Sermon for Trinity Sunday

The curious thing about Trinity Sunday is that it’s one of the few festivals in the Church calendar that celebrates a doctrine. Many feasts of the liturgical year commemorate events recorded in Scripture – and very often on the date or during the season of the year when we believe them to have happened. Easter falls in the spring around Passover, the time of year when Jesus died and rose again. And following the New Testament chronology exactly, Ascension comes forty days and Pentecost fifty days after Easter.

The date of Christmas is admittedly arbitrary, and appropriately occurs on the date of an old Roman midwinter holiday celebrating the triumph of light over darkness around the time of the winter solstice. But then the Church coordinated the dates of the Annunciation, the Visitation, and the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist to fit in chronologically with the putative date of Christ’s birth at Christmas. Likewise, we keep most saints’ days on the anniversary of the saint’s death: his or her “birthday into heaven.”

But Trinity Sunday is different. We could really observe it at any time of the year, for the mystery it celebrates is timeless. Such events as the Birth of Christ, the Baptism of Christ, and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost all represent definite historical moments in God’s revelation of himself to his people. For this reason, theologians sometimes speak of the cumulative record of these moments as “salvation history.” But there is no single historical moment when God revealed himself as Trinity. Rather, over several centuries of sustained reflection on the biblical revelation, the Church developed the doctrine of the Trinity – as summarized in the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds – as the only way of speaking about God that could adequately account for the reality of people’s actual experiences of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

So, why do we celebrate Trinity Sunday when we do? The reason is simple: For the past six months, from Advent Sunday through the Day of Pentecost, we’ve been retracing the history of God’s self-revelation to his people, from the preaching of the Old Testament prophets, through the Incarnation, death and Resurrection of Christ, to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Church. Today, we step back and do precisely what the early Christians did: we reflect on what we’ve learned. And the whole history of revelation that we’ve been recapitulating these past six months adds up to this picture of the Triune God given expression by the Trinitarian doctrine.

The word Trinity never occurs in Scripture. It appears to have been coined by the Second Century Roman theologian Tertullian. But the Christians of the first four centuries found that the doctrine made sense of so much: such as the threefold “Holy, Holy, Holy” of the cherubim in the vision of Isaiah; and God’s strange use of the first-person plural in the opening chapter of Genesis: “Let us make man in our own image.”

Most important of all, the doctrine of the Trinity helped the early Christians understand the words and actions of Jesus, who was himself God Incarnate and yet spoke of his Father in heaven and of the Holy Spirit he would send down upon the Church after his Ascension. Moreover, Trinitarian language helped them make sense of their own experience of God: for at one and the same time they had a vivid sense of God as their heavenly creator and father; of Jesus as their Lord, Savior, friend, and brother; and of the Holy Spirit as the guiding and empowering divine presence within. God was indeed one in being, and yet had revealed himself as three Persons.

A good exercise on Trinity Sunday, rather than trying to resolve the paradox of how God can be one and three at the same time, is to ask ourselves how we’ve experienced the three Persons of the Trinity in our own spiritual lives: In what ways have we known God as our Father in heaven; as Jesus our Savior; and as the Holy Spirit who indwells us and gives us inner counsel and strength?

Most of all, the doctrine of the Trinity speaks to us of God’s very nature and being as love. Our God is not a solitary monad subsisting in splendid isolation, but rather a community of three Persons eternally united in mutual relations of perfect self-giving love. And because God has created us in his image, it follows that we find the fulfillment of our nature not in rugged individualism, but rather in relationship and community. In other words, because God is love, we realize our God‑given purpose in life by learning to love and to be loved! And our eternal destiny in Christ is to be caught up forever into that perfect circle of divine love that is God’s own inner life.

So, Trinity Sunday remains a superb way to wrap up and summarize the completed cycle of the liturgical year before we move into Ordinary Time. And it invites us to celebrate the most unique aspect of the Christian revelation: our faith in God who is one in three and three in one, whose very nature and essence is love.

Easter VII -- Year C [Sunday after the Ascension]

John 17:20-26

The opening chapter of the Acts of the Apostles tells us that after our Lord’s Ascension into heaven, the Apostles together with the women and Mary, the mother of the Lord, returned to Jerusalem. And: “All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer …” This period of prayer culminated, of course, in the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost.

In the cycle of the Church Year, we find ourselves in the corresponding period. We celebrated the Ascension on Thursday; and we shall celebrate Pentecost a week from today. Christ has ascended into heaven; but the Holy Spirit has not yet descended. So for us, as for Mary and the Apostles in the Upper Room, it’s a time of waiting and prayer.

Although in many places it’s become the practice to transfer the Ascension from Thursday to Sunday, nonetheless I think we lose something vital by doing so. For the Sunday after the Ascension has much to teach us about praying for the coming of the Holy Spirit. And this is particularly the case with today’s reading from Saint John’s Gospel.

The setting is the Last Supper. Our Lord is praying for his disciples on the eve of his arrest, trial, and death. He prays specifically for their unity in love after he’s taken from them. So this prayer exactly anticipates their situation after his Ascension. He’s no longer physically present with them; yet he’s entrusted them with the mission of preaching the Gospel to the ends of the earth. They cannot possibly fulfill this mission without prayer. So here he prays for them and for us as well.

A helpful hint for understanding today’s Gospel is that when we hear it read, we need to assume the posture of people being prayed for. After his Ascension, Jesus stands in the presence of the Father continually making intercession for us. And in today’s Gospel we have the privilege of hearing a snippet of what his prayer for us sounds like.

He prays that we all may be one, as he and the Father are one. During the past century, this passage has become one of the proof texts for the ecumenical movement, which has striven mightily to overcome the various divisions within the Body of Christ.

A key development in the history of Christianity in the twentieth century was the growing realization among Christians that our disunity hinders the Church’s mission and witness in the world. Thus, Christians who had once seen themselves as being in competition and rivalry – Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Roman Catholics – began to discover the rewards of getting to know each other, exchanging ideas, and exploring areas of potential co-operation.

By the 1960s and 1970s, conversations between Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, and Methodists had gained great momentum, occasioning enormous optimism about the ecumenical future. Yet in the following decades, disillusionment began to set in. While these dialogues produced some interesting agreed statements on doctrinal matters, and in some cases formal intercommunion – such as between the Lutherans and us – early hopes for quick corporate reunion have largely met with frustration.

In response, some proposed changing the movement’s goals and methods. In 1995, for example, Konrad Raiser, Secretary General of the World Council of Churches, proposed that the various church bodies should give up seeking doctrinal agreement and structural unity, and instead devote themselves to co-operation on issues of justice, peace, and protection of the environment.

Others sought to ignore, minimize, or trivialize the differences between Christians. For example, also in the 1990s, when I was in my previous parish, I participated in a great ecumenical service at a local Lutheran church for the Week of Prayer for Christian unity. About forty clergy of different traditions processed and sat together. The vestments and robes ranged from Geneva pulpit gowns to cassocks and lacy surplices. The musical offerings featured traditional choral music, an African American Gospel choir, and a folk rock group. A Baptist preacher and a Roman Catholic priest both gave outstanding sermons. About four hundred people packed the church to standing room only. It was a moving and powerful witness to our shared commitment to Christian unity.

Imagine my disappointment the next morning when I opened the local paper and read the first line in the story: “Christians of all denominations came together last night to demonstrate that doctrine doesn’t matter.” What a profound misreading of that service’s meaning! Doctrine does matter! Yet in that ecumenical service we’d come together to express, first, our conviction that our shared beliefs and practices outweigh our differences; and, second, our commitment to praying and working together to resolve and overcome the very real differences that still divide us.

For the unity that we seek, the unity for which Christ prayed, is nothing less than unity in the fullness of truth and love. Such unity can’t be achieved by warm fuzzy feelings of togetherness fostering the illusion that differences in belief don’t matter. It can’t be achieved solely by new bureaucratic structures, or by carefully crafted statements concealing unresolved differences behind compromise formulas and ambiguous language. It really can’t be achieved by human effort at all. Rather, it’s a gift of the Holy Spirit, which can only be prayed for and received in God’s good time.

Listen again to our Lord’s words: “that they may be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they may also be in us . . . that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one . . .”

This unity, which Jesus has with his Father in heaven, is a complete harmony of heart, mind, and will. In John’s Gospel, Jesus emphasizes again and again that he has come to speak the words and to do the will of his Father in heaven. And here Jesus is praying that his disciples may likewise be of one heart, mind, and will—both with him, and with each other.

And such complete harmony of heart, mind, and will is humanly impossible. But notice that here Jesus is praying for his disciples. He’s not commanding us to be one; he’s not promising that we shall be one; he’s praying that we may be one. In other words, we cannot achieve this true unity on our own. We can only pray for it, and we can only receive it as a gift from God.

