holy cross / easter 6 / april 27 2008

John 15.1-8: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser…” etc.

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

“…apart from me you can do nothing” but “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you.”

In another Gospel passage, Matthew (17), Jesus says: “I say to you, 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.” And in last week’s Gospel lesson, the Lord said:

“Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”

Today’s reading is the corollary of such passages: “apart from me you can do nothing” but “if you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you.”

Clearly the Lord teaches that those who have faith in him can do anything. But in today’s reading we find that the opposite is also true: apart from Christ, you can do nothing.

Here again is an uncomfortable teaching. And its very likely not merely the inability to do anything that rattles us. The most uncomfortable facet of the Lord’s teaching lies behind both of these related teachings: In Christ, anything is possible; and apart from Christ, nothing is possible.

The most audacious fact here is Jesus Christ himself. Jesus sets himself up as the wellspring of all power: its his proclamation of himself that is so scandalous, the outrageous claim that he is the source of all ability, all potential – he’s not even saying that he is the source of all power TO DO GOOD – that might be understandable. Rather he says: “apart from me you can do NOTHING.”

The key to understanding this saying is in the Lord’s words about the vine and the branches: “As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit…”

Jesus proclaims himself to be the source of all life, the main body of the plant through which the branches are nourished, from which life-giving liquids are directed and delivered, through which the nutrients course out to the dependent shoots. And when we are fed by Christ, receptive to what he delivers to us, when we soak up his doctrine, when we are nourished by his body and blood, then we become fruitful – we are enabled to act in such a way that others may in turn receive nourishment from us.

But without him, we are like branches cut off from the main plant – unable to sustain ourselves, disconnected from the roots and without any means of nourishment. We lie there seemingly alive for a time, but ultimately and necessarily dry, withered – lifeless refuse, to brittle to be useful, fit only for kindling.

This is hard, but it is the implied by Jesus being the true life, and truly the source of all life. And this is why the most important thing is Christ himself: why he proclaims himself, why we must seek him, hold to him, look to him for guidance, for strength, for nourishment – not because he punishes us for not seeking him, but because apart from him we can do nothing – apart from him there are only shadows and illusions that lead to NOTHING.

In Deuteronomy God said to the Children of Israel: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live” (Deut. 30.19). This injunction comes to fruition in Christ. Our choice must be for him: because to choose him is to choose life and blessing. And the choice of anything other than him is ultimately the choice of cursing and death.

We get a taste of such separation from Christ in those moments when we indulge our feelings of despair, or hopelessness, or anger, or ennui, or dissipation, or whatever. When we willfully act without Christ as our frame of reference; when we use ourselves up in the pursuit of anything apart from Christ – whatever it is: money, relationships, happiness, even church. Apart from Christ, there’s nothing, and it leads only to more nothing. And this is why its critical for us to form an intentional habit of SEEKING – to spend time daily in prayer, looking with our hearts and our minds, with our INNER BEING – looking for Christ… reading the Gospels, turning over its tropes in our minds, always asking ourselves the Lord’s meaning by this phrase or that, why too we must often avail ourselves of the sacraments – because the Lord has promised to meet us there. “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you.”

My favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, once said: “What is eternal and important is often hidden from a man by an impenetrable veil. He knows: there’s something under there, but he cannot see it. The veil reflects the daylight” (Culture and Value, 80). It is not always easy to EXPERIENCE Christ at work in us, to FEEL his word abiding in us, his presence making all things possible. But that’s why patient and persistent ABIDING is necessary: As the prophet Isaiah said: “they who WAIT FOR THE LORD shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40.31).

“If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you.”

One of my favorite stories from the “Sayings of the Desert Fathers” is the following:

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, 'Abba 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.'”

That’s the difference. Apart from Christ, you can do NOTHING. Saying the office, a little fasting, a little prayer and meditation, not bothering anyone, trying to be good… its all NOTHING apart from Christ. But if you ABIDE in Christ, and if his words abide in you, you can become all flame… you can do ANYTHING.

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

catholicism 101 -- part 8

CATHOLICISM 101

(The outline of this series is taken from Father Vernon Staley’s book The Catholic Religion.)

