TRINITY SUNDAY, 2021

May 30, 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N.J.

In the year 325 AD, there occurred an event of momentous importance for the history of the Christian Church. Summoned by the Emperor Constantine, 230 bishops from far and wide gathered at the town of Nicaea in what is today Turkey – about 55 miles southeast of Constantinople or present-day Istanbul.

It was the first but not the last gathering of its kind: an ecumenical Council. The word ecumenical in this context means “worldwide” or “universal.” While most of the bishops who attended were from the Greek-speaking Eastern half of the Roman Empire, the Pope in Rome sent two priests as his representatives, and the Bishop of Carthage in North Africa was present as well.

Some of the bishops who traveled with their entourages along the Roman roads to Nicaea bore the scars of tortures they’d suffered in the last great persecution under the Emperor Diocletian. Such a gathering would have been impossible during the preceding three centuries when Christianity remained an illegal religion.

 

Previously, local councils had met to consider questions facing the Church in specific local regions. But now, the Council of Nicaea met with unprecedented authority to make decisions binding on the Church throughout all lands.

Beginning on May 20, 325, the Council met for two months and issued rulings on a variety of topics, ranging from the method of calculating the date of Easter to ratification of the Church’s four principal metropolitan sees as Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. (Constantinople would be added later.)

But the most pressing item on the Council’s agenda was a raging theological controversy that been causing division among Christians for the previous twenty years or so. In the Egyptian city of Alexandria, the presbyter Arius had been teaching a doctrine that struck many of his contemporaries as heretical and blasphemous. 

Both Arius and his opponents agreed that the Son of God, also known as the Logos or Word of God, had come down from heaven and taken flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary. But Arius insisted that this Son of God who’d become incarnate in Jesus Christ was not fully divine but rather a created spirit, an angel or a demigod—the highest of God’s creatures to be sure, but nonetheless inferior and subordinate to God the Father, whose divine nature he did not and could not share.

Those who opposed Arius, including his own bishop Alexander, and Alexander’s successor Athanasius, rightly saw that unless Christ was truly divine as well as truly human, he could not reconcile fallen humanity to God or communicate God’s divine life to humanity. The Council of Nicaea decisively sided with Alexander and Athanasius against Arius. 

To make its position absolutely clear, the Council solemnly promulgated the earliest version of the profession of faith that we know today as the Nicene Creed, beginning “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” (Incidentally, when the Creed was translated into Latin it changed the first person plural, “We believe,” in the first person singular, “I believe.” So both English translations, “We believe” and “I believe,” are equally valid. One just follows the Greek while the other follows the Latin.)

In response to the Arian heresy, the Nicene Creed went on to affirm that the Son is “God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father …” That clause, which we sing or say at the Eucharist every Sunday and major Holy Day, represented the first but certainly not the last step in the Church’s definition of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which we celebrate today.

On Trinity Sunday, then, we give thanks for the Ecumenical Councils and the Catholic Creeds given to us as essential components of what is sometimes called the “deposit of faith.” (The Catholic Creeds, by the way, are normally reckoned as three: the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed.) A week ago, we celebrated the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. The Ecumenical Councils and the Catholic Creeds demonstrate the continuing presence and work of the Holy Spirit in history, teaching the Church and leading it into all the truth.

A useful way of thinking about the Creeds is as thumbnail summaries of the teaching of Scripture. As Anglican Catholics we affirm that the Bible contains the definitive record of God’s revelation. It is “the Word of the Lord,” and it “contains all things necessary to salvation.” The problem is that the Bible is a vast compilation of many writings, spanning many different periods and composed by many human authors in many different genres. Left to themselves, different groups of Christians generally come up with widely varying and often mutually contradictory understandings of biblical teaching. Scripture is not self-interpreting. We need an authoritative guide to Scripture’s true meaning; the Ecumenical Councils and Catholic Creeds supply the guidance we need, being the fruit of the universal Church’s Spirit-guided reflection and meditation upon the Sacred Texts over the centuries.

Our celebration today invites us each to reflect on the Creeds’ place in our life and worship. Nowadays, some liturgists and church leaders are pushing for a less prominent role for the Creeds in the Church’s worship, especially in future Prayer Book revisions. Some participants in this debate have even complained that reciting the Creed every Sunday feels like oppression, like we’re being told how to think and what to believe. But such criticism misses the point completely!