One of the signs of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our midst is the unity of our hearts, minds, and wills in the truth of God’s Word. A key work of the Holy Spirit is to reconcile those who are divided and at enmity. And so, in this interval between the Lord’s Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, we join with our Lady and the Apostles praying in the upper room – the same room, incidentally, where Jesus prayed at the Last Supper – that we may all be one, even as he and the Father are one.

Ascension of the Lord

In my end is my beginning. The motto of Mary Queen of Scots famously quoted by T.S. Eliot in East Coker might well sum up the relationship between today’s readings from the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel according to Saint Luke.

Actually, the placement of the first and third readings in today’s liturgy exactly reverses Luke’s sequence in his two books. The Acts of the Apostles is Luke’s sequel to his Gospel. So the third reading this evening comes from the very end of Luke’s Gospel, which comes first; whereas our opening reading came from the very beginning of the sequel, in which Luke tells the story of the early Church.

In any case, for Luke, the Ascension of the Lord is so pivotal an episode that he tells it twice: first at the end of his Gospel as the climax of his story of Jesus; and then at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles as the commencement of his story of the early Church. And the Ascension is pivotal for us today in our life as Christians as well.

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

The question, then, is what difference it makes to us. It used to be fashionable for theologians to write books attempting to tease out the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith: that is, between the historical figure of Jesus about whom we read in the Gospels; and the Christ whom we worship and obey as Lord in the Church today. The Ascension teaches us, however, that the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are absolutely one and the same person. In other words, the Jesus about whom we read in the Bible is not merely an historical figure who lived and died in the ancient past, but rather someone who is alive even now in the fullest possible sense of the word.

The Ascension is absolutely critical to our Christian faith because it addresses the question: Where is Jesus now? The answer is that he’s been exalted to the right hand of his Father in heaven, where he reigns as Lord over all creation.

Yet, precisely because he’s returned to his Father in heaven, he can be present for us in the Church here and now. We can know him not only as someone whose words and deeds we read about in the Bible as a distant figure from the past, but also as a living presence in our midst – and more specifically, as the one who still speaks to us in his Word, who still comes among us in his Sacraments, and who still claims our deepest loyalty, allegiance, faith, and obedience as our Lord and Savior.

Paradoxically, then, the Ascension marks the beginning not of the absence of Jesus from his Church on earth, but rather of his presence in a new mode. During our Lord’s earthly Incarnation, his presence to his disciples was localized in his human body. After his Ascension, however, Jesus becomes present in the Spirit wherever his disciples travel, wherever the Church gathers in his name, wherever his Word is preached, wherever his Sacraments are celebrated.

So the Ascension is both end and beginning. It marks the end of the story of our Lord’s earthly Incarnation at a definite time and place in human history. But it also marks the beginning of our story as the Church, the Body of Christ on earth, the community of those who continue his mission and find new life in him.

Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C

John 13:31-35

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.

At one level, this saying of Jesus seems simple. There’s nothing very surprising or startling about telling his disciples to love one another. But, especially in John’s Gospel, it’s often worth taking a closer look at our Lord’s words and paying attention to the details.

A new commandment I give to you. Notice, first of all, that Jesus calls this saying a commandment: not a suggestion, recommendation, invitation, good advice, or exhortation, but a commandment. Spoken on the night before his death, these words are part of what is often called his farewell speech. If you want to continue to be my disciples after I’m gone, here’s what you must do. These are your marching orders.

Notice, also, that Jesus calls this saying not merely a commandment but a new commandment: something that the disciples presumably haven’t heard before. And that raises the question: In what sense is the instruction to love one another new?

Well, for one thing, there are the words “one another.” In the Old Testament, God had given Israel the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus tells the disciples to love even their enemies. But here he’s narrowing the focus to speak specifically of love within the community of disciples. In other words, from now on the members of his Church must be known to the world as people who love one another.

Even more than that, this commandment to love one another is a new commandment on account of what comes next: “as I have loved you.” There’s the kicker. It’s really not that hard to love your neighbor as yourself. You just need to be willing to do for your neighbor whatever you’d expect your neighbor to do for you. So, for example, if when I’m not feeling well I’d like you to go to the pharmacy for me and get my prescription filled, then I’d better be prepared to go to the pharmacy for you and get your prescription filled when you’re not feeling well.

But our Lord’s love far surpasses that kind of love. For us, he dies on the cross. That’s not something we’d ever expect anyone else to do for us. Yet for us, Jesus offers up everything, with no thought for himself. The love he demonstrates on the cross is self-giving and sacrificial: love that dies to self for the sake of the beloved.

It’s this quality of self-giving, self-denying love that Jesus commands us to exhibit in our life together as Christians. This does not necessarily mean that we shall literally be called to suffer martyrdom on account of our Christian commitment – although in many parts of the world giving one’s life for Christ remains a very real possibility. But it does mean that in the life of the Church we need to be willing to put each other’s interests before our own interests, and to put the collective good of the community before our own individual good. In this way, we learn to love one another, even as Christ has loved us.

And to a large extent we can already see this love for one another in lives of our parish and diocesan communities. Here at S. Stephen’s, I’m often touched, even moved, by the ways in which parishioners reach out to express concern for one another in times of loss, or to lend a helping hand in time of need. True, we’re not a cozy little suburban parish where everybody minds everybody else’s business; and I’m just as glad for that. But nonetheless our life together in this rather eclectic collection of occasionally eccentric personalities – entirely typical of Anglo-Catholic parishes – is marked by genuine Christian love in all sorts of quiet and unobtrusive ways. And that’s very good.

But loving one another as Christ has loved us entails even more basic commitments. And the most basic commitment of all is simply to be here: to come faithfully to Mass on Sundays and principal holy days throughout the year; and to support by our presence the various other parish activities and events on the schedule as we’re able. In other words, the first step in loving one another as Christ has loved us is simply to be here for one another – even when, especially when, a dozen other claims on our time and attention seem more pressing.

The second step in loving one another as Christ has loved us is to assume collective responsibility for those activities that express our identity and fulfill our mission as a parish. If we truly love one another here at S. Stephen’s, and if we truly love our parish community as a whole, then we shall want to do everything we can to facilitate its participation in the spreading of the Gospel and the up-building of God’s kingdom.

Two opportunities in particular stand before us at this time. First, this coming Friday and Saturday, we shall be hosting Bishop Lindsay Urwin of the Anglican Shrine at Walsingham in England. He shall be giving an address at 6 pm on Friday evening followed by a panel discussion and Vespers of our Lady. And then on Saturday he’ll be our preacher at the Annual Mass and Meeting of the Society of Mary, beginning at 11 am. A number of visitors and guests are likely to be present. Coming out to support our parish in these activities is one concrete way in which we express our love for one another as Christ has loved us.

The other opportunity is perhaps a bit more challenging. We really need more parishioners coming to our daily Offices and Masses. Opening our doors daily for worship has been an integral part of this parish’s mission since 1896. Currently, weekday attendance is running at between two and three people, including the priest; and that’s really not enough to keep these daily services going as an active and vibrant ministry. I know in my bones that there are more parishioners out there who could come to at least some of these daily services if they simply made the decision to do so.

Here is a key example of what I mean by assuming collective responsibility for those activities that express our identity and fulfill our mission. Making the decision to come to one or more of our weekday Masses would be a profound expression of our love for God, for our parish, and for one another.

The point is that loving one another begins with such simple steps as these. They’re not always easy at the outset; they’re not always convenient; and they’re not always what we feel like doing at the moment. And yet, such little sacrifices school us in the art of loving one another as Jesus has loved us. In this way, those in the wider world will know that we’re his disciples, and may even be drawn in turn to joining us.

Easter 2, Year C [Low Sunday]

When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side.

A curious feature of the resurrection narrative in today’s Gospel is the emphasis placed on the wounds of the risen Christ. The Evangelist John mentions them twice.

First, Jesus appears, stands among the disciples, and says, “Peace be with you.” That greeting suggests that the disciples need reassurance. John has already told us that they’re hiding behind closed doors because they’re afraid of the authorities. But perhaps they’re also afraid of this mysterious figure that has suddenly appeared from nowhere—and certainly without having come in through the closed doors.

Then, after he says, “Peace be with you,” he shows them his hands and his side. Only then do the disciples recognize him: “Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.” In other words, the disciples realize that it’s Jesus standing before them, risen from the dead, precisely because they see his wounds.

Throughout the various resurrection appearances, even those who were closest to Jesus during his earthly life have trouble recognizing him at first. But then there comes a moment when it becomes overwhelmingly clear who he is. Here, in this account, the clear markers of his identity are the scars in his hands and his side. Christ is gloriously risen; yet he reveals himself by means of his wounds.

