PROPER 8, YEAR B

Sunday 27 June 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt

Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24

Psalm 30

II Corinthians 8:7-15

Mark 5:21-43

Last Sunday’s Gospel of the stilling of the storm on the Sea of Galilee presented Jesus in his divine power as Lord of the elemental forces of nature. Picking up where last week’s left off, today’s Gospel goes a step further, revealing Jesus as Lord of sickness and health, even of life and death itself.

As Jesus and his disciples return from their boat trip across the Sea of Galilee and disembark in Capernaum, an elder of the local synagogue, named Jairus, begs him to come and lay hands on his twelve-year-old daughter, who’s gravely ill to the point of death.

As they’re making their way to Jairus’s house, however, a woman who’s suffered for twelve years from an issue of blood takes hold of the Lord’s garment, saying to herself, “If I touch even his garments, I shall be made well.” Such is the divine power that inheres in his person, extending even to his clothes, that she’s healed on the spot, without his even knowing who’s done this. He simply perceives that power has gone forth from him.

Following this interlude, messengers arrive and inform Jairus that his daughter has died, and they attempt to dissuade him from troubling Jesus any further. Undeterred, Jesus continues toward the house, taking only his innermost circle of disciples: Peter, James, and John. There, amazingly, he raises the girl from death. She gets up, walks about, and, at the Lord’s instruction, is given something to eat.

A point to note is that both miracles involve touch: the woman touches the Lord’s garment; Jesus takes the dead girl’s hand. And in both cases Jesus speaks. His word to the woman confirms and ratifies her healing: “Go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” To Jairus’s daughter, likewise, he issues a command: “Little girl, I say to you, arise.”

Both miracles reveal Jesus as the divine giver of life and health: or, as he’s known in Christian tradition, the Great Physician. In this respect, he reflects and expresses the character of God his Father. Today’s reading from the Book of Wisdom declares: “God did not make death and he does not delight in the death of the living …” Jesus' healings in today’s Gospel fulfill the joyful acclamation of Psalm 30: “O Lord my God, I cried out to you; and you restored me to health; You brought me up from the dead; you restored my life as I was going down to the grave.”

Today’s Gospel invites us to place our faith in the Lord’s healing power. In both miracles, the recipient’s faith plays an indispensable part. Jesus commends the woman healed from her issue of blood: “Daughter, your faith has made you well.” In the case of the twelve-year-old girl, the operative faith is not her own but that of her father, who clearly believes from the beginning in Jesus’ power to save her, and whom Jesus reassures: “Do not fear, only believe.”  So, today’s Gospel holds up for us both Jairus the ruler of the synagogue, and the unnamed woman with the hemorrhage, as models of faith. Both stories display a kind of synergy between human faith and the Lord’s healing power, which work together to make the miracles happen.

A difficulty arises, however, in the form of the question: What about all those cases where such faith seemingly goes unrewarded, and where such prayers for healing seemingly go unanswered? In addressing this question, I think we need to dispose of two errors.

First is the mistaken belief that the age of miracles ended with the death of the last apostle. (Some Christian denominations actually teach this.) Catholic teaching is clear that miracles do still happen in our own time, and that God is still perfectly capable of intervening in our world of time and space to bring about healings, deliverances, and other miracles for which there’s no scientific or medical explanation. The Church thus supports and encourages healing prayer for the sick and dying.

The opposite error is the much more insidious temptation to conclude that when people being prayed for don’t recover, then either they themselves or those praying for them were somehow lacking in faith or not praying hard enough. And that, frankly, is a horribly uncharitable thought, which understandably brings the healing ministry itself into disrepute.

The solution to this conundrum lies in the recognition that when God does grant healing, it’s on his terms and not on ours. When Jesus performs the sort of miracle recorded in today’s Gospel, the cure is never an end-in-itself but always a means to some larger end fitting into God’s wider purposes for the salvation of the world. 

Both the woman with the hemorrhage and Jairus’s daughter eventually grew old and died of other ailments. So why did Jesus heal them at the time and place he did? We can only guess. But it seems reasonable to suppose that the woman’s healing served not only to confirm her faith, but also to build the faith of the crowd that was present. Similarly, for the chosen few permitted to witness it, the raising of Jairus’s daughter served to reveal Jesus’ identity as one bearing God’s own authority over life and death.

