FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT -- YEAR A

November 27, 2022

Christ Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Matthew 24:37-44

 

Back in the 1990s, when I was serving in a parish in Staten Island, New York, the Episcopal Diocese would hold a clergy tax seminar, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, every year on the Monday before Thanksgiving. All the canonically resident clergy were strongly encouraged to attend. The idea, as I recall, was that the end of November was an opportune time to be reminded of what needed to be done before year-end to get ourselves into the best possible position for preparing the coming year’s tax returns. 

 

The speaker in those days was always Canon William Geisler, a priest who’s also a Certified Public Accountant, former Controller of the Diocese of California, and who until recently continued to serve as a clergy tax consultant for the Church Pension Fund. He’s not a bad theologian either. One year that I attended, Canon Geisler began the seminar by enunciating three basic principles that he said should guide all our tax planning and preparation.

 

The first was accountability. In Canon Geisler’s memorable words, “sunlight kills germs.” In other words, we need to conduct our financial affairs with honesty and integrity, keeping our records as thoroughly and accurately as if we positively expect to be audited.

 

The second principle was preparation. Don’t put off doing what needs to be done now. Set up tax-saving arrangements before the tax year begins. It’s too late to start asking what we can do to lower this year’s taxes once the year is over. Again, be prepared for an audit before getting notice of an audit. It’s better to have all our financial affairs in order ahead of time than to scramble to get all our ducks in a row once that letter from the IRS arrives in the mail.

 

And the third basic principle was repentance. As Canon Geisler put it, no matter what portions of the tax code we may inadvertently have been violating, no matter how much of a mess we may have made of our record-keeping, we need not despair: “There’s still time to repent.” We can always start putting things right, here and now. For repentance means not only being sorry for our past mistakes but also taking action to correct them in the present for the future.

 

Perhaps it was just a coincidence that Canon Geisler’s tax seminar always came about a week before the beginning of Advent, but his message certainly fit well with the season. For Advent asks us to prepare for the Lord’s coming with even more care and attentiveness that we ideally should give to our taxes! In fact, Canon Geisler’s three principles—accountability, preparation, and repentance—offer a good roadmap not only to our taxes but also to the Advent season as indeed to our entire Christian lives.

 

First: accountability – Advent reminds us that one day we shall face judgment. On the basis of its reading of Scripture, the Church believes and teaches that at the end of time as we know it, the Lord will return to judge the living and the dead. That’s what’s known as the General Judgment. But even before that, immediately after death we shall each face what’s known as the “particular judgment,” when our individual lives will be examined, and our eternal destiny decided. 

 

Second: preparation – The Advent Mass readings remind us that we can’t predict the day or hour when we’ll be called upon to face this judgment and render our account. Jesus says in today’s Gospel that his coming will be unexpected, like a thief in the night. Therefore, we need always to be ready, watchful, and vigilant. Otherwise, we get lulled into a false sense of security, with the attendant risk that Judgment Day will catch us by surprise, off guard, and unprepared. 

 

Third: repentance – In this life, it’s never too late to repent. Some people feel that they’ve made such a mess of their lives, and are guilty of such terrible sins, that God couldn’t possibly ever forgive them or love them. But nothing could be farther from the truth. The good news here is that no matter no matter how far we’ve strayed from God, right now, here, today, there’s always the opportunity to repent, return to the Lord, and begin putting things right. 

 

Just as living in the expectation of an IRS audit incentivizes us to put our financial affairs in order, so living in the expectation of divine judgment incentivizes us to put our moral and spiritual affairs in order. The Season of Advent confronts us with the most basic question of all: If we really expected to meet the Lord and face his judgment in the near future—whether next year, next month, next week, or tomorrow—then what last-minute changes would we want to make in our lives before it was too late?

 

As with most analogies, of course, the differences between the two things under comparison are even more instructive than the similarities. For most of us, financial record-keeping and tax preparation are necessary evils, to be endured for the sake of getting them over with. By contrast, the spiritual practices by which we prepare to meet the Lord—worship, prayer, Bible-study, spiritual reading, and service to others—are sources of ever-increasing reward and fulfillment—precisely because they bring us more and more into a loving relationship with the One whose coming we await. 

But the biggest difference of all is that so long as we turn to God in faith and repentance, he’s always willing to forgive us our debts—completely, freely, without interest or penalties! Several years back, I stopped using a software application to prepare my tax returns, and hired a Certified Public Accountant instead—partly because of the assurance that said CPA would represent me and serve as my advocate if I ever did get audited. (And I understand that some tax software packages also include such representation as an optional extra for an additional fee.) But on Judgment Day, we can have available free of charge Jesus as our Advocate and the Holy Spirit as our Counselor: an unbeatable team!