When we say the Nicene Creed at Mass, it’s not as if the aggregated individuals who make up the congregation are each expressing their own personal faith. That would be impossible in any case, because we all hold slightly different beliefs, and were we to vocalize them all at the same time the result would be a cacophony of discordant voices. What’s really happening is that the Church is proclaiming the Church’s faith; and we’re being invited to join in, so that by repeated participation in this liturgical proclamation, the Holy Spirit may gradually lead us into all the truth by forming a mature faith within us.

A favorite story of mine recounts how an Eastern Orthodox bishop once visited a well-known Methodist Divinity School to give a lecture on the Nicene Creed. During the question time that followed, one of the seminarians raised his hand and said, “I’m sorry, but I just won’t say the part about Jesus being born of the Virgin Mary. Try as I may, I can’t bring myself to believe in the Virgin Birth.” 

The bishop smiled compassionately and responded in a gentle voice: “Well, don’t be too hard on yourself. You’re still very young. You can’t expect to get it all at once. But the crucial thing is not to give up: just keep on saying it, and someday God will give you this faith when he knows that you’re ready for it. In the meantime, remember that what the Divine Liturgy proclaims is not your faith, but the Church’s faith.”

THE DAY OF PENTECOST: WHITSUNDAY

May 23, 2021

Saint Uriel's, Sea Girt, N.J.

Acts 2:1-21

Fifty days ago, we gathered to celebrate the Lord’s Resurrection in a darkened church illumined only by candlelight. The Great Vigil of Easter is a liturgy of great antiquity and beauty. But it may come as a surprise to hear that we could have done something similar last night. The Church’s rites provide for a Vigil of Pentecost on what used to be called Whitsun Eve. Perhaps this would be something worth attempting in future years here at St. Uriel’s.

The Vigil of Pentecost is similar in structure to the Easter Vigil, but a bit simpler. First, there’s a service of readings from the Old Testament. Second, the font is blessed, and Holy Baptism is administered, or, failing that, baptismal promises are renewed. And third, the Holy Eucharist is celebrated: the first Mass of Pentecost.

The service of readings at the Vigil’s beginning sets forth some Old Testament prophecies and anticipations of the Holy Spirit’s descent at Pentecost. Four readings are featured in particular: from Genesis on the Tower of Babel; from Exodus on God’s giving the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai; from Ezekiel on the Valley of Dry Bones; and from the Prophet Joel on God’s promise to pour out his Spirit on all flesh. Each of these readings helps elucidate some aspect of what’s happening in the Upper Room when the Day of Pentecost finally comes.

The story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 takes us back to the ancient days when the whole earth had one language with few words, and people gathered to build a city with a tower reaching to heaven. In response to this prideful project, the Lord came down and confused the people’s language so that they could no longer understand one another. So the people were scattered, and left off building the city, which was called Babel, because there the Lord confused their language. The story thus explains the mutual unintelligibility of different languages as a consequence of human sin. The gift of language, originally given as a means of communication, has now become a barrier to communication.

Against this background, the speaking in tongues on the Day of Pentecost symbolizes the reversal of what might be called “the Babel effect.” There’s no return to one language. Redemption doesn’t work that way. God doesn’t erase or obliterate the effects of human sin but rather brings forth from them an even greater good. Mutual intelligibility and comprehension now replace confusion and misunderstanding: “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language? … We hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.” The miracle signals a new restoration pointing to, and indeed initiating, the Church’s mission to preach the good news of reconciliation to every race, nation, ethnicity, and language, to the farthest ends of the earth.

Then a reading from Exodus 19 and 20 reminds us that in the Jewish calendar Pentecost, better known as the Feast of Shavuot, commemorates God’s giving of the Law on Mount Sinai. Just as Pentecost comes fifty days after Easter in the Christian calendar, so Shavuot comes fifty days after Passover in the Jewish calendar—and that's no accident. In the reading, God comes down on the mountain amidst clouds of thick darkness, flashes of fire, peals of thunder, and blasts of the trumpet. The Holy Spirit’s descent on the Day of Pentecost features similar sights and sounds: the rush of a mighty wind, and tongues of fire distributed and resting upon each of those in the Upper Room.