So, we always do well to pray for the healing of the sick and the dying. But we need to realize that while such prayers never go unanswered, in many cases the answers are such that we won’t ever see or understand in this life. When miracles do happen, we rejoice and give thanks. When they don’t, we give thanks also, trusting that God is unfailing working to bring about the ultimate good, indeed the eternal salvation, of all involved.

We need to bear in mind, moreover, that the ultimate healing offered each of us is that which takes place after death. A legend grew up in the early Church that the woman with the hemorrhage was none other than Veronica, who according to tradition wiped Our Lord’s face with her veil as he was carrying his cross to Calvary, so that the image of his bloodstained face was imprinted on it. We have no way of knowing whether that’s true, but it’s beautifully fitting nonetheless. He dried up her flow of blood ultimately by letting his own blood flow freely to heal us all.

The words he speaks to Jairus’s daughter, “Little girl, I say to you arise,” echoes another of his sayings, in John’s Gospel: “Truly, truly, I say to you, the hour is coming and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.” Her being given something to eat points to the endless feast of the Kingdom of God—of which this Eucharist itself is a foretaste. So, we look forward to the day when he takes each of us by the hand and bids us rise from our sleep in the grave into that new world where pain, sickness, death, and sorrow are no more, for the former things have passed away. 

PROPER 7, YEAR B

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

Job 38:1-11

Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32

II Corinthians 6:1-13

Mark 4:35-41

Our Old Testament reading, Psalm, and Gospel presuppose a view of the sea or ocean as a terrifying place. The ancient Hebrews did not entertain a romantic view of the ocean. In their cosmology, it was a remnant of the primordial chaos that existed in the beginning before God began his work of creation, separating the waters from the waters, and making the sky and the dry land appear.

Some of God’s most spectacular exploits in the Old Testament take the form of divine victories over the waters. God makes the great flood recede in the story of Noah and the Ark, so that the earth once again becomes habitable and capable of being repopulated. God leads the children of Israel through the Red Sea on a path of dry land, with walls of water to their right and their left, during the Exodus from Egypt. God delivers the prophet Jonah from the belly of a great fish that has swallowed him during a storm at sea, causing it to vomit him out on the land so that he can continue with his mission of preaching repentance to the city of Nineveh. Today’s psalm (Psalm 107) describes the terror experienced by sailors during a storm at sea, and their rejoicing and praise of the Lord who calms the waves in response to their cries and brings them safely to harbor. 

In all these biblical passages, God stands forth as the Creator who demonstrates his superiority to the waters of death and destruction. In today’s Old Testament reading, from the whirlwind God firmly reminds Job of how he brought order out of chaos in the beginning: “Who prescribed bounds for [the sea] … and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed.’”

This background makes clear the significance of today’s Gospel. Although it’s a just a large inland lake, the Sea of Galilee is prone to sudden violent squalls whipped up by winds funneled in through the surrounding high hills. And when from the storm-tossed boat Jesus rebukes the wind and commands the sea to be still, he’s exercising a power that properly belongs to God alone. The disciples are filled with awe—the Greek text says literally that “they feared a great fear”—and they say to one another, “Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?” If they were afraid before, they’re even more afraid now. But whereas their previous fear was a bad fear, arising from lack of faith, their new fear is a good fear, the fear of the Lord, because the only possible answer to their question is that the one standing in their midst is none other than God incarnate.

The detail of his sleeping on the cushion in the stern reminds us of his two natures as true God and true man. He’s one Person, fully human and fully divine. In his humanity, he shares with us the same physical needs we all have, to eat, drink, rest, and sleep. So, according to the dictates of his human nature he falls asleep after a long, hard day of preaching to the multitudes on the shore. But after he awakens, it’s by the power and authority of his divine nature that he commands the wind and the waves to be still, and they obey him.