Church of the Holy Cross
April 13, 2008

Part 8
Christian Duty: Christian Belief

- Christian Duty

• We have seen that we are promised salvation, and that salvation comes to us by supernatural grace, and that the Catholic Church is the covenanted sphere of grace, the domain within which grace is operative, and where the truth is proclaimed and taught.

• But obviously mere passive membership in the Church is not sufficient. Rather, as in 1 Timothy 6.12, the journey toward salvation demands certain things of us. It demands 1) the “good confession” and 2) “the good fight of the faith” (1 Tim. 6.12). Not just any old confession or fight will do. They must be “the good confession” and “the good fight of the faith”.

• What is necessary, in other words, are the two inseparable and interpenetrating realities of 1) faith, and 2) works. We must BELIEVE rightly, and DO rightly.

• In Part 7 we saw that Baptism is the first act of faith, and that by it we are brought into the Church, incorporated into the mystical Body of Christ (the Church), and the possibility of salvation / restoration / healing / fulfillment was thereby opened to us.

• In Baptism we promised several things (in the baptismal promises, BCP p. 302ff).

• We renounced: Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God, all the evil powers of this world, and all sinful desires. (In short: the world, the flesh, and the devil.)

• We promised that we turned to Jesus Christ, put our trust in his grace and love, and that we would follow and obey Jesus as Lord.

• (If we were very young, these promised were made in our name and on our behalf.)

• In short we promised to:

• Avoid evil,

• Believe the truth,

• Do what is right.

• This is the essence of Christian Duty, which encompasses the domains of faith and works; belief and action; doctrine and devotion; etc.

• Now we will consider the first of these two spheres: Belief.

- Christian Belief

• We don’t make up the faith as we go along. We are not the inventors of Christianity. God is. “The Lord has founded Zion” (Isaiah 14.32), and “…I will build my Church” (Matt. 16.18), etc.

• So Christian duty with respect to BELIEF is to seek and to believe what God has revealed, without questioning – to accept it on God’s authority, because he is God and he has revealed it. Anything else is horrendously presumptuous.

• “Not questioning” does not preclude the seeking for reasons; this is in fact enjoined upon us (“Be prepared to give a defense…” etc. (1 Peter 3.15). But it does mean FIRST deciding that God HAS revealed himself, and then seeking his revelation.

• Right belief is also important because what you believe informs what you will DO. We are less likely to DO the right thing without BELIEVING the right thing. For example: all else being equal, a person who believes that murder is permissible is more likely, prima facie, actually to COMMIT (to DO) murder than a person who believes that murder is impermissible. So believing correctly is important. St. Jude writes, first urging his hearers to “to contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” and then to “build yourselves up on your most holy faith” (vv 3 and 20). If we are to build on faith, then it is important that our faith be solid (extending the construction metaphor – our faith is our foundation).

• Revelation 14.12 defines the saints as those “who keep the commandments of God [ACTION] and the faith of Jesus [BELIEF]”.

• So… Q: what ARE we to believe?

• A: the catholic faith.

• Q: where is it?

• A: First, its in the “Catholic Creeds” - the Apostles’ Creed, and the Nicene Creed.

• The word “Creed” comes from the Latin word “credo” which means “I believe.” This is the first word of both the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds. The Greek word for “creed” is σύμβολον which originally meant half of a broken thing which, when placed with the other half of the broken thing, would serve to verify the bearer’s identity. It thus came by extension to mean a password or watchword. And the term came to be applied to the creeds because they were watchwords of belonging to the Christian community of faith. If you can affirm THIS, then your belief is recognizably that of the Christian communities’ – the creed was the formula by which a Christian could make himself known to fellow Christians.

• The use of the creeds by Christians began very early – before the books of the New Testament were written. Many see a reference to very early Christian creeds in St. Paul’s writings:

• “The saying…” (1 Tim. 1.15, 1 Tim. 4.9, 2 Tim. 2.11, Titus 1.9, Titus 3.8).

• “…the pattern of the sound words which you have heard from me, in the faith…" (2 Tim. 1.13).

