PROPER 7, YEAR A

Sunday 25 June 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Jeremiah 20:7-13

Matthew 10:16-33

 

Well, today I have good news and bad news. The bad news first: today’s readings make it clear that doing God’s will and following in the way of Christian discipleship can be an enormously difficult and costly business.

 

The Prophet Jeremiah laments and complains about the consequences of his fidelity to God’s word: 

 

“I have become a laughingstock all the day; every one mocks me … The word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision … ‘Denounce him, let us denounce him,’ say all my familiar friends, watching for my fall. ‘Perhaps he will be deceived, then we can overcome him, and take our revenge on him.’” 

 

Wow. With friends like that, who needs enemies? 

 

Try as he may, however, Jeremiah cannot refrain from speaking God’s word. He’s driven by an inner compulsion: “If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ there is in my heart … a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”

 

And in today’s Gospel, Jesus delivers the bad news to the Twelve Apostles whom he’s just called: 

 

“Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves … Beware of men, for they will deliver you up to councils, and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear testimony before them … Brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake.”

 

Hardly the most attractive recruiting strategy; imagine an evangelism and church growth program built around those words!

 

These verses from Jeremiah and Matthew put me in mind of the English title of a book by the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, published in 1937. Bonhoeffer wrote this book as a protest against what he called “cheap grace,” which he defined as “the preaching of forgiveness without repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession.”

 

Cheap grace, he continued, consists in a Gospel preached in such words as “Of course you have sinned, but now everything is forgiven, so you can stay as you are and enjoy the consolations of forgiveness.” The chief defect of this proclamation, he said, is that it lacks any call to discipleship.

 

By contrast, Bonhoeffer wrote, costly grace confronts us with the call to follow Jesus; it comes as a word to the contrite heart and broken spirit. It is costly because it compels us to submit to Christ’s yoke and follow him; and it is grace because Jesus says, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

 

Bonhoeffer himself knew the cost of discipleship very well. For his resistance to the Nazi regime, and his complicity in the plot to kill Hitler, he was hanged at the Flössenburg concentration camp on Hitler’s express orders on April 9, 1945, just as the war was ending. He was 39 years old.

 

So, if the bad news is that true discipleship is costly, what’s the good news? The best way to sum it up is by saying that God never asks us to do anything without giving us the means to accomplish all he asks, and to do so with joy.

 

We begin again with the Prophet Jeremiah. After taking stock of the whispering of his treacherous friends, he’s nonetheless able to affirm: “The Lord is with me as a dread warrior; therefore my persecutors will stumble, they will not overcome me.” And so, by the end of the reading, he’s exclaiming in triumph: “Sing to the Lord; praise the Lord! For he has delivered the life of the needy from the hand of the evildoers.”

 

Similarly, after warning the Twelve of the sufferings that lie ahead, Jesus reassures them: “Do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” And then he promises them: “He who endures to the end will be saved.” 

 

We know from subsequent history, however, that only one of the Twelve, John, the son of Zebedee, lived to old age and died a natural death. All the rest died as martyrs for the faith under the persecutions that Jesus here foretold. So, enduring to the end and being saved doesn’t necessarily mean being delivered from physical suffering and death, but rather being delivered from eternal death by remaining faithful, no matter what.

 

Notice in today’s Gospel that Jesus uses the word “fear” no less than four times. “So have no fear of them … And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell … Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.” And again, the Collect of the Day asks God to give us a perpetual fear and love of his holy name.

 

The point is not, I think, that we need to be afraid of God. Although the fear of the Lord is traditionally reckoned as one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, psychologists and spiritual directors counsel that being afraid of God often holds people back from developing a mature faith in God grounded in trust and love.

 

The point, rather, is that we need to get our fears in the right order. We’re all afraid of something, usually some form of loss. It’s natural to fear the loss of wealth, possessions, reputation, friendships, relationships, health, and indeed physical life itself. But more than fearing the temporal consequences of being faithful to God, we need to fear the eternal consequences of being unfaithful to him. 

 

What I want to get clear is that we don’t need to fear God himself because he’s a loving God who desires only our good. What we do need to fear, however, is losing God, for then we lose everything. He will never forsake or abandon us, but we can certainly forsake or abandon him. There’s a prayer—I forget the exact source—that sums it all up in the words: “Grant, O Lord, that I may fear nothing so much as the loss of thee.” 