 

So, to make a good beginning of Advent, we remember Canon Geisler’s three principles. Be accountable. Be prepared. Repent while there’s still time. As we thus put our spiritual houses in order, our anticipation of the Lord’s Second Advent becomes no longer an occasion of fear but a source of unspeakable joy.

THANKSGIVING DAY

Thursday, November 24, 2022

Christ Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

 

As we begin the celebration of our national Thanksgiving holiday, it seems appropriate to reflect on the act of giving thanks itself, and the role it plays in our individual and community lives.

 

Giving thanks is the outward expression of the inward disposition of thankfulness or gratitude. And gratitude is one of the classical Christian virtues. Its opposite, ingratitude, is one of the classical vices. To say, for example, that someone has a grateful heart or a thankful spirit is to pay them a high moral compliment. Conversely, to say that someone is habitually ungrateful is to call attention to a perceived moral flaw or defect in their character.

 

The thirteenth century theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas classified gratitude as a subcategory of the cardinal virtue of justice, by which we render to each their due. Traditionally, there are four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. As one of the cardinal virtues, justice comprises dozens of subvirtues—such as truthtelling, prompt payment of debts, restitution of injuries, and so forth. So, the question is: under what circumstances is gratitude and thanksgiving something we owe somebody in order to render them their due and so fulfill the obligations of justice?

 

Well, according to Aquinas, gratitude is what we owe our benefactors for favors received. Let’s unpack that a bit. In medieval language, a benefactor is someone who gives us something over and above anything they owe us. A favor received from such a benefactor is a freely-given gift or good deed that we really had no right to expect. When we receive such a free gift, then, the morally appropriate response is one of inward gratitude expressed in outward praise and thanksgiving.

 

A prosaic example will illustrate the point. When I’m driving along the street in my car and I come to an intersection where I have the right of way, and another car comes to the stop sign and lets me pass before proceeding themselves, I don’t normally feel any sense of gratitude towards the other driver. Nor should I. They’ve simply obeyed the law and yielded me the right of way that was mine. No thanks are called for. (I may feel relief if it looked as though they weren’t going to stop and they slammed on the brakes at the last minute, but not gratitude. And I might thank God that they stopped, but that’s another matter.)

 

But if I’m the one coming to the stop sign at a busy intersection where I’m likely to be stuck waiting a long time for a break in the traffic—which seems to happen a lot around here—and a driver who does have the right of way takes pity on me, slows down, and waves me on in front of them, then I do feel gratitude, and wave them a thank-you and flash them a smile. And so I should, because they’ve performed a generous deed that I had no right to expect. The virtue of gratitude, expressed in a word or gesture of thanks, involves precisely acknowledging that someone didn’t have to do whatever they did for us, but they did so anyway.

 

This disposition of gratitude is what St. Thomas Aquinas calls a natural moral virtue. That is, there’s nothing particularly Christian about it. It’s capable of being exercised by Christians and non-Christians, believers and unbelievers, alike. Aquinas argues that God has written into creation and implanted in the human conscience a natural moral law, which we all have some ability to follow, even though our awareness of it has become obscured and distorted by the Fall and Original Sin. 

 

To my mind, one of the unique blessings of our national Thanksgiving holiday is that it’s something we can all share with our family, friends, and neighbors, no matter what their religious convictions or lack thereof. Very few among us object to the idea of setting aside a day to express our gratitude for all the gifts we’ve received in our life as a nation—and indeed to recommit ourselves to working for a more equitable distribution of those gifts among all members of our communities.

 

Now, I might have some excuse for stopping there, but I don’t think I can—because I’m a Christian. And I suspect that most of us here are too, or else we wouldn’t be attending this service of Christian worship. And from a theistic and a Christian perspective, much more needs to be said. But I will try to say it briefly.

 

We begin with creation itself. A basic tenet of the theistic religions—especially Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—is that our very existence is a free gift. God was under no constraint or compulsion to create us; but he chose to do so anyway. Every time we wake up in the morning, we can thank God simply that we’re alive. Then, beyond our very life, we owe him our thanks for his providence: supplying us with the necessities of our survival, beginning with food, shelter, and clothing, but certainly not ending there.

 

Most specifically, as Christians we owe our thanksgiving to Jesus Christ, for the redemption that he’s won for us by his life, death, and resurrection. And for which we offer our thanks to God every time we celebrate the Eucharist, which word in Greek simply means thanksgiving.