This detail casts new light on the story of doubting Thomas that follows immediately afterwards. Here is the second instance where John mentions the wounds of the risen Christ. When the disciples tell Thomas, “We have seen the Lord,” he responds, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

On account of these words, Thomas has become known and loved down through the centuries as the patron saint of skeptics everywhere. But perhaps what he’s saying is not so much that he disbelieves the story, as that the only way that he will recognize this mysterious figure appearing to the disciples as Jesus is by touching his wounds.

In other words, perhaps Thomas doesn’t doubt that someone or something—a ghost, an angel, or a demon—is really appearing to the disciples. In those days, such supernatural apparitions were believed to be commonplace occurrences. But the only Jesus that Thomas wants anything to do with is the same Jesus that he knew during his earthly life, the same Jesus whom he saw crucified and laid in the tomb. No ghostly phantom will do.

In that case, Thomas’s attitude is not so much as doubt or lack of faith as an admirable insistence on the reality of Christ’s sufferings. One of the first heresies to trouble the early Church was known as docetism. The word comes from the Greek verb meaning “to appear” or “to seem.” According to this false teaching Jesus was indeed fully divine but had only the appearance or semblance of a human being. Thus, he could not suffer or die, and only appeared to suffer and die on the cross. It was all a sham. And three days later, he appeared to the disciples to reveal that his death was only an illusion after all. Everything was fine and there was nothing to worry about.

The Church rightly condemned this teaching as a dangerous heresy. Unless Jesus is truly human, unless he has shared fully in the human condition, then he cannot be the savior of real human beings. Unless he has truly suffered and died, he cannot redeem us from suffering and death. By repudiating docetism, the Church effectively took its stand with Thomas and said, “Unless we can place our fingers in the mark of the nails, and place our hands in his side, we don’t have a faith worth believing.”

In the course of my priestly ministry, I’ve discovered that as I get to know parishioners really well, there often comes a moment when they either come into my office or invite me into their home and sit me down and tell me the story of the worst things that have ever happened to them—bereavements, family tragedies, divorces, accidents, injuries, crimes, betrayals, assaults, incarcerations, incidents of childhood neglect or abuse.

It’s a privileged moment, and very humbling. I've come to think of it as "the showing of the wounds." The underlying premise is that I don’t really know you until I’ve seen your wounds. And by revealing your scars, you entrust me with the knowledge of who you really are, and you invite me into a closer pastoral relationship with you. And that’s precisely what the risen Jesus does when he shows the disciples—when he shows us—his wounds. He reveals to us who he really is, the crucified Savior, and invites us into the closest possible relationship with him.

Some years ago I read the story of a woman who’d suffered a great trauma, being assaulted in broad daylight in her own back yard. While her physical injuries were minimal, the psychological and emotional shock was overwhelming. She was hospitalized for several weeks and then spent months recovering on heavy doses of medication and frequent sessions with her therapist. Although everyone knew that something was wrong, the only people who knew what had happened were the police, her doctors, her therapist, and her pastor. Outside that circle, she just couldn’t talk about it.

Finally, her therapist suggested that a necessary step on the path of healing would be to tell someone else, perhaps a close friend. She told her pastor of this suggestion, and then said: “I want to tell my story to Joe.” The pastor was surprised. Although a member of the congregation, Joe seemed an odd candidate. Joe’s life seemed straightened out now, but several years back he’d become addicted to drugs, lost his career, lost his family, and had spent years in and out of rehab clinics. Now he mostly kept to himself. “Why Joe?” he asked. “Because,” she replied, “the only person I can talk to right now is someone who knows what it’s like to have been to hell and back.”

The message of today’s Easter Gospel is that we worship a risen Lord who has literally been to hell and back. He can understand anything we tell him and help us through anything we ever have to suffer. And he’s got the scars to prove it.

Acknowledgment: Key ideas for this sermon came from William R. Willimon, “He showed them his scars,” Pulpit Resource, Vol. 25, No. 2 (April, May, June 1997), 3-6.

Easter Sunday 2013

Duccio di Buoninsegna [1260-1318]
The Three Marys at the Tomb, c.  1308-1311

Luke 24:1-12

As I did last night at the Great Vigil of Easter, I want to begin my remarks this morning by reflecting on a depiction of Christ’s Resurrection in Christian art. If you would look at the illustration on the cover of our program, it shows an Italo-Byzantine painting of three women encountering an angel at the tomb on the first Easter Sunday morning. In the Western tradition they’re sometimes known as the three Marys; in the Eastern tradition they’re known as the holy myrrh-bearing women.

The resurrection narrative in Saint Luke’s Gospel, which we’ve just heard, names them as Mary Magdalene, Joana, and Mary the mother of James. The other Gospels feature slight variations on their names and number. All four Gospels are clear, however, that before dawn on the first Easter Sunday a small group of women go to the tomb, but find it empty, and encounter heavenly messengers telling them that he is not there, for he is risen from the dead.

The women are then instructed to go and tell the disciples what they’ve heard and seen. For this reason, they are sometimes known as “apostles to the apostles”; and in the Eastern Orthodox tradition they have the title “equal to the apostles.” They’re witnesses to the events of both Good Friday and Easter Sunday. They’d followed Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem. They were present when Jesus was taken down dead from the cross, wrapped in a linen shroud, and laid to rest in the tomb. Then it seemed that their whole world had fallen apart, their hopes dashed. But when they return after the Sabbath to anoint the body, they’re first to find the tomb empty.

Beyond the joy of realizing that something unimaginably wonderful has happened, they receive the crucial assignment of bearing witness to what they’ve seen and heard. In Jewish law, a fact can be established by the unanimous testimony of three witnesses, men or women – hence the importance of there having been at least three women at the tomb.

The Church’s faith in the resurrection of Christ rests in large part on their testimony. In recent years, some New Testament scholars have pointed out that belief in Christ’s resurrection from the dead depends on two pieces of evidence taken together: the empty tomb, and the subsequent appearances of the risen Christ to his disciples.

By itself, the empty tomb proves nothing. The body could have been stolen by his enemies, or surreptitiously removed by his followers. And by themselves, the appearances of the risen Christ can be explained away either as a delusion, or as the apparitions of a ghost. In the ancient world, as in many times and places since, it was not uncommon for grieving relatives and friends to encounter spirits of the departed.

But combine these two pieces of evidence – the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances – and it becomes clear that we’re dealing with an event that’s unique, unprecedented, and mysterious. One who was really and truly dead has now been raised to not just new life but a whole new state of existence. This is not merely the resuscitation of a corpse, but a passage from earthly life through death to eternal life. In the risen Christ, death itself has been defeated, and life has gained the victory.

Of this victory, both the women at the tomb and the disciples are made witnesses. The women are sent to bear witness to the disciples; and the disciples are in turn sent to bear witness to all nations and peoples of the earth. And from then until now, the Church has not ceased to continue this mission of bearing witness to the Lord’s Resurrection.

Years ago, when I was in the process of discerning my vocation to the priesthood, and going through all the steps necessary to secure approval to go to seminary, a friend of mine focused this point for me in a way that I’ve never forgotten. He went to the same seminary I did, in Virginia, three years ahead of me. In the middle of his second year, I went to visit him there, both to catch up with how he was doing, and to see the seminary for myself, since I was already thinking of going there.

In the course of our conversations, he remarked: “I’m a cradle Episcopalian. I grew up attending Sunday School, participating in the Youth Group, and serving as an acolyte. But in my first year of seminary I began to realize that I’d been wrong about much of what I thought were the purposes of the Church’s existence, its reasons for being. Worship and prayer; preaching, study, and teaching; mission, evangelism, and good works in the world – are all ordered towards serving the main purpose, the primary purpose, which is to bear witness to the Lord’s Resurrection. If we’re not doing that, then we’re not fulfilling our mission as the Church; we’re not being the Church.”

Those were challenging words; and I’ve often called them to mind when I’ve encountered people and groups in the Church who seem to think that the Resurrection is an optional extra that we don’t have to believe in if we don’t want to: or perhaps a metaphor for some sort of subjective experience of renewal on the part of the disciples and, by extension, on our part as well. No. Bearing witness to the Lord’s bodily Resurrection is the key activity that defines our identity and mission as the Church.

But can we believe in the Resurrection today and maintain our intellectual integrity? Yes we can. True, we live in a skeptical world which discourages belief in anything supernatural or miraculous. But where we end up so often depends on where we start. Some time ago, someone told me that she couldn’t accept Christianity because it was impossible to believe all its stories about miracles. For once, the right answer occurred to me on the spot, right there and then, rather than in the shower the next morning; and I replied: “No, you’ve got it exactly the wrong way round. It’s not that you can’t accept Christianity because you don’t believe in miracles; it’s that you can’t believe in miracles because you don’t accept Christianity.” In other words, if the Christian God is the sort of God that the Scriptures claim him to be, then miracles are no problem. If God created the universe and everything in it out of nothing, then he’s certainly capable of creative actions in the world that surpass human understanding, including raising the dead.