 

So, as today’s Collect puts it, we ask God to give us a perpetual fear and love of his holy Name, for he never fails to help and govern those whom he has set upon the sure foundation of his loving kindness.

PROPER 6, YEAR A

June 18, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Matthew 9:35-10:8

 

One of the greatest war movies of all time—I’m probably dating myself by saying this—is The Dirty Dozen, released in 1967. The film dramatizes a special military operation during World War II. Lee Marvin plays John Reisman, an American officer given the assignment of parachuting into France and eliminating Wehrmacht officers at a resort chateau to disrupt the German chain of command ahead of the D-Day landings.

 

The mission is so difficult and dangerous that Reisman adopts an unusual recruiting strategy. Instead of assembling a team of the best and the brightest, West Point graduates or members of elite commando units, he goes to a military prison containing the army’s dregs: thugs, murderers, and thieves – men who’d been criminals in civilian life and who continued in their lawless ways in the army until arrested and court-martialed.

 

Five of the convicts have been sentenced to death, and the remaining seven face lengthy imprisonments at hard labor. Reisman offers the convicts a pardon and freedom if they’ll volunteer for this one mission and survive. Odds are nine to one that the mission will fail, and they’ll all be killed. But the twelve who do volunteer on the chance that the mission might succeed become the Dirty Dozen.

 

It looks as though Reisman’s scraping the bottom of the barrel. But, as the movie unfolds, the strategy’s wisdom becomes apparent. The Dirty Dozen have developed skills in their criminal careers that prove perfect for the mission’s demands. One knows how to pick locks. Another is good with his fists. They all excel at lying, concealment, and other criminal tactics that are exactly the talents needed to get this job done.

 

Now, I’m not commending a policy of using convicts in the military. Such a policy can have bad consequences, as we’ve seen most recently with the Russians in Ukraine. But the movie’s appeal is that in the right situation, in the right team, with the right leadership, those whom the world regards as losers can become heroes. The mission succeeds, even though only one of the Dirty Dozen survives and lives to tell the tale. The rest are nonetheless redeemed from a fate of living and dying ignominiously as convicts. 

 

Today’s Gospel tells of another dozen, this time chosen and recruited by Jesus—not the Dirty Dozen to be sure, but a collection who also seem at first glance totally lacking in qualifications for the mission to which they’re called.  In his compassion for the crowds, who seem harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd, Jesus selects from his disciples Twelve Apostles and sends them out to do the very same work that he’s been doing: preaching the good news, healing the sick, cleansing lepers, raising the dead.

 

These Twelve Apostles are an unlikely crew. Some time ago, I read a whimsical piece of writing that speculates on the kind of personnel evaluation that Jesus might have received on them from a management consulting agency. The report reads as follows:

 

Dear Sir:

 

Thank you for submitting the resumes of the twelve individuals you have selected for managerial positions in your new organization. They have all now taken our battery of tests. We have not only analyzed the results, but have also arranged personal interviews for each of them with our psychologist and vocational aptitude consultant.

 

The test profiles of all twelve candidates are included. You will want to study each carefully. As part of our service, without any additional fee, we make some general recommendations.

 

It is the staff opinion that most of your nominees are lacking in educational background and vocational aptitude for the type of enterprise you are undertaking. They do not have the team concept. We would recommend that you continue to search for persons of experience in managerial skills and proven capability.

 

Simon Peter is emotionally unstable and given to fits of temper. Andrew has absolutely no qualities of leadership. The two brothers, James and John, place personal interest above company loyalty. Thomas demonstrates a questioning attitude that would tend to undermine morale. We feel that it is our duty to tell you that Matthew has been blacklisted by the Greater Jerusalem Better Business Bureau. James the son of Alphaeus and Thaddeus have radical leanings.

 

Only one of the candidates shows any potential. He is a man of ability and resourcefulness who meets people well and has a keen business mind. He has contacts in high places and is highly motivated, ambitious, and responsible. We recommend Judas Iscariot as your controller and right-hand man.

 

Wishing you every success in your new venture.

Sincerely yours,

Jordan Management Consultants

Jerusalem, Judea

 

So, from a contemporary management perspective, it would seem that Jesus could have done better. But, like Lee Marvin in The Dirty Dozen, Jesus knew exactly what he was doing. He didn’t choose the brightest and best of his society: the most accomplished rabbinical students, or the most eminent priests, lawyers, and scribes. Instead, he chose fishermen and tax collectors. And his strategy paid off. After his death, resurrection, and ascension, the twelve became the leaders of a missionary movement that spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

 

(Another parallel with the Dirty Dozen—I have no idea if it was intentional—is that only one of the Twelve Apostles, Saint John, lives to die a natural death. The rest die as martyrs for the faith, but their deaths ensure the mission’s success.) 

