Sermon for the 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B

January 18, 2015 (at the 8 o'clock Mass)

I Samuel 3:1-20

John 1:43-51

Cambridge, England: Gonville and Caius College: chapel apse mosaic
(prophet Samuel being tutored by Eli)
(1870, made by firm of Antonio Salviati)

The Gospel readings for this season after the Epiphany emphasize the manifestation or showing forth of Christ. At Christmas we celebrate the Son of God coming down from heaven and sharing in our human life. But, momentous as that was, it was not enough to suffice for our salvation. His divine identity also had to be revealed and made known to us. Otherwise, we would never have known who he was or what he had come to offer us.

Revelation is a process that takes place in two stages. First, God must speak. But, second, we must hear his voice and recognize who it is that’s speaking. Today’s readings tell the stories of two people who come to recognize the Lord speaking to them: Samuel in the Old Testament; and Nathanael in the Gospel.

In the Old Testament reading, the boy Samuel is serving in the temple at Shiloh. Religion in that period seems to have reached a low ebb and become dry and formalistic: “the Word of the Lord was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision.” So, when Samuel hears a voice calling him, it doesn’t occur to him that it might be the Lord, and he thinks that it’s his master Eli instead.

Similarly, in the Gospel reading, when Philip goes to tell his friend Nathanael that they’ve found the Messiah – and it’s Jesus of Nazareth – Nathanael’s reaction is one of incredulity and disbelief: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” In both cases, the serious danger is that although the Lord is speaking, the message will be missed: by Samuel on account of his mistaking the voice for something else; and by Nathanael on account of his prejudice that no-one from Nazareth could possibly be the Messiah.

Notice, however, that in both cases someone else helps bring the person to the point of recognition. Samuel goes three times to Eli, saying, “Here I am, for you called me.” When Eli finally catches on as to what’s really happening, he instructs the boy: “The next time he calls, you shall say, ‘Speak Lord, for thy servant hears.’” Without Eli’s help, Samuel might simply shut the voice out and go through life never realizing his vocation to be a great prophet.

Likewise, Nathanael most likely would never come to know Jesus without the help of his friend Philip. For it’s Philip who first bothers to tell him, “We’ve found the Messiah,” and then, when Nathanael expresses disbelief that anything good could come out of Nazareth, it’s Philip who says simply, “Come, and see.” (That, by the way, is excellent evangelistic strategy. Philip doesn’t try to argue or persuade. He simply invites. Come and see.)

In both cases, the actual life-changing encounter with the divine is direct, one-on-one. Samuel must hear for himself what the Lord will say; Eli can’t do that for him. And Nathanael must meet Jesus for himself and come to his own realization that this is the Son of God, the King of Israel. Nonetheless, neither Samuel nor Nathanael comes to that point alone or unaided. Both Eli and Philip play pivotal roles in making the encounter possible. Reflecting on our own lives, we may be able to recall the role that such individuals have played in helping us come to faith and recognize the Lord’s voice calling us.

When I was a graduate student in Washington DC, my friend Susan played such a role for me. One Saturday evening, she and I were out having a drink in one of the bars on Connecticut Avenue; and I asked her if she would like to join a group of my friends for a game of volleyball on Sunday morning. She replied, “No, I can’t. I’m going to church.” So, I started asking her about the church she attended, and she invited me to come with her.

At that point, I was an agnostic who didn’t believe anything much, and I hadn’t darkened the door of a church in years. But for some reason I found myself saying yes; and the next morning I was attending the Sunday liturgy at Saint Margaret’s Episcopal Church, also on Connecticut Avenue. And that was the beginning of my conversion to Christianity. In a sense, then, Susan was Philip to my Nathanael. She issued the initial invitation, Come and see, and our Lord did the rest.

A couple of years later, I found my brain invaded by crazy thoughts about becoming a priest. Initially, I thought that this was the most ridiculous idea that had ever occurred to me. But the more I tried to push these thoughts out of my mind, the more they came back and reasserted themselves with a vengeance.

Finally, I went to my parish priest in the hope that he would disabuse me of any thoughts of ordination and tell me to do something else with my life since obviously I was so totally unsuited to the priesthood. Instead, he just smiled and said, “I’ve been wondering when you would come to talk about this.” In a sense, then, he was Eli to my Samuel. In so many words, he told me not to ignore the call I was hearing but rather to pay attention and listen.

The point is that the Christian life is not a solo endeavor. Relationships in the Body of Christ are crucially important. We all need others to be Eli and Philip to us, strengthening our faith and helping us discern all the different ways in which God is speaking to us. Then, having received this gift, we in turn need to make ourselves available to be Eli and Philip to others. And we need to keep on building a parish community that nurtures and fosters these relationships of spiritual friendship: a community in which we all help each other to know the Lord and to hear his voice.