Now, at this point, the standard homiletical move would be for the preacher to draw an allegory, perhaps likening the boat to the Church or the individual Christian making a way over the storm-tossed sea of life, so that just when we feel overwhelmed by our troubles and about to go under, Jesus steps up and commands, “Peace, be still!” Then, even if our problems don’t go away, they’ll at least become navigable. I suspect that we’ve all heard that sermon on multiple occasions; I’ve given it a few times myself. And it’s a perfectly legitimate application of today’s Gospel.

But I’d like instead to to go in a slightly different direction and quote from a sermon of Saint Augustine of Hippo, who lived in North Africa in the late fourth and early fifth century. Augustine takes a more psychological approach, likening the wind and waves to our temptations and sins. Augustine writes this:

When you have to listen to abuse, that means that you are being buffeted by the wind. When your anger is roused, you are being tossed by the waves. So when the winds blow and the waves mount high, the boat is in danger, your heart is imperiled, your heart is taking a battering. On hearing yourself insulted, you long to retaliate; but the joy of revenge brings with it another kind of misfortune—shipwreck. Why is this? Because Christ is asleep in you. What do I mean? I mean that you have forgotten his presence. Rouse him, then; remember him, let him keep watch within you, pay heed to him … A temptation arises: it is the wind. It disturbs you: it is the surging of the sea. This is the moment to awaken Christ and let him remind you of those words: “Who can this be? Even the winds and the sea obey him.”

Isn’t that wonderful? If Christ is asleep in you, this is the moment to awaken him! Or, as Saint Paul puts it in today’s reading from Second Corinthians: “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”

As the disciples awaken Jesus, they cry out, “Teacher, do you not care if we perish?” I could be wrong, but my guess is that all they expect from him in that moment is to help them strike the sail and bail the water so that the boat won’t go under. Hence their amazement and awe when instead he stills the storm simply by his word. They’d merely wanted him to join all hands on deck, but he does almost infinitely more than they’ve asked of him. 

Therein lies a message of hope and encouragement for us all. Perhaps, as Saint Augustine suggests, we’ve let Christ fall asleep within us. Then, if we call on him in moments of crisis, he’ll indeed awaken and come to our aid. But it will be on his terms rather than ours. He’ll insist on doing more for us than it even occurred to us to ask, and he’ll expect far more from us in return. 

This episode of the stilling of the storm takes place early in Mark’s Gospel, not long after the initial calling of the Twelve. For the disciples, the adventure is just beginning, and it will take them places they’ve never imagined they’ll go: not just across the Sea of Galilee but ultimately across real seas and real oceans to begin the Church’s mission of preaching the Gospel to all nations. Similarly, when we awaken Jesus within us, the adventure of the Christian life begins: an adventure that I wouldn’t exchange for anything else in the world. So, happy Father’s Day – and happy sailing!

PROPER 6, YEAR B

June 13, 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N.J.

Ezekiel 17:22-24; Psalm 92; 

II Corinthians 5:6-10; Mark 4:26-34

Today’s Epistle reading from Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians includes the rather intriguing statement: “While we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith and not by sight.”

The implication is that in this life many things remain hidden from our view that will be revealed to us only when we finally arrive in the fullness of God’s kingdom. In the meantime, we may never completely comprehend all that God is doing in our lives, in the lives of those around us, or in the life of the wider world. Still, we trust that God desires only our good, and that even if his ways remain to some degree hidden from us, he’s nonetheless leading us through this present world to an infinitely better destination. So we do our best to follow, even if we don’t fully understand why he’s taking us by this particular route. (Sometimes I don’t understand why my GPS is taking me by this particular route, but I’ve learned through bitter experience that it’s usually best to follow its directions.) That’s what it means to walk (or drive) by faith and not by sight.

The other readings illustrate this principle with vivid images of God acting in often mysterious and hidden ways, but with powerful results. We begin with Ezekiel’s vision of the cedar tree. To understand this prophecy, it helps to have some background on what was going on at the time.

Things were going really badly for Israel. The mighty Babylonian Empire had conquered Judah and had taken its young king captive into exile. While the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple still remained about five years in the future, it was nonetheless a dark and hopeless time in the Jewish people’s history, and understandably so.