 

The choice of the Twelve Apostles teaches us something about how Jesus operates. He calls each of us to continue his work today. He calls us to be his disciples, to proclaim his Gospel, and to bring healing and reconciliation to the world in his Name. 

 

All baptized Christians, not just the clergy, are entrusted with a share in the Church’s mission. Studies of church growth demonstrate that there’s no substitute for every member of the congregation taking responsibility for his or her share in the task of recruiting new members by means of personal, one-to-one evangelization.

 

We instinctively recoil from that idea, I think, because we have a healthy dose of self-doubt about our ability to do the job. Who among us is qualified to proclaim the Gospel to an unbelieving world? Who among us is qualified to be an agent of healing and reconciliation in Jesus’ Name? You’re not and I’m not. The Bishop-Elect is not; and the incoming Priest-in-Charge is not. But the Lord chooses us anyway. Perhaps he sees more potential in us than we see in ourselves. Perhaps he sees gifts and talents that he can use in totally unpredictable and unexpected ways.

 

That’s how Jesus works. He delights in calling the most unlikely people to be his apostles. He promises us that he’ll give us everything we need to be faithful to him and to his mission. And then he sends us out to share in that mission of proclaiming the Gospel and bringing salvation to a hungry and hurting world.

 

Acknowledgment: Key ideas for this sermon came from a sermon of Will Willimon, published sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s.

CORPUS CHRISTI

Sunday 11 June 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N.J.

 

 

At the heart of the Church’s life is the Good News that God became human so that he might reconcile humanity to himself. The Incarnation—the coming down of God from heaven to assume our human nature in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary—is a divine gift of amazing generosity and love.

         

In a well-known passage from his Letter to the Philippians, Saint Paul describes what he calls the self-emptying 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 meaning—“Therefore, 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, crucified, risen, and ascended Lord manifests this same self-emptying love when he gives himself to us in the Blessed Sacrament of his Body and Blood. He makes himself 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 gives himself to us as a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, who in turn gives himself 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. As the Dominican preacher Aidan Nichols 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 nature 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 Christ Church.

 

The feast dates to thirteenth century Flanders. The idea came from 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. As she reflected on the vision, she discerned that the moon represented the Church reflecting the light of Christ to the world. The shadow signified the absence of any feast in the Church calendar celebrating the Sacrament of the Lord’s Body and Blood besides 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 doom. 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. When Judas Iscariot leaves to betray Jesus, he goes out into the night.

 

So, Juliana recognized the need for another Thursday on which to celebrate the gift of the Eucharist in the light of day—the daylight signifying 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 instituted Corpus Christi as a feast for the entire Western Church.

 

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 danger 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 all too easily becomes a rote action, omitting the careful spiritual preparation that the Church recommends beforehand, and the loving thanksgiving 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 here at Christ Church, 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. So, we admit to Holy Communion a class of young people who’ve undergone careful preparation. Nothing could be more appropriate on Corpus Christi Sunday. 

 

I’m also taking the liberty of concluding today’s celebration with a devotion known as Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, which is a traditional part of the Corpus Christi observances in many places. Once we’ve all received Holy Communion and returned to our places, I will place the consecrated host in the monstrance—which, as I understand it, has up to now been used here only on Maundy Thursday. So, we’ll have the opportunity to prolong our communing with Jesus in adoration of his sacramental presence on the Altar. 

 

The devotion culminates with the priest taking the monstrance and making the sign of the cross over the congregation to convey Christ’s blessing. It’s a wonderful devotion, which I wanted to introduce here as a parting gift before my leave-taking at the end of next month. So, as the antiphon at the beginning and end of the concluding psalm puts it: “Let us forever adore the most holy Sacrament.”

TRINITY SUNDAY

June 4, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N.J.

 

 

In the year 325 AD, there occurred an event of momentous importance for the history of the entire 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. In this context, the word ecumenical means “worldwide” or “universal”—a council bringing together bishops or representatives from all the local churches throughout the world. While most of the bishops who actually attended were from the Greek-speaking Eastern half of the Roman Empire, the Pope sent two representatives from Rome, and the Bishop of Carthage in North Africa was present as well.