The deeper point is that the Holy Spirit becomes in the New Covenant what the Law of Moses was in the Old Covenant. After liberating the children of Israel from bondage in Egypt and leading them through the Red Sea on dry ground, God gives them the Law as the guide to ordering their life together as his chosen people. Similarly, after delivering us from the bondage of sin and death by Christ’s death and Resurrection, God gives us the Holy Spirit as the living guide to ordering our life together as his Church in the world.

Then comes the reading from Ezekiel. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t love the vision of the Valley of Dry Bones. At the Lord’s command, Ezekiel prophesies to the bones strewn over the valley, and he hears a great rattling sound as the bones come together, and are miraculously covered with sinews, flesh, and skin. But they’re still without life. So the Lord commands Ezekiel to prophesy to the breath: “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these bones, that they may live.” Ezekiel prophesies as commanded, and breath comes into the bones, and they live, and stand upon their feet, an exceedingly great host.

Then God explains the vision’s meaning: the dry bones are the house of Israel, to whom God makes the promise, “I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live.” On the Day of Pentecost, the sound of rushing wind evokes this image of God’s life-giving breath.

In the fourth reading, from the prophet Joel, the Lord declares: “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.” Saint Peter quotes these very words in his sermon on the Day of Pentecost, explaining to the onlookers the meaning of the miracle they’ve just witnessed.

So, those are the Old Testament readings at the Vigil of Pentecost, which, like the Great Vigil of Easter, is a baptismal liturgy. Pentecost marks the beginning of the Church’s life and mission as the Body of Christ, into which we’ve been incorporated in Holy Baptism.

Even though we didn’t keep the Vigil of Pentecost last night, we shall be renewing our baptismal promises in just a few minutes. So, today’s celebration invites each of us to reflect on our baptismal vows and recommit ourselves to keeping them.

When we read those promises—I mean, really read them—we realize that’s a tall order: and nothing that we could ever accomplish on our own. But God’s Holy Spirit is already alive and at work within us, long before it even occurs to us to call upon him. A basic teaching of the Catholic faith is that we received the Holy Spirit at our baptism. His gifts may be lying dormant within us and in need of awakening, but they’re already there, nonetheless.

As Saint Paul says in today’s reading from Romans, the Spirit helps us in our weakness; we don’t know how to pray, but the Spirit intercedes within us with sighs too deep for words. And in today’s Gospel our Lord himself promises us the Counselor, the Spirit of truth, who will guide us into all the truth.

The good news is that God never leaves us to our own devices in doing whatever he may ask us to do. His Holy Spirit enlightens our minds, enflames our hearts, and fortifies our wills. His gifts are always available to us, simply for the asking, because we’ve already received them. And only in that reassurance do we dare recommit ourselves today to keeping our baptismal promises.

EASTER 7, YEAR B

May 16, 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N.J.

Acts 1:15-17; 21-26; Psalm 1

I John 5:9-13; John 17:6-9

Over the past twenty years or so, it’s become something of a cultural cliché to say: “I don’t believe in organized religion but I’m very spiritual.” However, this dichotomy between religion and spirituality is false. Whether we admit it or not, we human beings are inescapably both religious and spiritual. 

Religion may be defined as the total system of beliefs, stories, symbols, values, and practices by which we construe our identity and place in the world. By this definition, even an atheist has a religion; the belief in God’s non-existence is a key component of his religion. In the modern world, one’s religion might not be Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism, but rather nationalism, capitalism, fascism, Marxism, or socialism. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these secular ideologies did function as religions in the sense that they gave ultimate meaning, purpose, and direction to millions of people’s lives. In today’s world, one’s functional religion might be individualism, hedonism, consumerism, or egoism. We don’t have a choice about being religious; we do have a choice about which religion we believe to be true and worthy of adherence.

Moreover, the term “organized religion” is really redundant. There’s no such thing as an unorganized religion. We human beings are born organizers; the drive to order and arrange things belongs to our nature. Religious organization is neither limiting nor restrictive but liberating. For example, I didn’t choose the readings for Mass today. The Church chose them for me by means of something called the lectionary. I trust the Church to do a better job of choosing the readings than I could. Having that choice made for me gives me the freedom to concentrate on more edifying and worthwhile questions. The organized part of religion means that we don’t need to keep on reinventing the wheel.

