you so that he does not hear” (Isaiah 1.2).

Sin removes us from the free-flowing stream of God’s grace. Jesus says in St. Matthew’s Gospel that the Father “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5.45). And it is true that God is favorably disposed towards every person he ever created. He has nothing but love, mercy, and compassion for each and every single person, and he sends to each of us nothing but blessing. Nevertheless, to sin is to remove ourselves from this free-flowing stream of God’s love. It is important to note that God never stops loving us. Never. He never punishes. He always forgives, he always loves, he has nothing but compassion and mercy. But we may reject it. We may turn away from it. And when we do, we bring ourselves into darkness and suffering – because apart from God there is only darkness. What we experience as punishment, or the wrath of God, is always the result of our own choice. Therefore Isaiah says “your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you so that he does not hear.” To sin is to remove ourselves from God’s love, from his light, from his mercy.

And this is why sin is often described not as an action, but as a condition or a state of being. This doesn’t mean that there are not sinful actions. It does not mean that we can do whatever we want so long as we try to cultivate the correct state of being. That is a twisted form of legalism. Particular sins, the kinds of actions we normally think of as sins – theft, murder, sexual impurity, lying, and that sort of thing – all LEAD TO the condition of sin. Through indulging in these sorts of things, we wander away from God, and find ourselves without light and love. And then we experience sin as a state of being – a spiritual place – and we experience it as things like bitterness, anger, and eventually despair.

Isaiah describes this state of being in today’s reading. He says “we look for light, and behold, darkness, and for brightness, but we walk in gloom. We grope for the wall like the blind, we grope like those who have no eyes; we stumble at noon as in the twilight, among those in full vigor we are like dead men” (Isaiah 1.9f). This is the state of being to which sinful action eventually leads us: a place of darkness and helplessness, of bitterness, anger, and despair. Sin may begin with our simply wanting to have fun, or to make ourselves happy, or to make ourselves better off. But there is no joy, no happiness, no goodness, apart from God. So every attempt to give these gifts to ourselves is doomed to failure. And it is at the point where we realize that our sinfulness has not made us happy, that we have not gotten the satisfaction we were seeking, that sin as a state of being sets in – where our lives become permeated by the nothingness that flows in sin’s wake: the bitterness, anger, and despair. And because this is an interior state of being – because this process unfolds in our hearts – there is no thing and no circumstance that can change it, that can help us. That’s why Isaiah says “we stumble at noon as in the twilight.” The sun may be shining, the birds chirping, but if there is darkness within us, it doesn’t matter. We are like dead men among those in full vigor. If nothing is done about this, this state of being becomes leads to – it literally becomes – hell.

What is the solution? First of all, we have to be honest about the situation. Human beings are proud creatures. All of us. We don’t like to admit it when we have done wrong, when we’ve done something stupid, or when we’ve gotten ourselves into trouble. And this is why humility is crucial. We have got to admit it. We have got to have the courage to admit that through our own fault, we have brought ourselves into darkness. This is not easy. And the fact that it is so difficult speaks to the depth of our pride – that we have very hard hearts and very hard heads. But unless we can admit our faults, we will only go on spinning our wheels, making our situation worse and worse, until eventually we are dead forever. And the world and the devil conspire against us in this way. They keep holding out to us alternatives to God, who is in truth the only solution. The world and the devil keep encouraging us to look for the answer anywhere other than the place where it can be found – at the feet of Jesus.

Today’s Gospel reading from St. Mark is about this very dynamic. The surface story about Jesus healing a blind man conceals a truer story about each one of us – about sin as a state of being, and about the way out of the darkness to which sin leads. As Jesus is leaving the town of Jericho, on his way to Jerusalem, a blind beggar named Bartimaeus hears that Jesus is passing by, and begins to cry out, saying “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” This prayer should be the cornerstone of our own prayer life: “Jesus, have mercy on me.” Like Bartimaeus, we are all blind beggars, because we have all sinned, and we all labor, to one degree or another, under the condition of sin. Our hearts and minds are darkened, and Jesus is the only one who can help. We are in constant need of his mercy, and therefore we should constantly ask for it in prayer.

Mark goes on to say that “many [in the crowd] rebuked [Bartimaeus], telling him to be silent; but he cried out all the more, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’” (v. 48). This verse is about the conspiracy of the world and the devil, both of which bombard us with the message of infidelity (faithlessness) – that is, both of which constantly attempt to convince us that Jesus cannot save us, for whatever reason. One of most popular reasons bandied about these days, is that Jesus can’t save us because he was a nice, wise philosopher like Buddha. He has lots of nice things to say, but he can’t actually help us, because as wise and as nice as he was, he died two thousand years ago. That’s a lie. A popular lie, but no less of a lie for that. Jesus CAN help us because he rose from the dead and ascended to the right hand of the Father. He is alive, and he has received all authority in heaven and on earth (Matthew 28.18). Not only can he save us, but he is in point of fact the ONLY one who can save us, because he is the only living person with all power and all authority. Therefore, like the blind beggar, Bartimaeus, we should ignore the urgings of the crowd, which tell us that prayer is useless. Like Bartimaeus, we should cry out all the more, imploring Jesus to have mercy.

The ancient scriptural commentator Pseudo-Jerome wrote about this passage, saying the same thing: “Many rebuke [the blind beggar] that he may hold his peace, [and this means that] sins and devils restrain the cry of the poor; [but] he cried all the more, because when the battle waxes great, hands are to be lifted up with crying out to the Rock of help, that is, [to] Jesus of Nazareth.”

Jesus hears his cry. The Gospel says, “Jesus stopped and said [to his disciples], ‘Call him.’ And they called the blind man, saying to him, ‘Take heart; rise, he is calling you.’” (v. 49). Note that Jesus doesn’t call the man himself, but tells his disciples to call him. Often, when we are in sin and darkness, we are deaf to his voice, even as we are blind to his light. So he calls to us through his servants and his ministers. Likewise, sometimes we find ourselves in the position not of the blind beggar, but of one of Jesus’s servants and ministers. And in such a case, our word to those who suffer in sin and darkness, and who are looking for a way out, should be the words from this passage: “Take heart; rise, Jesus is calling you.”

“And throwing off his mantle [Bartimaeus] sprang up and came to Jesus” (v. 50). Jesus calls to us in our blindness. He answers our prayers for mercy. And like Bartimaeus, we must throw off our mantle, and run to Jesus. What does it mean to “throw off our mantle”? St. Bede says “[the one who] throws away his garment and leaps, [is the one] who, [throws] aside the bands of the world, and with unencumbered pace hastens to the Giver of eternal light.” If we want to receive light, we have to be willing to leave behind everything in the world to come to the Giver of light. But what does that mean? It means that we must acknowledge every circumstance, every thing, every human relationship, to have come to us from the Lord. Therefore we must acknowledge that none of it belongs to us ultimately, and that if anyone or anything stands between us and Jesus, we must abandon the impediment and keep running toward the Lord.

“And Jesus said to him, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ And the blind man said to him, ‘Master, let me receive my sight,’ (vv. 51-52). Two critical elements are brought out in these verses: 1) honesty and 2) faith. Bartimaeus has the humility to acknowledge his problem: he is blind – “Master, let me receive my sight.” We too must stop pretending that we are fine just as we are. We are not. If we would be healed and delivered from our suffering and mediocrity, we must admit it. And secondly, we must believe that Jesus has the power to heal us, and ask him for it: “Master, let me receive my sight.”

“And Jesus said to him, ‘Go your way; your faith has made you well.’ And immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way.” Bartimaeus receives illumination and healing from Jesus, and Jesus says to him, “Go your way…” and the passage concludes by saying that Bartimaeus “followed Jesus on the way.” Notice that Bartimaeus’ way has become the way of Jesus, who said “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life” (John 14.6). Bartimaeus follows Jesus. This is how we may know we have been enlightened and healed: we become followers of Jesus. His way becomes our way. Again, St. Bede says the one who “follows Jesus, [is the one] who understands and executes what is good, who imitates [Jesus], who had no wish to prosper in this world, [but] bore reproach and derision.” And where does this way lead? The next verses in Mark’s Gospel says that they drew near to Jerusalem (Mark 11.1), to the city of gold, to the place where God’s glory dwells.

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

holy cross sermon for pentecost 20 / year b / proper 24 / october 18, 2009

2009-10-20T14:06:00.000-07:00

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

In today’s readings the central, challenging mystery of the Gospel begins to become clear, a mystery hidden since the foundation of the world, but one that had been becoming clearer and clearer throughout the history of Israel, and by the revelation of the prophets: that God is a god of love; that, as Jesus says elsewhere, quoting the prophet Hosea, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice” (Matt. 9.13, cf. Hosea 6.6). This is the most central theological truth, and the one that makes Christianity totally unique in the catalogue of religions: “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4.16).

The whole edifice of our faith, Christian spiritual praxis, as well as what we like to think of as the “moral” or “ethical” code by which we are bound as disciples of Jesus, can be rightly understood only as a marinating in, and a living-out of this truth. To inhabit this mystery is what it means to be saved, what it means to become like God. “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”

In today’s Gospel lesson, two of the disciples make a reasonable request of the Lord: “And James and John, the sons of Zeb'edee, came forward to him, and said to him, ‘Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.’ And he said to them, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ And they said to him, ‘Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory’” (Mark 10.35-37). It might perhaps annoy us a little bit when we read this, the presumption of these two disciples and their attempt to cut to the front of the line. But if it annoys us – and it probably should – it does so because the same impulse lies in our own hearts.

It becomes clear that James and John have misunderstood the meaning of the coming of the Kingdom, which Jesus had spent several years proclaiming. And its really no surprise: the whole purpose of his coming might, in a sense, be understood to be to clear up of this confusion which is built into the human condition and which colors our conception of ourselves and of the world and of our relationships to one another. It is the self-seeking and violence that lies in our hearts, and on the foundation of which we organize our individual lives, as well as our cultural forms.

It is for this reason that the eyes of James and John were veiled to the truth. “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” We ask the Lord for the same thing, and in the same spirit, when we ask him for earthly goods – for temporal fulfillment of whatever sort, when we ask him that he grant us to “win” – to become successful – on the world’s terms.

“But Jesus said to them, ‘You do not know what you are asking,’” (v. 38). We do not know what we are asking. As Jesus told Pilate, the Kingdom of God is not of this world (cf. John 18.36). And its coming is according neither to the expectations of the world nor of the flesh.

“Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” The Lord is here indicating the cup of his suffering and the baptism of his death, which are bearing down on him, and he indicates this when he points out that James and John will indeed both drink his cup and share his baptism, though not in the way that they suppose. But the Lord will be crowned, robed, sceptered, and hailed as a king, when he comes to the cross. And on his right hand and on his left there will be two thieves, “those for whom it has been prepared” (v. 40).

The cross is indeed a scandal to all who look on it. And we must confess that the spectacle of Golgotha is not the kingdom of God we have come to expect, nursing as we do the notions of the world and the flesh in our hearts. We expect God to triumph through some progressive ascendency, and we expect our participation in his triumph to be by means of some vindication in the world’s eyes, some victory that all can see and recognize. At the level of human society, we expect the Messiah to come riding an army tank or administering a social program.

We do well to expect the Lord’s vindication to be brought forth as the light, and his just-dealing as the noonday (Ps. 37.6). But we do poorly to assume that our eyes are such that can see it, or our ears such that can hear it. Nevertheless: there are the Lord’s vindication and his justice, reigning from the tree. And the perception of an open heart, a broken and contrite heart, looks on this spectacle, sees the truth, and weeps tears of penitence, realizing that this is the means by which:

“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. [Realizing that] he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; [that] upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed. [That] all we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. [That] he was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; [and] like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is [mute], so he opened not his mouth. [Realizing that] by oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people?”

Jesus came precisely to deliver us from these delusions of ours with respect to the Kingdom, the power, and the glory; from the lies we tell ourselves about the genesis of our desire; from the government of envy and violence, and from the despair and the death to which these cycles give rise.

But – thanks be to God! – “we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4.15-16).

Jesus not only diagnoses the problem, but he gives us the means of overcoming it: by drinking his cup, and being baptized with his baptism. Or, as he says succinctly elsewhere, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8.34). Envy and pride, the roots of our problem, are overcome by humility and self-emptying. In the value-system within which we live, humility and self-emptying are almost inevitably met with violent opposition, because they shed light on the deception by which this world’s Kingdom of violence and death holds sway.