Sermon for the Confession of Saint Peter

Sunday 18 January 2015 (at the 10 o'clock Solemn High Mass)

Matthew 16:13-19

In its present form, the feast of the Confession of Saint Peter is a fairly recent addition to the Church calendar. Up until 1960, the Roman Church kept January 18th as the Feast of Saint Peter’s Chair at Rome. In the apse at the back of St. Peter’s Basilica stands the magnificent Bernini bronze sculpture encasing the chair traditionally identified as the one on which Saint Peter sat to preside at worship as the first Bishop of Rome.

The bishop’s chair is, of course, an item of great symbolic significance. In Judaism, rabbis would sit in a chair to teach. The Gospels describe Jesus sitting down to teach – most notably as he delivers the Sermon on the Mount. And so the apostles and bishops of the earliest church likewise would preside at worship from a seat from which they would teach and which came to symbolize both the content of their teaching and their teaching authority.

In the early centuries of Church history, the great see cities of the Christian world were careful to preserve the chairs on which their founding bishops had sat. According to Eusebius, writing in the fourth century, Jerusalem preserved the chair of Saint James, and Alexandria preserved the chair of Saint Mark. In the late second century, Tertullian wrote: “Visit the apostolic churches in which the very chairs of the apostles preside in their places. If you are near Italy, there is Rome.” 

One of the Latin words for chair, cathedra, is the root of the English word cathedral, the church where the bishop has his chair. So, the Feast of St. Peter’s Chair celebrated Saint Peter’s teaching authority as the first Bishop of Rome – authority which was believed to be derived from our Lord’s words in today’s Gospel: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.”

In the old Roman calendar, January 18th was identified as the date when Saint Peter first presided over an assembly of the faithful after his arrival in Rome. A second feast of Saint Peter’s Chair at Antioch was kept on February 22nd. According to Gregory the Great, after leaving Jerusalem, Peter went first to Antioch where he stayed for seven years; and then he went to Rome, where he lived twenty-five years before his martyrdom during the persecution of the Emperor Nero.

Records indicate that during the pontificate of Pope Damasus in the fourth century, a wooden chair, identified as that of Saint Peter, was kept in the baptistery in old Saint Peter’s Basilica. Following baptisms, the pope would sit on the chair, and the newly baptized would be brought to him to receive an anointing with oil, known as the consignatio, or Sacrament of Confirmation.

During the Middle Ages, the Chair of Saint Peter would be brought from the baptistery to the High Altar on February 22nd, which was believed to be the anniversary of the date on which Peter had confessed Jesus to be the Christ and was in turn identified by Jesus as the rock on which he would build his Church. At their enthronements, also, new Popes would be seated on this chair, brought from the baptistery to the high altar for the occasion.

In the seventeenth century, to preserve this precious relic, Pope Alexander VII had it encased in the Bernini sculpture in which it sits today. In 1867, however, it was exposed for veneration by the faithful, and photographed. The photographs show a very medieval-looking chair that has been added to and embellished over the centuries with panels of acacia wood and inlaid ivories. Nonetheless the original frame of oak, much worm-eaten, is also clearly visible; and there is no reason to dismiss the possibility that this is the frame of the chair on which Saint Peter sat as he began his ministry as the Bishop of Rome.

In 1960, the Roman Catholic Church abolished the January 18th Feast of St. Peter’s Chair, keeping it instead on February 22nd. In the 1970s, however, a number of churches of the Anglican Communion, including our own Episcopal Church, added a Feast of the Confession of Saint Peter to their calendars on January 18th to mark the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

So we’ve come full circle. In its current form, the feast of the Confession of Saint Peter is a fairly new addition to the Church Calendar. Nonetheless, a rich history stands behind it. Its trajectory begins with Peter confessing Jesus to be the Messiah, the Christ, at Caesarea Philippi. It continues through Peter’s subsequent ministry as bishop first at Antioch and then at Rome. The Chair of Saint Peter symbolizes both his teaching and his teaching authority, grounded in the faith that expressed itself in his original Confession of Jesus as the Christ.

I encourage us all to observe the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity between now and next Sunday. Pray not only for the healing of the divisions of the sixteenth-century Reformation, but also for reunion between the historic Churches of the Christian East and West. It seems to me that here in Rhode Island we are significantly lacking in ecumenical interaction and cooperation – including joint worship service – and I wish we could do more.

Beginning the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity with the feast of the Confession of Saint Peter reminds us that Christian unity cannot be predicated on good feelings and warm relationships alone, nor even on cooperation in matters of shared pastoral concern and social witness. Genuine Christian unity must also rest upon the rock of the faith and teaching of the apostles, of whom Peter was the acknowledged leader and spokesman. In our search for Christian unity, then, we can do no better than to seek to re-appropriate and re-immerse ourselves in this shared heritage of apostolic faith and teaching symbolized by the Chair of Saint Peter at Rome.