Here, then, is the reason for our joyful gathering this morning and, indeed, every Sunday morning. We gather as the Church to continue the witness begun by the women at the tomb. Christ is not dead but alive; and he makes himself available to us as a living presence in each of our lives if only we invite him in. Because he lives, we also have the promise of eternal life. And it’s our mission as the Church never to cease bearing witness to this good news.

Easter Vigil 2013

Saturday 30 March 2013

Not surprisingly, the Resurrection of Christ is a principal subject of Christian art. In the Churches of the West, both Catholic and Reformed, both paintings and statues tend to depict the Risen Christ emerging triumphant from the tomb, perhaps with the soldiers sleeping on either side of the rolled back stone.

In the Eastern Church, however, the artistic tradition is different. The illustration on the cover of your service booklet shows a typical Eastern Orthodox icon of the Resurrection or Anastasis.

Standing astride a great set of fallen gates – which have landed in the figure of a cross – with the nail-prints visible in his hands and feet, Christ reaches down to grasp the hand of a man rising from a tomb. The man is Adam, our first parent. Beside him is Eve. Behind her, the figure with the shepherd’s crook is likely King David. To the left, stand John the Baptist and one of the kings of Israel, probably Solomon.

This strange image symbolically depicts what happened between our Lord’s death on the cross on Good Friday, and his rising from the tomb on Easter Sunday: namely, his descent into hell. The Apostles’ Creed states that after Jesus died and was buried, “he descended into hell, and on the third day he rose again.” Yet often during Holy Week it’s possible to go straight from the death and burial on Friday afternoon to the Resurrection on Sunday morning, without pausing to consider anything in between.

Over the years, people have occasionally asked me the same question about the Great Vigil of Easter: why are you celebrating Easter when it’s not yet Easter Sunday? Part of the answer is that on Easter Sunday we celebrate the resurrection appearances to the women and the disciples; while during the Great Vigil we instead on the resurrection itself: the deep mystery of what happens in the dark solitude of Christ’s tomb before dawn. So, on this most holy night, it seems appropriate to say a few words about Christ’s harrowing of hell.

The Bible briefly mentions this descent into hell in several places. Perhaps the best-known reference occurs in the First Letter of Peter. The apostle writes that Jesus was “put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit; in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison” (3:18-19). A bit later, he adds: “For this is why the gospel was preached even to the dead, that though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God” (4:6).

Paul writes in his Letter to the Ephesians, that Christ “descended into the lower parts of the earth,” and then later “ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things” (4:9-10).

In the Acts of the Apostles, the apostle Peter, in his sermon on the day of Pentecost, quotes Psalm 16, which says, “You will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor let your Holy One see corruption.” Peter then says that in the psalm David “foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption” (2:31). These words suggest that Christ’s soul went to the place called Hades, but was not abandoned there, while his body remained incorrupt in the tomb.

One final hint is that in the many places where the New Testament writers speak of Christ being raised from the dead, the phrase “from the dead” in the original Greek means not “from the state of death,” but rather, literally, “from among the dead ones.”

The Church’s traditional understanding is that when Jesus died and his body was placed in the tomb, his soul left his body and descended into the place known in Hebrew as Sheol, and in Greek as Hades: not the hell of eternal damnation and punishment that awaits the unrepentant after the Last Judgment, but rather that shadowy realm where the spirits of the dead were awaiting the coming of the Redeemer.

Here, rather than becoming a prisoner himself, Christ trampled down the gates, crushed the power of the devil, preached the Gospel, and set free the souls of the dead. Finally, his soul ascended and rejoined his body, which was lying incorrupt in the tomb awaiting resurrection.

This doctrine of Christ’s descent into hell points to at least three truths of importance.

First, Jesus truly experienced death. From his conception, he went through all the stages of human existence, both on this side of the grave and beyond. And this means that he’s present for us in every stage of our life and death. Even as we go down into the grave, he’s already there waiting for us. Not even death can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Second, by descending into hell, Christ has made his presence known in every part of creation, from the highest heaven to the lowest depths of the earth. In particular, by preaching the Gospel to those who had died before him, he shows that his offer of salvation extends to all people in all times and in all places.

And third, by ascending from hell after descending there, he accomplishes his victory over death and the grave: a victory which will be made manifest when he appears to the women and the disciples on Easter Sunday; and a victory in which we share by being baptized into his Body, the Church.

Tomorrow morning we shall celebrate the discovery of the empty tomb and the appearances of the Risen Lord to his followers. But this evening, we rejoice, give thanks, and celebrate -- for in the words of the Exsultet: “The night is come, wherein the bonds of death were loosed, and Christ harrowing hell rose again in triumph.”

Good Friday, 2013

Friday 29 March 2013

This year, the theme of our Sunday evening Lenten series was forgiveness and reconciliation. During the course of the series, we watched three movies and read one book. The book was Free of Charge, by Miroslav Volf, a professor at Yale Divinity School who was born in Croatia. And one of the movies was the French language film The Widow of Saint Pierre. So, by way of a Good Friday sermon, I want to offer some reflections on both the movie and the book.

The film is set on the island of Saint Pierre, a French territorial possession located just off the coast of Newfoundland. The year is 1850, during the short-lived Second French Republic. The movie begins with a senseless drunken murder committed one night by a drunken fisherman, Neel Auguste.

After his arrest, Neel is sentenced to death. Since there is no guillotine on the island, however, the island authorities must send to France for one before the execution can be carried out. And it will take months and months for a guillotine to be shipped to Saint-Pierre.

In the meantime, Neel is delivered into the custody of the local army captain. Skeptical that the guillotine will ever arrive, his wife takes an interest in rehabilitating the convict. She soon has Neel doing odd jobs all over the island – fixing roofs and such – so that he becomes popular, well-loved, and apparently forgiven. It also turns out that Neel has several children by one of the women on the island, and the captain’s wife arranges for the local priest to solemnize their marriage.

Meanwhile, the island authorities grow increasingly nervous, knowing that Neel’s new-found popularity could cause them problems when the guillotine finally arrives. But the law must be upheld. They try alternatively bullying and cajoling the Captain to restrain his wife’s activities on behalf of Neel. But the Captain, deeply devoted to his wife, refuses to rein her in and insists that the prisoner is his responsibility, not theirs.

In one revealing scene, the captain’s wife explains to Neel the philosophy of what she’s doing. He was drunk when he committed the murder, but since he no longer drinks, he’s changed. People can change, so they ought to be given second chances. Yet the expression on Neel’s face betrays skepticism of such a simplistic and facile explanation.

When a guillotine finally arrives from Martinique, it becomes clear that even though the islanders have forgiven him, Neel has not forgiven himself. Deep down, he believes that he must pay the penalty of his crime. He refuses to take advantage of an opportunity to escape to Newfoundland; and when the islanders initially refuse to unload the ship’s cargo, Neel himself enlists for the work because the money he earns will go to support his wife and children once he’s dead.

Meanwhile, on account of his defiance of the island authorities, the Captain is sent back to France where he’s court-martialed and executed by firing squad for mutiny. And on Saint-Pierre, Neel is finally executed as well.

It’s a disturbing movie, devoid of any explicitly religious message. But if I read it correctly, the deaths of both Neel Auguste and the Captain have a dimension of redemptive self-sacrifice. Rather than escape, Neel Auguste chooses to accept the death penalty to expiate the guilt of his crime, and in the process he’s able to bequeath a small inheritance to his survivors. Similarly, the Captain loves his wife so much that he accepts death willingly to pay the price of her transgression and testing the limits of what was acceptable to the island’s authorities and their sense of the demands of outraged justice.

As I watched the movie and reflected on it afterwards, I couldn’t help wishing that someone had told Neel Auguste that he didn’t have to die to expiate the guilt of his crimes, because Christ had already done that for him on the cross. He was already forgiven by God on account of the death of Christ. His faith in that assurance might not have altered the outcome of the story – the wheels of temporal justice would likely have turned inexorably anyway. But then he could at least have faced his death in the confidence that his sins were forgiven, his guilt taken away.

At some level, Neel understood what the Captain’s wife did not: that true forgiveness is always costly. In the book Free of Charge, Miroslav Volf makes it clear that to forgive is not to excuse or overlook wrongdoing. If I forgive you for some injury you’ve caused me, I am simultaneously condemning what you’ve done as wrong, and also saying that I’m not going to hold it against you. And that kind of forgiveness is costly, because it requires me to bear the injury, to absorb the offense, and to let go of the natural desire for compensation or retribution.

Yet Volf is also clear that as Christians we’re called to forgive others their trespasses because God has forgiven ours. When someone injures or offends us, we cannot withhold our forgiveness once we learn to see that person as a sinner for whom Christ died, someone who stands forgiven by God in Christ. And just as forgiveness is costly to us, so it’s costly to God, for it entails the sacrifice of the cross.