The solution is, as ever, to come to Jesus and allow him to make us like him, by the gift of the Holy Spirit. We see this in the Gospel reading today: “And Jesus CALLED THEM TO HIM… and said to them, ‘You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’” (Mark 10.42ff).

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

more and more girard...

2009-10-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

In the course of declaiming on "science and apocalypse" we find the following....

The Gospels can serve as a foundation for a new culture, similar to all the previous cultures only as a result of a certain distortion of the original message....

Like every history within the sacrificial system, the course of historical Christianity consists in a gradual loosening of legal constraints in proportion to the declining efficacy of ritual mechanisms. We have argued that this development cannot simply be seen as decadence and decomposition. It is also incorrect to view the process as a liberating opening to a future of unlimited 'progress'. In both cases, the Christian text is interpreted as having already said its last word; it is there behind us, not in front of us.

girard on the betrayal of jesus by judas

2009-10-14T01:43:00.000-07:00

To prove beyond a doubt that in the Gospels we should not overemphasize the classic structure of betrayal, we can show that the final element in this structure is not to be found -- the punishment of the traitor. The only difference between Judas and Peter resides, not in the betrayal, but in Judas's inability to come back to Jesus. Judas is not condemned by anyone; he commits suicide, despairing of himself and seeking to make the rupture definitive. The underlying factor here is the idea (a truly evangelical one) that men are never condemned by God: they condemn themselves by their despair. When he takes himself to be solely and uniquely responsible for the death of Jesus, Judas makes a mistake that is the exact opposite (though in the end the equivalent) of Peter's, when Peter states that even if all the other disciples are scandalized, he never will be. Basically, the same pride governs all people; they refuse to recognize that they are all equal in relation to the murder of Jesus, and therefore that they all take part in it in a more or less equivalent way -- however much external factors may appear to differ.

rené girard on the virgin birth

2009-10-11T14:02:00.000-07:00

As readers of this blog (if there are any) will have deduced, I have become a Girardian. The following is a lengthy excerpt from Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. It explains much.

R.G. : Let us turn to the gospel themes that are on the surface most mythical in character, like the virgin birth of Jesus as it appears in Matthew and Luke. We notice at once that behind a superficial appearance of recounting fabulous events, the Gospels are always giving us a message exactly opposite to the one conveyed by mythology: the message of a non-violent deity, who has nothing in common with the epiphanies of the sacred.

Everything that is born of the world and of the 'flesh', as the prologue of John's Gospel puts it, is tainted by violence and ends up by reverting to violence. Every man is the brother of Cain, who was the first to bear the mark of this original violence.

In innumerable episodes of mythical birth, the god copulates with a mortal woman in order to give birth to a hero. Stories of this kind always involve more than a hint of violence. Zeus bears down on Semele, the mother of Dionysus, like a beast of prey upon its victim, and in effect strikes her with lightening. The birth of the gods is always a kind of rape. In every case we rediscover various structural features that have already been touched upon; in particular, the feature of monstrosity. In every case we find the doubling effects, the mad oscillation of difference, and the psychotic alternation between all and nothing. These monstrous couplings between men, gods and beasts are in close correspondence with the phenomenon of reciprocal violence and its method of working itself out. The orgasm that appeases the god is a metaphor for collective violence.

G.L. : And not the other way round, as psychoanalysis would have us believe!

R.G. : Monstrous births provide mythology with a way of alluding to the violence which always haunts it and that gives rise to the most varied meanings. The child whose birth is at the same time human and divine is a particularly relevant metaphor for the thunderous resolution of reciprocal violence as it passes into unanimous, reconciliatory violence and gives birth to a new cultural order.

To put its message across, no doubt the virgin birth of Jesus still resorts to the same 'code' as do the monstrous births of mythology. But precisely because the codes are parallel, we should be able to understand the message and appreciate what is unique to it -- what makes it radically different from the message of mythology.

No relationship of violence exists between those who take part in the virgin birth: the Angel, the Virgin and the Almighty. No one here is playing the role of the mimetic antagonist, in the sense of the 'enemy twins': no one becomes the fascinating obstacle that one is tempted to remove or shatter by violence. The complete absence of any sexual element has nothing to do with repression -- an explanation thought up at the end of the nineteenth century and worthy of the degraded puritanism that produced it. The fact that sexuality is not part of the picture corresponds to the absence of violent mimesis with which myth acquaints us in the form of rape by the gods. This idol -- what we have called the model-obstacle -- is completely different.

In fact, all the themes and terms associated with the virgin bith convey to us a perfect submission to the non-violent will of the God of the Gospels, who in this way prefigures Christ himself:

'Hail, O favoured one, the Lord is with you!' (Luke 1, 28)

The unprecented [sic] event brings no scandal with it. Mary does not set up any obstacle between herself and the Word of God:

'Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word' (Luke 1, 38)

The various episodes around the birth of Christ, make palpable the humble beginnings of the revelation, its complete insignificance from the standpoint of the mighty. Right from the start the child Jesus is excluded and dismissed -- he is a wanderer who does not even have a stone on which to lay his head. The inn has no room for him. Informed by the Magi, Herod searches everywhere for him in order to put him to death.

Throughout these episodes, the Gospels and the Christian tradition, taking their cue from the Old Testament, place in the foreground beings foredoomed to play the part of the victim -- the child, the woman, the pauper and domestic animals.

The Gospels can make use of a mythological code in this account of the birth of JEsus without being brought down to the level of the clumsy mystification and 'mystical naivety', which our philosophers customarily see in them.

Our own period's summary dismissal of them is in fact quite revealing, because reactions have become outmoded for the violent mythologies. We may congratulate ourselves on having made some progress, but this still leaves the message of non-violence out of account -- among all the others, the Christian message alone is universally despised and rejected.

G.L. : So the only religion it is still permissible to disdain and ridicule, in intellectual circles, is also the only one that expresses something different from violence and a failure to come to terms with violence. We can hardly fail to ask ourselves what such a blind spot might imply in a world dominated by nuclear weapons and industrial pollution. Are the beliefs of our intellectuals as out of tune as they themselves like to think with the world that has brought them into being?

R.G. : There is no more telling feature than the inability of the greatest minds in the modern world to grasp the difference between the Christian crib at Christmas-time and the bestial monstrosities of mythological births. Here, for example, is what Nietzsche writes in The Anti-Christ, after he has drawn attention, as a good follower of Hegel, to what he terms the 'atemporal symbolism' of Father and Son that in his view dominates the Christian text:

I am ashamed to recall what the Church has made of this symbolism: has it not placed an Amphitryon story at the threshold of the Christian 'faith'?

We could well ask why Nietzsche might be ashamed to discover in the Gospels something he acclaims enthusiastically when he comes across it somewhere else. After all, the Amphitryon myth is one of the most splendidly Dionysiac myths of all. The birth of Hercules seems to me to square very well with the will to power, and indeed it contains all the elements that Nietzsche praises in the The Birth of Tragedy and other writings.

It is important to try and explain the reason for this shame. It tells us a good deal about the double standard that all modern thought -- taking after Nietzsche and his rivals -- applies to the study of Christian 'mythology'.

A great many modern theologians succumb to the terrorism of modern thought and condemn without a hearing something they are not capable of experiencing even as 'poetry' any more -- the final trace in the world of a spiritual intuition that is fast fading. So Paul Tillich dismisses in the most peremptory way the theme of the virgin birth because of what he calls 'the inadequacy of its internal symbolism'.

In Luke the theme of the virgin birth is not all that different when you come down to it, from the PAuline thesis defining Christ as the second Adam, or the perfect Adam. Saying that Christ is God, born of God, and saying that he has been conceived without sin is stating over again that he is completely alien to the world of violence within which humankind has been imprisoned ever since the foundation of the world: that is to say, ever since Adam. The first Adam was himself also without sin, and it was he who, in becoming the first sinner, caused humankind to enter the vicious circle from which it has never been able to break out. Christ is thus in the same situation as Adam, facing the same temptations as he did -- the same temptations as all humanity, in effect. But he wins the struggle against violence; he wins, on behalf of all humankind, the paradoxical struggle that all people, in the succession of Adam, have always been fated to lose.

If Christ alone is innocent, then Adam is not the only one to be guilty. All men share in this archetypal state of blame, but only to the extent that the chance of becoming free has been offered to them and they have let it slip away. We can say that this sin is indeed original but only becomes actual when knowledge about violence is placed at humanity's disposition.

holy cross sermon for pentecost 19 / year b / proper 23 / october 11 2009

2009-10-11T12:47:00.000-07:00

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

In today’s Gospel, the Lord again confronts us with a difficult truth, namely “How hard it will be for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God” (v. 23). Again, let us not attempt to diminish the Lord’s words, nor look for a clever, critical workaround. As if this saying of the Lord’s were not austere enough, he broadens the scope of the difficulty with his clarification to the disciples: “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!” (v. 24). So the rich among us should take heart. Apparently entry into the Kingdom of God is difficult for the general population as well. But Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (v. 25).

If this seems harsh to us, the disciples thought so too, and once again we are in good company. Mark says that they were exceedingly astonished and asked Jesus, “Then who can be saved?” And Jesus looked at them and said, “With men it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God” (vv. 26-27).

So the discourse ends, as it were, on a hopeful note: all things are possible with God, even the salvation of the rich. But what is so bad about riches? We might plausibly ask ourselves if it isn’t, in fact, possible to do a great deal of good with money. If we have money we can give it away. We can help those who don’t have money. If we have lots of money, we can build hospitals and orphanages and schools. Wherein therefore is the innate iniquity of wealth?

St. Bede points out that a number of saints have been rich people – among them, in the New Testament, St. Joseph of Arimathea. And Bede therefore asks how it is – given Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel – that such people seemingly found their way into the kingdom of God, unless it be, he says, that “they learned to count their riches as nothing, or to quit them altogether.”

As we see time and time again in the witness of Scripture, God looks on the heart. Jesus teaches this lesson many times over in the gospels. The Lord speaks of the irrelevancy of external things when he says that nothing that comes from outside of a man can defile him. But “from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a man” (Mark 7.20ff). Just so, the Lord draws an equivalency between evil thoughts and evil actions when he teaches that anger is the same thing as murder (Matt. 5.22), lust the same thing as adultery (Matt. 5.28).

The Epistle of Titus puts it succinctly: “To the pure all things are pure, but to the corrupt and unbelieving nothing is pure; their very minds and consciences are corrupted” (Titus 1.15).

It is the disposition of our hearts that will be the material condition of our salvation or the loss of our souls. What do we desire? In what do we place our trust? What satisfies us? What brings us joy? Whom do we love? What motivates our action?

The “impossibility” of a rich man entering the kingdom of God does not speak to some magical, innate evil residing in money or even the possession of it. Still less does it speak to God’s antipathy toward a particular class of people (the rich). It speaks rather to the near inevitability of wealth’s corrosion of the heart. It speaks to our weakness in the face of the world’s blandishments. This weakness, this susceptibility of our hearts to corruption, is at the bottom of various categories of sinfulness: envy, jealousy, covetousness: all matters of the heart.

Again St. Bede gives what at first glance may seem a fanciful exposition of what the Lord meant by the camel passing through the eye of a needle. Bede says, “in a higher sense, it is easier for Christ to suffer for those who love Him, than for the lovers of this world to turn to Christ; for under the name of camel, he wished HIMSELF to be understood, because he bore the burden our weakness; and by the needle, he understands the prickings, that is, the pains of his passion. By the eye of a needle, therefore, he means the straits of his passion, by which he, as it were, deigned to mend the torn garments of our nature.”

But perhaps this exposition isn’t so fanciful after all, as it gets right to the heart of the matter: the impossibility of salvation from the vantage point of the world, from the vantage point of what is merely human. As WH Auden put it (from “For the Time Being” from his “Christmas Oratorio”): “nothing can save us that is possible / we who must die demand a miracle.” And that miracle is the coming of eternity into history in the person of Jesus Christ, the advent of pure love – pure self-gift – right in the midst of this world of envy and violence we have made for ourselves. But the coming of Jesus means the destruction of every vain attempt to make a life for ourselves, to earn a living from the world’s resources.

Jesus is the poor man. The man who holds onto absolutely nothing, but lets everything go. He is the one who gives to everyone who asks of him. He seeks nothing of his own, desires to possess nothing for himself, but he pursues only the good of those whom he loves. And because of the logic of love (which really is the divine economy), we find in Jesus the true heir divinity, the only-begotten Son of God. And so “there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life” (Mark 10.29-30). Why persecutions? Because the Gospel – and the love of God which it reveals – is subversive. It exposes the futility and emptiness of the world’s means as well as its ends, and the world hates that.

When we encounter Jesus – animated as he is at every moment of his existence by divine love, which is a consuming fire (Heb. 12.29) – when we come to him, we are faced with a choice. What do we do? Do we return to our acquisitiveness? Do we spend ourselves in the pursuit of what in truth will never make us happy, of what is ephemeral, of what will in the end melt like wax at the fire? Do we return to our petty, bourgeois, do-gooder religiosity? …But God demands a LIFE (cf. Gen. 9.5, et passim). And so in the light of the truth which is Christ, we are faced with a choice. What will we do? Where will we look for life? Will we continue spinning our wheels, thinking that happiness is just around some next corner? Or will we have the courage to let go of ourselves and the silly identities we have constructed in our weakness, the houses we have built on sand? Will we have the courage to become empty for the sake of Christ, and so be consumed by the fire of God’s love?

There is an ancient Christian text, from the fifth century, called “The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.” One of the stories from it goes like this:

“Father Lot went to see Father Joseph and said to him, ‘Father as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace, and, as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?’ Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, ‘IF YOU WILL, YOU CAN BECOME ALL FLAME.’”

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

yet more girard

2009-10-11T12:42:00.001-07:00

To recognize Christ as God is to recognize him as the only being capable of rising above the violence that had, up to that point, absolutely transcended mankind. Violence is the controlling agent in every form of mythic or cultural structure, and Christ is the only agent who is capable of escaping from these structures and freeing us from their dominance. This is the only hypothesis that enables us to account for the revelation in the Gospel of what violence does to us and the accompanying power of that revelation to deconstruct the whole range of cultural texts, without exception. We do not have to adopt the hypothesis of Christ's divinity because it has always been accepted by orthodox Christians. Instead, this hypothesis is orthodox because in the first years of Christianity there existed a rigorous (though not yet explicit) intuition of the logic determining the gospel text.

more girard

2009-10-10T11:19:00.001-07:00

Violence is unable to bear the presence of a being that owes it nothing -- that pays it no homage and threatens its kingship in the only way possible. What violence does not and cannot comprehend is that, in getting rid of Jesus by the usual means, it falls into a trap[ that could only be laid by innocence of such a kind because it is not really a trap: there is nothing hidden. Violence reveals its own game in such a way that its workings are compromised at their very source; the more it tries to conceal its ridiculous secret from now on, by forcing itself into action, the more it will succeed in revealing itself.

We can see why the Passion is found between the preaching of the Kingdom and the Apocalypse. It is an event that is ignored by historians, who have much more serious topics, with their Tiberius and their Caligula; it is a phenomenon that has no importance in the eyes of the world -- incapable, at least in principle, of setting up or reinstating a cultural order but very effective, in spite of those who know better, in carrying out subversion. In the long run, it is quite capable of undermining and overturning the whole cultural order and supplying the secret motive force of all subsequent history.

(again from Things Hidden...)

girard on matthew 23.27

2009-10-05T16:18:00.001-07:00

Deep within the individual, as within the religious and cultural
systems that fashion the individual, something is hidden, and this is
not merely the individual 'sin' of modern religiosity or the
'complexes' of psychoanalysis. It is invariably a corpse that as it
rots spreads it's 'uncleanness' everywhere.

yet more girard

2009-10-02T21:36:00.000-07:00

There can be no question of producing more pious vows and hypocritical formulae. Rather, we will more and more often find ourselves faced with an implacable necessity. The definitive renuniation of violence, without any second thoughts, will become for us the condition sine qua non for the survival of humanity itself and for each one of us.

another from girard....

2009-10-02T20:31:00.000-07:00

I am fully in favor of the major liquidation of philosophy and the sciences of man that is currently taking place. The grave-digger's work is necessary, for what is being buried is truly dead -- even if there is too much ceremony. There is no need to exaggerate the task and make the undertaker the prototype of all future cultural life. We ought to let the dead bury the dead, and move on to other things.

The danger today, in fact, is that as the public becomes weary of these interminable funerary rites for meaning and of the funerary metaphysics it has swallowed for so long now, it will lose sight of the real accomplishments of modern thought, all of which are critical and negative. I subscribe to many facets of this criticism and find it indispensable. I simply refuse to admit that there is nothing more to be done from now on than to mull over past failures.

(From Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, as below)

rené girard on violence and the contemporary situation

2009-10-02T19:50:00.001-07:00

...the process that leads to the discovery of the victimage mechanism cannot possibly be a smooth, peaceful process. At this point we already know enough about the paradoxical and violent cultural remedies for violence to understand that any increase in our knowledge of the victimage mechanism, anything that tends to disengage or reveal violence, represents considerable progress, at least potentially, in intellectual and ethical respects, but that also, in the short term, it will mean a terrible recrudescence of that same violence, often in odious and atrocious forms, since sacrificial mechanisms become progressively less efficient and less capable of renewal. One can imagine that human beings, confronted with this situation, will be tempted to restore the lost effectiveness of the traditional remedy by forever increasing the dosage, immolating more and more victims in holocausts that are meant to be sacrificial but that are progressively less so. The always arbitrary but culturally real difference between legitimate and illegitimate violence will weaken. Its power of illusion diminishes, and henceforth there are only enemy brothers to confront one another in its name, which all will claim to embody but which in reality no longer exists; cultural difference will be distinguished less and less from the mimetic crisis to which it returns. Any sense of legality will be lost.

from 'the city of god' (book 21, chapter 8), by st. augustine

2009-09-18T13:44:00.000-07:00

"Of Miracles Which Were Wrought that the World Might Believe in Christ, and Which Have Not Ceased Since the World Believed.”

Why, they say, are those miracles, which you affirm were wrought formerly, wrought no longer? I might, indeed, reply that miracles were necessary before the world believed, in order that it might believe. And whoever now-a-days demands to see prodigies that he may believe, is himself a great prodigy, because he does not believe, though the whole world does. But they make these objections for the sole purpose of insinuating that even those former miracles were never wrought. How, then, is it that everywhere Christ is celebrated with such firm belief in His resurrection and ascension? How is it that in enlightened times, in which every impossibility is rejected, the world has, without any miracles, believed things marvellously incredible? Or will they say that these things were credible, and therefore were credited? Why then do they themselves not believe? Our argument, therefore, is a summary one— either incredible things which were not witnessed have caused the world to believe other incredible things which both occurred and were witnessed, or this matter was so credible that it needed no miracles in proof of it, and therefore convicts these unbelievers of unpardonable scepticism. This I might say for the sake of refuting these most frivolous objectors. But we cannot deny that many miracles were wrought to confirm that one grand and health-giving miracle of Christ's ascension to heaven with the flesh in which He rose. For these most trustworthy books of ours contain in one narrative both the miracles that were wrought and the creed which they were wrought to confirm. The miracles were published that they might produce faith, and the faith which they produced brought them into greater prominence. For they are read in congregations that they may be believed, and yet they would not be so read unless they were believed. For even now miracles are wrought in the name of Christ, whether by His sacraments or by the prayers or relics of His saints; but they are not so brilliant and conspicuous as to cause them to be published with such glory as accompanied the former miracles. For the canon of the sacred writings, which behooved to be closed, causes those to be everywhere recited, and to sink into the memory of all the congregations; but these modern miracles are scarcely known even to the whole population in the midst of which they are wrought, and at the best are confined to one spot. For frequently they are known only to a very few persons, while all the rest are ignorant of them, especially if the state is a large one; and when they are reported to other persons in other localities, there is no sufficient authority to give them prompt and unwavering credence, although they are reported to the faithful by the faithful.

The miracle which was wrought at Milan when I was there, and by which a blind man was restored to sight, could come to the knowledge of many; for not only is the city a large one, but also the emperor was there at the time, and the occurrence was witnessed by an immense concourse of people that had gathered to the bodies of the martyrs Protasius and Gervasius, which had long lain concealed and unknown, but were now made known to the bishop Ambrose in a dream, and discovered by him. By virtue of these remains the darkness of that blind man was scattered, and he saw the light of day.

But who but a very small number are aware of the cure which was wrought upon Innocentius, ex-advocate of the deputy prefecture, a cure wrought at Carthage, in my presence, and under my own eyes? For when I and my brother Alypius, who were not yet clergymen, though already servants of God, came from abroad, this man received us, and made us live with him, for he and all his household were devotedly pious. He was being treated by medical men for fistulæ, of which he had a large number intricately seated in the rectum. He had already undergone an operation, and the surgeons were using every means at their command for his relief. In that operation he had suffered long-continued and acute pain; yet, among the many folds of the gut, one had escaped the operators so entirely, that, though they ought to have laid it open with the knife, they never touched it. And thus, though all those that had been opened were cured, this one remained as it was, and frustrated all their labor. The patient, having his suspicions awakened by the delay thus occasioned, and fearing greatly a second operation, which another medical man— one of his own domestics— had told him he must undergo, though this man had not even been allowed to witness the first operation, and had been banished from the house, and with difficulty allowed to come back to his enraged master's presence—the patient, I say, broke out to the surgeons, saying, Are you going to cut me again? Are you, after all, to fulfill the prediction of that man whom you would not allow even to be present? The surgeons laughed at the unskillful doctor, and soothed their patient's fears with fair words and promises. So several days passed, and yet nothing they tried did him good. Still they persisted in promising that they would cure that fistula by drugs, without the knife. They called in also another old practitioner of great repute in that department, Ammonius (for he was still alive at that time); and he, after examining the part, promised the same result as themselves from their care and skill. On this great authority, the patient became confident, and, as if already well, vented his good spirits in facetious remarks at the expense of his domestic physician, who had predicted a second operation. To make a long story short, after a number of days had thus uselessly elapsed, the surgeons, wearied and confused, had at last to confess that he could only be cured by the knife. Agitated with excessive fear, he was terrified, and grew pale with dread; and when he collected himself and was able to speak, he ordered them to go away and never to return. Worn out with weeping, and driven by necessity, it occurred to him to call in an Alexandrian, who was at that time esteemed a wonderfully skillful operator, that he might perform the operation his rage would not suffer them to do. But when he had come, and examined with a professional eye the traces of their careful work, he acted the part of a good man, and persuaded his patient to allow those same hands the satisfaction of finishing his cure which had begun it with a skill that excited his admiration, adding that there was no doubt his only hope of a cure was by an operation, but that it was thoroughly inconsistent with his nature to win the credit of the cure by doing the little that remained to be done, and rob of their reward men whose consummate skill, care, and diligence he could not but admire when be saw the traces of their work. They were therefore again received to favor; and it was agreed that, in the presence of the Alexandrian, they should operate on the fistula, which, by the consent of all, could now only be cured by the knife. The operation was deferred till the following day. But when they had left, there arose in the house such a wailing, in sympathy with the excessive despondency of the master, that it seemed to us like the mourning at a funeral, and we could scarcely repress it. Holy men were in the habit of visiting him daily; Saturninus of blessed memory, at that time bishop of Uzali, and the presbyter Gelosus, and the deacons of the church of Carthage; and among these was the bishop Aurelius, who alone of them all survives—a man to be named by us with due reverence—and with him I have often spoken of this affair, as we conversed together about the wonderful works of God, and I have found that he distinctly remembers what I am now relating. When these persons visited him that evening according to their custom, he besought them, with pitiable tears, that they would do him the honor of being present next day at what he judged his funeral rather than his suffering. For such was the terror his former pains had produced, that he made no doubt he would die in the hands of the surgeons. They comforted him, and exhorted him to put his trust in God, and nerve his will like a man. Then we went to prayer; but while we, in the usual way, were kneeling and bending to the ground, he cast himself down, as if some one were hurling him violently to the earth, and began to pray; but in what a manner, with what earnestness and emotion, with what a flood of tears, with what groans and sobs, that shook his whole body, and almost prevented him speaking, who can describe! Whether the others prayed, and had not their attention wholly diverted by this conduct, I do not know. For myself, I could not pray at all. This only I briefly said in my heart: O Lord, what prayers of Your people do You hear if You hear not these? For it seemed to me that nothing could be added to this prayer, unless he expired in praying. We rose from our knees, and, receiving the blessing of the bishop, departed, the patient beseeching his visitors to be present next morning, they exhorting him to keep up his heart. The dreaded day dawned. The servants of God were present, as they had promised to be; the surgeons arrived; all that the circumstances required was ready; the frightful instruments are produced; all look on in wonder and suspense. While those who have most influence with the patient are cheering his fainting spirit, his limbs are arranged on the couch so as to suit the hand of the operator; the knots of the bandages are untied; the part is bared; the surgeon examines it, and, with knife in hand, eagerly looks for the sinus that is to be cut. He searches for it with his eyes; he feels for it with his finger; he applies every kind of scrutiny: he finds a perfectly firm cicatrix! No words of mine can describe the joy, and praise, and thanksgiving to the merciful and almighty God which was poured from the lips of all, with tears of gladness. Let the scene be imagined rather than described!

In the same city of Carthage lived Innocentia, a very devout woman of the highest rank in the state. She had cancer in one of her breasts, a disease which, as physicians say, is incurable. Ordinarily, therefore, they either amputate, and so separate from the body the member on which the disease has seized, or, that the patient's life may be prolonged a little, though death is inevitable even if somewhat delayed, they abandon all remedies, following, as they say, the advice of Hippocrates. This the lady we speak of had been advised to by a skillful physician, who was intimate with her family; and she betook herself to God alone by prayer. On the approach of Easter, she was instructed in a dream to wait for the first woman that came out from the baptistery after being baptized, and to ask her to make the sign of Christ upon her sore. She did so, and was immediately cured. The physician who had advised her to apply no remedy if she wished to live a little longer, when he had examined her after this, and found that she who, on his former examination, was afflicted with that disease was now perfectly cured, eagerly asked her what remedy she had used, anxious, as we may well believe, to discover the drug which should defeat the decision of Hippocrates. But when she told him what had happened, he is said to have replied, with religious politeness, though with a contemptuous tone, and an expression which made her fear he would utter some blasphemy against Christ, I thought you would make some great discovery to me. She, shuddering at his indifference, quickly replied, What great thing was it for Christ to heal a cancer, who raised one who had been four days dead? When, therefore, I had heard this, I was extremely indignant that so great a miracle wrought in that well-known city, and on a person who was certainly not obscure, should not be divulged, and I considered that she should be spoken to, if not reprimanded on this score. And when she replied to me that she had not kept silence on the subject, I asked the women with whom she was best acquainted whether they had ever heard of this before. They told me they knew nothing of it. See, I said, what your not keeping silence amounts to, since not even those who are so familiar with you know of it. And as I had only briefly heard the story, I made her tell how the whole thing happened, from beginning to end, while the other women listened in great astonishment, and glorified God.

A gouty doctor of the same city, when he had given in his name for baptism, and had been prohibited the day before his baptism from being baptized that year, by black woolly-haired boys who appeared to him in his dreams, and whom he understood to be devils, and when, though they trod on his feet, and inflicted the acutest pain he had ever yet experienced, he refused to obey them, but overcame them, and would not defer being washed in the laver of regeneration, was relieved in the very act of baptism, not only of the extraordinary pain he was tortured with, but also of the disease itself, so that, though he lived a long time afterwards, he never suffered from gout; and yet who knows of this miracle? We, however, do know it, and so, too, do the small number of brethren who were in the neighborhood, and to whose ears it might come.

An old comedian of Curubis was cured at baptism not only of paralysis, but also of hernia, and, being delivered from both afflictions, came up out of the font of regeneration as if he had had nothing wrong with his body. Who outside of Curubis knows of this, or who but a very few who might hear it elsewhere? But we, when we heard of it, made the man come to Carthage, by order of the holy bishop Aurelius, although we had already ascertained the fact on the information of persons whose word we could not doubt.

Hesperius, of a tribunitian family, and a neighbor of our own, has a farm called Zubedi in the Fussalian district; and, finding that his family, his cattle, and his servants were suffering from the malice of evil spirits, he asked our presbyters, during my absence, that one of them would go with him and banish the spirits by his prayers. One went, offered there the sacrifice of the body of Christ, praying with all his might that that vexation might cease. It did cease immediately, through God's mercy. Now he had received from a friend of his own some holy earth brought from Jerusalem, where Christ, having been buried, rose again the third day. This earth he had hung up in his bedroom to preserve himself from harm. But when his house was purged of that demoniacal invasion, he began to consider what should be done with the earth; for his reverence for it made him unwilling to have it any longer in his bedroom. It so happened that I and Maximinus bishop of Synita, and then my colleague, were in the neighborhood. Hesperius asked us to visit him, and we did so. When he had related all the circumstances, he begged that the earth might be buried somewhere, and that the spot should be made a place of prayer where Christians might assemble for the worship of God. We made no objection: it was done as he desired. There was in that neighborhood a young countryman who was paralytic, who, when he heard of this, begged his parents to take him without delay to that holy place. When he had been brought there, he prayed, and immediately went away on his own feet perfectly cured.

There is a country-seat called Victoriana, less than thirty miles from Hippo-regius. At it there is a monument to the Milanese martyrs, Protasius and Gervasius. Thither a young man was carried, who, when he was watering his horse one summer day at noon in a pool of a river, had been taken possession of by a devil. As he lay at the monument, near death, or even quite like a dead person, the lady of the manor, with her maids and religious attendants, entered the place for evening prayer and praise, as her custom was, and they began to sing hymns. At this sound the young man, as if electrified, was thoroughly aroused, and with frightful screaming seized the altar, and held it as if he did not dare or were not able to let it go, and as if he were fixed or tied to it; and the devil in him, with loud lamentation, besought that he might be spared, and confessed where and when and how he took possession of the youth. At last, declaring that he would go out of him, he named one by one the parts of his body which he threatened to mutilate as he went out and with these words he departed from the man. But his eye, falling out on his cheek, hung by a slender vein as by a root, and the whole of the pupil which had been black became white. When this was witnessed by those present (others too had now gathered to his cries, and had all joined in prayer for him), although they were delighted that he had recovered his sanity of mind, yet, on the other hand, they were grieved about his eye, and said he should seek medical advice. But his sister's husband, who had brought him there, said, God, who has banished the devil, is able to restore his eye at the prayers of His saints. Therewith he replaced the eye that was fallen out and hanging, and bound it in its place with his handkerchief as well as he could, and advised him not to loose the bandage for seven days. When he did so, he found it quite healthy. Others also were cured there, but of them it were tedious to speak.

I know that a young woman of Hippo was immediately dispossessed of a devil, on anointing herself with oil, mixed with the tears of the prebsyter who had been praying for her. I know also that a bishop once prayed for a demoniac young man whom he never saw, and that he was cured on the spot.

There was a fellow-townsman of ours at Hippo, Florentius, an old man, religious and poor, who supported himself as a tailor. Having lost his coat, and not having means to buy another, he prayed to the Twenty Martyrs, who have a very celebrated memorial shrine in our town, begging in a distinct voice that he might be clothed. Some scoffing young men, who happened to be present, heard him, and followed him with their sarcasm as he went away, as if he had asked the martyrs for fifty pence to buy a coat. But he, walking on in silence, saw on the shore a great fish, gasping as if just cast up, and having secured it with the good-natured assistance of the youths, he sold it for curing to a cook of the name of Catosus, a good Christian man, telling him how he had come by it, and receiving for it three hundred pence, which he laid out in wool, that his wife might exercise her skill upon, and make into a coat for him. But, on cutting up the fish, the cook found a gold ring in its belly; and immediately, moved with compassion, and influenced, too, by religious fear, gave it up to the man, saying, See how the Twenty Martyrs have clothed you.

When the bishop Projectus was bringing the relics of the most glorious martyr Stephen to the waters of Tibilis, a great concourse of people came to meet him at the shrine. There a blind woman entreated that she might be led to the bishop who was carrying the relics. He gave her the flowers he was carrying. She took them, applied them to her eyes, and immediately saw. Those who were present were astounded, while she, with every expression of joy, preceded them, pursuing her way without further need of a guide.

Lucillus bishop of Sinita, in the neighborhood of the colonial town of Hippo, was carrying in procession some relics of the same martyr, which had been deposited in the castle of Sinita. A fistula under which he had long labored, and which his private physician was watching an opportunity to cut, was suddenly cured by the mere carrying of that sacred fardel, — at least, afterwards there was no trace of it in his body.

Eucharius, a Spanish priest, residing at Calama, was for a long time a sufferer from stone. By the relics of the same martyr, which the bishop Possidius brought him, he was cured. Afterwards the same priest, sinking under another disease, was lying dead, and already they were binding his hands. By the succor of the same martyr he was raised to life, the priest's cloak having been brought from the oratory and laid upon the corpse.

There was there an old nobleman named Martial, who had a great aversion to the Christian religion, but whose daughter was a Christian, while her husband had been baptized that same year. When he was ill, they besought him with tears and prayers to become a Christian, but he positively refused, and dismissed them from his presence in a storm of indignation. It occurred to the son-in-law to go to the oratory of St. Stephen, and there pray for him with all earnestness that God might give him a right mind, so that he should not delay believing in Christ. This he did with great groaning and tears, and the burning fervor of sincere piety; then, as he left the place, he took some of the flowers that were lying there, and, as it was already night, laid them by his father's head, who so slept. And lo! before dawn, he cries out for some one to run for the bishop; but he happened at that time to be with me at Hippo. So when he had heard that he was from home, he asked the presbyters to come. They came. To the joy and amazement of all, he declared that he believed, and he was baptized. As long as he remained in life, these words were ever on his lips: Christ, receive my spirit, though he was not aware that these were the last words of the most blessed Stephen when he was stoned by the Jews. They were his last words also, for not long after he himself also gave up the ghost.

There, too, by the same martyr, two men, one a citizen, the other a stranger, were cured of gout; but while the citizen was absolutely cured, the stranger was only informed what he should apply when the pain returned; and when he followed this advice, the pain was at once relieved.

Audurus is the name of an estate, where there is a church that contains a memorial shrine of the martyr Stephen. It happened that, as a little boy was playing in the court, the oxen drawing a wagon went out of the track and crushed him with the wheel, so that immediately he seemed at his last gasp. His mother snatched him up, and laid him at the shrine, and not only did he revive, but also appeared uninjured.

A religious female, who lived at Caspalium, a neighboring estate, when she was so ill as to be despaired of, had her dress brought to this shrine, but before it was brought back she had gone. However, her parents wrapped her corpse in the dress, and, her breath returning, she became quite well.

At Hippo a Syrian called Bassus was praying at the relics of the same martyr for his daughter, who was dangerously ill. He too had brought her dress with him to the shrine. But as he prayed, behold, his servants ran from the house to tell him she was dead. His friends, however, intercepted them, and forbade them to tell him, lest he should bewail her in public. And when he had returned to his house, which was already ringing with the lamentations of his family, and had thrown on his daughter's body the dress he was carrying, she was restored to life.

There, too, the son of a man, Irenæus, one of our tax-gatherers, took ill and died. And while his body was lying lifeless, and the last rites were being prepared, amidst the weeping and mourning of all, one of the friends who were consoling the father suggested that the body should be anointed with the oil of the same martyr. It was done, and he revived.

Likewise Eleusinus, a man of tribunitian rank among us, laid his infant son, who had died, on the shrine of the martyr, which is in the suburb where he lived, and, after prayer, which he poured out there with many tears, he took up his child alive.

What am I to do? I am so pressed by the promise of finishing this work, that I cannot record all the miracles I know; and doubtless several of our adherents, when they read what I have narrated, will regret that I have omitted so many which they, as well as I, certainly know. Even now I beg these persons to excuse me, and to consider how long it would take me to relate all those miracles, which the necessity of finishing the work I have undertaken forces me to omit. For were I to be silent of all others, and to record exclusively the miracles of healing which were wrought in the district of Calama and of Hippo by means of this martyr— I mean the most glorious Stephen— they would fill many volumes; and yet all even of these could not be collected, but only those of which narratives have been written for public recital. For when I saw, in our own times, frequent signs of the presence of divine powers similar to those which had been given of old, I desired that narratives might be written, judging that the multitude should not remain ignorant of these things. It is not yet two years since these relics were first brought to Hippo-regius, and though many of the miracles which have been wrought by it have not, as I have the most certain means of knowing, been recorded, those which have been published amount to almost seventy at the hour at which I write. But at Calama, where these relics have been for a longer time, and where more of the miracles were narrated for public information, there are incomparably more.