• “…what has been entrusted…” (1 Tim. 6.20, 2 Tim. 1.12).

• This way of speaking fits the pattern of use which we know creeds had in the early centuries of the Church – namely they were “entrusted” to catechumens to be learned by heart (they were not written down), in the days immediately prior to their Baptism at Easter.

• In the first few centuries of the Church, there came to be broad agreement on certain “patterns of sound words” and “sayings” that expressed well and succinctly the content of the Christian faith – and which thus serve well as watchwords for members of the Christian community and those who were coming into it. For the next few weeks we will look at: 1) the Apostles’ Creed, and 2) The Nicene Creed.

holy cross / easter 4 / april 13 2008

John 10.1-10 “I am the door…” etc.

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

In today’s reading from the Gospel of St. John, the Lord says something that might be difficult for modern ears to hear. He says “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber…” And later on in the reading he says “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep.”

Obviously we are the sheep – those living in the world, who wander around without guidance, confused, and vulnerable, susceptible to the powers of predation at work in the world. Life in the world brings with it the danger of falling prey to the powers, visible and invisible, arrayed against us. And the triumph of the world’s powers, apart from Christ, is manifest in the universal dominion of death – the end of sin’s corrosive influence.

This may sound equivocal, so let me explain what I mean. Our teaching is that physical death is an aberration, an evil introduced into the world by sin – the primal event and action wherein mankind turned away from God – freely and definitely chose not to obey the explicit commandment of God, which God gave for mankind’s own good – so that we might have life and freedom and fulfillment. Our teaching is that mankind was made by God to dwell with him, and by dwelling with him, to have life and fulfillment. And this dwelling-with-God is what mankind rejected, and continually rejects – and the rejection of togetherness-with-God is precisely what sin is. And sin has left us weak, confused, and prone to death, like sheep without a shepherd, wandering around and subject to predation – to thieves, who have come to kill and destroy.

The sheepfold is this togetherness-with-God, the household of God, and Jesus is himself the doorway to the sheepfold, the way by which we may attain togetherness-with-God, because Jesus is the only and eternal Son of God. In the first chapter of St. John’s gospel we read: “No one has ever seen God; the only son, WHO IS IN THE BOSOM OF THE FATHER, HE HAS MADE HIM KNOWN.” Our problem is separation from God – Jesus Christ is the solution because he has a unique, indissoluble, essential, personal, and eternal union with God. As in Ephesians St. Paul writes: “through Jesus Christ we… have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are… MEMBERS OF THE HOUSEHOLD OF GOD, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.”

Christ opens for us the possibility of a mutual and personal indwelling with God, because Christ is in the Father, and the Father is in him. Therefore by being in him, WE find ourselves in the Father, and the Father in us. So in today’s Gospel reading Jesus declares: “I am the door; if anyone enters by me, he will be saved…” Because THROUGH him, we find the sheepfold – togetherness-with-God, the house of the Father.

And this gives content to any number of the Lord’s sayings:

"Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father; how can you say, `Show us the Father'? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?”

And:

"I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.”

Because Jesus is the only and eternal Son of the Father, and because he gives his life for and to us, if we will only have it. So he is TRULY the WAY to the LIFE, which is togetherness-with-God.

A word must be said at this point about people of other faiths. Modern ears hear the Lord saying things like “No one comes to the Father, but by me” – and perhaps we find our generosity a little bit offended. Here is the thing: No one comes to the Father, except by way of the Son – because the Father is not even the Father apart from the Son. His very fatherhood obtains in relation to the Son. But that doesn’t mean, for example, that all Hindus are going to hell. It means that WHOEVER attains togetherness-with-God will find it by way of the door of the sheep, the one who is the way, the truth, and the life – whether they realize it or not. All of us have imperfect conceptions of God. And if our togetherness with God depended on the perfection of our conceptions, we’d all be in serious trouble. Whoever comes to the presence of God does so by way of the only and eternal Son, the Word of God, Jesus Christ. But we should remember that he made the heavens and the earth, and is perfectly capable of working invisibly within the heart of ANY person whatsoever – a Sikh, a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, even an Episcopalian. But Christ’s ability to lead non-Christians to God does not diminish his status as the one and only door of the sheep.