Volf does a good job of making clear that Christ’s death on the cross is not the unjust punishment of an innocent victim to make satisfaction for human sin. Rather, because Jesus Christ is the Incarnate Second Person of the Holy Trinity, by dying on the cross God himself bears the burden of our sins and absorbs our offenses. Volf writes: “the one who was offended bears the burden of the offense” (p. 145).

And yet, because Christ is not only truly God but also truly human, his death pays the price of human sin. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul writes: “One has died for all; therefore all have died.” Volf expands on this idea: “Now we see that we were also in Christ. What happened to him happened to us. When he was condemned, we were condemned. When he died, we died” (p. 147). The upshot is that our sinful natures have been crucified with Christ; we’re separated from the guilt of our sins; and we’re set free from the power of sin itself.

Such is the power of the cross in the life of the Christian. It’s the sign of the forgiveness of our sins in virtue of Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf. So, unlike Neel Auguste in The Widow of Saint-Pierre, we don’t need to die to expiate the guilt of our sins, because we’ve already died in Christ. And insofar as we accept God’s forgiveness, we can rest assured that Christ has taken away our guilt. We’re set free to live in the power of Christ’s resurrection, to live in Christ and to have the risen Christ live in us as the source of our life. But that is to get ahead of the story, which we’ll pick up again tomorrow evening and on Sunday morning.

Maundy Thursday, 2013

Thursday 28 March 2013

Peter said to him, “You shall never wash my feet.” Jesus answered him, “If I do not wash you, you have no part in me.”

In the thirteen years I’ve been at S. Stephen’s, the foot-washing has never been a problem. Every year we invite twelve parishioners to come forward as representatives of the congregation to have their feet washed by the clergy; and we never seem to have any problem finding volunteers to fulfill that role.

This has not been the case in most of the other parishes that I’ve known. Before I came to S. Stephen’s, in the other parishes I served, just about every year someone who was asked to have their feet washed at the Maundy Thursday liturgy refused point blank: sometimes sheepishly, sometimes defiantly, sometimes apologetically – but always implicitly taking the stand of Peter, “You shall never wash my feet.”

The ceremony of the foot washing, the Mandatum or Maundy, dates from the Middle Ages. In obedience to our Lord’s new commandment to love one another as he has loved us, on Maundy Thursday Popes would wash the feet of servants, abbots the feet of monks, and kings and queens the feet of peasants.

Yet in many places it remains a controversial practice. Some years ago the Episcopal news magazine, The Living Church, printed an opinion piece by a priest arguing that we ought not to do the foot washing at all because it distracts our attention from the primary focus of Maundy Thursday, our Lord’s institution of the Holy Eucharist.

The foot-washing plays out differently in different parishes. When I lived in Texas, an old lady in the church I attended loudly told everyone that if they ever did the foot washing there she’d leave the parish. And since she was one of the principal contributors, her threat deterred the rector from introducing the practice, for several years at least.

On the other hand, this past week I heard of a parish where all the members of the congregation – about a hundred and fifty people – have their feet washed, a process lasting about an hour and a half. And just today, I heard of a parish where the ones who get their feet washed are the twelve members of the vestry, some of whom consciously or unconsciously project the smug attitude that now they’ve got the rector where they really want him.

Many more people are quite happy to have the foot washing take place in their parish so long as they don’t have to participate. The first time I was asked to be one of the foot-washees in a Maundy Thursday service, the rector was very specific that he wanted us to remove the shoe and sock of the right foot. This made me slightly uncomfortable, because several years before, when I was fifteen, I’d had surgery on the big toe of my right foot, leaving only half a toenail there. So, I was a bit reticent about exposing this little deformity to my rector’s up-close and personal inspection. In fact, I even warned him ahead of time so he wouldn’t be too shocked by the discovery.

The only reason I’m sharing this piece of information is to offer an example of why people are sometimes reluctant to participate in the foot washing ceremony. A writer by the name of Jay Rochelle says this: “When we wash feet we quickly recognize the many meanings feet have for us. We consider them sensitive and silly appendages. People don’t want to expose them. Feet get knobby and worn. They are covered with protruding veins, bunions, and calluses. Who wants to let the priest or anyone else touch these barges of human flesh? It’s an unfamiliar intimacy.”

So we can understand why Peter initially refuses to allow Jesus to wash his feet. Peter clearly wants to follow Jesus and to serve him in any way he can. But when it comes to allowing Jesus to minister to him, Peter draws back. “You shall never wash my feet.”

The conventional explanation of Peter’s refusal is that he thinks it beneath our Lord’s dignity to do the menial work of a household servant. But perhaps Peter is expressing a much deeper refusal to let Jesus get close to him and know him, with all his faults and shortcomings. Perhaps it symbolizes his own reluctance to open up, and let his Lord care for him, and love him, just as he is.

In that case, our Lord’s response is telling. “If I do not wash you, you have no part in me.” In other words: no foot washing, no Eucharist. To be in fellowship with Jesus, to share in the Lord’s Supper, Peter must open up and let Jesus into every private corner of his life. That’s what letting Jesus wash his feet symbolizes. Peter quickly gets the point. “Lord, not just my feet but also my hands and my head!”

Having been on both the giving and receiving end of the foot washing, I can testify that it’s a moving and humbling experience. When I kneel down and the feet of my parishioners, I am reminded in a profound way whose servant I’m called to be. But to be willing to get your feet washed requires definite humility as well. We need to realize that before we can minister effectively to others, we need to open up and allow our Lord to minister to us.

Quite apart from Maundy Thursday, the foot washing reminds us that if we want the fellowship and communion with our Lord that he offers us in the Holy Eucharist, we need to begin with this basic attitude of openness and receptivity. If we don’t feel comfortable exposing our feet in church and participating in the foot washing ceremony, fine. The real question, however, is whether we’re willing to invite Jesus into every dark, dusty, grimy corner of our lives, so that he can pour on fresh clear water, and wash us clean. Not just our feet, but our hands and our heads as well. For, in this way, he cleanses us and makes us fit partakers of his heavenly banquet.

Palm Sunday, 2013

Sunday 24 March 2013

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” That saying highlights what I like to call the “paradox of judgment.” We cannot avoid judging. From day to day, we make hundreds of critical evaluations and decisions. Yet the paradox is that in the very act of evaluating we subject ourselves to evaluation; in the very act of judging, we subject ourselves to judgment.

There’s a story of a brash American tourist who went into one of the famous art museums in Italy. In less than an hour he breezed through all the rooms containing medieval and renaissance paintings that often occupied other visitors for days. On his way out, he remarked to the guard at the door, “Well, I certainly don’t think much of your old masters.” The guard replied calmly, “Yes, sir. And they don’t think much of you either. But unfortunately for you, it’s not the old masters who are on trial here, but the viewers.”

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, writes that the word “trial” signifies an event (or even an ordeal) designed to reveal the truth. The purpose of a judicial trial in particular is to find out the truth of an accused person’s guilt or innocence. But in the process the trial typically lays bare many other truths as well – the honesty and reliability of the witnesses, the competence of the lawyers, the impartiality of the judge, and the wisdom of the jury.

In other words, many others are on trial than just the accused. In a real sense, the entire system of justice is on trial. When the courts find guilty and sentence someone who’s innocent, and who’s later exonerated by new evidence; or, conversely, when they acquit and set free someone who’s guilty, who then goes out and commits more crimes, then the judicial system itself stands judged by its own false judgment.

In every act of judgment, then, we subject ourselves to judgment. The judgment may be for us or against us. The crucial point is that we have no privileged vantage point from which to evaluate and judge without being evaluated and judged at the same time.

So, it’s a bit surprising that so many people today seem to think that they have the luxury of critically examining the claims of Christianity, and effectively standing in judgment over God himself, without any corresponding sense of their own accountability. In his famous essay “God in the Dock,” C.S. Lewis describes the difference between previous generations and us in this regard:

“The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the bench and God in the dock.”

But what would it really look like to put God on trial? The answer is that almost two thousand years ago, we did put God on trial. When God came among us as a human being, we arrested him, put him on trial, and executed him.

What stands out in the Passion according to Saint Luke is the depiction of the different ways in which the characters in the story respond to Jesus. Luke seems acutely aware that it’s not Jesus who’s really on trial here, but everybody else.

In the course of the story, a number of the characters reach their own verdicts concerning Jesus. The chief priests, scribes, and rulers of the people seem to have their minds made up from the beginning; and they press relentlessly for Jesus’ condemnation, thus securing their own condemnation.

Representing the powers that rule this world, Pilate and Herod find nothing to condemn in Jesus. Pilate even declares Jesus innocent three times; but then demonstrates the sheer bankruptcy of his system of justice by condemning Jesus to death anyway.

The crowds are a bit harder to pigeonhole. At least some of them go along with the chief priests and scribes in crying, “Crucify, crucify him.” But Luke is careful to tell us that the crowds watch the crucifixion itself in silence, not joining in the taunts of the rulers and soldiers. And then, once Jesus has died, the crowds return to their homes beating their breasts – a gesture of sorrow and perhaps even repentance.