 

Just as we don’t have a choice about whether to be religious, so we don’t have a choice about whether to be spiritual. All human beings have a spiritual life of one sort or another. Our experience of reality is not limited to the material world of things that can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled. We have imaginations and the capacity to dream dreams. Although some individuals are possibly more sensitive to this dimension than others, we all have some awareness of an unseen world: a realm of presences and influences distinct from yet capable of impinging upon the material world in which we live. Some such forces are benign, and others are malign. Different spiritualities put us in touch with different aspects of this unseen world. We don’t have a choice about being spiritual; we do have a choice about which spiritual practices to embrace as beneficial to our souls’ health, and which to avoid as dangerous and destructive.

The contemporary emphasis on spirituality-without-religion tends in a self-centered, self-indulgent, and ultimately narcissistic direction. Its root flaw is hyper-individualism. Being all about me and my personal fulfillment, it lacks traditional religion’s power to build community, motivate moral heroism, and inspire self-sacrifice for a greater good.

So, contrary to those who claim to be “not religious but very spiritual,” we human beings are inescapably both. The real questions are: Which religion we shall embrace as the organizing principle of our life? And: Which spiritual disciplines shall we practice as our entry point into the invisible dimensions of reality? It might be profitable to reflect on those two questions during the coming week as we approach the Feast of Pentecost.

From my point of view, speaking both personally and on behalf of the Church, the best answers to those questions are clear. I find that Catholic Christianity offers a more satisfactory framework for understanding life’s meaning and purpose than any of the available alternatives. It’s not just a system of beliefs but a relationship with a living God, the Holy Trinity, and membership in an organic community, the Church, the Body of Christ. Moreover, authentic Christian spirituality involves openness not just to some vaguely spiritual dimension of life, but to a specific divine Person, the Holy Spirit, who brings us into a living relationship with God the Father through God the Son.

In today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles, the risen Lord has ascended into heaven, but the promised Holy Spirit has not yet descended. It’s a time of waiting. And so what do the apostles do? Why, they attend to matters of religious organization! 

The defection of Judas Iscariot has broken the circle of the Twelve. A replacement must be appointed – someone who can share in the apostolic mission of bearing witness to the Resurrection. The candidate must be someone who followed Jesus from his baptism until his Ascension. At Peter’s instigation, the apostles choose two suitable candidates, pray, and cast lots to identify Matthias as the new Twelfth Apostle. So, the period between the Ascension and Pentecost is a time not only of waiting and praying for the Holy Spirit, but also of regrouping and reorganizing in preparation for the Spirit’s arrival.

We need both religious organization and spiritual power. The Church has aptly been likened to an old-fashioned sailing ship. Such a vessel requires a specific type of construction to stay afloat – a watertight hull and properly configured masts, rigging, and sails to catch the wind. Without the right design and structure, the ship will sink, founder, or capsize. But neither will the ship move forward if there’s no wind. For the Church, the wind that propels the vessel is none other than the Holy Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit, the Church is dead in the water and not going anywhere.

We don’t make any progress in the Christian life without both the ordering structure of organized religion and the dynamic power of the Holy Spirit. We need set religious practices, such as the weekly Mass and the daily Office. But all that structure becomes dry and arid formalism unless the Spirit breathes life into our religion. It’s not a question of either/or, but of both/and. We need both sound religion and authentic spirituality. 

In some respects (but not others), the interim period between rectors in a parish is analogous to the interval between the Ascension and Pentecost. The previous rector has departed; the next one is yet to come. In the meantime, both organizational and spiritual work needs to be done. The disciples attended to the organizational matter of replacing Judas and so reconstituting the Twelve. In like manner, your vestry is addressing necessary administrative tasks like refurbishing the rectory and working with the diocese to get a search process underway. But the disciples also gathered in the Upper Room every day to watch and pray. At this time, then, we can do no better than join in praying with Our Lady and all the Apostles: Come, Holy Spirit: fill the hearts of thy faithful, and kindle in us the fire of thy love. Send forth thy Spirit, and we shall be created, and thou shalt renew the face of the earth.

SOCIETY OF MARY ANNUAL MASS

Saturday 15 May 2021

S. Clement’s, Philadelphia

John 19:25-27

Saint John’s description of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Beloved Disciple at the foot of the Cross is wonderfully evocative. One of the blessings of hearing this Gospel today is that six weeks after Good Friday we return to the scene of Our Lord’s crucifixion, viewing it again from the new perspective of his Resurrection and Ascension.