 

As Christians, also, we owe thanks for the gifts of the Holy Spirit, who stirs our hearts to gratitude for all God’s blessings. Here, in a curious way, we come full circle. For the virtue of gratitude not only disposes us to be thankful for gifts freely received from all our benefactors, beginning with God himself, but it also moves us to exercise the further virtues of generosity and kindness, by which, as the saying goes, we “pass it forward.” 

 

So, even after the stresses and strains of the past couple of years—and it’s been rough for all of us—this Thanksgiving holiday affords us the opportunity to consider how by God’s grace we may further cultivate the virtues of gratitude and generosity in our own lives. May God grant us the grace to be a truly thankful people. Amen.

PROPER 29, YEAR C

(CHRIST THE KING)

November 20, 2022

Christ Church, Woodbury, N.J.

 

Luke 23:35-43

 

The death of Queen Elizabeth II on September 8, and the subsequent accession of King Charles III, got me thinking about our ambivalent relationship with monarchy in this country. In my experience, we Americans are often fascinated by the British royal family. Along with millions of people the world over, many of us will make whatever effort is necessary to watch King Charles’s coronation live this May. For us Episcopalians in particular, all the pageantry showcases our Anglican tradition at its best. 

 

But this American fascination with royalty can create a misleading impression. In general, it’s fair to say that while we Americans find it wonderful that the British have a royal family over there, a monarchy is the last thing we’d ever want over here! By our history, traditions, and culture, we live in a republic, in which the people are sovereign. So, for most of us, the very idea of subjecting ourselves to a hereditary monarch is unthinkable.

 

Still, every year, the Feast of Christ the King comes around to remind us that while as Americans we may be republicans—using the word not in its party sense but in its constitutional sense—nonetheless as Christians we are indeed monarchists: freely yielding our loyalty and allegiance not to any earthly king but to a heavenly king. Today’s liturgical observance reminds us that, despite all appearances to the contrary, the risen and ascended Christ reigns as King over all creation; and no earthly political system, ideology, ruler, or power can ultimately thwart his saving purposes for humanity.

 

A relative newcomer to the Church Calendar, the Solemnity of Christ the King was instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925 as an antidote to Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, and modern Western secularism in general. It was initially kept on the last Sunday in October, but in 1969 moved to its current position on the last Sunday of the liturgical year. We thus conclude our annual cycle of seasons, feasts, and fasts with a ringing affirmation of Christ’s sovereignty over all human affairs.

 

The theologian Aidan Nichols points out that Christ the King belongs to a special category of feasts added to the Church calendar to afford a second look at doctrines and mysteries already given a first glance on previous occasions in the year. Thus, on Corpus Christi we take a second look at Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist, previously considered on Maundy Thursday. On Holy Cross Day in September, we take a second look at Christ’s compassion and suffering, previously considered on Good Friday. And on the Solemnity of Christ the King, we take a second look at the risen Christ’s exaltation to divine glory at his Father’s right hand in heaven, previously considered on the Feast of the Ascension.

 

After all, on Ascension Day we remember that forty days after his Resurrection, Christ is taken up from the sight of his disciples to reign as king over all creation until the Last Day when he shall return to judge the living and the dead.

 

Nichols further points out that in Western Church’s artistic tradition—as seen, for example, in the carved stone tympanum reliefs over the entrances to gothic cathedrals—Christ is typically depicted as the Judge separating the saved from the damned, as sheep from goats, at the Last Judgment. By contrast, the Eastern Church’s iconography emphasizes Christ as the heavenly ruler of all things, even now in the present. Byzantine churches in places like Sicily and Greece feature magnificent apse mosaics of Christ Pantocrator dominating the entire interior space of the building. Yet both types of image—Christ the future Judge of the living and the dead, and Christ the present ruler of the cosmos—merely illuminate different aspects of the mystery that we celebrate today.

 

But what does it mean to affirm the universal kingship of Christ? Here we touch on the doctrine of divine Providence, which teaches that God is active and involved in all aspects of human affairs, and that everything that happens in history is ultimately under his control and subject to his will.

 

I realize that claim may set off alarm bells. In seminary we were taught that the one thing we must never say to people in times of personal loss, tragedy, or bereavement—such as the death of a child—is that it was God’s will. Bad pastoral technique and spiritually very harmful! And I really don’t believe that such tragedies, or indeed natural catastrophes and disasters—such as floods, famines, and earthquakes—really do represent God’s will in any active sense. For God is infinitely good, and he wills only our good.