The starkest contrast is that between the two thieves crucified with Jesus. The one thief joins in the executioners’ mockery and abuse. The other thief, against all expectations, puts his faith and trust in Jesus – saying “Remember me when you come into your kingdom” – and in turn receives the promise, “Today you shall be with me in Paradise.” There’s no clearer instance of the point that Jesus is not really the one on trial here; in reaching the true judgment about Jesus the good thief has gained his own acquittal.

We may well say the same of the centurion who renders the verdict, “Certainly this was a righteous man!” In so saying, he acknowledges the guilt of his complicity in a wrongful execution and yet, paradoxically, emerges as a righteous man as well – as does Joseph of Arimathea, the member of the Council who demonstrates that even the rulers are not unanimous in their condemnation of Jesus.

In all these different ways, the characters reach their various judgments concerning Jesus, and, in so doing, find themselves judged accordingly. The same is true for us today. As we question, probe, and evaluate God, we are really the ones being questioned, probed, and evaluated. As we render our verdict, verdict is rendered on us.

The trouble is that none of us can stand up to that kind of scrutiny. None of us has clean hands. Throughout our lives, so many of our judgments are misjudgments; so many of our decisions are so deeply flawed. So often, we’re at our worst precisely when we’re trying to do our best.

But notice that the characters who come off best in the Passion narrative are not those who are beyond reproach – for, besides Jesus, there aren’t any – but rather those who accept responsibility for their actions and repent of their sins: the thief who acknowledges that he’s suffering the due reward of his deeds; the centurion who admits his complicity in a wrongful execution; the crowds who go home beating their breasts.

Our only hope lies in repentance. Yet, once we’ve put God on trial and condemned him to death, what possible hope can remain for us? For the answer to that question, come back a week from today.

Lent 5, Year C -- Sunday Sermon

John 12:1-8

When Pope Francis is inaugurated on Tuesday, one item almost certain to be missing from the ceremony is the papal tiara, the beehive-shaped Triple Crown. From the twelfth century until well into the twentieth, the papal inauguration was actually a coronation. But the last Pope to be crowned with the tiara was Paul VI in 1963. Later in the same year, at the end of the second session of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul descended from the papal throne, and laid his tiara on the High Altar in a dramatic gesture of renunciation of temporal power and glory. It was later announced that the tiara would be sold and the proceeds given to the poor. As it happened, Roman Catholics in the United States bought the tiara, which is now on display in the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C.

At one level, Pope Paul’s gesture calls attention to a perennial issue in the life of the Church: the tradeoff between earthly riches, and the Gospel mandate to give to the poor. In one place in the Gospels, our Lord tells the rich young man, "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." But then in today’s Gospel, after Mary of Bethany anoints our Lord's feet with costly ointment, Judas issues the challenge, “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” and Jesus rebukes him, ‘Let her alone … The poor you have always with you, but you do not always have me.”

Judas’s objection is not unreasonable. Mary’s gesture is certainly costly. A denarius is a day’s wage, so a jar of ointment valued at 300 denarii is worth the best part of a year’s wages. Moreover, Mary’s actions are as extravagant as the ointment is expensive. Anointing his feet and wiping them with her hair borders on scandalous impropriety in a culture where men and women are supposed to keep their distance and certainly not touch one another. What’s going on?

Mary’s action becomes intelligible in light of the preceding events in the narrative of John’s Gospel. Remember, this Mary is the sister of Martha and Lazarus. And today’s episode follows on directly our Lord’s raising Lazarus from the dead.

To recapitulate the main points of that story, Jesus and the disciples withdrew across the Jordan because a mob in Jerusalem was on the verge of stoning him, and the Jewish authorities tried to arrest him. When Jesus received word that his friend Lazarus was ill, he waited three days and then announced his intention to go to him. Since Bethany was only two miles from Jerusalem, however, the disciples reminded Jesus of the danger; and ultimately Thomas said, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

So, it was enormously risky for Jesus and the disciples to return to Judea. Then, after the raising of Lazarus, the dangers multiplied. For in John’s Gospel it was this miracle that precipitated the decision of the Council, the Sanhedrin, to do away with Jesus. The chief priests and the elders asked: “What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on thus, everyone will believe in him and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” And the High Priest Caiaphas responded, “It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish.”

When today’s Gospel begins, then, Jesus is already a man marked for death. The authorities are trying to track him down and catch him away from the crowds so they can arrest him and hand him over to the Romans for execution. Against this background, Mary’s anointing his feet has deep significance. If she’d poured the oil on his head, the symbolism would have been that of a coronation—anointing a king about to enter into his reign. But anointing the feet is characteristically something done to the dead in the Jewish rites of burial.

Our Lord’s words in today’s Gospel bear this symbolism out. But we have a slight translation problem. Our Revised Standard Version renders his words as “Let her alone, let her keep it for the day of my burial.” But another possible translation is something like, “Let her alone, for she was keeping it for the day of my burial.”

Barbara Brown Taylor points out that Mary’s action is itself prophetic, an enacted sign pointing to our Lord’s crucifixion. For it’s precisely the costliness of Mary’s offering, the selfless extravagance of her love, that anticipates the great cost that Jesus will bear on the cross out of God’s extravagant love for his creation.

One further detail: when Jesus was about to raise Lazarus from the dead and ordered the stone sealing the tomb to be removed, Mary’s sister Martha objected, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.” By contrast to the stench of death, however, when Mary anointed Jesus’ feet, “the whole house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment.” In the same way, our Lord’s approaching death on the cross will be a sacrifice of sweet fragrance that brings life, health, and salvation to the whole world.

None of what I’ve said really answers the question with which I began, of the trade-off between the Church’s stewardship of earthly riches and its fidelity to the Gospel mandate to give generously to the poor. I have a hunch that at times we are indeed called as the Church to do as our Lord bade the rich young man do: sell what we have, give to the poor, and have treasure in heaven. And there are times when we’re called to expend the equivalent of costly ointment of pure nard in our worship of the one Lord.

We spend a significant amount of money on our music and liturgy here at S. Stephen’s, not because we’re refined people who deserve quality entertainment, but because we believe that the worship of God demands our very best, just as Mary of Bethany gave her very best to honor her Lord. There’s a time to don the papal tiara, and a time to lay it aside. And who knows, the time may come when it will become appropriate for a future Pope to put it on again.

However we negotiate these choices, today’s Gospel suggests we’re called to do nothing by half measures. The Christian life is a life of radical generosity born of love. And we’re called to give it our all. Mary of Bethany enacts this radical generosity born of love in her anointing of our Lord’s feet, just as Jesus will soon offer himself for the whole world in his sacrifice of himself on the cross. And it’s precisely this same costly, extravagant, all-outpouring love that we’re called to make manifest in the Church today, as we follow Christ, and serve the world in his name.

Lent 3, Year C -- Sunday Sermon

Luke 13:1-9

Some of the most interesting episodes in the Gospels describe various people’s attempts to entrap Jesus into saying something that they can use against him. Today’s Gospel opens with just such a challenge: “Some present told Jesus of the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.” 

They are reporting an atrocity and outrage. We have no independent attestation of the incident, but apparently Roman troops under Pilate have massacred a group of Galileans either in or en route to the Temple, so that their blood ran together with that of their sacrificial animals.

The challenge is to see how Jesus will respond. After all, he is himself a Galilean. If he flies into a rage and denounces Pilate, his enemies will have a pretext to arrest him on a charge of sedition. If, on the other hand, he says nothing or implies that the Galileans were sinners who got what they deserved, then he’ll seem harsh and uncaring, and people will turn against him.

The text doesn’t tell us the motives of those reporting this outrage. Perhaps they’re provocateurs sent by the authorities to entrap Jesus. Or, perhaps they’re zealots using this report of a Roman atrocity to try to get Jesus to commit himself publicly to their cause of armed rebellion.

Either way, Jesus refuses to fall into the trap. Instead of saying anything for or against Pilate, he takes the occasion to warn his listeners of their own need to repent. Those Galileans were no worse sinners than any other Galileans. Nor were eighteen Judeans killed by a collapsing tower any worse sinners than all the other residents of Jerusalem. “But unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” 

The traditional interpretation of these words is that our Lord is warning his listeners not to worry about why bad things happen to good people, but instead to make use of the time available to repent and amend their lives, so that they won’t perish in the final judgment on the last day. According to this interpretation, the Galileans massacred by Pilate and the Jerusalemites crushed by the falling tower symbolize and point to the fate of those condemned to the eternal punishments of hell. “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

However, in recent years some New Testament scholars have suggested a more literal interpretation, according to which Jesus is directing a large part of his message against those of his fellow Jews who seek to achieve the Kingdom of God by means of armed confrontation with Rome. But in Jesus’ teaching, the Kingdom of God comes about not by means of earthly power and coercion but by means of sacrificial, self-giving love and forgiveness -- turning the other cheek, going the extra mile, praying for your persecutors, loving your enemies -- precisely the type of sacrificial love that Jesus himself embodies and fulfills on the cross.