Some biblical scholars argue that Our Lord’s words to his Mother and the Beloved Disciple amount to nothing more than a dying man’s last-minute disposition of family affairs, ensuring that his Mother will be provided for after he’s gone. And that’s indeed part of what’s taking place.

(Incidentally, this interpretation still supports the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, for if she and Joseph had had other male offspring after Our Lord’s birth, then this responsibility would have passed automatically to them, and no such provision would have been necessary.)

But as any serious student of the New Testament can attest, nothing is ever that simple in John’s Gospel. Beyond the level of literal meaning, Our Lord’s words frequently communicate profound and sublime truths at multiple levels of symbolic meaning. There’s no reason why this episode in particular should prove any exception to that general rule. And at the outset, I want to acknowledge my debt to the contemporary Catholic apologist Edward Sri in his 2018 book, Rethinking Mary in the New Testament, which I highly recommend. 

Sri points out that Our Lord’s words to his Mother and the Beloved Disciple follow a recurring pattern in Saint John’s Gospel. Character A sees Character B and makes a statement beginning with the word “Behold.” John the Baptist sees Jesus coming towards him, and declares, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” Then, after seeing Nathanael under the fig tree, Jesus remarks, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile.” In both cases, the word “behold” introduces a statement revealing some theological or spiritual truth concerning the person being spoken about. 

Our Lord’s words from the Cross follow exactly this pattern. Seeing his Mother, and the Beloved Disciple standing by, Jesus says to his Mother, “Woman, behold thy son.” And to the disciple: “Behold thy mother.” The pattern of words signals us that the relationship being named and called into being has not only a practical but also a theological and spiritual meaning.

To tease out the content of this meaning, we need to look at two more words that John uses. First is Our Lord’s form of address to his Mother: “Woman.” In that cultural and linguistic context the term is not disrespectful as it might be in contemporary English, but it’s nonetheless highly unusual. The second is the word “hour,” in John’s comment, “from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.”

Both words, “woman” and “hour,” have appeared together before, in John’s account of the miracle of water changed into wine at the wedding at Cana in Galilee. There, Our Lord also addressed his mother as “Woman,” remarking enigmatically, “My hour has not yet come.” Throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus has spoken repeatedly of his approaching “hour,” which the reader understands to be the hour when he will be lifted high on the Cross. So now, when John remarks that “from that hour the disciple took her into his own home,” we’re to understand that this hour he’s been speaking about all along now finally has come.

In this context, the form of address, “Woman,” clearly implies that Mary is the New Eve—Eve being of course the original Woman. The name Eve, we recall from Genesis 3:20, means “mother of all living.” We recall also that in Genesis 3:15, God tells the serpent who’s brought about humanity’s downfall, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head; and you shall bruise his heel.” On the Cross, then, the hour has finally come when the woman’s offspring defeats our ancient enemy, the devil.

That symbolism by itself would be rich enough. But there’s more. The words “woman” and “hour” occur together in yet another place in John’s Gospel. In his Farewell Discourse at the Last Supper, Our Lord tells a parable describing how his disciples will suffer when they see him betrayed, arrested, condemned, and crucified, but then will rejoice when they witness his Resurrection from the dead: “When a woman is in travail she has sorrow because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers her anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.”

At the foot of the Cross, Mary figuratively fulfills this image of the woman in travail and sorrow because the hour has come. Some patristic writers indeed describe Our Lord’s sufferings on the Cross and his Mother’s concomitant sorrows as a kind of birth pangs of a new creation. A key result is precisely her new maternal relationship with the Beloved Disciple into whose care Our Lord entrusts her.

That reflection brings us to the significance of the Beloved Disciple himself. Traditionally, he’s been identified with the Apostle John, and I see no reason to dispute that identification. But again, nothing is ever that simple in the Fourth Gospel! In addition to being a specific person, the disciple whom Jesus loves is also a representative figure, an ideal disciple, a model of discipleship. So, when Our Lord names the Beloved Disciple the son of Mary, and Mary Mother of the Beloved Disciple, the unavoidable implication is that he’s establishing a new maternal relationship between his Mother and all Christian disciples in all times and places. Just as the first Eve was mother of all living, so Mary, the second Eve, becomes the Mother of all who live in Christ, and Mother of the Church.