 

Here, however, some theologians make a helpful distinction between what they call God’s active will and God’s permissive will. That is, God doesn’t actively bring about the bad things that happen in this world. But he is in charge, and he is all-powerful, omnipotent, almighty, and that means that in some sense he permits these bad things to happen. 

 

Partly out of his respect for our human freedom, he limits his exercise of divine power and lets things play out for the moment as they will in our fallen world. Nonetheless, the doctrine of divine providence assures us that no matter what evils may befall us in this life, God is working in and through them to turn them to our ultimate good—indeed to an infinitely greater good than we can ask or imagine.

 

More than that, today’s Gospel reading reminds us that Christ enters into his kingship precisely by way of his own suffering and death on the cross. There, a king is the very last thing that Jesus appears to be. The soldiers mock him, “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.” The inscription placed over his head, “This is the king of the Jews,” is totally ironic in its intention.

 

And yet, against all expectations, one of the two criminals being crucified alongside him miraculously recognizes him as a real king: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” By his response, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise,” Jesus reveals that he is indeed already the king, for only the true sovereign of the universe has the authority to forgive sins and admit a condemned criminal to eternal life.

 

Such is the nature of Christ’s kingship: exercised in vulnerability and weakness as much as in power and glory. Whatever bad things we may suffer in this life, on the cross he suffers with us, and there he turns our suffering to an infinitely greater good. And in those moments when it feels like we’re being crucified, to find our king we need look no further than the next cross over. From there he exercises his universal kingship, gently assuring us, “Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

 

PROPER 28, YEAR C

November 18, 2022

Christ Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

“As some spoke of the Temple, how it was adorned with noble stones and offerings, Jesus said, ‘As for these things which you see here, the days will come when there shall not be one stone left here upon another that shall not be thrown down.’” (Luke 21:5-6)

 

The Temple of Jerusalem on Mount Zion was the center of Israel’s national life for over a millennium, from the tenth century BC until the first century AD. Over the course of this thousand-year period, its existence went through three distinct stages, sometimes known as the First Temple, the Second Temple, and the Third Temple.

 

King Solomon built the First Temple. His father King David had completed the conquest of Canaan, the Promised Land, and established his royal capital at Jerusalem. Construction of a temple in the capital city served to legitimize the new kingdom by showing that the king and his regime enjoyed divine approval.

 

The First Temple stood about four hundred years, until Jerusalem’s capture by the Babylonians in 587 BC. Then, for almost seventy years, the Temple lay in ruins while the people were captives in Babylon. Then the returning exiles rebuilt the Temple, thus creating a Second Temple. During the ensuing centuries, however, the Jewish people were no longer politically independent, but lived within first the Persian and then the Hellenistic Greek empires.

 

Under foreign rule, the Temple became the symbolic focus of Jewish religious and national identity. When the Hellenistic Greeks were foolish enough in 167 BC to install in the Temple a statue of Zeus—which the Book of Daniel calls “the abomination of desolation”— Judas Maccabeus led a revolt, resulting in a century of Jewish political independence, until the Roman Empire took over in 63 BC.

 

The Romans installed a client king, Herod I, known as Herod the Great, who undertook many spectacular building projects, of which the greatest was a reconstructed Temple. Herod surrounded this third Temple with vast courtyards resting on a huge platform. Its exterior walls were covered with gold. This project was a key component of Herod’s political agenda. He wanted not only to court the favor of his Jewish subjects, who tended to regard him as a collaborator and traitor, but also to impress his Roman overlords with his kingdom’s importance within their empire.

 

And it was this third Temple of which Jesus prophesied, “the days shall come when there shall not be one stone left here upon another that shall not be thrown down.” Although Jesus is here echoing Old Testament prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel who foretold Jerusalem’s destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BC, his words nonetheless must have been shocking to his contemporaries. 

 

In the ancient world, religious buildings didn’t function in quite the same way as they do today. We’re apt to think of churches, cathedrals, synagogues, mosques, and temples primarily as places of public assembly for worship. But even though the Jerusalem Temple was indeed a center of worship, with animal sacrifices offered daily upon its altars, its primary designation in the Bible is “the House of God.” 

 

In other words, the Temple was seen as a divine residence. The general populace had access only to its courtyards. Only the priests were allowed into its interior. And its inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies, was off limits to all but the High Priest, and even he was allowed to enter only one day of the year—Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. So, as God’s dwelling place on earth, the Temple was the visible sign of God’s presence with his people Israel.

