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

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

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 the second sunday after the epiphany / january 17 2010

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 pentecost 20 / year b / proper 24 / october 18, 2009

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.

sermon for the fourth sunday in lent -- church of the holy cross, march 22, 2009

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

Today’s Old Testament reading from 2 Chronicles tells a very condensed version of the story of destruction of the temple by the forces of the Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, and of the exile of the Jews from their home for seventy years, the “Babylonian Captivity”. This was an incredibly significant and traumatic event for the Jewish people, and a much more replete account of it can be found elsewhere in the Old Testament (2 Kings, Jeremiah, Ezra, Nehemiah, inter alia).

In today’s reading, the Chronicler tells us the SPIRITUAL reason for the destruction of Jerusalem: “King Zedekiah and all the leading priests and the people were exceedingly unfaithful, following all the abominations of the nations; and they polluted the house of the Lord, which the Lord had hallowed in Jerusalem.”

It is important to remember that the commandments of God are given to us for our own good. God does not need our service. Our righteousness adds nothing to his greatness or his glory, and our sinfulness, our disobedience to his commandments does not harm God in any way whatsoever. He has not given revealed his will to us because he gets something from our obedience. In the book of Job, one of Job’s interlocutors (the only one, as it turns out, with any wisdom – and he was the youngest of all of them) makes this point. He says: “Look at the heavens, and see; and behold the clouds, which are higher than you. If you have sinned, what do you accomplish against [God]? And if your transgressions are multiplied, what do you do to him? If you are righteous, what do you give to him; or what does he receive from your hand? Your wickedness concerns a man like yourself, and your righteousness [only has to do with mortals]” (Job 35.5ff).

This, incidentally, sheds light on the reason we protect holy things: why, for example, it is not alright to receive communion if we are in a state of serious sin which we have not confessed – not because somehow it brings dishonor to God; but rather because it is bad for US. God forbids it not to protect himself or his glory, but because he is a consuming fire (Heb. 12.29), and unless we are willing to become like him, to be reformed in his image, then careless closeness to him will destroy us.

The broader point is that God has revealed his will to us, he has given us commandments, because he LOVES us. This has ever been the case, because he is LOVE. He always has been love, and he always will be love. He cannot NOT be love, because he cannot be other than himself. His love is the reason he brought the universe into being. He did not need it. And this is one of the most mysterious truths there is: God created us because he loved us. And the story of our relationship with him, chiefly as told by the Bible, is the story of his seeking to do us good in EVERY instance.

That should be in the back of our minds as we read today’s Old Testament lesson about the destruction of Jerusalem, about God’s judgment and his wrath toward Judah. And the Chronicler points out that God had persistently wooed his people, even after they had forsaken him and gone whoring after other gods: “The Lord, the God of their fathers, sent persistently to them by his messengers, because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place; but they kept mocking the messengers of God, despising his words, and scoffing at his prophets.” And then the Chronicler says something that we are apt to misunderstand in the light of God’s unfailing love. He says “the wrath of the Lord rose against his people, till there was no remedy. Therefore he brought up against them the king of the Chaldeans, who slew their young men with the sword in the house of their sanctuary, and had no compassion on young man or virgin, old man or aged; he gave them all into his hand.”

How are we to reconcile this account of God’s wrath with his unfailing love? How can he at once love us, always and unconditionally, and yet wrathfully deliver us to destruction and death? The answer is that he does not deliver us to destruction and death. Rather, when we persistently turn away from him, when we are presented with his law, which he has given us for our own good, precisely to SAVE us from destruction and death, when we go our own way and ignore his determined seduction of our souls, then we take ourselves into death and destruction. Our relationship with God comes to be characterized only by our distance from him, because WE have run away. And when we find ourselves distanced, by our own self-will, from the source of our life and sustenance, we find ourselves sliding into destruction.

God allows this to happen because he honors our freedom – because our ability freely to choose is the bedrock of our ability to love God and one another – because when love is constrained or forced it is not love at all. But if we exercise our freedom in turning away from the one who loves us and who always and only gives us life, then we find ourselves, as did the Jews in today’s OT reading, at the mercy of the forces of evil arrayed against us in the world. We find ourselves subject to those powers that seek our destruction. And we EXPERIENCE ourselves as the objects of God’s wrath, though in fact he is only honoring our freedom, the material condition of our reciprocal love for him.

But what happens when we find ourselves in such a situation, as we all have done, or will do, to one degree or another, at some point in our lives? What do we do when we find ourselves under God’s judgment? As the prophet Isaiah says, “let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the LORD, and he will have compassion, and to our God, for he will richly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55). God has the power to bring good out of evil, to bring life from death. This is the essence of our faith as Christians. When we profess our believe that Christ has died, but is now risen, we bear witness to our dogged insistence that God is ALL ABOUT bringing forth good – even, and especially, from the worst conceivable circumstances, and even from out of his wrath, because we belong to him: “you have been buried with [Jesus] in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead” (Col. 2.12). Nothing can alter that fact. The Lord said “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand” (John 10.28).

And we see this as well in the reading from 2 Chronicles. After a period of 70 years, there arose a new empire, that of Persia, which defeated and overthrew the Babylonians. The King of the Persians was named Cyrus. And, as the Chronicler says, “the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing: ‘Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, “The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him. Let him go up.’”