The invitation and challenge of today’s Gospel for us, then, is to do as the Beloved Disciple did. From that hour he took Mary into his own home. Here, the English translation fails to capture the richness of the original Greek. In that sentence the verb “take” can also be translated as receive, accept, or welcome personally. More tellingly, the phrase translated “into his own home” reads more literally “into the things that were his own.” So an equally accurate translation might be that the Beloved Disciple “welcomed Mary into his life.” In that respect, he stands as a model and example for us all!

To any who may be seeking ways to welcome Our Lord’s Mother more fully into their lives, I heartily commend the Society of Mary as a fellowship of Christians who do our best to support one another in doing precisely that. If you think you might like to join us, then visit our website, somamerica.org, where you’ll find everything that you need to become a member. We’d love you to join us in our common endeavor to live into our identity as children of Mary, into whose maternal care Jesus, her divine Son, entrusted us in that most solemn moment recounted in today’s Gospel.

THE ASCENSION

Thursday, May 13, 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N.J.

Acts 1:1-11; Psalm 47 or 93

Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53

Have you ever noticed that our secular culture has appropriated certain Christian festivals but not others? You don’t have to grow up in a church-going family to know when Christmas and Easter are coming. The wider society even pays a tribute of sorts to All Saints Day with Halloween costumes and trick or treating.

But just think: when was the last time anyone sent you an Ascension card? Or gave you a Pentecost present? Or hosted a Trinity Sunday holiday party? I suppose we ought to be grateful that at least some of the holy days in our calendar have remained free from commercial exploitation. But on that account, we may be apt to overlook these days’ pivotal significance in the Church calendar.

Today we celebrate the Ascension of our Lord. Both the Ascension and Pentecost, which we shall celebrate a week from Sunday, are principal feasts of the Church Year, of equal rank with Christmas, Easter, and All Saints Day. Yet while our attendance today is pretty good, it’s still far less than the throngs who turn out for Christmas and Easter.

I suspect that the reasons for this relative neglect of the Ascension are not only cultural but also theological. Not only does the wider culture fail to notice the Ascension, but many believing and practicing Christians don’t quite know what to make of it either.

Perhaps the imagery itself is a bit embarrassing. Unlike ancient people, we’re no longer accustomed to imagining a three-story universe, with heaven up there in the sky, hell down there under the earth, and us here on the ground floor in between. The birth of Jesus we can understand; it’s easy to imagine the manger, the barnyard animals, and the shepherds. The resurrection of Jesus we can understand; the empty tomb and the appearances of one previously dead but now alive speak to our deepest longings and hopes.

But the same risen Christ lifting off from the earth and rising up into the clouds? It’s difficult to make sense of this picture when we no longer think of heaven as a place located spatially up there, in the sky. A friend once told me of a sermon he’d heard in which the preacher described Jesus as the first astronaut: the first human being to leave the earth’s atmosphere and travel through outer space. That description just highlights the absurdity of too literal a reading of the Ascension story.

So, what really happened on Ascension Day? The short answer is that we don’t know. Perhaps the story is just a symbolic way of saying that Jesus has returned to his Father in heaven. Or perhaps Jesus really did lift off from the ground and rise into the clouds. The priest Robert Farrar Capon once wrote that Jesus only needed to get up as far as the first cloud to make his point – a visual point that his disciples would understand in terms of their own world view and cosmology. The underlying principle is that God always accommodates himself to our human limitations by speaking in a language, whether verbal or visual, that we can understand. And the Ascension may be a case in point.

Either way, the Ascension is absolutely crucial to our Christian faith because it answers the question: Where is Jesus now? He is at the right hand of his Father in heaven, whence he reigns as Lord over all creation. And that answer makes all the difference in the world as to how we relate to him here and now.

Some great teachers from ancient history are figures to whom we can relate only through their writings or through what others have written about them. Think, for example, of Socrates. Like Jesus, he never wrote anything, but his disciples Plato and Xenophon wrote down many of his teachings in minutely detailed transcripts of his dialogues in Fifth Century BC Athens. Reading these dialogues, we get a wonderful picture of Socrates’ personality, his relentless questioning, and his deeply held principles. It’s admittedly difficult to disentangle the historical sayings of Socrates from the words that Plato and others put in his mouth as they developed their own philosophies. Either way, however, when we close the book, Socrates remains nothing more than a figure from the ancient past, someone whom we can know only through the medium of what others wrote about him so many centuries ago. Even though he may seem to come alive in these writings, the indisputable fact is that Socrates was, is, and remains as dead as a doornail.