 

For Jesus to predict that this holy building would be torn down would have seemed scandalous, even blasphemous. And yet, within a generation, his prophecy came to pass. In response to the Jewish rebellion of AD 66, the Roman legions laid siege to Jerusalem in AD 70. When the city fell, the Temple was set on fire and razed to the ground.

 

Even though its destruction must have seemed an unimaginable catastrophe, the world didn’t come to an end. Life went on. And the Jewish religion went on. In the century or so after the Temple’s destruction, Judaism effectively reorganized itself and transformed itself into a religion centered in local synagogues throughout the world, with worship focused no longer on animal sacrifice but on the study and practice of Torah, God’s teachings as received in the Hebrew Scriptures.

 

Today’s Collect reminds us that God caused the Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning that we may embrace and hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life in Christ Jesus our Lord. And the practice of hearing, reading, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting them is something that we in the Christian Church inherited from our forebears in the Jewish synagogue, for which we ought to be eternally thankful.

 

Now, I’m not saying that the Temple’s destruction was a good thing. It was a kind of death, and death is always bad. But it did make way for something new. And we know, from a Christian perspective, that before we can receive new life, before we can experience resurrection, we must first undergo death in one form or another.

 

Sometimes I look at my own life as a series of projects. That’s not necessarily the best way of looking at life, but sometimes it offers a helpful perspective. There was the getting into college project, the graduate school project, the first job project, the getting married project, the seminary project, the first parish project, and so on. Some projects have worked better than others. Some were great successes; others had mixed results; a few were dismal failures.

 

When a project fails, one experiences a kind of death, which is never pleasant. When I graduated from college, for example, I had my heart set on a career in government. To make a long story short, that project failed. I ended up working in the corporate world for six years and then going to seminary. My original ambitions underwent a kind of death, which I grieved at length. But that death made possible the gradual emergence of my awareness of a vocation to the priesthood. And these many years later, it’s clear to me that I’ve been much happier and more fulfilled as a priest than I could have been doing anything else I might have spent my life doing. Still, the original project had to fail before I could even begin to understand where I was really being called.

 

That’s how God works: always creating new life, opening up new possibilities, bringing new worlds into being. But before we can enter the new life into which God is calling us, we need to let go of the old forms to which we’re apt to cling so desperately.

 

Sometimes we’re given no choice. Our projects fail and are dismantled with not one stone left standing upon another. Even so, the world doesn’t come to an end. Then we discover that God’s gift of new life is always there, waiting for us, if only we have the courage to accept it.

THE SUNDAY AFTER ALL SAINTS

November 6, 2022

Christ Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

 

On our observance of the Feast of All Saints, it seems opportune to ask the question: What is a saint? The word literally means “holy one.” In the Bible, the term is used to refer to all the people of God. In the Old Testament, the “holy ones” or “saints” are the whole congregation of the people of Israel; in the New Testament, the “saints” are the whole assembly of the Church.

 

Early on in Church history, however, the word “saint” took on a more precise theological meaning. In this more restricted sense, a saint is a departed Christian who exhibits three characteristics. 

 

The first characteristic is that a saint is someone whose life on earth manifested such holiness that we’re sure they must now be in heaven. In the early Church, the definitive sign of sainthood was martyrdom. For the early Christian faithful there was no question that those who’d shed their blood and given their lives rather than deny the faith were now reigning with the Lord in glory. But as the early ages of persecution waned, it became clear that Christians of exemplary holiness who’d lived and died peacefully could also reliably be counted among the saints in heaven.

 

The second characteristic is that enjoying the fullness of the Lord’s presence without any worldly worries or distractions, the saints in heaven are free to give their full and undivided attention to praying for the Church and its members on earth. 

 

Like most ancient peoples, the early Christians revered their dead. So, they often gathered for worship, devotions, and festive banquets at the martyrs’ burial places, particularly on the anniversaries of their deaths, their “birthdays into heaven.” On these days they sometimes used the horizontal slab on top of the sarcophagus as a makeshift altar for celebrating the Eucharist. The early Christians soon discovered that the martyrs’ tombs were holy places, where healings and other miracles were apt to occur. As Saint Augustine of Hippo explained in the early fifth century, when you prayed in the presence of a saint’s relics on earth, that same saint could be relied upon to pray for you in heaven, often with powerful results.

 

The third characteristic of sainthood eventually became an official decision, on the basis of the first two characteristics, that this person merited some form of public recognition in the Church’s life. 

Beginning in the third or fourth century, churches began to be dedicated and named in honor of individual saints, often built over their earthly resting places. The most famous is St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, built over the cemetery on the Vatican Hill where Peter himself was buried. In other cases, where the burial place was too remote and hard to get to, a saint’s relics might be disinterred and brought to a more conveniently located church, where they were usually placed in or under the altar. 