Now, this leaves the question of HOW. How does one enter the sheepfold? Where does one find the door? One finds the door where the door has promised to be. You find him with in the one, holy, catholic and APOSTOLIC Church, the community of faith and practice founded and governed and taught by Jesus Christ himself, through the Apostles, because Jesus said to the Apostles: “I am with YOU always, even to the close of the age” (Matt. 28.16).

For individuals, this means above all that we must seek Jesus with an open and solicitous heart, purged from ideological self-seeking, and willing to leave everything to follow Christ. It means we must seek him in prayer, every day, and that we must seek to conform our believing, and our LIVING, to the apostolic teaching – which means the Scripture. And it means we must order our lives around the wellsprings of divine power given by Jesus himself to effect our union with him: the sacraments of the Church.

The Lord has promised that such a life of humble seeking will be rewarded by joyful finding, in the realization that the Lord came that we may have life, and have it abundantly.

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

holy cross / easter 3 / april 6 2008

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

“O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”

In today’s Gospel reading we hear the much loved story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus to whom the Lord appears. The first thing to notice about this reading is the distance that they are from Jerusalem. The translation of the Bible that we use says that the two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, “about seven miles from Jerusalem.” Saint Bede, the venerable English monk of the 7th century, sees spiritual significance in this distance of seven miles from Jerusalem. St. Bede says:

“…a little over seven miles was the length of the journey which they were walking, who were certain about our Lord’s death and burial, but doubtful concerning his resurrection. For the resurrection which took place AFTER the seventh day of the week, no one doubts is implied in the number eight. The disciples therefore as they walk and converse about the Lord had completed the sixth mile of their [spiritual] journey, for they were grieving that he who had lived blamelessly had come at length even to death, which the Lord underwent on the sixth day. These disciples had also completed the seventh mile of their spiritual journey, because they believed that the Lord indeed rested in the grave. But they had not yet finished the eighth mile of their spiritual journey; because THE GLORY OF THE LORD’S TRIUMPHANT RESURRECTION THEY DID NOT BELIEVE PERFECTLY.”

“The glory of the Lord’s triumphant resurrection they did not believe perfectly.”

This failure to believe perfectly the glory of the Lord’s triumphant resurrection lies as a danger at the center of every Christian’s spiritual life. The disciples on the road to Emmaus knew that the Lord had suffered and died. And when the risen Jesus himself drew near and asked what they were talking about, “they stood still, looking sad.” They don’t recognize Jesus. And one of them, named Cleopas, says: “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?” And Jesus, almost playfully, asks “What things?” And you can almost hear the confusion and foundering faith in Cleopas’s answer:

What do you mean ‘what things’?! “Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since this happened. Moreover, some women of our company amazed us. They were at the tomb early in the morning and did not find his body; and they came back saying that they had even seen a vision of angels, who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb, and found it just as the women had said; but him they did not see."

This is the same incredulity, the same imperfect faith, we encountered in Thomas in last week’s Gospel lesson. It’s the same imperfect faith we see in all the disciples we find hiding out at the time of the resurrection, despite the fact that the Lord had told them time and time again that “that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised” (Matt. 16.21). And it is the same incredulity, the same imperfect faith we find in OURSELVES in those times when we suffer, or when we look into our own hearts and find ourselves irretrievably sinful, when we make up lies about who we are, or what we are, to accommodate our honest belief that the Lord’s passion and death really, in the end, has no power to CHANGE us. So we keep ourselves from living no longer for ourselves, but for him who died and rose for us, and so we wall ourselves off from the Lord’s first gift for those who believe: the Holy Spirit, the Comforter.

Cleopas says “We had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel.” There is in this incredulity about the resurrection, more than a hint of suspicion about the Lord’s messianic credentials – an intuition that the Christ, the Messiah, is not the sort of man who can die – let alone who can die the death of a condemned criminal; because the Messiah was, WE thought, was the one who was going to redeem US – and its hard to redeem people if you’re dead and buried.