Precisely the opposite is true of Jesus. Sometimes scholars make a distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith – the Jesus of history being the figure whom we encounter in the pages of the Gospels; and the Christ of faith being the figure worshiped by the Christian Church throughout the centuries since.

The doctrine of the Ascension teaches us, however, that the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are one and the same. The Jesus about whom we read in the Bible is not merely an historical figure who lived and then died in the ancient past, but rather one who is alive, even now, in the fullest possible sense of the word.

And so, to return to the question: Where is Jesus now? He’s at the right hand of his Father, reigning as Lord over all creation. Moreover, we can know him today not only as someone whose words and deeds we read in the Bible, but also as a living presence in our midst – and more specifically, as the one who still speaks to us in his Word, who still becomes one with us in his Sacraments, and who is still worthy of our deepest loyalty, allegiance, faith, and obedience.

SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER, YEAR B

May 9, 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N. J.

Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98;

I John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17

The episode in this morning’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles is sometimes known as “the Gentile Pentecost.” In response to a vision from God, a Roman centurion named Cornelius has sent for the Apostle Peter, who in turn has received his own vision from God directing him to accept the invitation. So Peter has come to Cornelius’s house in Caesarea, the principal Roman port in the Mediterranean coast of Palestine. Cornelius is one of those Gentiles known at the time as “God-fearers”—that is, people who admire the Jewish religion and believe in the God of Jewish monotheism, but who are for whatever reason unwilling or unable to undertake the commitment involved in converting to Judaism and keeping all the precepts of the Jewish Law or Torah.

The reading begins as Peter has begun preaching to Cornelius and his household the good news of Jesus Christ and his resurrection from the dead. The Holy Spirit descends upon all present, they begin speaking in tongues as at the original Pentecost in the Upper Room at Jerusalem, and Peter commands that they should all be baptized.

This moment is absolutely pivotal in the development of early Christianity, making clear once and for all that the apostolic witness to the Lord’s resurrection is to be borne to all nations, not just Israel alone. Henceforth the Church, the community of those gathered in response to the Easter proclamation, is to comprise all the world’s peoples, fulfilling the words of today’s psalm: “all the ends of the earth have seen the victory of our God.”

We’re all in this together. Saint John writes in today’s Epistle that everyone who believes is a child of God. And Jesus says in today’s Gospel that he calls us no longer servants but friends. The Church is thus called to be a fellowship transcending all divisions of race, class, ethnicity, nationality, and language. (Incidentally, the symbolic point of the speaking in tongues is that differences in language no longer constitute a barrier to mutual intelligibility and understanding, for we’re all one in Christ Jesus. We shall have occasion to reflect further on this point in two weeks’ time, on the Day of Pentecost.)

So today’s readings challenge us, as our Lord puts it in the Gospel, to “love one another as I have loved you.” In too many times and places, however, the Church has failed to live up to its identity as a community where all are welcome and loved without distinction. All too often, parishes and congregations become exclusive clubs for “people like us”—those who speak and dress in a certain way, who live in the right neighborhoods, who belong to this or that political party, or who hold certain opinions on the controversial social and political questions of the day.

I don’t want to belabor the point, but in our fallen and sinful human condition, we do tend to find our greatest comfort zones among those whom we find most like-minded, and with whom we most readily identify. So we need to be reminded periodically that the Church is a universal fellowship, where we’re called to engage in the sometimes difficult and often challenging work of welcoming and including all comers, especially those with whom we may be instinctively less at ease.

But this challenge was the same for Peter and his companions that day in Caesarea almost two millennia ago. As the reading from Acts puts it: “The believers from among the circumcised who came with Peter were amazed because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles.” Peter himself had to overcome enormous personal reluctance, even revulsion, to enter the house of the Gentile Cornelius, whom he regarded as an unclean foreigner. But we may be glad that he did, because otherwise we wouldn’t be here today! Christianity could well have remained a movement existing purely within the confines of Judaism, and we Gentiles would never have had the opportunity to hear, receive, and respond to the good news of Jesus Christ.

We do well, then, to pray the same Holy Spirit that moved Peter and his companions to welcome Cornelius and his household into the Church, to move our hearts also, that we may do whatever we need to do in our own time to welcome those whom we might otherwise be tempted to regard as foreigners and strangers. Only then can we truly begin to realize and live into our identity as the Church Catholic.