 

At around the same time, the Church began to designate official feast days in memory of particular saints: usually the anniversaries of their deaths—or, in some cases, the anniversaries of the translation of their relics to new resting places. And so, in the end, the term “saint” characteristically came to designate those heroes and heroines of the faith with both churches and days in the calendar dedicated in their honor. 

 

To recapitulate, then, the term “saints” refers in a general sense to the whole assembly of the faithful, and, in a more restricted sense, to those departed Christians whose holiness in this life was such that they were deemed worthy of official place of honor in the Church’s worship and calendar.

 

A problem began to emerge, however, when the Church found, after several major persecutions, that it had more martyrs than days in the year to commemorate them. So, between the fifth and ninth centuries, the Feast of All Saints grew up as a sort of catchall festival when the Church honored all the holy men and women throughout its history who’d lived and died in the faith of Christ.

 

To my knowledge, the first church to be dedicated to all the saints was the Pantheon in Rome, which had been built in the first century as a temple to all the Roman gods and goddesses. At its consecration as a church on May 13, 609, Pope Boniface IV decided to undo its former pagan dedication by rededicating it to Saint Mary and all the Martyrs. Then, just over a century later, in the year 732, Pope Gregory III dedicated a chapel to All the Saints in Saint Peter’s Basilica on November 1^st, which has been kept ever since as All Saints Day in the Western Calendar.

 

So, we come full circle to the biblical understanding of the saints as a great multitude, many more than we can name or number. While we remember and celebrate some of the more notable ones on their designated days in the Church year, the Feast of All Saints reminds us of the millions of anonymous holy men and women down through the centuries who’ve gone before us to their heavenly reward: a great cloud of witnesses watching us and cheering us on as we run the race that they’ve already completed ahead of us.

 

All Saints’ Day thus reminds us, also, that we’re all called to be saints. Contrary to popular belief, sainthood is not an exclusive vocation reserved to a few elite souls of extraordinary sanctity. When we actually read the lives of the saints, we discover not stained-glass figures of otherworldly perfection, but real flesh and blood people, of every temperament and personality, exhibiting all the anxieties, neuroses, hang-ups, temptations, annoying habits, and sins that beset us all, and then some. Yet, by their perseverance in God’s grace, they show us what life in Christ can look like, in the power of the Holy Spirit. If they did it, then so can we. 

 

We receive the call to sainthood at baptism. All Saints’ Day is one of the four great baptismal occasions of the Church year. (The others are the Easter Vigil, Pentecost, and the First Sunday after the Epiphany, a.k.a. the Baptism of Christ.) On these days, it’s particularly appropriate to administer Holy Baptism, or, failing that, to renew our baptismal vows, as we shall be doing [shortly].

 

So, today we give thanks for all the saints – both the famous heroes and heroines of the faith whose lives inspire and encourage us in our Christian journey, and also the countless anonymous holy women and holy men who’ve run the same race. Today we take the opportunity to recommit ourselves to following in their footsteps, “encouraged by their examples, strengthened by their fellowship, and aided by their prayers.” In this way, we make our own the words of the wonderful hymn, “for the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.”

ALL SOULS DAY

November 2, 2022

Christ Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

When I made my first trip as an adult to England in my twenties, I was almost always struck by the sheer numbers of memorials in the cathedrals and churches I visited. The interior walls and walkways were typically strewn with busts and statues, reliefs, plaques, and inscriptions, extolling the accomplishments and virtues of deceased parishioners and local dignitaries. Nowhere more than in Westminster Abbey, where so many of the nation’s heroes, statesmen, poets, and artists are commemorated with a proliferation of lavish monuments taking up almost every bit of free space in that vast building.

 

The erection of memorials is part of a wider pattern of offerings and gifts to commemorate the dead. As in many other parishes, Christ Church is beautified by dozens and dozens of memorial gifts in memory of departed loved ones: from virtually all of the stained-glass windows, to the pietà by the choir, to the carved Christus Rex and angels on the west wall above the front entrance. 

 

On All Souls Day, it seems appropriate to reflect on this impulse to memorialize the departed. Why do we do it? 

Such offerings fulfill some deep-seated human needs. To begin with, they express our emotions of sorrow and mourning. Particularly in England, many Victorian monuments adorning the churches and graveyards feature weeping angels, winged hourglasses, broken vases, and other symbols of loss and desolation. One gets the impression that such monuments serve to memorialize the grief of the living as much as the memory of the dead.