 

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

 

Then, local councils met to consider questions facing the Church in specific regions. But now, following the conversion of Constantine, it was possible for an ecumenical council to meet with unprecedented authority to make decisions binding on the Catholic Church throughout all lands.

 

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.

 

But the most pressing item on the Council’s agenda was a raging theological dispute that been dividing 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 had come down from heaven and taken flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary. But Arius insisted that this Son who’d become incarnate in Jesus Christ was not fully divine but a created spirit—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 of Alexandria, and Alexander’s successor Athanasius, rightly discerned 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. 

 

And to make the Church’s faith absolutely clear, the Council solemnly promulgated the earliest version of what 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, the first-person plural, “We believe,” became the first-person singular, “I believe.” So, both translations, “We believe” and “I believe,” are equally valid. One just follows the Greek while the other follows the Latin.)

 

To refute the Arian heresy, the Nicene Creed went on to affirm that the Son is “God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father …” That clause represented the first but certainly not the last step in the Church’s definition of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

 

On Trinity Sunday, we give thanks for the Ecumenical Councils and Catholic Creeds given to us as key components of what’s known as 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 Holy Spirit’s descent on the Day of Pentecost. The Ecumenical Councils and the Catholic Creeds demonstrate the Holy Spirit’s continuing presence and work in the subsequent centuries, teaching the Church and leading her into all truth.

 

A useful way of thinking about the Creeds is as thumbnail summaries of the teachings of Scripture. As Anglican Catholics we affirm that the Bible contains the definitive record of God’s revelation. It’s “the Word of the Lord,” and it “contains all things necessary to salvation.” But 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 readings of biblical teaching. Scripture is not self-interpreting. We need an authoritative guide to Scripture’s true meaning. The Ecumenical Councils and the Catholic Creeds supply the guidance we need, distilling the universal Church’s Spirit-guided reflection upon the Sacred Texts over the centuries.

 

Our celebration today invites us to reflect on the Creeds’ place in our life and worship. When we say the Nicene Creed at Mass, it’s not as if those of us who make up the congregation are each expressing our own personal faith. That would be impossible anyway, 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. No, what’s really happening is that the Church is proclaiming the Church’s faith; and we’re joining in, so that by repeated participation in this solemn liturgical proclamation, the Holy Spirit may gradually lead us into all truth, forming a mature faith within our hearts and minds.

 

A favorite story of mine recounts how a well-known Eastern Orthodox bishop and theologian once visited a certain Methodist Divinity School in the South 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 cannot say the part about Jesus being born of the Virgin Mary. Try as I may, I just 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. 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. In the meantime, remember that what the Divine Liturgy proclaims is not your own personal faith, but the corporate faith of the entire Catholic Church.

 

The great gift, the great blessing, of belonging to a Church such as ours where we recite the Creeds regularly in worship, is that we don’t have to figure it all out for ourselves and keep on reinventing the theological wheel. As we join in professing the Nicene Creed at the Eucharist every Sunday, and ideally the Apostles Creed at Morning and Evening Prayer every day, we’re brought into a living relationship with the three divine Persons that the Creeds describe. So, let’s never tire of saying the Creeds! Let’s never tire of growing in our union with the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.

 

 

 

 

 

PENTECOST: WHITSUNDAY

May 28, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

 

Historians use several different methods to investigate the meaning and significance of past events. One technique is to try to reconstruct how people who lived through a particular event—say, for example, the American Revolution—experienced it as reflected in their speeches, books, journals, letters, and so forth. How did those involved understand, think, talk, write, and feel about what was going on around them in the times they were living through?

 

A very different method, which really doesn’t contradict the first one, is to look at the before and after, and to ask what difference the event made. So, to understand the significance of the American Revolution, we might compare life in the Thirteen Colonies in 1760 with life in the newly formed United States in 1800. What changed and what stayed the same—politically, economically, socially, and culturally? –And, at the most basic level, in the ways people saw themselves and the world they lived in? 

 

It’s a tricky question because some of the changes might have happened anyway. But once our investigations bring us to the point of being able to say with any degree of confidence that these are the differences the event in question made, then we’ve come a long way towards understanding the inner meaning and significance of the event itself.