Sermon for the Epiphany

THE EPIPHANY OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST

Tuesday 6 January 2015

At Saint John's Church, Newport, RI

Epiphany follows logically after Christmas. At Christmas, we celebrate the Incarnation. God the Son came down from heaven and was born in Bethlehem so that he could redeem us by sharing in our human condition, living and dying as one of us, to free us from sin and death and lead us to eternal life.

Yet we would never have known what Christ had done for us, we would never have been able to accept his offer of new life, unless somehow his Incarnation had been revealed to us. Without some clear public manifestations or signs of who he was, Jesus would have lived and died like any other First Century Jewish rabbi, without anyone recognizing his true identity as the Son of God.

So, it was necessary not only for the Son of God to take human flesh and come among us, but also for his divine identity to be revealed and made manifest to those among whom he came. The word Epiphany simply means “showing forth” or “manifestation.” And the Feast of the Epiphany begins a season in the Church Year when we celebrate the signs, illuminations, and manifestations that point to Christ and tell us who he is.

Thus, in the Gospel according to Saint Luke, Christ is not merely born in Bethlehem, but his birth is immediately announced by angels to shepherds in the fields. There’s not only a birth but also an announcement of who’s been born: a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.

Similarly, Saint Matthew’s Gospel describes the Wise Men from the East who see his star and come bearing gifts for the newborn King. The point of the star, by the way, is to show that even the world of nature, the very cosmos itself, heralds the Messiah’s birth. And the Wise Men from the East signify that the recipients of this Good News are not only the children of Israel, but all the nations. It’s not enough for the Christ simply to arrive: his arrival must be made known to the whole world.

In the coming weeks, we shall be looking at other signs by which Christ’s identity as the Son of God is made manifest to those around him: the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove at his baptism in the Jordan River; his many miracles of healing; his Transfiguration with dazzling light on the holy mountain. All these signs point behind the outward appearance of the man, Jesus of Nazareth, to the inward reality of the Incarnate Son of God.

Christianity is a religion of signs and symbols. We practice a sacramental faith, in which inward and spiritual realities are made known by outward and visible signs: water in baptism, bread and wine in the Eucharist, oil in anointing, rings in marriage, the sign of the cross in absolution, the laying-on-of-hands in confirmation and ordination. These sacramental signs are, if you will, epiphanies showing forth inward and spiritual graces. And like the star that guided the wise men in their pilgrimage, their purpose is always to lead us to Christ.

Epiphany, then, is a feast with a profoundly evangelistic message. It’s not enough for Christ simply to be present as a carefully guarded secret in the most private recesses of our inner lives. Rather, he must be made manifest in us. Those around us must be able to see in us the signs of his life. The wise men from the East were led to Christ by the sign of a star in the heavens; we are called to be signs by which the world may be led to Christ.

The wise men offered gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. According to the early Church Fathers, these gifts manifest or show forth three aspects of who Christ is: gold as the sign of his kingship; frankincense, which is burned in worship, as the sign of his divinity; and myrrh, the oil used to anoint the dead, as the sign of his cross and passion.

But another possible interpretation of the three gifts concerns what we can offer Christ as we seek to serve him and let him make himself manifest in our lives.

Gold symbolizes our earthly treasure. As Christians, we’re called to serve Christ by giving generously to fund the mission and ministry of his Church.

Frankincense symbolizes our worship and prayer. We serve Christ by our faithful attendance at Mass on Sundays and Holy Days, and by our participation in the Church’s daily round of prayer and devotion.

And what of myrrh? In the Bible, the oil of anointing is often used as a metaphor for good deeds and morally upright behavior. And that really completes the picture. In addition to our offerings of earthly treasure, and our worship and prayer, we make Christ manifest to the world by lives of moral integrity and by deeds of compassion and loving kindness towards those less fortunate than ourselves.

So, the Feast of the Epiphany draws our attention once again to the various signs by which Christ is made manifest to us: a star in the heavens; Sages from the East bearing gifts; a ewer of water poured out into a baptismal font; bread and wine changed into his Body and Blood. But if Christ is to be made manifest in our society today, it can only be through us. Our calling as the People of God is open ourselves up to the leading of the Holy Spirit so that Christ may make us his Epiphany to an unbelieving world.

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas

Jesus among the Doctors
Duccio di Buoninsegna (c. 1255 -- c. 1318)

Luke 2:41-52

Saint Luke’s account of the finding of the child Jesus in the Temple is the only episode we have in the canonical Gospels from what are sometimes described as Our Lord’s “hidden years.” Apart from this one incident, the New Testament skips from the infancy of Jesus to his baptism at the River Jordan, conventionally reckoned to have occurred when he was about thirty years old.