But beyond this incredulity there is a simple, deadly pessimism, a willing conformity of our expectations to the mandates of [worldly possibilities] telluric modality. The dead just don’t come back to life. Yet this is a central – THE central – tenet of our faith: that THIS man, Jesus of Nazareth, died, and that on the third day after his death he surged out of the tomb, alive.

It is on account of their inability to believe the Lord’s glorious triumph THROUGH DEATH, in his resurrection, that Jesus upbraids these two disciples:

"O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things AND ENTER INTO HIS GLORY?" And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

The resurrection is the counterpoint to the Lord’s suffering and death. The resurrection has no power apart from its being a resurrection FROM THE DEAD. It is the plentitude of the promised spiritualization of human nature – and it is painfully difficult to believe. Yet even in Old Testament times, the prophet Joel had said: “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I WILL POUR OUT MY SPIRIT ON ALL FLESH; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.”

And here is the Lord, raised from the dead, enlivened in his very flesh by the Spirit of God; here is Jesus no longer subject to the natural law of sin’s consequences - of death and decay. Here is the Lord totally given to the government of the spiritual and supernatural (cf. Theophylact). And WE foolish disciples are slow to believe. Its easy enough for us to believe in the natural order of things – in the seemingly inexorable laws of disease, and violence, and corruption, and sinfulness, and death. And its easy to believe that we are beyond being made clean, being made holy, being made ALIVE. Its HARD to believe in the triumph of Jesus Christ over all of that. Yet here he is – if we are willing – triumphant, risen, glorified, ALIVE, opening our minds; here he is, making himself known to us in the breaking of bread.

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

holy cross / low sunday / march 30 2008

"Doubting" Thomas

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

The closing sentence of today’s Gospel reading contains a very profound truth lying at the center of the Christian teaching. It encapsulates the whole PURPOSE of the Gospel:

These [things that Jesus did] are written [in this book] that YOU may believe that Jesus is the Christ – the Messiah – the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.

The purpose of the Gospel is to tell the TRUTH of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. And what God wrought in him, and with him, through him, for him, and by him. The Gospel is most fundamentally the TRUTH of who Jesus is – and this truth contains in itself the life-giving, recreating POWER of God – made perfectly manifest in the resurrection of Jesus Christ – in the fact that THIS MAN who was also the Son of God, who was murdered, CAME BACK TO LIFE, and thus broke the power of death forever – a power which had held everyone until Jesus came and made it otherwise.

These things are written that you may BELIEVE that Jesus is who he says he is, and that believing, you may have LIFE – the same life that he has…. “life in his name.”

The gift that he gives, the gift of “life in his name” is a consequence of his coming to give us everything that he has and everything, in fact, that he IS. “In him was life” (John 1) – so through faith in him, we receive life – the kind of life that is not merely snuffed out by disease or old age or murder.

But we should also notice the other gifts that the Lord gives concomitantly. Two times he says to them: “Peace be with you.” The peace of the Lord is a psychological FACT for those who have “life in his name.” I mean “psychological” in the literal Greek sense of “soulish”. When we come to know ourselves in relation to Jesus – as his disciples, his friends, his brothers – then we will come to know ourselves as HEIRS OF GOD. And as this conviction wakes up in our hearts, then we will have peace – because then we will come to know and to FEEL the truth of what Saint Paul said: “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, not anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8.37ff).

It is this coming-to-know Jesus in faith – as our Lord, as our friend, and most intimately, as our BROTHER – that we find peace and life – the kind rooted in love, which doesn’t grow old or wear out, but casts out fear, and brings healing.

And most importantly: Jesus gives the gift of the Holy Spirit – which is shown to be part and parcel of his gift of himself, the outpouring of his own life – because it is given with his breath, which brings to mind the event of the total outpouring of his life. In Mark’s Gospel Jesus’s death is depicted in terms of his breathing: “And Jesus uttered a loud cry, and breathed his last” (Mark 15.37).

And so we find him here again, having taken up his life again, breathing on the disciples the very inner life of God – the divine breath, the Ruach, the Holy Spirit.