The Lord did something for his people that they could have never foreseen, but his ways are not our ways, neither are his thoughts our thoughts. Right in the middle of their deepest darkness, he raises up Cyrus and the Persians, who conquer and subjugate the Babylonians, and become the instruments for God to call his people back to Zion. Because of his benevolence toward God’s people, the Bible has only good things to say about Cyrus. Isaiah the prophet even calls him God’s anointed [the messiah] (Isaiah 45.1).

And in this, of course, Cyrus prefigures Jesus, God’s true anointed: another king raised up by God at a totally unexpected historical moment – Jesus, who just as significantly, emerges, if we allow him to, in our own lives, in our times of desolation, there to proclaim our kinship with him by the will of the Father. He is the one that brings us home from exile, sheds light on our darkness, and brings us out of desolation and death into his abundant and eternal life, if we will only follow him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

holy cross christmas eve sermon 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

john 3, nicodemus -- the second sunday of lent

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

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

So spoke Jesus to Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.

The first thing to notice about this passage from John’s gospel is that Nicodemus comes to Jesus “at night”. On the surface, this means exactly what it says it means. But the gospel of John is always concerned with symbols – and light and darkness are symbols used and reused throughout John. The Gospel begins by saying that in Jesus was life, and the life was the LIGHT of men. And the light shines in darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1.4-5).

Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night. This is an image of Nicodemus coming to Jesus with a darkened heart and mind. Nicodemus comes to the Lord yet unilluminated by the light of the Truth. He comes out of the darkness of the world, the darkness of ignorance about God, and preeminently about what God had done in Christ.

And Nicodemus’s first words to the Lord manifest exactly this darkness. He says “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do, unless God is with him." How often do we hear similar talk about Jesus in our own lives – in the media, from friends and family, sometimes perhaps even on our own lips – that Jesus is certainly a great teacher who is in some sense divine, because he is said to have done amazing things, and his teaching was certainly interesting and revolutionary. “we know that you are a teacher come from God.”

And the Lord’s words to Nicodemus cut right to the heart of his darkness. Jesus doesn’t bother defending himself. He doesn’t bother with correcting Nicodemus on his doctrinal error. The next verse the Lord says “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Nicodemus could not see the Kingdom of God, which was standing right in front of him. Remember that the Kingdom of God in Greek really means the REIGN of God – the sphere within which God’s will is done. And so Jesus is HIMSELF the Kingdom of God. He is the one in whom the Father’s will is done perfectly and completely. And so back then, if he were standing nearby, you were liable to hear a true prophet like John the Baptist cry out “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!”

Nicodemus sees in Jesus a clever teacher, perhaps even a sublime teacher, maybe like the Buddha, someone who teaches interesting things about God. He can’t seem to see that the Kingdom of God and God HIMSELF, is standing in front of him. He’s only part way there.

“Rabbi, we know that you are a great teacher, we know that you are a wonder-worker, a prophet – we know that you utter divine truths.” And Jesus says gently “Nicodemus, you have to be born again to see the Kingdom of God.”

And Nicodemus is incredulous. “What are you talking about? Born again? How can you be born again?” And the Lord says “You must be born of water and the Spirit to enter the Kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

Reading this passage about water and the spirit and illumination, we should be mindful of the beginning of the Bible – of Genesis, where for the first time there is again water, and Spirit, and light. The first verses of the first book of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the SPIRIT of God was moving over the face of the WATERS. And God said, ‘Let there be LIGHT” (Gen. 1.1-3).

So the Lord is telling Nicodemus that he must become a new creature. He must be recreated by the Spirit. And just as surely as the spirit of God brooded over the waters of chaos at the creation of the world, so the Spirit of God moves over the waters of Baptism – forming those who are becoming members of the Lord’s Body into new and spiritual creatures.

St. Paul writes “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6.3f).

The coming of Jesus Christ means the possibility of new life. It means the possibility of living in the truth of God himself, in the confession of Jesus as Lord. It means illumination – and not merely the ability to SEE the Kingdom of God, but to follow Christ and ENTER it.

Nicodemus appears once more in the Gospel of John, at the very end. He is one of the disciples who buries Jesus. Nicode'mus also, who had at first come to him by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pounds' weight. “They took the body of Jesus, and bound it in linen cloths with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews. Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb where no one had ever been laid. So because of the Jewish day of Preparation, as the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there” (John 19.39ff).

The womb and the tomb. It is fitting that this disciple who hears the message of the possibility and the necessity of illumination through rebirth by water and the Spirit – this disciple is there at the tomb, seeing the material condition for our rebirth, that the Son of God came to earth to DIE, to take on all the sickness and sin that seeks to destroy us, to BEAR IT, to die under its weight, and to be laid in a tomb… by Nicodemus. All so that we can have life and light with and in and through and by HIM – by being made members of his crucified and risen Body – “the fullness of him who fills all in all”.

For us, this means bearing witness to him, showing him to those around us, and at the same time seeing him in those around us – in our brother and sister Christians, in the poor and the suffering, and even in our enemies. We may measure our life in the Spirit – our growth into the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ (Ephesians 4.13) – we may mark our progress into the Kingdom thus: to what degree do we see him who IS the Kingdom everywhere?

For “unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Therefore we Praise the Name of the Lord.

….

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

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

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

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

Therefore:

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

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