So, when Jesus calls his contemporaries to repent, he’s concerned not so much with their personal sins as with the whole strategy of armed resistance that the Jews of his day are counting on to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. He accurately foresees that this strategy will provoke an escalating cycle of repression, further outbreaks of rebellion, and finally a conflagration of total disaster. In AD 70, his predictions come true, when the Jews revolt and the Roman armies besiege Jerusalem and destroy its Temple.

Against this background, the exchange in today’s Gospel takes on a whole new meaning. We can imagine some zealots trying to enlist Jesus in their cause by telling him of a Roman atrocity. But Jesus warns them that unless they forsake the path of rebellion and violence, they too shall perish by Roman swords and collapsing buildings. Jesus means it all very literally, and subsequent history eventually proves him right.

If this reading is correct, then these words of Jesus are much more specific to his immediate historical circumstances than the Church has generally recognized. Nevertheless, the exchange in today’s Gospel holds up a principle of crucial importance for us today.

Confronted with so much that’s wrong with our world, people in our culture seem always to want to assign blame to something or someone other than themselves: whether the government, big business, the unions, the Republicans, the Democrats, the Tea Party, the NRA, the Christian Right, the Roman Catholic Church, or perhaps the forces of socialism, secularism, and sexual permissiveness. Whatever side we may find ourselves on, the pervasive tendency is to assume that we’re the good guys, and that those who disagree with us are the bad guys. Thus, the solution is almost always to find some way to outflank and outmaneuver the bad guys, driving them from office and expunging their influence on public life. Or better yet: to persuade them of the error of their ways so that they will repent, change their minds, and come around to our point of view.

This approach is fundamentally flawed because it still treats the cause of the problem as “out there,” to be solved by changing – or at least neutralizing – the attitudes and behavior of others. But the effects are generally counterproductive. Such mutual recrimination and scapegoating tends to push people into defensive corners so that the conflicts intensify and we become more and more divided and polarized.

In today’s Gospel, however, Jesus challenges his fellow Jews who see the Romans as the problem to recognize their own need to repent and change their ways before they do anything else. Likewise, when we become distressed with something that’s wrong in our world, our society, or our community – or for that matter, in our Church -- Jesus challenges us to try to recognize our own complicity in the problem first, so that we can hear God’s call to change our ways, before we try to change anyone else.

Such is the meaning of repentance. And if we’re serious, we’ll soon discover that we can’t do it without the Lord’s help. So, this season of Lent invites us to examine our lives and discover for ourselves the difference that Jesus alone can make.

Lent 1, Year C -- Sermon at Sunday Mass

Luke 4:1-13

A key theme of this first Sunday of Lent is temptation. In the biblical languages, the verb “tempt” is more or less interchangeable with “put to the test.” A temptation is a test or time of trial during which we are confronted with the choice either to turn away from or reaffirm our loyalty and obedience to God.

The early Church Fathers saw the Temptation of Christ in the Wilderness as the reversal of the original Temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a theme taken up in the seventeenth century by John Milton in his poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. While I certainly don’t want to dismiss that line of interpretation, a close reading of today’s Gospel suggests instead the reversal of the temptations of Israel during its forty years in the wilderness. Rebuffing the devil’s temptations, Jesus quotes three texts from the Book of Deuteronomy, each of which alludes to Israel’s desert wanderings.

The first temptation is: “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” Jesus responds: “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone’.” Here he’s quoting Deuteronomy 8:2-3, which reads in full as follows:

[Moses said to the people] And you shall remember all the way which the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments, or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know; that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the LORD.

The reference to the manna alludes to Israel in the wilderness longing for the fleshpots of Egypt, and murmuring against Moses and Aaron on account of hunger. The temptation then was to give up and return to Egypt – to seek food at the cost of turning away from the Lord. And before the miraculous appearance of the manna, the bread from heaven, the Israelites were prepared to do just that.

Likewise, the devil’s suggestion that Jesus turn a stone into bread is a temptation to use his power as the Son of God in his own interests, to provide food for himself apart from trust in his Father’s plan. But where Israel was tested and found wanting, Jesus is tested and overcomes the temptation.

This use of food as an enticement to disobedience suggests why fasting and abstinence are basic Christian disciplines, especially during Lent. When we go without food for a time we have the opportunity to practice resisting temptation and to enact the words of Scripture: “Man shall not live by bread alone.”

In the second temptation, the devil shows Jesus all the world’s kingdoms, and makes him the offer: “If you, then, will worship me, it shall all be yours.” Jesus responds by quoting Deuteronomy 6:13: “It is written: ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve’.”

In this part of Deuteronomy, Moses is warning the Israelites of the temptations they will face to worship other gods when they enter into the Promised Land. The devil’s temptation of Jesus, then, is to receive world dominion in return for worshiping him. But our Lord’s response makes clear that God is the sole ruler of the world; and that he alone is to be worshiped and served.

This second temptation is thus an enticement to false worship, putting someone or something else in God’s place. The best antidote is true worship, putting God first. And for Christians, being faithful and regular in the Church’s Sunday worship is how we begin to put into practice the command of Scripture: “You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.”

The third temptation is more subtle, and requires a bit more unpacking. The devil takes Jesus up to the pinnacle of the temple and urges him to throw himself down, so that the angels will catch him according to the words of the psalm. In response, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:16: “You shall not tempt the Lord your God.” The actual text of Deuteronomy reads: “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah.”

The reference here is to Exodus 17, where the Israelites arrive in a place where there is no water. They find fault with Moses and demand, “Give us water to drink.” When Moses asks, “Why do you put the Lord to the proof?” they grumble all the more at Moses: “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to kill us and our cattle and our children with thirst?” When Moses cries to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me” the Lord directs him to strike the rock at Horeb; water gushes out, and the people drink. And Moses calls the place Massah and Meribah because of the fault-finding of the children of Israel, and because they put the Lord to the proof by asking, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

Instead of trusting God not to let them die of thirst, the sin of the Israelites was to make their loyalty to God contingent upon having their demands met on their own terms. Otherwise they were prepared to stone Moses and go their own way in search of water. Likewise, by throwing himself off the Temple pinnacle to force God to send his angels to catch him, Jesus would have committed the same sin – of trying to dictate the terms of his relationship with God, rather than obediently doing his Father’s will.

Understood in this way, this third temptation is very real and very common. It’s the temptation to make our faith and obedience contingent upon God’s fulfillment of some expectation that we may have of him. It’s the temptation to want to serve God on our own terms – not literally by throwing ourselves off a high building so that God’s angels will be forced to catch us, but in hundreds of more subtle ways.

Think of all the bargains we’re tempted to make with God – promising our devoted service if he will only grant us some favor such a saving a loved one from terminal illness; or threatening to forsake him if he doesn’t meet some other demand we’ve made of him. I’ve known people who’ve done this – stopped coming to church because God disappointed their expectations that he would protect them from all harm, tragedy, and loss in this life.

The virtue by which we resist this temptation is simply the willingness to love, serve, and follow God no matter what – without preconditions. In this way we put into practice the words of Jesus: “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.”

The Letter to the Hebrews describes the risen and ascended Christ as a great high priest who is able to sympathize with our weakness, having been tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. Elsewhere, the same letter affirms: “For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted.”

By resisting temptation successfully on our behalf, our Lord has made it possible for those united to him likewise to resist temptation. And when we find ourselves being tempted to turn away from God like Israel in the wilderness, we need only call upon Jesus to strengthen us in the way of loyalty and faithfulness.

Last Sunday after the Epiphany -- Sunday Sermon

Luke 9:28-36

Today we conclude the Season after Epiphany with Saint Luke’s account of our Lord’s Transfiguration. Just under a month ago, we began the Season with the Baptism of Christ. Both events, the Baptism and the Transfiguration, are pivotal moments in the Gospels. So it may be instructive to look at both in relation to each other to see what the comparison can tell us.

On one hand, the respective settings could not be more different. The Baptism takes place in a valley, at the Jordan River. The Transfiguration takes place upon the peak of a mountain. The Baptism has many witnesses, consisting of the multitudes flocking to see and hear John the Baptist. The Transfiguration has only three witnesses: Peter, James, and John, the inner circle of our Lord’s disciples. At the Baptism, John the Baptist occupies center stage as the principal human agent, preaching and baptizing. At the Transfiguration, our Lord occupies center stage, taking the three disciples up a high mountain apart.