Life, peace, and the Holy Spirit. These gifts we find through faith in Jesus Christ. But this leaves the very practical question of how this WORKS. What is it to have faith in Jesus? How do we get life and peace and the Holy Spirit by faith in Jesus?

In this passage from John, we see in St. Thomas what a response to Jesus IN FAITH looks like. Many people make much of “doubting Thomas” – focusing on Thomas’s incredulity before he had encountered the risen Lord. But in so doing, they risk missing the point. The story is not about Thomas’s doubt before encountering the risen Lord, but about his FAITH AFTER the encounter. Before they saw the risen Lord for themselves, ALL of the disciples experienced the same kind of doubt that Saint Thomas shows here. The notable thing is his faith IN the encounter with Christ. Thomas says “My Lord and my God!” A clear, resounding, unambiguous, and PERSONAL affirmation of the truth of Jesus: Thomas recognizes him to be him whom he claimed to be: both Lord and God.

There are two kinds of responses to the risen Christ depicted in the Bible. When the risen and gloried Christ appears with his wounds having become marks of victory, there is the response of Thomas, on the one hand: where we recognize the victorious actuality of the impossible: that this man in whom we had placed our hope and our trust really is risen, that he really is both Lord and God, that death really has been swallowed up in victory…. Or there is the response of “the tribes of the earth” portrayed in Revelation: Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, everyone who pierced him; and all tribes of the earth will WAIL on account of him” (Rev. 1.7). These are the possibilities: The latter, a doleful realization that Christ has conquered, but that I am a child of the darkness and that I’ve been defeated – but the former, the confession of Thomas, is a recognition that he has conquered, but that he is my Lord and God, and that I therefore have conquered with him.

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

holy cross / easter sermon / march 23 2008

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

Alleluia. Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by dying, and bestowing life on those who were dead.

Christ is indeed risen from the dead. All four of the Gospel accounts are unambiguous on this point. Jesus Christ, the man from Nazareth, the man who was put to death by Pontius Pilate, who had been nailed to a tree, who had had his heart pierced by a lance, who was wrapped in a shroud and put in a grave – THIS man, on the third day after he was murdered, rose again from the dead. He rose and went around, and many of his friends saw him and spoke with him.

This is the central mystery of the Christian faith. In the end, beyond the bluster and the politicking, at the metaphysical bedrock of the faith, to be a Christian means to believe THIS – that the only and eternal Son of God became a man, that he was born of a woman, that he grew up, that he was tortured to death by Roman authority, and that three days later he rose again from the dead.

There are all kinds of reasons not to believe this. It sounds like a myth. And this time of year, there has evolved a little cottage industry of Biblical scholars who will appear on cable television to introduce you to a man they call “the historical Jesus.” He’s usually someone around whom one can pretty easily wrap one’s mind. He’s a sage, a prophet, a rabbi, a liberator, a Marxist revolutionary, a capitalist revolutionary, a proto-feminist, a gay rights activist. The most excruciatingly “relevant” biographical detail I’ve ever heard propounded by the television scholars is that Jesus crossed the Hindu Kush, where he learned from Tibetan gurus and lamas how to be the all-round awesome guy who went on to capture the world’s imagination.

All of this represents a common impulse – the impulse to package the Christ into something marketable, something consumable. We want the Christ to be something around which we can wrap our minds – and we understand politics, we understand the impulse to liberate, the desire for liberation; Tibet captures the imagination. So Jesus, in upper middle class, educated, white culture, takes on our form: he comes to look like us. His values and teachings come to reflect the values and beliefs of people who drink Starbucks coffee and listen to NPR.

But all of this bluster obscures the metaphysical claim lying like a scandal at the center of the Christian faith: that the Son of God became a man, was nailed to a tree until he was dead, and three days later rose again. If you want to figure out whether you can believe something, see if you can believe THAT. It isn’t easy. Its much easier to believe in politics or the esoteric. St. Paul wrote:

“For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor. 1).”

We don’t need to package Christ so that he’s marketable, so that he’s palatable, so that we can wrap our bourgeois minds around the mystery he is. We need to MYTHOLOGIZE him. We need to hold up the central impossibility at the center of our faith. We need to hold it up in front of others in the conviction that it GIVES LIFE, and we need to hold it up in front of ourselves as a challenge for the continual renewal of our own minds.