Against this gloomy background, Ezekiel conveys a message of hope from the Lord: “I will take a sprig from the lofty top of the cedar …” The key to the vision is that this tall cedar from which the sprig is taken is the old Kingdom of Judah, now doomed to destruction.

God then foretells that he will plant the sprig upon “a high and lofty mountain, the mountain height of Israel.” This almost certainly refers to Mount Zion in Jerusalem, the location of the Jewish Temple. There, the sprig taken from the cedar will grow into a great new noble cedar; under it will dwell all kinds of beasts; in the shade of its branches birds of every sort will nest. According to many interpreters, these beasts and birds represent the Gentiles, all the world’s nations and peoples, who’ll come to worship the Lord in Jerusalem.

So, the tender sprig taken from the old cedar is the faithful remnant that God will bring back to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon to begin again and start over. The prophecy concludes: “I the Lord bring low the high tree, and make high the low tree …” In other words, even when all seems lost, God is nonetheless working in and through the present devastation to bring about a brighter future than any of the glories of the past.

The parables of Jesus in today’s Gospel develop similar themes in fascinating ways. The kingdom of God, Our Lord says, is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground. Then, as he sleeps and rises day and night, the seed sprouts and grows, he knows not how. The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. At least part of the point is that once the farmer has done his part, he has no option but to wait for God to do God’s part. And while God’s part remains largely hidden and mysterious, it nonetheless brings about an amazingly abundant harvest.

The parable of the mustard bush not only alludes back deliberately to Ezekiel’s cedar tree, with the birds of the air making their nests in its shade, but also makes the crucial point that in the building of his kingdom, God often obtains the most spectacular results from beginnings so tiny as to be almost imperceptible. That observation encourages all of us who build ambitious projects upon necessarily small foundations!

So, the question that these readings challenge us to ponder is how we’re being called to walk by faith and not by sight at this time in our life together as the Church. It’s a particularly urgent question, I think, during a period of declining attendance and shrinking membership, not just here at St. Uriel’s but across the entire American religious landscape. (In fact, St. Uriel’s is doing significantly better than many parishes and congregations, both in the Episcopal Church and in other communions and denominations.) We’re just beginning to recover from an enormously disruptive pandemic, and we’re still not sure what the reconstructed future is going to look like. So, I invite everyone here today to take that question away, and reflect and pray on it: How is God calling us in this situation to walk by faith and not by sight? That’s your homework for the coming week.

Part of the answer has to be that just as the farmer in the parable did his part by scattering the seeds, so we do our part and rely on God to do God’s part. Today’s Collect suggests what doing our part might look like: “Keep, O Lord, thy household the Church in thy steadfast faith and love, that by the help of thy grace we may proclaim the truth with boldness, and minister thy justice with compassion …”

According to the Collect, then, our part has two components: faith and love, made possible by God’s grace alone. The component of faith is to speak God’s truth with boldness, and the component of love is to minister God’s justice with compassion. But how exactly we’re called to do those two things is up to each of us to discern. So, there’s another bit of homework for the coming week. Reflect and pray on what it might mean in your life to speak God’s truth with boldness and to minister his justice with compassion.

The reassurance of today’s readings is that if we do our part, in faith and in love, then we can certainly rely on God to do God’s part—often working in deeply hidden and mysterious ways to bring great things from small beginnings, and to transform present misfortune and calamity into greater glory than we can even begin to imagine.

CORPUS CHRISTI

Sunday 6 June 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N.J.

At the heart of the Christian Gospel is the Good News that God became one of us so that he might reconcile us to himself through his death and Resurrection. The Incarnation—God the Son coming down from heaven and taking human nature in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary—is a divine action of amazing generosity and love. We celebrate this mystery at recurring times during the Church year: most especially at the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25^th, and nine months later at the Feast of the Nativity on December 25^th.