These differences make the similarities all the more striking. In both events, there is a visual manifestation of God’s presence: at the Baptism, the Holy Spirit descending in bodily form as a dove; and at the Transfiguration, the dazzling light, the miraculous appearance of Moses and Elijah, and the cloud that overshadows them. And in both events, a voice from heaven speaks almost identical words: at the Baptism, “Thou art my Son, my chosen, with thee I am well pleased,” and at the Transfiguration, “This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him!”

This recapitulation of parallel themes and images suggests that a stage of our Lord’s life that begins in the Baptism ends in the Transfiguration, which in turn begins a new phase in the narrative. And this indeed turns out to be the case. In the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Baptism inaugurates, and the Transfiguration concludes, our Lord’s public ministry in Galilee. The Transfiguration likewise marks the beginning of the Journey of Jesus and the Twelve to Jerusalem that will end in his betrayal, arrest, trial, death, and resurrection.

The placement of these two events at these pivotal transitions reveals something more of their significance. The Baptism sets the stage for Our Lord’s public ministry in Galilee by showing in advance that everything he subsequently does – his teachings, healings, and miracles – he does by the power of the Holy Spirit that descends upon him. He is no charlatan or wonderworking magician, but the beloved Son, in whom his heavenly Father is well pleased.

The meaning of the Transfiguration is a bit more complex. Today’s Gospel begins: “Now about eight days after these sayings …” The sayings in question have consisted of his first prediction of his coming Passion and death. In response to his question, “Who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter has responded on behalf of the Twelve, “The Christ of God.” But immediately Jesus has commanded and charged them to tell no-one, saying, “The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day rise again.” He has then continued with the exhortation, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me … For whoever is ashamed of me and my words, of him will the Son of man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the Holy Angels.”

Now notice that in these sayings Jesus has spoken not only of his coming suffering and death, but also of his rising again on the third day, and his return at the end of time. Eight days later, then, his Transfiguration serves as an anticipatory confirmation of the latter part of the prophecy: his resurrection from the dead and his coming in glory.

Sermons and devotional literature often describe the Transfiguration as a “mountaintop experience” that the disciples must let go and leave behind in order to come down off the mountain and follow Jesus in the hard way of discipleship that leads to Calvary and the Cross. But the truth is really the opposite. The Transfiguration is given to the three disciples as a foretaste of the glory that lies on the other side of Holy Week and Good Friday. It strengthens them for the hardships and suffering that lie ahead by equipping them with a vision of the victory that awaits them at the end of the story.

As in the Gospel narratives: just so in the Christian year and in the Christian life. Celebrating the Transfiguration today, on the Last Sunday of the Epiphany, helps strengthen us for the rigors of the Lenten Season by pointing in an anticipatory way to the Resurrection on Easter Sunday.

For us, the Baptism of Christ is reminiscent of all those sacramental moments when we receive the spiritual gifts and graces necessary to commence some new phase of activity in our life. Think of the Sacraments of Initiation, Holy Baptism and Confirmation, that prepare us to live the Christian life and exercise our ministries as members of Christ’s Body, the Church. Think of the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, which initiates two people into married life together. Think of the Sacrament of Holy Orders, which sets apart, consecrates, and equips those who’ve been called to minister as deacons, priests, or bishops in the Church.

The Transfiguration, however, is reminiscent of all those moments that equip us for the end by giving us a foretaste of the glory that awaits us beyond the grave. Think, for example, of the Sacrament of Holy Unction, also known as the Anointing of the Sick. It’s a very simple little ritual: the priest marking the sign of the cross on your forehead with oil of a rather pleasant aroma. Yet anointing has inseparable associations with coronation – kings and queens are anointed when they enter upon their reign. In this way, the Sacrament reminds us that whatever physical or mental suffering we may undergo in this life, nonetheless in Christ we are “anointed ones,” destined for eternal life in God’s Kingdom.

The Anointing of the Sick is thus what might be called “a Transfiguration moment,” a foretaste of the glory to come. The same can definitely be said of receiving Holy Communion, the Sacrament of our Lord’s Body and Blood, which was known in the early Church as “the medicine of immortality.” Even as we live in the midst of a world that is passing away, our Lord affords us countless such Transfiguration moments, anticipatory glimpses of the glory that awaits us, if only we open our eyes to see.

Epiphany 4, Year C -- Sunday Sermon

Luke 4:21-30

Shortly after I was ordained to the priesthood, I had the opportunity to return to the parish that had sponsored me for ordination: as it happens, another Saint Stephen’s. I’d been a member of that parish for about twelve years, from my early twenties. There I’d learned a great deal of the faith and practice of the Church, and had gradually become aware of my own vocation to the priesthood. The congregation had been warmly and prayerfully supportive as I negotiated the various steps in the process along the way to seminary and ordination.

In some ways, returning there after ordination to say Mass and preach the sermon was a bittersweet experience. Everyone there who remembered me seemed happy and proud. Our John is now a priest. At the same time, I knew I could never go back there. In the Episcopal Church, with very few exceptions, it’s forbidden for priests to return and serve as the rector or clergy on the staff of the parish that raised them up and sponsored them for ordination.

When you offer yourself to the Church for ordination as a deacon or priest, the default assumption is that you will exercise your ministry in another parish, or series of parishes, to which you will come initially as someone sent from outside. This is one reason why the ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons is called the apostolic ministry. The word apostolic comes from the Greek verb “to send,” and apostles are by definition “those who are sent.”

I’m pleased to report that this post-ordination visit to my parish-of-origin went smoothly and pleasantly, with no blow-ups of the sort that today’s Gospel records of our Lord’s visit to the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth. But there are some parallels between the two situations. Just as the Church has discerned that priests and deacons exercise their ministries most effectively in places other than where they came from, so our Lord proclaims to the people of Nazareth, “No prophet is accepted in his own country.”

So far, everything has been going well in what appears to be the first return visit of Jesus to Nazareth after his baptism and the beginning of his public ministry. As we heard last Sunday, on the Sabbath he entered the synagogue, read from the scroll of the Torah, and commented on the text. Today’s Gospel picks up with the townspeople responding with approval: “all spoke well of him and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth; and they said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’” The text gives us no reason to suppose that this last question, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” indicates anything other than pride in a hometown boy who has done well.

Strangely, then, perhaps knowing that they’re not saying everything that they’re thinking, Jesus challenges them: “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb: Physician, heal yourself.” Actually, we do have independent attestation of such a proverb in the ancient world, among both Jews and Greeks. It was something one might to say to a meddlesome person offering unwanted advice or assistance: attend to your own problems before you try to solve mine. One Greek version reads: “Physician, see to the sores on your own body.”

But immediately our Lord makes it clear that he means something else, when he adds: “What we have heard you did at Capernaum, do here also in your own country.” In other words: “Physician, why are you devoting your time and attention to those outsiders? Heal your own people, here in your own home town!”

To these imputed thoughts, Our Lord makes the response: “No prophet is accepted in his own country.” In other words: “You’re speaking well of me now, but if I were to do here what I have done in Capernaum and the other places to which I’ve been sent, you wouldn’t accept me.”

And then he expands his point by citing the prophets Elijah and Elisha. There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, but Elijah was sent only to a Gentile widow in the land of Sidon. There were many lepers in Israel in the days of Elisha, but Elisha cleansed only the Gentile leper Naaman the Syrian. In this way, our Lord implicitly identifies himself as a prophet after the fashion of Elijah and Elisha; and he also implies that his mission, too, will reach in some fashion beyond Israel to embrace the Gentiles. At these words, the people’s approval turns into outrage. Barely escaping with his life, Jesus continues on his way.

The early Church community for which Luke was writing his Gospel would have recognized this episode as prefiguring some of their own experiences. In their lifetime, the Church has begun reaching out to the Gentiles and has established missions throughout the Mediterranean world. This opening to the Gentiles has occasioned outrage among many, however, who think that the apostles – and remember that all the original apostles were Jews – have not concentrated their efforts in sufficiently in the Jewish community and have instead taken their ministry and message to the outside world.

One implication of this episode in the Gospels is that as the Church we’re always called to conceive of our mission in global terms. For example, speaking personally, I’m never impressed when charitable fund raising organizations make the boast that every cent one gives them will go to help people here in this country, or indeed here in this state – as though people in other parts of the world are less worthy and less deserving of our assistance.

Likewise, in our efforts at parish development, we need to beware the temptation to focus our attention inward, on ourselves and on the needs of our own community, to the exclusion of those outside. A significant part of our mission as the church is to reach out beyond our walls to those who may need our help, regardless of what’s in it for us. Paradoxically, study after study shows that churches grow most when they stop focusing inwardly on their own needs and start thinking about how to discern and fulfill their mission in the wider community.

Just as bishops, priests, and deacons are called to exercise an apostolic ministry as those sent to new communities, so all of us together, as the Church, are called to be an apostolic community, sent out to share the good news of Christ with all people. Pray, then, for the grace and courage to embrace that call.