 

“When the Day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” So often sermons and meditations take the first approach and try to describe what it must have felt like: the rushing wind, the tongues of fire, the ecstasy of praise, and the miracle of mutual comprehension among peoples of different languages. But such an exercise in imaginative reconstruction can take us only so far. In the end all we have is Saint Luke’s brief account in the Acts of the Apostles, and beyond that we cannot really know what the participants themselves actually experienced. 

 

I say this with all due respect to Charismatic Christians who claim that they regularly undergo for themselves the Pentecost experience in their worship. While I do esteem their tradition, the truth remains that participants in ecstatic forms of worship cannot know for sure whether their sensations, emotions, and feelings are really anything like those of the original disciples. Some experiences of people in the past are simply irretrievable.

 

So, a more fruitful avenue of exploration is to compare the before and after. And here we’ve got a bit more to go on, because Saint Luke tells us a lot about what happened pre- and post-Pentecost. The Jewish festival of Pentecost or Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, comes fifty days after Passover, For the disciples, it’s been fifty days since the Lord’s death and Resurrection, and ten days since his Ascension into heaven.

 

And what have they been doing? According to the biblical accounts, they’ve been meeting behind closed doors and praying. Despite having been privy to the amazing events of the Lord’s Resurrection and Ascension, they haven’t yet begun to proclaim these events publicly. Instead, they’ve obeyed the Lord’s instructions to wait in Jerusalem until they’re clothed with power from on high.

 

The contrast of before and after couldn’t be sharper. Immediately, on the Day of Pentecost, the Church becomes a missionary movement going out into the world, preaching the Gospel, baptizing new converts, and growing by leaps and bounds. What makes the difference is clearly the Holy Spirit who has descended upon the disciples in the Upper Room.

 

This transformation is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the person of Saint Peter. All through our Lord’s earthly ministry, the apostles were slow on the uptake, not always understanding his teachings. Peter in particular could be somewhat obtuse—to the point where he confidently predicted that he would never abandon Jesus only to deny him three times the very same night.

 

But now, on the Day of Pentecost, all that changes. In the passage immediately following today’s reading from Acts, Peter stands up and preaches the Gospel boldly, confidently, and authoritatively, explaining to the crowds how the miraculous events they’re witnessing fulfill the scriptural prophecies. It’s the first of many sermons in Acts by which thousands of people are converted and baptized. Clearly, for the disciples, Pentecost is one of those pivotal moments after which nothing is ever the same again.

 

Many of us here today can probably testify that God has spoken and acted in very real ways in our lives. One of the privileges of being a priest is that people occasionally feel safe telling me of spiritual experiences that they normally don’t tell just anyone. These experiences may take such vivid forms as visions of heavenly beings, messages from angels, or even something as simple as resting in an overwhelming sense of peace in God’s presence. Very few of these individuals strike me as crazy or psychotic; and my first inclination is always to take these reports very seriously.

 

But somewhere in the conversation, I always try to ask: “Okay, how has this experience changed you?” For that question really is the key diagnostic in discerning the meaning. Not so much, “What did it subjectively feel like at the time?” as “What objective difference has it made in your life? In your sense of identity, purpose, mission, and calling? In your attitudes and behavior? And if a ready answer to that question isn’t forthcoming, then I usually take the opportunity to challenge the person gently to reflect on what God might be asking them to do as the result of this experience. For when the Holy Spirit moves in our lives, the effects are palpable and real.

 

Conversely, moments when we might not have felt anything much at all—such as perhaps Baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation—often turn out in retrospect to have been really life changing. The key to discerning the Holy Spirit’s presence and activity isn’t so much what we did or didn’t experience at the time, but the before and after. What were the long-term effects, and were they good?

 

Our celebration of Pentecost marks a personal milestone for me. My first Sunday here at Christ Episcopal Church was the Feast of Pentecost last year. So, today I’m marking the completion of a full liturgical cycle here with you and the beginning of a new one. 

 

I’m confident that during this past year the Holy Spirit has been working through our ministries together, possibly in ways that none of us yet fully understand. God has been preparing this parish for its future—and maybe also preparing me for future ministries that I may be called to undertake elsewhere. And my hope is that maybe in three years’ time, or five years’ time, we’ll be able to look back and say, “Oh yes, now we understand, that’s what God was doing here at Christ Church during that Interim period when that Alexander fellow was with us. It wasn’t so clear then but it’s clear now.” For that’s so often how the Holy Spirit works in the life of the Church, and the world.