 

Memorial offerings also express thanksgiving for the lives of the departed. This is particularly true of monuments erected to public figures, such as the Washington Monument and the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials in Washington DC. And here in Church people likewise offer memorial gifts in thanksgiving for the ways in which departed loved ones enriched the lives of their families, friends, parish, and community.

 

Most of all, perhaps, these memorial offerings express the natural human desire to ensure that the deceased will be remembered and not forgotten. The literal meaning of the word “memorial,” after all, is an aid to memory, a reminder, a stimulus to remembrance: lest we forget. We offer these memorials so that those who see them will call to mind those in whose memory they were given. 

 

Sometimes it works, even over many generations, long after no-one alive remembers the people being memorialized. That plaque on the north wall of the chancel still calls to mind the Episcopal Missionary to Woodbury, William Herbert Norris, who founded this parish and built this church building.

 

So, the impulse to offer memorial gifts responds to the human need to express in tangible form our mourning and grief, our gratitude for the lives of the deceased, and our desire to keep their memories alive for generations to come. All this is perfectly natural and entirely good. And yet – everything I’ve described so far can be done just as well by atheists and agnostics as by people of faith.

 

All Souls Day reminds us that as Christians we have the opportunity to do something more. In addition to memorializing the dead we can also pray for them. This practice hinges on the conviction that even though the departed are no longer visibly with us, nonetheless they’re alive in Christ.

 

The doctrine of the Communion of the Saints teaches us that in Christ we have fellowship with both the living and the dead. Just as we pray for one another here on earth, so the saints in heaven pray for us; and both they and we pray for the souls of the faithful departed. We have the assurance that in God’s providence our prayers really do benefit and help the departed in their continuing heavenward journey. And we have the hope that just as we pray for the dead, so too, after our time comes, the members of the Church on earth will pray for us as well.

 

Bereavement, the loss of a loved one, is a painful ordeal. When someone in our community loses someone, it’s often difficult to know what to say. We want to say something lest it seem that we don’t care; yet we’re also reluctant to say anything that might come across as too intrusive. Our society’s therapeutic culture responds to almost every life event in terms of how we feel about it and how it makes us feel. But people who’ve been recently bereaved often tell me that the last thing they need is well-meaning people prying into how they’re processing their feelings about their loss, or worse, telling them how they must be feeling, or how they should be feeling.

 

The good news is that our Christian tradition gives us a very different language for speaking of death and bereavement. When we encounter someone who’s just lost a loved one, above and beyond such conventional sentiments as “I’m very sorry for your loss,” we can also say something like, “I will pray for her; and I will pray for you as well.” That need not be just a sanctimonious platitude – provided that we follow through and actually say the prayers that we promise! In my experience, ninety-nine per cent of the time, people are touched, grateful, and even comforted to be told that we’re praying for their departed loved ones, no matter what their religious beliefs or lack thereof may be.

 

Now, of course, we pray for the departed not merely so that we can have something comforting to say to the bereaved, but because we believe that such prayers are intrinsically worthwhile. My point is simply that if we take seriously the Church’s teaching and practice concerning prayers for the dead, we gain a whole new language for responding to bereavement that’s clearly counter-cultural, but also remarkably effective in offering solace and comfort.

 

This evening, then, we gather to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for all the faithful departed. All Souls Day reminds us that as Christians we’re called not only to memorialize the dead, but also to pray for them. And, throughout the year, whenever we encounter a memorial gift given in loving memory of someone departed this life – even something as simple as flowers at the altar – we do well always to remember them with a prayer: that they may rest in peace and rise in glory.

PROPER 26, YEAR C

October 30, 2022

Christ Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Luke 19:1-10

 

While it seems straightforward enough on a first reading, today’s Gospel story of the encounter between Jesus and Zacchaeus presents two fascinating problems of interpretation.

 

First, Saint Luke tells us that as the Lord and his disciples were passing through Jericho on their way up to Jerusalem, Zacchaeus “sought to see who Jesus was, but could not, on account of the crowd, because he was small of stature.” But the wording is ambiguous. Who was it that was small of stature, Zacchaeus or Jesus? Grammatically, the “he” could refer to either, and the sentence would make sense either way. 

 

If it was Jesus who was small of stature, then this is the only text in the Gospels that makes any mention whatever of the Lord’s physical appearance. But the most common reading, from the early Church Fathers to the present day, is that Zacchaeus was the short one. As the beloved Sunday School song has it: “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he. He climbed up in a sycamore tree, for the Lord he wanted to see.”