What difference does it make whether Christ really rose from the grave? It makes all the difference in the world. My favorite 20th century philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, wrote the following, in a moment of candor:

“What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought. – If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort of hell where we can do nothing but dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven. But if I am to be REALLY saved, -- what I need is certainty – not wisdom, dreams, or speculation – and this certainty is faith,. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe the Resurrection. Or: It is love that believes the Resurrection. We might say: Redeeming love believed even in the Resurrection; holds fast even to the Resurrection.”

The Resurrection means that what was hitherto the central and equalizing fact of human existence: DEATH – that death has been overcome, once and forever. The resurrection of Jesus means that death no longer holds universal sway – that there was ONE man for whom death was not the last word. It means that the sort of life possessed by this man was the sort of life that is not susceptible to the power of corruption.

And if you have ever faced death, either your own or the death of someone you love, then you know that this would be truly good news: that the horrible, silent question mark standing at the end of every human life, has been taken away, and it in its place is light and life, fulfillment and peace.

Our Easter proclamation is our insistence on exactly this point. That the impossible is, in fact, TRUE. That this myth came to pass on a hillside outside Jerusalem. That Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death. That belief in him and incorporation into his life means immortality. Alleluia.

holy cross / good friday sermon / march 21 2008

This sermon comments on the poem Friday's Child by W.H. Auden.

WH Auden was born in 1907 in York, England. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. After having abandoned the faith at about the age of 13 and dabbling in what he would later called the “Christian heresies” of William Blake and Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, Auden immigrated to America and entered the Episcopal Church and lived out his days as an observant churchman.

Temporally, I think this poem speaks clearly to the experience of Good Friday; and it expresses, I think, a common and appropriate psychological response to Good Friday – common, that is, I think among Christians who approach Holy Week and Good Friday intentionally and prayerfully. The poem also gives theological expression to the contemporary cultural situation within which the Church, and the Church’s people, now find themselves called to bear witness to Jesus. Many, especially in Western Europe and America, see a kind of seismic shift in Western culture after World War II and the Nazi Holocaust. We live in a time when indeed the old “analogies are rot” – wherein the idols of human ways of believing, at place sense the enlightenment, have been violently shaken and perhaps overthrown entirely. Think of the sure confidence of secular culture, even in America, beginning really with the Puritan settlement of New England – the kind of certainty that found expression in Manifest Destiny, in the pervasive confidence of enlightened rationalism coming out of the Protestant Reformation, and in the political systems laid on the foundations of such people as Blackstone, Locke, and Montesquieu – or, nearer to us, as the founding fathers of the United States.

Friday’s Child is dedicated to the memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a contemporary of Auden’s. Bonhoeffer, as many of you probably know, was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who studied at Union (Theological) Seminary in New York. His denomination had actively opposed the Nazi rise to power, and Bonhoeffer returned to Germany out of a conviction that he was called to share the fate of his people. As the situation deteriorated Bonhoeffer became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. In 1943 he was arrested after money used to help Jews escape to Switzerland was traced to him. The contours of the plot were uncovered and after being shuffled through various prisons and concentration camps for a year and a half, Bonhoeffer was executed in 1945 at Flossenburg, three weeks before the liberation of Berlin. Bonhoeffer had written movingly about the cost of being a disciple of Jesus. He said

…cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must the asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: “ye were bought at a price, and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us.

Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.

And Bonhoeffer was richly filled with God’s costly grace. His martyrdom was at once obscene and beautiful in the way that only a martyrdom can be – like our Lord’s own suffering and death. At dawn on April 9, 1945, Bonhoeffer was stripped naked in his cell and tortured and ridiculed by the guards. He was led naked into the prison yard where he was made to hanged by piano wire from a meat hook. His hanging lasted half an hour before he died.

In the words of Auden’s poem: this kind of cruelty, perpetrated on such an enormous scale in our time, is what has left all the analogies rot upon which our senses hitherto based belief…. When we are faced with such cruelty, such devastation, such suffering – we can have the experience of being cognitively stripped – of being denuded of all the ground-rules of our believing: all those things that we think God is – like justice and goodness and beauty and mercy and compassion and love – we can find all of that stripped away, mocked, obscenely inverted, or entirely evacuated from our experience, left to hang and to suffocate. And we don’t have to run up against something as spectacular as a genocide to have this experience of epistemic devastation. It can happen – indeed for us it usually happens – in the middle of something as cruelly mundane as cancer or a car crash or Alzheimer’s or a suicide in the family.

At such times – all that we’ve learned from Scripture or heard in church rings hollow. It has no foothold in the soul. And this can be the most painful thing for a Christian – just when we need the Lord’s consolation and mercy the most, to find that its disappeared, along with the Lord himself, withdrawn, having descended to the dead – and we have to endure having learned “all proofs or disproofs that we tender / of his existence are returned / unopened to the sender.”

Mother Therese had this experience. Some of you may have read the recent book of her letters and writings called “Come be my Light” – where we learn that her spiritual life was a rarely mitigated experience of this kind of epistemic divestment, for over fifty years. Fifty years of earnest and constant seeking after the Lord, and his constant withdrawal beyond the horizon of our apprehension. The Lover in the Song of Solomon says:

I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not;
I called him, but he gave no answer.

The endurance of such things is precisely the via dolorosa, the way of suffering: its what it is to take up your cross daily and trudge with Jesus up to Golgotha, to choose with him moment by moment continually to plunge into the darkness of psychic desolation – the sword of grief piercing your own heart also, in the awful emptiness and silence. In the words in Auden’s poem: Meanwhile, a silence on the cross, / As dead as we shall ever be, / speaks of some total gain or loss, / and you and I are free / to guess from the insulted face / just what appearances he saves / by suffering in a public place / a death reserved for slaves”.

It is precisely this freedom to guess – or as Auden calls it at the beginning of the poem, this freedom “to choose” that’s so horrifying, and yet which is God’s own most awesome gift to us. Christians encounter it in a way that MATTERS in these times of desolation and suffering. Because THEN we’re really stripped, then the choice is a REAL choice: not based on rotten analogies, but based on what von Balthazar called “the obedience of a corpse.” The question every believer must ask himself is: Who do YOU say that I am. Sooner or later we will be asked this question at Golgotha, at the place of a skull. Who do you say that I am? This corpse hanging on a tree – who abandoned all his good and useful teaching, all his miracle working in Galilee – who set his eyes toward Jerusalem, and came here for THIS. Who do you say that I am?

I want to leave you with two thoughts. Today we are left in silence before the cross – we end this liturgy with the really horrifying fact that the Lord comes into his Kingdom on the cross: IESUS NAZARENUS REX IUDEORUM.

I would like to leave you at the foot of the cross. But I would like to point out that if you are at the foot of the cross, you are with Mary. If you’re at the foot of the cross, you’re standing there with Mary. Our task is to hold to Jesus in faith, with Mary, even here. Mary’s greatness lies in the fact that she held on in faith to Jesus. We keep finding her in the Gospels, next to Jesus, despite her constant discovery of the rotten analogies: depite having constantly to face the identity of her Son outpacing her ability to understand, hearing him say “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I would be in my father’s house?” and “Woman what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come,” and “Who are my mother and my brothers? Everyone who hears the word of God and keeps it is my sister and my brother and my mother…” And finally on the cross she holds on in faith even as the most intimate analogies are stripped away. Msgr. Romano Guardini said: “…at last [Jesus] severed the very bond of son-ship, appointing another, the man beside her under the cross, to take his place! On the highest, thinnest pinnacle of creation, Jesus stood alone, face to face with the justice of God. [And Mary’s greatness is in that] From the depths of her co-agony on Golgotha, Mary, with a final bound of faith, accepted this double separation – and once again stood beside him!”

Our vocation is – with Mary – to confess Jesus to be as Messiah even in the face of the cross’s awful silence, to hear in that silence the voice of God’s total self-disclosure, and to know Jesus to be our king and savior by knowing “his suffering in a public place / a death reserved for slaves.”

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