In a well-known passage in his Letter to the Philippians, Saint Paul describes the self-emptying and self-abasement of the Son of God: “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” This self-emptying is the prerequisite to his glorification. “Therefore,” Paul writes—and that “therefore” is pivotal to the passage’s structure and meaning—“God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

By extension, the Incarnate Lord manifests this same self-emptying love when he gives himself to us in the Blessed Sacrament of his Body and Blood. He makes his saving Death and Resurrection present and available in all times and places by means of the simple signs of bread and wine, the material elements of human nourishment and delight. So we have a double movement of divine self-giving. Without in any way diminishing the infinite gulf separating the Creator from creation, God makes himself present and available to us as a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, who in turn makes himself present and available to us in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood.

Every day, on hundreds of thousands of altars all over the world, he continues to give himself to us in this Sacrament just as he once gave himself to us by his conception in the Virgin’s womb, and indeed by his suffering and death on the cross for our salvation. As Aidan Nichols, O. P. puts it: Christ continues to pour himself out, as the celebrant pours the wine into the chalice, and to distribute himself as his priests distribute the Host to innumerable disciples. We worship a God whose very métier is self-giving.

The feast of Corpus Christi proper fell this past Thursday. It comes every year exactly nine weeks after Maundy Thursday. Since 1969, however, the option has existed of transferring it to the following Sunday so that more people can join in the celebration, as is the custom here at St. Uriel’s.

The feast dates back to the thirteenth century. It was first conceived in Flanders by Juliana of Liège, a Norbertine canoness of considerable holiness. In her youth, Juliana had a vision of the moon partially eclipsed by a dark spot. Interpreting the vision, she discerned that the moon represented the Church reflecting the light of Christ to the world. The shadow represented the absence of any feast in the Church calendar celebrating the Sacrament of the Lord’s Body and Blood above and beyond the commemoration of the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday. Every year during Holy Week the Church recalls the Institution of the Eucharist, but always in the context of impending betrayal and death. The Maundy Thursday Mass is always celebrated at night, as was the original Last Supper as described in Saint John’s Gospel. There, night symbolizes the darkness of human sin that brings Jesus to the cross.

Juliana recognized in her vision the need for another Thursday on which to celebrate the gift of the Eucharist in the light of day—the daylight recapitulating the joy of Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost. Although Juliana kept her vision secret for some twenty years, when it finally came to the attention of her bishop, Robert of Liège, he ordered the celebration of the feast of Corpus Christi in his diocese on the Thursday following Trinity Sunday beginning in 1246. Eighteen years later, in 1264, Pope Urban IV, who had served as Archdeacon in Liège, instituted Corpus Christi as a feast for the entire Latin Church. He then commissioned Saint Thomas Aquinas to write the Office and Mass for its celebration [including the wonderful sequence Lauda Sion Salvatorem, a version of which we’ll be singing at the end of this Mass].

The feast of Corpus Christi asks us to reflect on the place of Eucharistic adoration in our spiritual lives. One of the blessings of the liturgical renewal of the past fifty years or so in the Western Church has been a revived emphasis on receiving Communion as the normal practice of God’s people at every celebration of the Mass. In the Episcopal Church, the 1979 Prayer Book finally and definitively established the Holy Eucharist as the principal act of worship every Sunday and major holy day. Prior to that, many Episcopal parishes offered only Morning Prayer at the main service on most Sundays. So, the Liturgical Movement has brought us some definite gains.

The risk is that as we become habituated to receiving Holy Communion every Sunday and possibly once or more during the week as well, we may well be tempted to take such a wonderful gift for granted. It can all too easily become a rote action, omitting the careful spiritual preparation that the Church recommends beforehand, and the loving thanksgiving that is so appropriate afterwards. In this context, the celebration of Corpus Christi refocuses our attention on Christ’s great gift of the Sacrament of his Body and Blood, calling forth our gratitude, adoration, and awe.

So, as is the annual custom at many Anglo-Catholic parishes, including St. Uriel’s, we begin another summer on a note of victory and triumph. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the risen and ascended Christ remains present with his people in the Blessed Sacrament. And Corpus Christi devotions such as the solemn Procession and Benediction call to mind the procession of the pilgrim Church through history, sharing the blessings of the Gospel with all people, until Christ comes again to gather all creation into his kingdom and bring us home to our final destination in the light of God’s glory.