At Uzali, too, a colony near Utica, many signal miracles were, to my knowledge, wrought by the same martyr, whose relics had found a place there by direction of the bishop Evodius, long before we had them at Hippo. But there the custom of publishing narratives does not obtain, or, I should say, did not obtain, for possibly it may now have been begun. For, when I was there recently, a woman of rank, Petronia, had been miraculously cured of a serious illness of long standing, in which all medical appliances had failed, and, with the consent of the above-named bishop of the place, I exhorted her to publish an account of it that might be read to the people. She most promptly obeyed, and inserted in her narrative a circumstance which I cannot omit to mention, though I am compelled to hasten on to the subjects which this work requires me to treat. She said that she had been persuaded by a Jew to wear next her skin, under all her clothes, a hair girdle, and on this girdle a ring, which, instead of a gem, had a stone which had been found in the kidneys of an ox. Girt with this charm, she was making her way to the threshold of the holy martyr. But, after leaving Carthage, and when she had been lodging in her own demesne on the river Bagrada, and was now rising to continue her journey, she saw her ring lying before her feet. In great surprise she examined the hair girdle, and when she found it bound, as it had been, quite firmly with knots, she conjectured that the ring had been worn through and dropped off; but when she found that the ring was itself also perfectly whole, she presumed that by this great miracle she had received somehow a pledge of her cure, whereupon she untied the girdle, and cast it into the river, and the ring along with it. This is not credited by those who do not believe either that the Lord Jesus Christ came forth from His mother's womb without destroying her virginity, and entered among His disciples when the doors were shut; but let them make strict inquiry into this miracle, and if they find it true, let them believe those others. The lady is of distinction, nobly born, married to a nobleman. She resides at Carthage. The city is distinguished, the person is distinguished, so that they who make inquiries cannot fail to find satisfaction. Certainly the martyr himself, by whose prayers she was healed, believed on the Son of her who remained a virgin; on Him who came in among the disciples when the doors were shut; in fine—and to this tends all that we have been retailing—on Him who ascended into heaven with the flesh in which He had risen; and it is because he laid down his life for this faith that such miracles were done by his means.

Even now, therefore, many miracles are wrought, the same God who wrought those we read of still performing them, by whom He will and as He will; but they are not as well known, nor are they beaten into the memory, like gravel, by frequent reading, so that they cannot fall out of mind. For even where, as is now done among ourselves, care is taken that the pamphlets of those who receive benefit be read publicly, yet those who are present hear the narrative but once, and many are absent; and so it comes to pass that even those who are present forget in a few days what they heard, and scarcely one of them can be found who will tell what he heard to one who he knows was not present.

One miracle was wrought among ourselves, which, though no greater than those I have mentioned, was yet so signal and conspicuous, that I suppose there is no inhabitant of Hippo who did not either see or hear of it, none who could possibly forget it. There were seven brothers and three sisters of a noble family of the Cappadocian Cæsarea, who were cursed by their mother, a new-made widow, on account of some wrong they had done her, and which she bitterly resented, and who were visited with so severe a punishment from Heaven, that all of them were seized with a hideous shaking in all their limbs. Unable, while presenting this loathsome appearance, to endure the eyes of their fellow citizens, they wandered over almost the whole Roman world, each following his own direction. Two of them came to Hippo, a brother and a sister, Paulus and Palladia, already known in many other places by the fame of their wretched lot. Now it was about fifteen days before Easter when they came, and they came daily to church, and specially to the relics of the most glorious Stephen, praying that God might now be appeased, and restore their former health. There, and wherever they went, they attracted the attention of every one. Some who had seen them elsewhere, and knew the cause of their trembling, told others as occasion offered. Easter arrived, and on the Lord's day, in the morning, when there was now a large crowd present, and the young man was holding the bars of the holy place where the relics were, and praying, suddenly he fell down, and lay precisely as if asleep, but not trembling as he was wont to do even in sleep. All present were astonished. Some were alarmed, some were moved with pity; and while some were for lifting him up, others prevented them, and said they should rather wait and see what would result. And behold! He rose up, and trembled no more, for he was healed, and stood quite well, scanning those who were scanning him. Who then refrained himself from praising God? The whole church was filled with the voices of those who were shouting and congratulating him. Then they came running to me, where I was sitting ready to come into the church. One after another they throng in, the last comer telling me as news what the first had told me already; and while I rejoiced and inwardly gave God thanks, the young man himself also enters, with a number of others, falls at my knees, is raised up to receive my kiss. We go in to the congregation: the church was full, and ringing with the shouts of joy, Thanks to God! Praised be God! every one joining and shouting on all sides, I have healed the people, and then with still louder voice shouting again. Silence being at last obtained, the customary lessons of the divine Scriptures were read. And when I came to my sermon, I made a few remarks suitable to the occasion and the happy and joyful feeling, not desiring them to listen to me, but rather to consider the eloquence of God in this divine work. The man dined with us, and gave us a careful ac count of his own, his mother's, and his family's calamity. Accordingly, on the following day, after delivering my sermon, I promised that next day I would read his narrative to the people. And when I did so, the third day after Easter Sunday, I made the brother and sister both stand on the steps of the raised place from which I used to speak; and while they stood there their pamphlet was read. The whole congregation, men and women alike, saw the one standing without any unnatural movement, the other trembling in all her limbs; so that those who had not before seen the man himself saw in his sister what the divine compassion had removed from him. In him they saw matter of congratulation, in her subject for prayer. Meanwhile, their pamphlet being finished, I instructed them to withdraw from the gaze of the people; and I had begun to discuss the whole matter somewhat more carefully, when lo! As I was proceeding, other voices are heard from the tomb of the martyr, shouting new congratulations. My audience turned round, and began to run to the tomb. The young woman, when she had come down from the steps where she had been standing, went to pray at the holy relics, and no sooner had she touched the bars than she, in the same way as her brother, collapsed, as if falling asleep, and rose up cured. While, then, we were asking what had happened, and what occasioned this noise of joy, they came into the basilica where we were, leading her from the martyr's tomb in perfect health. Then, indeed, such a shout of wonder rose from men and women together, that the exclamations and the tears seemed like never to come to an end. She was led to the place where she had a little before stood trembling. They now rejoiced that she was like her brother, as before they had mourned that she remained unlike him; and as they had not yet uttered their prayers in her behalf, they perceived that their intention of doing so had been speedily heard. They shouted God's praises without words, but with such a noise that our ears could scarcely bear it. What was there in the hearts of these exultant people but the faith of Christ, for which Stephen had shed his blood?

holy cross sermon for the feast of the holy cross 2009 / our titular feast / 'the living cross'

2009-09-14T11:57:00.000-07:00

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

This year we took as the theme for our festivities, “the Living Cross”. It’s a nice sounding phrase, but what does it mean? Words and phrases – and especially religious words and phrases – have a tendency, through frequent repetition, to kind of go in one ear and out the other. It doesn’t help that we live in a particularly technological age, when our collective poetic imagination has grown somewhat dull, displaced by a surpassing interest in facts and figures. What often seems most concrete – most REAL – to us modern people, are things like interest rates, gas mileage, and hard drive space: things that are measurable, empirically or instrumentally verifiable. The character Uncle Monty, in one of my favorite films, “Withnail and I,” expresses this intuition in his characteristically misguided and appetitive way, when he says to the title characters, “We’re at the end of an age. We live in a land of weather forecasts and breakfasts that set in…. And here we are, we three, perhaps the last island of beauty in the world.”

To understand what might be meant by “The Living Cross”, we must resist this post-enlightenment urge to empiricism and quantification to the exclusion of all else. And there is a resistance to this urge that lives, I believe, in every human heart, deep down; an inexplicable, perhaps ineffable, intuition that makes us restless, but is the bedrock of our satisfaction when we know ourselves to have caught a glimmer of transcendence in something undeniably true, or good, or beautiful. This is the intuition, whispering to us that there is something far less precise in Phi memorized to 12,000 digits, than there is in lines of real poetry:

When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,

The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,

In windless cold that is the heart's heat,

Reflecting in a watery mirror

A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.

(T.S. Eliot in Little Gidding)

The practice of Christianity presupposes the truth of this ineffable intuition. It somehow justifies the ancient, immortal, scientifically impossible exhortations of the “Benedicite” –

O ye showers and dew, bless ye the Lord:

O ye winds of God, bless ye the Lord.

O ye fire and heat, bless ye the Lord:

O ye winter and summer, bless ye the Lord.

O ye dews and frosts, bless ye the Lord:

O ye frost and cold, bless ye the Lord.

O ye ice and snow, bless ye the Lord:

O ye nights and days, bless ye the Lord.

O ye light and darkness, bless ye the Lord.

O ye lightnings and clouds, bless ye the Lord.

O let the earth bless the Lord:

Yea, let is praise him, and magnify him forever.

Jesus Christ is both the ground and the fulfillment of this intuition, because by him and with him and in him, alone, we find the indissoluble union of corporeality and Spirit – of palpability and transcendence. It is in virtue of his living flesh – perfectly and completely animated by the Holy Spirit – that physical createdness is gathered together into a unity, and offered as a perfect oblation of love, a sacrifice acceptable to God. In him – and only in him – fire and heat, frost and cold, lightenings and clouds, and all the whole earth, bless the Lord, praise him and magnify him forever.

The cross of Christ – in its material particularity – is “living” because of its connection with that one perfect oblation of love, the sacrifice that gives life to the world (John 6.51), in view of the merits of which God reconciled “to himself ALL THINGS, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1.20), and in virtue of which Jesus is called the “firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1.15). In Jesus Christ we are able to see beyond the fabric of materiality, and to transcend the modern hegemony of empiricism and comodification, joining in the cosmic song now become “expansive and great” – as we heard Pope Benedict say last week – the chorus of praise that “becomes our union with the language of all creatures… [for] God cannot be spoken of in an abstract way; [but] speaking of God is always… [a hymn]… SINGING for God with the great hymn of [all] creatures which is reflected and made concrete in liturgical PRAISE.”

Jesus Christ, the firstborn of all creation, is the one by whom, and with whom, and in whom all creation joins in the great and eternal hymn of joyful thanksgiving (Eucharist) to the Father, by the power of the Spirit. In Jesus therefore the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, that in the days of the Messiah, “you shall go out in joy, and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands” (Isaiah 55.12).

The Living Cross is therefore the first born of the trees of the field which clap their hands. Drenched in the life-giving blood of the Savior of the whole creation, we can see beyond the mere woodenness of the cross to the truest truth, and we can discern the hymnic joy sung by all the world in, and with, and through the perfect oblation of the Firstborn by which he draws all men to himself, as he says in today’s Gospel, and by which indeed the whole world is gathered into a unity and led forth in peace.

The cross of Christ is indeed the “tree of life” set within the margins of paradise (Gen. 2.9; Rev. 2.7), of whom all who conquer with Christ are granted to eat – and it is in virtue of this truth that, in the ancient Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood”, the visionary poet sees the cross come to life, and hears the Living Cross speak of its own glory:

Now has the time come

when they will honor me far and wide,

men over [all the] earth, and all this great creation,

will pray for themselves to this beacon. [For] on me God's Son

suffered awhile. [And] therefore I, glorious now,

rise under heaven, [that] I may heal

any of those who will reverence me.

(“Dream of the Rood”, lines 80-86)

The cross of Christ is indeed a “Living Cross” – THE Living Cross, because of its situation at the very center of the world’s reception of the Savior’s blood. The cross is the instrument by which God pours his life out on the world that he made, the tree from whose branches we eat the bread of angels, the fruit of immortality. Let us therefore revere the Living Cross. Let us glory in the Living Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, for from it – and from him who died on it – we receive life, salvation, and resurrection.

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

holy cross sermon for pentecost 13 / proper 17 / year b / august 30 2009

2009-08-30T17:25:00.000-07:00

Saint Moses the Black. Read about him.

Mark 7.1-8, 14-15, 21-23

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

Jesus said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me’” (Mark 7.6). Once again in today’s Gospel reading Jesus brings us to the centrality of our heart in the economy of salvation.