A more substantive problem of interpretation involves the basic question: Was Zacchaeus a bad person or a good person?

 

The crowd’s reaction when Jesus goes into the house of Zacchaeus is “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” Already, Luke has told us that Zacchaeus was “a chief tax collector, and rich.”

 

Here, a bit of background may be helpful. Jericho was the site of a customs station at the intersection of two major trade routes. The Roman authorities typically sold the rights to collect taxes for a period of several years to the highest bidder. The tax agents, effectively independent contractors, would then collect the duties on goods being transported through places such as Jericho. To recoup their outlay, such tax collectors had an enormous incentive to engage in such dishonest practices as overcharging and taking bribes. In the Jewish world, they were viewed as sinners on a par with prostitutes. The crowd’s assumption is that Zacchaeus has grown rich at the expense of honest travelers, traders, and merchants by means of fraud and extortion.

 

Some scholars advance the interpretation, however, that Zacchaeus isn’t really a bad person, but rather a good person misunderstood and unfairly judged by the crowd. (After all, that’s often how we like to think of ourselves: as basically good people who are misunderstood and under-appreciated.)

 

But was it possible to be a good tax collector? We get a clue earlier in Saint Luke’s Gospel, when tax collectors are among those coming to be baptized by John the Baptist in the River Jordan. They ask John what they should do to repent of their sins. Surprisingly, he doesn’t tell them to give up their profession, but only “Collect no more than is appointed you.” So it was possible, at least theoretically, to be an honest tax collector.

 

According to this interpretation, when the crowd begins to murmur that Jesus has gone into the house of a sinner, Zacchaeus stands up and defends himself: “You may think I’m a sinner, but look, I give half my goods to the poor, and if I discover that I’ve inadvertently cheated anyone, I make fourfold restitution.” On this reading, Jesus has singled Zacchaeus out recognizing what a good and decent person he really is: a true son of Abraham.

 

The problem with that interpretation is that it fails to account for the ending. Why does Jesus conclude that “today salvation has come to this house” unless this house has truly been in need of salvation? Why does he say that “the Son of man came to seek and save the lost” unless Zacchaeus has been among the lost?

 

For this reason, I’m inclined to go with the opposite interpretation: namely, that Zacchaeus is a dishonest tax collector whose encounter with Jesus changes him radically. His conversion entails not merely an inner change of heart, but the transformation of his entire way of life, including his business practices.

 

Either way, two episodes have just taken place that illuminate the significance of this encounter. On the way into Jericho, Jesus has healed the blind beggar Bartimaeus. This contrast between the beggar and the tax collector shows that the Lord has come to save rich and poor alike.

 

And a little before that, Jesus encountered the young ruler who was unwilling to part with his riches, prompting our Lord’s declaration that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to be saved.” Following on the heels of that hard saying, Zacchaeus represents the rich man who is saved, precisely by giving to the poor and making restitution to anyone he’s wronged.

 

Thus interpreted, the story exemplifies the great theme of reversal running throughout Saint Luke’s Gospel. The humble are exalted and the exalted are humbled. Those on the outside are brought in; and those who think themselves securely on the inside run the risk of finding themselves left outside. 

 

With that point in mind, let’s revisit the sycamore tree. When Zacchaeus couldn’t see Jesus over the crowds, “he ran on ahead and climbed into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was to pass that way.” Some New Testament scholars argue that in the biblical world, if you were concerned to preserve your dignity and status, the one thing you never, ever did was run. The more important you were, the more slowly you walked. You took your time. 

 

By running on ahead, Zacchaeus is sacrificing what little dignity he has. And to my knowledge, this is the only place in Scripture where anyone ever climbs a tree! My guess is that by doing so, Zacchaeus is positively making a fool of himself in the community’s eyes. But therein lies the secret of his conversion: Zacchaeus is willing to become a fool for Christ.

 

Often, those in the world around us seem to want to make us appear and feel foolish on account of our Christian faith. Reflecting on this story, Saint Augustine says: “You call our minds foolish. Say what you like, but for our part, let us climb the sycamore tree and see Jesus. The reason you cannot see Jesus is that you are ashamed to climb the sycamore tree.”

 

Augustine goes on to liken climbing the sycamore tree to taking up the cross. Just as Zacchaeus was not ashamed of the sycamore tree, so Christians must not be ashamed of the cross—which Saint Paul describes as: “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Gentiles, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”  Thus Zacchaeus the tax collector, short of stature, shows us the way to salvation by embracing God’s foolishness and God's weakness in Christ crucified.