All that I’m trying to say here is best summed up in one of my favorite hymns, written by Brian Wren in 1970, and set to the early American folk tune Land of Rest:

As Christ breaks bread, and bids us share

  Each proud division ends;

The love that made us makes us one,

  And strangers now are friends.

FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER, YEAR B

May 2, 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N.J.

Acts 8:26-40; Psalm 22:22-30

I John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8

A theme running through this morning’s readings is that of life—particularly appropriate for Eastertide, when we celebrate Christ risen from the dead to new, glorious, and eternal life, which he offers in turn to share with us.

Today’s Collect mentions the word life three times, first addressing God, whom truly to know is everlasting life, and then asking him to grant that we may so know Jesus to be the way, the truth, and the life, that we may follow in his steps the way leading to eternal life.

Saint John writes in the Epistle that God manifested his love among us by sending his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In Psalm 22 the psalmist acclaims the Lord as the source of all life: “My soul shall live for him; my descendants shall serve him.”

In the Gospel reading from John 15, Our Lord employs the extended metaphor of a vine and its branches to depict his life-giving relationship with his disciples: “I am the vine; you are the branches.” Just as the vine is the branches’ life, so the risen Christ is our life. Just as the branches wither and die when cut off from the vine, so apart from Christ we have no life in us.

So today’s readings invite and challenge us to stay connected as branches to the vine: to nurture our life-giving union with Christ, established in Holy Baptism, so that we may bear the fruit of good works and so prove to be his disciples.

Jesus uses the verb “abide” to describe this staying connected to the vine: “Abide in me and I in you … He who abides in me and I in him, he it is who bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” And again: “By this my father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.”

The Church’s tradition commends an array of spiritual practices by which may nurture our vital union with Christ. First and foremost is what we’re doing here this morning, and what we do here Sunday by Sunday, and week by week: celebrate Mass together and receive the Sacraments. Beyond that, we have daily prayer, Bible reading, and a host of devotional exercises by which we can stay connected to Christ as the source of our life.

The surest test of our success in this endeavor is love. Saint John writes in today’s Epistle: “By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his own spirit.” And the chief fruit of the Spirit in our lives is precisely love. As John writes: “If God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.”

The story of Philip the Deacon and the Ethiopian eunuch in today’s reading from Acts vividly illustrates what life in the Spirit manifesting itself in love looks like in practice. Notice how throughout the story Philip remains fully open and responsive to the Spirit’s promptings. At a time when the disciples are being scattered, fleeing Jerusalem during a persecution of the fledgling Church, an angel of the Lord tells Philip to take the road that heads southwest towards Gaza—the opposite direction from which he was intending to travel—and he goes as the angel directs. 

Having taken this road, Philip encounters a high-ranking Ethiopian official on his way home from worshiping in Jerusalem. (The way back to Ethiopia was south along the coastal road towards Egypt.) We don’t know whether he was Jewish, even though by tradition a Jewish community existed in Ethiopia since the time of the Queen of Sheba's visit to King Solomon centuries before. Since the twentieth century, by the way, large numbers of this ancient Jewish community have immigrated from Ethiopia to Israel. Like them, this Ethiopian official was almost certainly black, so it’s interesting and instructive for us that the first foreign convert to Christianity of whom we have record in the New Testament was a black African.

On account of his emasculation, however, he would have been barred from full participation in the Temple sacrifices. So perhaps he was ready for a newer and fuller relationship with Israel’s God than the official worship in Jerusalem was able to offer him.

In any case, the Spirit tells Philip to approach the chariot—an action that under most circumstances would seem presumptuous and risky. Philip nonetheless obeys, and the fruit of his obedience is the conversion and baptism of this important foreign official. The point to note is that the success of Philip’s ministry is due not so much to his initiative, courage, knowledge of Scripture, and eloquence—although these gifts undoubtedly played their part—as to his willingness to respond in love to the Spirit’s inner movements as the active expression of his life in Christ and Christ’s life in him. Then, in that wonderful flourish at the end of the story, the Spirit catches Philip up and takes him away north to Caesarea, so that the newly-baptized Ethiopian sees him no more but goes on his way rejoicing.

How wonderful it would be if our life in Christ were so rich and so deep that those whom we encounter gain such a glimpse of his love through us that they go on their way rejoicing! May God grant us the grace of his Spirit to be such conduits of Christ’s life and love in our world today.