The message about hypocrisy in today’s Gospel reading is fairly straightforward and requires little exposition. The “Pharisees… with some of the Scribes” – Jesus’ quotidian antagonists – come to him self-righteous accusations, masquerading as a question: “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with hands defiled?”

And Jesus turns rebukes them with the words of the prophet Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.”

Over the past several weeks, as we have been marinating in the great “bread of heaven” discourse from Saint John’s Gospel. In it we saw the remedy to the problem Jesus elucidates in today’s reading from Mark. Remember that the way to heaven is through coming to Jesus in faith, love, and humility, feeding on his flesh and drinking his blood, and so becoming inebriated, as Theophylact says, with divinity.

Today’s reading zeros in on the necessity of humility and self-emptying in this process. Remember that we must come to the Lord in faith – BELIEVING in him, trusting him. And remember that, as St. Augustine says, this kind of belief is a belief that works by LOVE: An inner trust that seeks the Lord’s will, and so to honor him, and to obey him. And remember that this works by humility and self-surrender, by being willing to let go of everything in order to seek the Lord’s pleasure. This is what St. Paul means when he says: “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Cor. 13.3).

And this attainment of the Lord, of course, is a process that takes place in the heart, in the center of our being, the location of our memory and desire. Jesus said to them: “This people honors me with their lips, but the HEART is far from me.”

Deep in our heart is the place where we keep those things that inform our desires. And Jesus is hear highlighting the necessity of purifying that place, and so making it a fit habitation for God to dwell in. In order to be saved, we must be given entirely to the dynamism that is at work in Christ – the Holy Spirit, who (as the Fathers bear witness) is the love that obtains between the Father and Son. It must be the Holy Spirit who sheds his light on the recesses of our hearts’ depth, who drives out every injury, every wound, every uncleanness, every power of evil, and who displaces all of those things, and begins to speak to the desires within us, enabling us to bear divine fruit in the realm of action, manifesting in our lives: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, [and] self-control” (Galatians 5.22f).

So what is the problem with the Pharisees and Scribes? In what does their hypocrisy consist? It consists in thinking that action by itself can please, or displease, God. You may remember the story of the prophet Samuel being commanded by the Lord to go and anoint a king to replace Saul. Samuel was looking for David, though he didn’t know it at the time. Samuel looked at the sons of Jesse, and his eyes lighted on the most impressive of them, named Eliab; “and [Samuel] thought, ‘Surely the Lord’s anointed is before him.’ But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature… for the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but THE LORD LOOKS ON THE HEART” (1 Sam. 16.6f). And indeed, Samuel had been told by the Lord that the “Lord has sought out a man AFTER HIS OWN HEART” to be king over his people (1 Sam. 13.14).

Purity of heart must therefore be our purpose, if we desire to attain the Kingdom of God. The Lord never withholds himself from us. He says, “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). And in another place he says, “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14.23). The Lord constantly seeks entry into our heart. Our task is to make a place for him there, by cleansing our hearts of “evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness,” and every evil thing that comes from within, and defiles us (Mark 7.21ff). And once we have cleansed our hearts, through tears, self-denial, confession, penance, acts of selflessness, alms, and the other means given to us by God to attain purity, then we must seek the Lord in prayer, and especially in the Blessed Sacrament, the wellspring and pinnacle of all prayer. To eat the bread of angels means to attain to the open contemplation of the Lord, from which vision the heavenly powers draw all their power and vitality (Denis the Carthusian).

But what does this mean? And how does it work? It begins, as St. Paul tells us in today’s epistle reading from Ephesians, with our having “girded [our] loins with truth” (6.14). The preeminent truth with which we gird ourselves is the truth of God himself: that he made us, that he loves us, and that he sent his Son to live and die for the sake of that love. These are the central facts of our faith, with which we must continually confront our minds, through prayer and meditation on Scripture. The truth of God thus becomes a springboard to the contemplation of the Lord in every circumstance. St. Moses the Black, one of the great desert fathers of 4^th century Egypt, said:

God is… to be known [in this life] from the grandeur and beauty of His creatures, from His providence which governs the world day by day, from his righteousness and from the wonders which He shows to His saints in each generation. When we reflect on the measurelessness of His power and His unsleeping eye which looks upon the hidden things of the heart and which nothing can escape, we are filled with the deepest awe, marveling at Him and adoring Him. When we consider that he numbers the raindrops, the sand of the sea and the stars of heaven, we are amazed at the grandeur of His nature and His wisdom. When we think of His ineffable and inexplicable wisdom, His love for mankind, and His limitless long-suffering at man’s innumerable sins, we glorify Him. When we consider His great love for us, in that though we had done nothing good He, being God, deigned to become man in order to save us from delusion, we are roused to longing for Him. When we reflect that He Himself has vanquished in us our adversary, the devil, and that He has given us eternal life if only we would choose and turn towards His goodness, then we venerate Him. There are many similar ways of seeing and apprehending God, which grow in us according to OUR LABOR and to THE DEGREE OF OUR PURIFICATION. (from Vol. 1 of the Kallistos Ware Philokalia, pp. 96-97)

So let us not be hypocritical Pharisees, who outwardly do and say the right things, but inwardly nurse uncleanness. Still less should we avoid hypocrisy by allowing our outward actions to be conformed to the evil within. Rather let us put on the whole armor of God, and incline our hearts to the Lord, knowing that as we were once slaves of sin, we may now renew our obedience from the heart to the standard of teaching to which we have been committed, and having been set free from sin, become slaves of righteousness and sanctification (cf. Romans 6.17ff).

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

rené girard: "ratzinger is right" etc.

2009-08-26T09:38:00.000-07:00

Read it all here.

NPQ: Is Christianity superior to other religions?

Girard: Yes. All of my work has been an effort to show that Christianity is superior and not just another mythology. In mythology, a furious mob mobilizes against scapegoats held responsible for some huge crisis. The sacrifice of the guilty victim through collective violence ends the crisis and founds a new order ordained by the divine. Violence and scapegoating are always present in the mythological definition of the divine itself.

It is true that the structure of the Gospels is similar to that of mythology in which a crisis is resolved through a single victim who unites everybody against him, thus reconciling the community. As the Greeks thought, the shock of death of the victim brings about a catharsis that reconciles. It extinguishes the appetite for violence. For the Greeks, the tragic death of the hero enabled ordinary people to go back to their peaceful lives.

However, in this case, the victim is innocent and the victimizers are guilty. Collective violence against the scapegoat as a sacred, founding act is revealed as a lie. Christ redeems the victimizers through enduring his suffering, imploring God to "forgive them for they know not what they do." He refuses to plead to God to avenge his victimhood with reciprocal violence. Rather, he turns the other cheek.

The victory of the Cross is a victory of love against the scapegoating cycle of violence. It punctures the idea that hatred is a sacred duty.

The Gospels do everything that the (Old Testament) Bible had done before, rehabilitating a victimized prophet, a wrongly accused victim. But they also universalize this rehabilitation. They show that, since the foundation of the world, the victims of all Passion-like murders have been victims of the same mob contagion as Jesus. The Gospels make this revelation complete because they give to the biblical denunciation of idolatry a concrete demonstration of how false gods and their violent cultural systems are generated.

This is the truth missing from mythology, the truth that subverts the violent system of this world. This revelation of collective violence as a lie is the earmark of Christianity. This is what is unique about Christianity. And this uniqueness is true.

holy cross sermon for pentecost 12 / proper 16 / year b / august 23 2009

2009-08-23T13:34:00.000-07:00

John 6.60-69

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

Today we conclude our several-week lectionary excursus on the great Bread of Heaven discourse in St. John’s Gospel. We have seen that in order to have eternal life, we must come to Christ in faith, love, and humility, and that we must feed on him. And we have seen the continuity of the spiritual dimension of this teaching with the bodily dimension, a continuity expressed and located, in the economy of the Church, in the consecrated elements of the Holy Eucharist. For it is the flesh of Jesus Christ – his physical body – which is entirely animated and empowered by the Holy Spirit, and which in consequence, carries out the will of the Father, and brings the Kingdom of God to earth, so that it might truly be said that the Kingdom of God has come near (Luke 10.11), that it has come upon us (Luke 11.20), that it is in the midst of us, that, if we feed on Christ’s flesh, it is within us (Luke 17.21).

Today’s Gospel reading begins with the scandal with which many of the Lord’s own disciples heard his teaching about the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood. Let us remind ourselves of what precisely Jesus had said that caused such consternation even among those who were otherwise well-disposed toward him. In the verses immediately preceding today’s Gospel, verses we encountered last week, the Lord says:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live for ever.” This he said in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum. (John 6.53ff).

And then we have the beginning of today’s reading: “Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?’” And it is indeed a hard saying. But where does the difficulty lie? A strictly literal understanding of the Lord’s words would lead to charges of cannibalism. And indeed in the early Church, in the days of persecution, cannibalism was indeed one of the standard charges trotted out against Christians by unbelievers – and even today many, especially in the Protestant traditions, misunderstand the Catholic Church’s teaching about eating the Lord’s flesh and drinking his blood, in this way. But as St. Paul says, “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3.6).

Jesus does not try to make it any easier for his disciples to understand. We are not cannibals. But the truth – the Word of God, which Jesus speaks – which Jesus IS – is perhaps even more difficult to receive. Theophylact said: the Body of Christ which we receive “is not simply the flesh of man, but [the flesh] of God: and it makes man divine, by inebriating him… with divinity.” Jesus does not soften the lesson to accommodate our incredulity. He makes it even MORE incomprehensible. He says, “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of man ascending where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you that do not believe.” Faith precedes and seeks understanding, as the Latin phrase has it: fides quaerens intellectum. Faith seeking understanding. And the inability of many of Jesus’ disciples to receive his teaching, has its genesis in their failure to BEGIN with faith in Jesus’ PERSON. St. Anselm of Canterbury said: “…the right order requires that we should BELIEVE the deep things of the Christian faith BEFORE we undertake to discuss them by reason” (Cur Deus Homo). “…The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you that do not believe.”

Saint Augustine says: “Christ became the Son of man, of the Virgin Mary here upon earth, and took flesh upon him: he says then, what if you were to see the Son of man ascending where he was before? [He says this in order] to let us know that Christ, God and man, is one person, not two; and [that he is] the object of one faith… He was the Son of man in heaven, as he was Son of God upon earth; the Son of God upon earth by assumption of the flesh, the Son of man in heaven, by the unity of the person.”

The real scandal – the real stumbling block – is the person of Jesus himself. He – his person – is the object of our faith, or the object of our incredulity: the stone, rejected by the builders, on which anyone who falls is broken in pieces (cf. Luke 20.18-19). “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of man ascending where he was before?” Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God – begotten of God from before all worlds – the One by whom, and through whom, and for whom, the universe was brought into being out of nothing. Jesus says, “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail,” and this is the proof of the divine identity of this person: that the Spirit of God has given him life; and that after eons of human flesh, of itself, availing nothing, but ending in every instance in death, it was not so for Jesus, who rose from death on the third day, in the power of the Spirit, never to die again, over whom death no longer has dominion (cf. Romans 6.9).

St. Paul says, “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you” (Romans 8.11). And again, St. Augustine says, “For the flesh does not cleanse of itself, but the Word who assumed it: which Word, being the principle of life in all things, having taken up soul and body, cleanses the souls and bodies of those that believe.” And we return to the centrality of the person of Jesus, who is the eternal Word of God, whose very flesh was given life by the Holy Spirit. What ultimately is the object of our faith? It is not doctrines or systems of ethics; nor even the Bible; and least of all is it works of the flesh, however good they may be. The object of our faith is rather the person of Jesus Christ, on whose flesh and blood we are invited to feast, in faith: faith working by love, and love working by humility.

Only by consuming him, and so being consumed BY him, and incorporated into his Body, does the Spirit come to dwell in us. How do we know that the Holy Spirit dwells in us? We look for its fruit, which, as St. Paul says, is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5.22-23). We do not attain the life-giving Spirit of God by striving for these things, rather we receive the Spirit by feeding on the divine flesh to which the Spirit has given life: by eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ.

It all begins with faith in the person of Jesus Christ, in believing that, in the flesh, he has come to us from God, and that he has returned, in the flesh, to God. And it is this faith to which St. Peter bears simple and eloquent witness at the end of today’s Gospel. Many of Jesus’s disciples had left him over the scandal of his teaching, and “Jesus said to the twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’ Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have BELIEVED, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God,’” (John 6.67ff).

Jesus is – in himself – eternal life; and in his flesh and blood, he gives to us what he himself is.

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

holy cross sermon for pentecost 11 / proper 15 / year b / august 16 2009

2009-08-17T09:15:00.000-07:00

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

Today’s Gospel continues the Lord’s teaching from Saint John’s Gospel, which we have encountered over the past several weeks, about the Bread of Heaven, the food which endures to eternal life, which Jesus says is his flesh. The words of Jesus which we hear in today’s Gospel, he speaks in response to a question put by “the Jews” in the verse just before the beginning of today’s reading. They ask: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (John 6.52).

The great Biblical commentator Theophylact says that the Body of Christ which we receive, “is not simply the flesh of man, but [the flesh] of God: and it makes man divine, by inebriating him, as it were, with divinity.” This is what we are after: being inebriated with divinity, and thereby being made divine. That is the whole purpose of the Incarnation of the eternal Word. As Saint Athanasius famously put it, the Word “was made man so that we might be made God” (De Incarn. 54.3).

We have seen that the effectual approach to receiving the Bread of Heaven, which is the body of Christ, is the approach of FAITH – of believing that Jesus is who he says he is, and that he has done what he said he would do. And we have seen that, as Saint Augustine puts it, faith works by love. “To believe in [Jesus means] believing to love [him], believing to honour Him, believing to go to Him, and to be made members incorporate of His Body. The faith which God requires of us, is that which works by LOVE.”

We may also see that a prerequisite of the faith that “works by love” – is humility. This should come as no surprise, as our approach to Christ – our LOVE of him – is elicited by his having first come to us in great humility, his having first LOVED us. Saint John says it explicitly: “We love, because [God] first loved us” (1 John 4.19).

The token of God’s love for us is the Incarnation of his only Son. How do we know that God loves us? Because Jesus Christ came into the world, “leaving” (so to speak) the transcendent domain of his Father, and taking to himself a bride – our nature, becoming frail flesh. This is an act of supreme humility, and it was undertaken out of nothing but love: because God looked with compassion on the human condition, the brokenness and confusion and futility of life in the world. God determined to fix it, and so he sent his Son, to live and die as one of us – yet the only one of us who offered himself in every instant of his life, in perfect and loving devotion, to God.

Christ came to live and die as one of us, and to live and die in such a way that his life and death might become not only an exemplar or paradigm of virtue or righteousness – a pattern for us to imitate – but so that his life might become for us the dynamism that animates us. Christ came not only to show us how to live, but to live for us, within us, to give his life not only FOR US, but TO US, as something for us to take to ourselves, to internalize, such that it wells up within us, displacing everything broken, confused, and futile, and transforming us by degrees into his own likeness. This is why the Apostle Paul says: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2.20). Faith, working by love, leads to divine life. “This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live for ever” (John 6.58).

I would like to draw our attention to two important things with respect to receiving and feeding on the Body of Christ in faith and in love. And both are aspects of the humility that is required of us – the subsumption of our own will into the will of God in Christ.

As we have seen in the previous several weeks, we must give our lives to Christ in order for the gift of his life to be effectual within us. This means that we must allow ourselves – we must allow the pattern of our life – to be transformed, and to become divine. Saint Augustine says: “There are some who promise men deliverance from eternal punishment if they are washed in Baptism and partake of Christ’s Body, whatever lives they live. The Apostle [Paul] however contradicts them, where he says: ‘Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.’”

In order to receive the gift of divine life, to become subsumed into the very life of God, and so attain to peace and joy, we must GIVE OURSELVES to Christ. And this means leaving behind the life of the world – it means leaving behind every pattern of action that is informed by what is telluric, what belongs essentially to the earth. Why? Because the earth is temporal, and it, and every pattern of action that belongs to it, will perish. Saint Peter says, “the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up” (2 Peter 3.10). What will remain is that which belongs to heaven, and those who have been transformed by allowing their lives – the pattern of their actions – to be nourished, informed, and empowered by that which belongs essentially to heaven – “the Bread which came down from heaven.” And “He who eats this bread will live for ever.”

To be members of the Body of Christ must mean that the power at work in us – the dynamism which drives our action, which governs our lives and the very movement of our bodies – is the same power at work in Christ, namely the Holy Spirit of God. It is for this reason that what were once called “sins of the flesh” – the sins which we commit with our bodies – are particularly difficult impediments to the inheritance of the kingdom of God. Speaking of sins of the flesh, again, St. Paul says: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that he who joins himself to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, ‘The two shall become one flesh.’ But he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Shun sexual immorality. Every other sin which a man commits is outside the body; but the sexually immoral man sins against his own body” (1 Corinthians 6.15ff).

So what we do with our bodies must be informed and empowered by the Holy Spirit, the same dynamism informing the action of Christ in the flesh.

The second important element in receiving the Body of Christ, to which I would like to draw your attention, is what we might call the “ecumenical” element. Saint Augustine says, “Whereas men desire meat and drink to satisfy hunger and thirst, this effect is only really produced by that meat and drink, which makes the receivers of it immortal and incorruptible; i.e. [which makes them into] the society of Saints, where there is peace and unity, full and perfect. On which account our Lord has chosen for the types of His body and blood, things which become one out of many. Bread is a quantity of grains united into one mass, wine a quantity of grapes squeezed together.”

As we come to Christ and receive the flesh of the Son of Man, and as we thereby give ourselves to being transformed by God into the image of his Son, we find ourselves in close proximity to all those who likewise have come to Christ and who are being transformed into the form of his life. In short, when we become children of God – by being members of his Son – Christ himself becomes “the firstborn of many brethren” (Romans 8.29). In the Body of Christ, we become for the first time, brothers and sisters of one another.

This is part of the reason that the Lord chose the elements of bread and wine to perpetuate his presence among us, and to effect our reconciliation with God. In the case of bread, many grains of wheat are gathered out of the fields, and separated from the chaff – the useless husks. The grain is ground down, mixed with water, and put into a fire, until it becomes a single loaf. The spiritual symbolism of this should be manifest. And it is summed up in the words of a very ancient prayer which I pray at every mass, under my breath, immediately after the Eucharistic host is consecrated and broken: “As grain, once scattered on the hillsides was in this broken bread made one, so from all lands may your Church be gathered into your Kingdom by your Son, for yours is the glory and the power, through Jesus Christ forever. Amen.”

To receive the Bread of Heaven without reference to the unity of the one Body of Christ, which is the Catholic Church – is a serious problem. This is the sacrament of unity, and I sincerely tremble at the presumption with which we receive it, in the midst of the reality of our separation from the overwhelming majority of Christians throughout the world.

This “is not simply the flesh of man, but [the flesh] of God: and it makes man divine, by inebriating him, as it were, with divinity.” Let us come to the Lord, but let us come in faith, remembering that faith works by love, and that love works by humility. Let us come resolute in putting off the works of the flesh, and every dissension, and renewed by the power of the Spirit. Let us come earnestly seeking the peace and unity of the one Body of Christ, the Una Sancta, for whom alone the Lord poured out his life (Ephesians 5.29-30).

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

holy cross sermon for pentecost 10 / proper 14 / year b / august 9 2009

2009-08-17T08:52:00.000-07:00

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

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus further develops the teaching which we heard last week: that we must not labor for food that perishes – that is to say, we must not seek after things in this world which will make us temporarily happy – but we must labor for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man alone can – and does – give to us. That is to say, we are to seek Jesus himself, and when we attain him, we will find a lasting joy and a lasting peace, which cannot be taken away from us by any means.

We also saw last week that we approach Jesus in FAITH – by believing in him – believing that he is who says he is, and that he has done for us what he said he would do for us.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says: “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me…” We learn from this saying that the remedy to our predicament is humility: in allowing our own will to be subsumed into the will of God: saying to him with conviction, “Lord, I do not know what is best for me, but you do; may your will be done in my life. Lord, I trust you with my life, and I place myself in your hands, for in your hands all is safe, and I am safe.”

Saint Augustine said: our soul “departed from God because it was proud. Pride casts us out, [but] humility restores us. When a physician in the treatment of a disease, cures certain outward symptoms, but not the cause which produces those symptoms, his cure is only temporary. So long as the cause remains, the disease may return. That the cause then of all diseases, i.e. pride, might be eradicated, the Son of God humbled himself. O man, why are you proud? The Son of God humbled Himself for you. It might shame you, perhaps, to imitate a humble man; but imitate at least a humble God. And this is the proof of His humility: ‘I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me…’ Pride does its own will; humility [does] the will of God.”

We are eaten up with pride. We always think we know best. Trusting in another is difficult – and it can be particularly difficult for people who have been injured by others. We train ourselves to stand on our own, to be self-sufficient, to go through life strong, self-reliant, and autonomous. But that is the road to death and hell. The road to peace and joy – the road to the presence of God – lies in self-abandonment, in giving up our own notions about what we need and even what we want, and instead trusting God: believing in Jesus, who said, “whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it” (Luke 9.24).

This process is difficult precisely because it requires trust. But if we attain to faith, we come to know that God does, in fact, provide WHAT we need, WHEN we need it. This is the experience described in the Old Testament reading from Deuteronomy, a passage that begins with the prerequisite – again – of HUMILITY: “you shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might HUMBLE you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments, or not. And he HUMBLED you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know; that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord. Your clothing did not wear out upon you, and your foot did not swell, these forty years.”

Coming to understand with our hearts that “man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord” – this can be painful, because it entails allowing ourselves to be purged, to have a lifetime of false-selves scraped away. In order to find the satisfaction of our hunger, we must first know what it means to hunger. Spiritually, this means giving up our pretensions, and giving up something that has been instilled in us as a very high end indeed: the American Dream itself: the pursuit of happiness. Lasting happiness eludes us as long as we seek it. But we make progress as we learn rather to seek Jesus – who is the SOURCE (and the only source) of true and lasting joy and peace. As he himself says in today’s Gospel: “this is the will of my Father, that every one who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.”

Jesus makes mention of the mystery of the resurrection three times in today’s Gospel, and each time with reference to it being the Father’s will that we should come to Jesus and be raised by him at the last day. In the Lord’s third mention of this, about halfway through the reading, Jesus says: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day.” And to this, Jesus connects a prophecy of the Old Testament: “It is written in the prophets, `And they shall all be taught by God.' Every one who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.”

Here we have a deep mystery of the divine life. It is God who calls to himself within us. As the Psalm says: “Deep calls to deep in the noise of your cataracts.” Our task to allow that process to unfold within us, to give in to it, and to pray for it continually. Saint Augustine says, “This is the doctrine of grace: none comes [to Christ], unless he is drawn. But whom the Father draws, and whom not, and why He draws one, and not another, presume not to decide, if you would avoid falling into error. Take the doctrine as it is given to you: and if you are not drawn, pray that you may be.” For only thus will your deepest longings find fulfillment and consummation.

The Gospel passages over these few weeks are about the Lord’s teaching about the Bread of Life. Last week I said how difficult it is to read these words and not see in them a reference to the Blessed Sacrament. That is no accident. Because in the Eucharist the eyes of faith see this spiritual drama unfold. The Eucharist fans the flame of the yearning for God within our hearts. The Eucharist is the principle location of the Lord’s summons within the economy of the life of faith within this world. It is where the Father draws us to the Son.

I would like to conclude, as I did last week, by saying a word about the Lord’s invitation to the Eucharistic feast. Firstly, we return to the centrality of humility. For we accept the Lord’s summons by means of humble faith. Saint Augustine reminds us that: “the Sacrament is one thing, the virtue of the Sacrament another. There are many who receive from the Altar, and then perish in [the very act of] receiving; eating and drinking their own condemnation, as the Apostle says. Therefore to eat the heavenly bread spiritually, is to bring to the Altar an INNOCENT MIND. Sins, though they be daily, are not deadly. Before you go to the Altar, pay attention to the prayer you pray: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. If you forgive, you are forgiven: approach confidently; it is bread, not poison. None then that eat of this bread shall die.”

Lastly Saint Augustine says, “The faithful know and receive the Body of Christ, if they labor to be the body of Christ. And they become the body of Christ, if they labor to live by the Spirit of Christ: for that which lives by the Spirit of Christ, is the body of Christ. It is this bread of which the Apostle speaks, where he says, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.. O sacrament of mercy, O sign of unity, O bond of love! Whoever wishes to live, let him draw near, let him believe, let him be incorporated, that he may be made alive.”

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

holy cross sermon for pentecost 9 / proper 13 / year b / august 2 2009

2009-08-17T08:49:00.000-07:00

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

“Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of man will give to you; for on him has God the Father set his seal.”

In today’s Gospel, the Lord exhorts us to seek him for his own sake, rather than for the temporal benefits that we think we might get from him. Jesus had just fed the five thousand with five loaves and two fish, and when the crowds come seeking him, he says to them: “You seek me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of man will give to you; for on him has God the Father set his seal.”

Saint Augustine said, “How many there are who seek Jesus, only to gain some temporary benefit… Jesus is scarcely sought for Jesus’ sake.”

Jesus says, “Do not labor for the food which perishes…” In other words, do not set your heart unequivocally on, nor commit your action unequivocally to, anything or anyone in all of creation. The key word being “unequivocally.” As the Lord says in the Gospel of Matthew: seek FIRST the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and by seeking the kingdom, you will become a co-heir, with Christ, of everything else.

Jesus says, “Labor… for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of man will give you.” And he says explicitly what this food is: it is Jesus himself. “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.”

We are therefore to labor to attain Christ himself. But what does this mean? How does it work? Well it begins with FAITH. With believing in God. And the Lord himself introduces the centrality of faith in today’s reading where he says “He who COMES TO ME shall not hunger, and he who BELIEVES IN ME shall never thirst.” And this is the proper sequence: first we must COME TO Christ, and once we have encountered him, the encounter becomes an invitation – and the material condition for the growth of our faith.

In the lives of individuals, this “coming to Christ” means listening for his voice. It begins, perhaps, with the stirring of a person’s conscience, or with their heart being engaged by what they know, intuitively or intellectually, to be true or good or beautiful. It continues when one begins to be engaged by the truth of the Gospel, as for example in the catechumenate. Major milestones are reached with acts of the will – with decisions along the way – to continue to conform one’s life to the commandments of Christ. And each such act of the will is likewise an act of FAITH, of believing that what Christ says is true, and that therefore we should live accordingly.

One also thereby continues to make progress in one’s journey to God – along the path that is straight but difficult, and through the gate that is open but narrow. The biggest milestone on this journey is the regeneration of Baptism and one’s admission to the sacraments of the new law. Likewise here one is faced with a decision: to conform one’s life to the discipline of communion, not only by showing up to mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation, which the Church and the Lord himself expect of us – but also to conform one’s life to the moral demands of the Gospel. Life in Christ should change everything for us, because in him we are “born anew” in the Spirit of God (Jn. 3.3). And because we have a new life, we have a new way of relating to others. Relationships of every stripe should be transformed by our conformity to the pattern of Christ: family relationships, economic relationships, sexual relationships, our relationship with the government, with friends, and even with enemies – all must be transformed by the Spirit of God and the discipline of communion: all must become HOLY. This is what St. Peter means when he says, “Gird up your minds, be sober, set your hope fully upon the grace that is coming to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct…” (1 Pet. 1.13ff).

Furthermore, we make progress in our journey to Christ – we “come to” him – as we begin to pray and as our prayer deepens. How often are our prayers about getting something from the Lord? How often do they have the character, “Lord, please do _______ for me,” or “Lord if you will just do ______, I will do ______,”? If our prayer remains in this order, we expose ourselves to the danger not only of treating God as a means to an end, – whereas in reality, he is the only end worthy of being desired in and for himself, toward whom everything in creation is oriented, and for whom everything is a means – not only do we set up something above God in the order of our desire, and so approach the sin of idolatry, but by thinking and praying this way, we risk cheating ourselves of the fullness of joy and peace.

I don’t mean that we should not ask God for things. We should. And we are told to do so in Scripture – St. Peter says, “in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God,” (Phil. 4.6), and the example of the apostles and saints confirms that this kind of prayer is licit and can be good. But it is not the best kind of prayer, and in order for it to acquire its proportional goodness, it must be informed by what is higher and better.

And here we return to the linchpin of FAITH. In today’s Gospel reading, the people ask Jesus what it means to do “the works of God”. Jesus answers: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” The work of God is BELIEVING in Jesus. But what does that mean? It means much more than simply believing that he lived – or even believing that he still lives. As St. James says of this kind of belief: “Even the demons believe -- and shudder” (Jas. 2.19). Rather, to believe in Jesus is to believe in the witness the Father bears him, chiefly by raising Jesus from the dead. And the truth to which the Father thus bears witness, is that Jesus is who he says he is: the Christ, the Son of the living God. To believe in Jesus means (1) to believe THIS, and then (2) to rely on his promises, and (3) to rely on what he has accomplished on our behalf – by dying on the cross. Saint Augustine says: “To believe in [Jesus means] believing to love [him], believing to honour Him, believing to go to Him, and to be made members incorporate of His Body. The faith which God requires of us, is that which works by LOVE.”

Life in Christ therefore means: to labor “for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of man will give to you; for on him has God the Father set his seal.” And we make progress in this labor as our faith deepens. And our faith deepens as we progress – as our vision of Christ becomes clarified by love, and the obedience that comes from love (John 14.15). This is the archetype of what the Psalmist refers to in today’s Psalm where he says, “so mortals ate the bread of angels.” Because Jesus is “the bread of God… that which comes down from heaven, and gives life to the world.” He is called the “bread of angels” because “the heavenly powers derive their life and vigor from contemplating him in open vision” (Denis the Carthusian). And this too is our destiny. As we are drawn more and more into the contemplation of the Lord in open vision, the more we find ourselves subsisting on the food which endures to eternal life, and the less anything else matters. We discover peace and joy in every circumstance, even suffering. We discover, with Saint Paul, “the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want” (Phil. 4.12). And it all begins, as Saint Augustine said, with seeking Jesus for Jesus’ sake.

So far I have been talking about the spiritual life. But there is another, more obvious, and related, significance to the Lord’s words in today’s Gospel, namely that concerning the Mass, wherein we receive the Bread of Heaven, the Body and Blood of the Lord. Here too faith is the linchpin, not because the efficacy of the sacrament depends on our faith, but because the benefits we draw from our reception of it stand in proportion to the faith in which we approach it. Saint Paul said that we may even harm ourselves by partaking of the sacrament unworthily (1 Cor. 11.27ff). I will leave you with a word of advice from Alcuin of York about receiving the Bread of Heaven in faith: “When, through the hand of the priest, you receive the Body of Christ, think not of the priest which you see, but [think] of the Priest you do not see. The priest is the dispenser of this food, not the author. The Son of man gives Himself to us, that we may abide in Him, and He in us. Do not conceive that Son of man to be the same as other sons of men: He stands alone in abundance of grace, separate and distinct from all the rest: for that Son of man is the Son of God.”

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

from gregory of nyssa's commentary on the canticle of canticles

2009-06-28T13:51:00.000-07:00

It is the angels to whom the Gospel precept compares us. Be like unto men who await their master returning from the marriage feast. They awaited the return of the Lord from the marriage feast, keeping close to the gates of heaven, constantly watching for Him so they would be ready to open the gates for the Lord as He came from His wedding feast to enter into supracosmic blessedness, 'like the bridegroom who leaves his wedding chamber,' after having united Himself, in the regeneration of the sacraments, to the virgin who had prostituted herself on idols -- that is, with us, having restored our nature in all its virginal integrity. The wedding feast is over, the Church is united to the Word (for according to the word of St. John, 'he who has the bride is the bridegroom') and has been admitted into the wedding chamber of the sacraments; the angels await the return of the King, raising up the Church to share in His own blessedness.

holy cross sermon for pentecost 4 / proper 8 / year b / june 28 2009

2009-06-28T12:57:00.000-07:00

Power made perfect in weakness.

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

Today’s Gospel reading treats of Jesus raising a twelve year old girl from the dead. The passage begins with the girl’s father coming to Jesus and beseeching him on her behalf: “seeing Jesus, [the little girl’s father] fell at [Jesus’] feet, and besought him, saying, ‘My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live’” (vv. 22-23).

This passage teaches us several things. First, it shows us something about prayer. In prayer, we come before the Lord, and we ask him for things, just as the father of the little girl has done. Moreover, the father of the girl shows us a kind of prayer that has transcended superficiality in one important respect: he is not praying for himself and his own needs.

Perhaps the most superficial kind of prayer is the kind where we ask God for a million dollars – something we think we want. But a soul that has been cleansed, to some degree, from self-seeking, will turn first toward the Lord, seeking him for his own sake, and then for the sake of others. And we see this in the father of the girl: he comes to the Lord in supplication, and he comes because of his love for his daughter.

We should also notice that the man comes to the Lord BELIEVING IN THE POWER OF THE LORD TO DO WHAT HE ASKS. Prayer must begin with faith in Christ: believing that Jesus is who he says he is – namely, that he is the Lord. And being the Lord means that he has power over every circumstance – both our own, and the circumstances of those whom we love.

We must learn to ask the Lord for good things, and we must ask him out of faith in him, and out of love. We know that the Lord’s own desire is to give us good things – indeed to give us EVERY good thing. Jesus said, “If you… know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matt. 7.11). Why then do we so often find ourselves bereft of goodness? Saint James answers that question: “You do not have, because you do not ask” (James 4.2). We must learn to ask the Lord for GOOD THINGS.

What are good things? In short, as the father asks for his little girl: that we may be made well and live. Good things are things that pertain to life – and not simply the humdrum life of the world, but things that pertain to the kind of abundant life that is ours in Christ. We must learn to ask him for things like healing, contrition, forgiveness, wisdom, discernment, prayer (pray for the gift of prayer!), joy in doing his will, the peace of God, and that we might be made vessels of his grace.

While Jesus is on his way to the house of the little girl, “there came from the… house some who said, ‘Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?’” (v. 35). There is a worldly vantage point, and there is a heavenly vantage point. To the eyes of the world, many situations seem hopeless. But we should always be mindful of the fact that “with God, nothing will be impossible” (Luke 1.37), and that Jesus tells us “if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, `Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you” (Matt. 17.20).

And so we find the Lord exhorting the faith of the girl’s father, who has just been informed by the clamor of the world that the situation is hopeless. Jesus ignores the clamor of the world. The passage says, “Ignoring what they said, Jesus said to the [man], ‘Do not fear, only believe,’” (v. 36).

When they get to the house, the house is filled with the same clamor of hopelessness, the kind of noise that does not come from faith in the power of God, but in the inevitability of the natural. Jesus says to them, “Why do you make a tumult and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” And those who have no faith in his power laugh at him.

Very often Christians encounter what seem like hopeless situations. And often the Lord, in his providence, allows situations to seem hopeless so that we might call out to him in faith and so draw closer to him, and secondly so that he might make his power known. It is easy to give in, in the face of what we think is the inevitability of the natural. The situation is hopeless; end of story. But the Lord desires us to bring our hopelessness and fear to him in prayer – firstly so that we may be drawn more closely into his presence and his care, and so that he can manifest his power.

In 2 Corinthians, Saint Paul tells the brethren about a troubling and difficult situation – he doesn’t say exactly what it was, but he does say that he prayed repeatedly to the Lord about it, and the Lord spoke to Paul’s heart: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12.9).

So in the Gospel, the little girl is dead to the world, but to God she is sleeping. St. Bede says that sub specie aeternitatis, from the divine vantage point, “both the soul was living, and the flesh was resting, [in order] to rise again”. Jesus quiets the clamor of the faithless crowd: he puts them all outside, and taking the girl’s father and mother, along with Peter, James, and John, he enters the room, takes the girl by the hand, and says to her, “Little girl, I say to you, arise” (v. 41). “And immediately the girl got up and walked” (v. 42).

The power of the Lord extends over the whole creation, and over every circumstance, even death. He desires to give us good things. Very often we do not receive good things for the simple reason that we do not ask for them. At other times, we are unable to see or to understand what is truly good. For example, we may pray for money, but God may know that were we to get it, we would rest in the security of our wealth rather than in his power. “For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses himself?” (Luke 9.25).

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2.9). God has unutterably good things in store for us. And we can begin to receive them even now, this side of Paradise. We have only to trust him, to love him, and to beseech him out of trust and love. “You do not have, because you do not ask.”

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