Some of the non-canonical apocryphal Gospels do feature fantastic stories of Our Lord’s childhood, such as the boy Jesus fashioning twelve clay birds and then causing them to come to life and fly away, or striking his playmates dead with a wave of his hand when they tease him. By comparison, Luke’s account of Mary and Joseph losing Jesus and then finding him three days later in the Temple is simple and prosaic by comparison -- and yet so much more profound.

Although this story is not devoid of symbolic elements, nonetheless in its basic outline it’s entirely plausible as the description of an incident that could really have happened. Jews living in Judea were expected to go up to Jerusalem three times a year for the great festivals of Pesach (Passover), Shavuot (the Feast of Weeks), and Sukkot (the Feast of Booths). For those living in places further away but still within reasonable traveling distance, such as Galilee, the requirement was reduced to once a year, at Passover.

In the way he tells the story, Luke is emphasizing that Jesus was brought up in the traditions of Judaism in an observant household. Luke is careful to make this point all along in his infancy narrative, noting both that Jesus was circumcised on the eighth day after his birth, and that after forty days Joseph and Mary brought him up to the Temple to present him to the Lord, as required by the Torah.

Even the detail of Jesus getting left behind by mistake is credible in the context of the times. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem often involved populations of entire villages traveling together, so Mary and Joseph could easily have assumed that he was elsewhere in the party. In his commentary on this passage, the Venerable Bede speculates that since even in the same caravan men and women customarily traveled separately, Mary and Joseph could each have assumed that Jesus was traveling with the other. 

Yet something new is also happening here. Up until now in the infancy narratives, Jesus has remained silent. As an infant he could say nothing, so others did all the talking for him. Between them, the angel Gabriel, Mary's cousin Elizabeth, the angels and shepherds in the fields, and Simeon and Anna in the Temple, have made some extravagant claims on his behalf: he is “the Son of the Most High …” “a Savior, who is Christ the Lord,” “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel.”

But now, Jesus speaks, and his first recorded words in Scripture are: “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Here he claims for himself the filial relationship with his Father in heaven that up to now others have ascribed to him. He is the Son of God. The Jerusalem Temple is his Father’s House.

(Notice that the Church offers children the opportunity to do something similar at about the age of twelve or older. If we were baptized as infants, our parents and godparents made the baptismal vows on our behalf. That was fine, but sooner or later there comes a point when we must own those promises for ourselves, and claim the relationship with God into which baptism has initiated us. So, in the Sacrament of Confirmation we reaffirm our baptismal vows and receive the strengthening of the Holy Spirit through the bishop’s laying-on-of-hands.)

In telling the story, also, Luke conveys something of the tension that is beginning to emerge in Our Lord’s relationship with his earthly family. His remaining behind in the Temple causes Mary and Joseph no small amount of distress, as Mary herself voices in the words, “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.” As a son, he has clearly defined duties to his parents. Luke duly notes that after this incident Jesus returned to Nazareth and was obedient to them. At the same time, however, his growing awareness of his filial relationship with his Father in heaven has introduced the claims of a higher loyalty: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”

Here the boy Jesus gives an anticipatory hint of the conflicts that his disciples will experience between earthly loyalties and obedience to God’s will. Later in the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly warns his disciples that they must be willing to give up everything that stands in the way of following him – and that sometimes faithful discipleship will entail conflict with members of their own families and even the sundering of family relationships.

Early Christian commentators on this passage liked to point out two more details of the story from the viewpoint of Mary and Joseph. First, they found Jesus in the Temple after three days of searching. Whether or not Luke intended it in telling the story, the three days struck the early Church fathers as an overwhelmingly obvious symbolic anticipation of our Lord’s Resurrection from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion and death. The losing-and-finding of Jesus in the Temple thus exemplifies the basic pattern of death and resurrection that shapes all Christian experience.

Second, the place where they found him was none other than “his Father’s House.” When we feel that we’ve lost sight of Jesus, and don’t know where to find him, that detail gives us a clue as to where to look: namely in the Church, the assembly of the faithful gathered for worship.

Listen to the words of the third-century Christian writer Origen of Alexandria:

“He is not found as soon as sought for, for Jesus was not among his kinsfolk and relations … nor in the company of the multitude … Learn where those who seek him find him, not everywhere, but in the Temple. And then seek Jesus in the Temple of God. Seek him in the Church, and seek him among the masters who are in the Temple. For if you will so seek him, you shall find him. They found him not among his kinsfolk, for human relations could not comprehend the Son of God; nor among his acquaintances, for he passes far beyond all human knowledge and understanding. Where then do they find him? In the Temple! If at any time you seek the Son of God, seek him first in the Temple, thither go up and you shall find Christ, the Word, and the Wisdom of God” (quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea).