Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent, Year B

March 8, 2015

The Ten Commandments

During Lent in Year B of the three-year lectionary cycle, the Old Testament readings at Sunday Mass focus attention on the theme of Covenant. To review what I said two weeks ago: in the ancient Near East, a covenant was a well-known form of agreement or treaty between two parties usually but not always of unequal power and status: a superior and an inferior, such as a powerful king and a vassal.

In a typical covenant, the superior party promised some benefit, such as military protection and good government, to the inferior party, in return for the inferior party’s pledge of obedience, loyalty, and tribute. Very often, also, the parties to such a covenant erected some sort of monument to stand as a perpetual sign and reminder of the agreement they’d made.

A basic principle of biblical theology is that in revealing himself to his people in a particular time at a particular place, God accommodates himself to their dominant images, symbols, and categories of thought, to make himself understandable in the context of their society and culture. So, it’s not surprising that the Old Testament depicts the relationship between God and his people as unfolding through a series of covenants. In each covenant, God makes a promise, usually makes some demand in return, and usually gives some sign to stand as a reminder of the covenant.

Two weeks ago, the Old Testament reading reminded us of God’s covenant with Noah, in which God promised never again to destroy the earth by water. The sign of that covenant was the rainbow.

Last week, the reading reminded us of God’s covenant with Abraham, in which God promised to make Abraham the ancestor of a great nation in whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed. The sign of that covenant was circumcision.

Today, we come to the third of the great covenants of the Old Testament, God’s Covenant with Moses on Mount Sinai. In this covenant God promises the twelve tribes of Israel that they will enter and take possession of the Promised Land, and that he will be their God and they will be his People, if they keep his laws and commandments. The sign of this covenant is the two stone Tables of the Law that Moses brings down from the mountain. And inscribed on these two Tables are the Ten Commandments.

Jews and Christians alike revere the Ten Commandments as the definitive summary of God’s moral law. Even though the Church early on set aside many of the ritual and ceremonial precepts of the Torah as no longer binding upon Christians, we’ve nonetheless always recognized the Ten Commandments as a digest of moral principles that remain valid for all people in all times and places. G.K. Chesterton once said that you can’t break the Ten Commandments; you can only break yourself against them.

The Ten Commandments are best understood in the context of the story of how they’re given. Moses leads the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt with great signs and wonders. At the Red Sea, they’re miraculously delivered from death at the hands of the Egyptians when God parts the waters to let them cross over on dry land. They enter the wilderness and come to the foot of Mount Sinai. The mountain is covered by clouds of thick darkness and flashes of fire. Alone, Moses ascends the mountain, to receive God’s law.

The first commandment refers explicitly to this preceding sequence of events: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods but me.” Here God is saying, in effect, “Now that I’ve done all this for you; here’s what I expect of you in return.”

The purpose of the Covenant is to call the people into relationship with the Lord who has delivered them from slavery. Henceforth, their motive in obeying the Commandments will be to express their gratitude and loyalty to the God who has chosen them as a people for His own possession.

The Christian Church has traditionally interpreted the Ten Commandments in light of our Lord’s Summary of the Law in Matthew 22:37-40: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

The classical Christian tradition sees the first four commandments as teaching what it means to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind: You shall have no other Gods before me, you shall not make any idol, you shall not take the Lord’s name in vain, remember to keep holy the Sabbath Day. The remaining six commandments teach what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves: Honor your father and your mother, you shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall not covet.

The Ten Commandments are worthy of memorization, study, and reflection. We Anglicans have traditionally used them as an outline for examining our consciences and repenting of our sins before we come to Holy Communion, which is why they’re printed in the Prayer Book at the very beginning of the Eucharistic Liturgy.

But it’s crucial to remember that we cannot save ourselves by keeping these laws. Notice that God gives the Commandments to the Israelites after He’s saved them from the Egyptians, not before. Similarly, for us, salvation comes to us first, apart from works of the law. If we try to fulfill God’s commandments by our own efforts, we quickly discover how far short we fall of the mark, and how much we need God’s forgiveness and grace.

Instead, God offers us eternal salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; and we receive that salvation in faith. Then, and only then, do the Commandments come into play as a means of teaching us a way of life appropriate to our identity as a redeemed people, a way of life by which we express our gratitude and loyalty to God for all that he’s already done for us.

During this Season of Lent, then, the Church calls us to renew our commitment to keeping God’s Law. But we do so never as a means of earning God’s favor – as if that were possible – but always as an expression of love for God, who in Christ Jesus has loved us first.

Sermon for First Sunday in Lent, Year B

Noah's Ark, English circa. 1100

Genesis 9:8-17

I Peter 3:18-22

Mark 1:9-15

Sunday 22 February 2015

This year, the Old Testament readings for four of the five Sundays of Lent have the common theme of covenants between God and his people. In church circles, we tend to toss around the word “covenant” quite freely. We talk about the Old Covenant, the New Covenant, the Marriage Covenant, and the Baptismal Covenant. But I’m not sure that we’re always clear on what “covenant” actually means. So, it may be helpful to look at the biblical meaning of the word.

In the ancient world, a covenant was an agreement or treaty between two parties. Today, we’re more familiar with the idea of a contract. In a contract, two parties sign an agreement attested by witnesses and enforceable by law. If either party breaks the contract, the injured party has recourse to the courts to have the terms of the contract enforced by a judge.

In the ancient world, however, a covenant was an agreement made between two parties in the absence of any judge or court to enforce its terms. Both parties would make solemn promises concerning their future behavior. Two kings, for example, might make a covenant to live at peace with each other, to respect each other’s trade routes, and to come to each other’s aid if attacked. More often, though, a covenant was not between equals, but rather between unequals, such as a lord and a vassal. In this case, the superior party typically promised to protect and care for the inferior party, and in return the inferior party typically promised loyalty and obedience to the superior party.

To ratify the covenant, the parties would participate in a solemn ceremony that might include an animal sacrifice or a ritual meal, invoking blessings on themselves if they kept the covenant, and curses if they broke it. Finally, they might erect some sort of public monument or sign – perhaps an engraved obelisk, plaque, or stone marker – to stand as a perpetual reminder of the covenant they had made.

Throughout the Bible, God reveals himself and discloses his purposes by means of ideas and concepts that people already know from the world of their everyday experience. In other words, God accommodates himself to the limits of our human understanding by speaking our language. And since covenant agreements were so familiar in the ancient world, it’s not surprising that God made use of them to initiate and establish relationships with his people. In the Old Testament, God makes at least four covenants: with Noah, with Abraham, with Moses, and with David. In each case, the covenant spells out a promise on God’s part, and sometimes also stipulates corresponding obligations on the people’s part.

This background is crucial for understanding the story of Noah. The Book of Genesis tells us that after God creates the world, the wickedness of the human race multiplies, from the original disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden; through the murder of Abel by Cain; to the blasphemous attempt to build a tower that reaches to heaven, the Tower of Babel. God regrets having created human beings, and so resolves to put an end to their wickedness by means of a great flood that will inundate the whole earth.

Amidst the whole wicked human race, God sees one righteous man, Noah; so God tells Noah to build a ship, the Ark, and to take into the Ark both his family and a male and female specimen of every animal upon the earth. So, Noah and his three sons and their wives – eight persons in all – enter the Ark. Then God opens the floodgates of the Great Deep, and it rains for forty days and forty nights. All living creatures on the earth are destroyed, except Noah, his family, and all the animals on the Ark. At length, the waters recede, the dry land re-appears; and Noah, his family, and all the animals go forth from the Ark to re-inhabit and repopulate a new creation.

God then makes a covenant with Noah promising never again to destroy the earth by water. This covenant is truly universal in scope; God makes it not with any particular race or nation but with all generations that shall come after Noah: and not only with all the people of the earth, but with every living creature as well. And the sign of this covenant is the rainbow that God puts in the clouds as a perpetual reminder of his promise.

The story of Noah makes the point, on one hand, that a holy and righteous God cannot abide human sin and wickedness. When people do evil, they bring God’s judgment upon themselves. But, on the other hand, God’s judgment always contains within itself a deeper purpose of redemption and salvation. So, in the Flood story, we see God executing judgment on a sinful and disobedient world and yet, at the same time, through Noah and the Ark, making possible that same world’s re-creation and renewal. 

In other words, God’s final purpose is never to annihilate and destroy but always to redeem and save, to start over and make new. Our God is above all a God of second chances and fresh starts.

We need to remember this truth at those times of crisis in our lives – times for example of illness, death, bereavement, conflict, or separation – when it seems that the flood is raging around us and our world is coming to an end. Even in the moments of greatest darkness, God is still present and at work to realize his purposes of redemption and salvation in ways that we can’t yet see and don’t yet understand.

This biblical pattern – of judgment carrying within itself the seeds of redemption – finds its ultimate expression and fulfillment on the cross. To all outward appearances, the death by crucifixion of Jesus represents unmitigated disaster and total defeat, and yet it bears within itself the seeds of cosmic victory and eternal life.

We begin to share in that life through Holy Baptism, which in today’s Epistle reading Saint Peter likens to the Flood. The analogy is that just as the Deluge drowned a sinful world while the Ark saved Noah and brought the members of his household to a creation made new, so the waters of Baptism drown out our old sinful natures and bring us to the new creation begun in Jesus Christ. The only reason we keep on sinning is that we’ve not yet fully lived into the reality of what God has already done for us in Baptism.

Even though our sins have merited God’s judgment, then, our Baptism holds out God’s promise and pledge of salvation. So, perhaps the best way to begin our Lenten pilgrimage is simply by renewing our trust in God’s promises. For the story of Noah reminds us that God’s desire above all else is to redeem and save his creation, which he loves.

Sermon for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B

Isaac Williams, 1802-1865

II Kings 2:1-12
Mark 9:2-9

In 1837, Isaac Williams, a priest of the Church of England and one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, published Tract Number Eighty of Tracts for the Times. The Tract was titled, “On Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge.” It caused quite a storm of controversy at the time, and established what became known as “the principle of reserve” as a key tenet of Anglo-Catholic teaching.

Briefly, the principle of reserve suggests that some mysteries of the Christian faith are so sublime and holy that they are best not talked about too openly, too publicly, or too casually, in settings where they’re apt to be not only rejected but also blasphemously ridiculed and reviled. Instead, such teachings are best left unmentioned except in hushed tones of reverence and respect.

Over and against the Evangelicals of the era, who had taken to preaching Christ’s Death, Resurrection, and Second Coming on street corners and in open-air marketplaces – often before hostile crowds who responded with catcalls and even projectiles – Williams advocated a restrained and graduated approach. Preachers, teachers, and catechists should progressively reveal the deepest and most sublime truths of the faith to potential converts only as they were ready to receive them.

Williams buttressed his argument with numerous illustrations from Scripture. It’s always seemed to me that today’s Gospel contains an archetypal example of the principle of reserve where it records that after the Transfiguration, as they were coming down the mountain, Jesus charged the disciples Peter, James, and John to tell no-one what they had seen, until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead.

Today’s readings are shot through with mystery. The Old Testament story of the assumption of the prophet Elijah, from the Second Book of the Kings, sets the stage for the Gospel. Since Elijah did not die but was taken up into heaven, he remains alive with God and thus appears on the holy mountain with Moses and Jesus in the light of divine glory.

The death of Moses, as well, is an event shrouded in mystery. The Book of Deuteronomy records that at the end of the Hebrews’ forty years of wandering in the Wilderness, Moses ascended Mount Nebo, in full view of the Promised Land, and there died. The Lord himself buried Moses, the narrative continues, and no one knows the place of his burial. By New Testament times, however, the tradition had grown up that Moses had not died but had been taken up into heaven – a view propounded in such apocryphal works as the Assumption of Moses.

Moreover, the tradition had also developed that the return of either Elijah or Moses or both would signal the arrival of the Messianic age. So the prophets of Israel had foretold. The Book of Malachi included the prophecy, “Behold, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” And before he died, Moses himself had told the Israelites, “The Lord your God will raise up a prophet like me from among you, from among your brethren – him you shall heed.”

So, when Peter, James, and John witness the spectacle of Jesus transfigured with the brightness of divine glory, and Moses and Elijah with him, the message is clear. Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed One of God. He is the One destined to bring about the reign of God on earth. So the voice from heaven confirms: “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.”

Most likely, as Peter, James, and John are coming down off the mountain they want nothing more than to proclaim what they have seen and heard: to the rest of the Twelve, to all the disciples, and to the multitudes far and wide. But then, to their surprise, Jesus enjoins silence. “He charged them to tell no one what they had seen, until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead.”

Why this divine gag order? The most likely reason is that while Peter, James, and John have seen a vision of overwhelming power and significance, they are not yet properly equipped to interpret the vision’s meaning.

The Transfiguration comes seven days after Peter has confessed Jesus to be the Messiah. Yet when Jesus immediately thereafter began to teach that he must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, Peter began to rebuke him, drawing in turn the Lord’s rebuke, “Get behind me Satan, for you are not on the side of God but of men.”

Again, shortly after the Transfiguration, Mark records that Jesus was traveling through Galilee teaching his disciples that “the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him; and when he is killed, after three days he will rise.” But, says Mark, “they did not understand the saying, and they were afraid to ask him”

A bit later, as they are on the road going up to Jerusalem, Jesus predicts his death and resurrection a third time, and in more detail than before: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him to the Gentiles; and they will mock him, and scourge him, and spit upon him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise.” But the disciples still don’t get it; and the depth of their incomprehension is evident in the request of James and John to sit one at his right and one at his left in his glory.

James and John, remember, were both present at the Transfiguration. For the moment, all they can see is the promise of divine glory of which they have received an anticipatory glimpse. Despite the Lord’s repeated warnings and admonitions, they still don’t grasp that before they can share in the glory of God’s Kingdom, they must first follow Jesus in the Way of the Cross. That is why the Lord charged them as they were coming down the mountain to say nothing of what they had seen until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead. Apart from the cross, the story of who Jesus is cannot be fully told. In this case, the principle of reserve means refraining of speaking of things not only that the hearers are not yet ready to hear, but also that the teachers are not yet ready to teach.

The assumption of Elijah in today’s Old Testament reading anticipates the ultimate ascension and glorification of Jesus, towards which the Transfiguration in today’s Gospel likewise points forward. For the disciples, as for us, the Transfiguration is a glimpse of a promised future but not yet the possession of that future. So, after today’s celebration, on Wednesday we begin the observance of Lent, by which the Church annually reminds us that before we can enter into the glory of Christ’s Kingdom, we must first climb with him another mountain, that of Golgotha.

Sermon for the 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B

January 18, 2015 (at the 8 o'clock Mass)

I Samuel 3:1-20

John 1:43-51

Cambridge, England: Gonville and Caius College: chapel apse mosaic
(prophet Samuel being tutored by Eli)
(1870, made by firm of Antonio Salviati)

The Gospel readings for this season after the Epiphany emphasize the manifestation or showing forth of Christ. At Christmas we celebrate the Son of God coming down from heaven and sharing in our human life. But, momentous as that was, it was not enough to suffice for our salvation. His divine identity also had to be revealed and made known to us. Otherwise, we would never have known who he was or what he had come to offer us.

Revelation is a process that takes place in two stages. First, God must speak. But, second, we must hear his voice and recognize who it is that’s speaking. Today’s readings tell the stories of two people who come to recognize the Lord speaking to them: Samuel in the Old Testament; and Nathanael in the Gospel.

In the Old Testament reading, the boy Samuel is serving in the temple at Shiloh. Religion in that period seems to have reached a low ebb and become dry and formalistic: “the Word of the Lord was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision.” So, when Samuel hears a voice calling him, it doesn’t occur to him that it might be the Lord, and he thinks that it’s his master Eli instead.

Similarly, in the Gospel reading, when Philip goes to tell his friend Nathanael that they’ve found the Messiah – and it’s Jesus of Nazareth – Nathanael’s reaction is one of incredulity and disbelief: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” In both cases, the serious danger is that although the Lord is speaking, the message will be missed: by Samuel on account of his mistaking the voice for something else; and by Nathanael on account of his prejudice that no-one from Nazareth could possibly be the Messiah.

Notice, however, that in both cases someone else helps bring the person to the point of recognition. Samuel goes three times to Eli, saying, “Here I am, for you called me.” When Eli finally catches on as to what’s really happening, he instructs the boy: “The next time he calls, you shall say, ‘Speak Lord, for thy servant hears.’” Without Eli’s help, Samuel might simply shut the voice out and go through life never realizing his vocation to be a great prophet.

Likewise, Nathanael most likely would never come to know Jesus without the help of his friend Philip. For it’s Philip who first bothers to tell him, “We’ve found the Messiah,” and then, when Nathanael expresses disbelief that anything good could come out of Nazareth, it’s Philip who says simply, “Come, and see.” (That, by the way, is excellent evangelistic strategy. Philip doesn’t try to argue or persuade. He simply invites. Come and see.)

In both cases, the actual life-changing encounter with the divine is direct, one-on-one. Samuel must hear for himself what the Lord will say; Eli can’t do that for him. And Nathanael must meet Jesus for himself and come to his own realization that this is the Son of God, the King of Israel. Nonetheless, neither Samuel nor Nathanael comes to that point alone or unaided. Both Eli and Philip play pivotal roles in making the encounter possible. Reflecting on our own lives, we may be able to recall the role that such individuals have played in helping us come to faith and recognize the Lord’s voice calling us.

When I was a graduate student in Washington DC, my friend Susan played such a role for me. One Saturday evening, she and I were out having a drink in one of the bars on Connecticut Avenue; and I asked her if she would like to join a group of my friends for a game of volleyball on Sunday morning. She replied, “No, I can’t. I’m going to church.” So, I started asking her about the church she attended, and she invited me to come with her.

At that point, I was an agnostic who didn’t believe anything much, and I hadn’t darkened the door of a church in years. But for some reason I found myself saying yes; and the next morning I was attending the Sunday liturgy at Saint Margaret’s Episcopal Church, also on Connecticut Avenue. And that was the beginning of my conversion to Christianity. In a sense, then, Susan was Philip to my Nathanael. She issued the initial invitation, Come and see, and our Lord did the rest.

A couple of years later, I found my brain invaded by crazy thoughts about becoming a priest. Initially, I thought that this was the most ridiculous idea that had ever occurred to me. But the more I tried to push these thoughts out of my mind, the more they came back and reasserted themselves with a vengeance.

Finally, I went to my parish priest in the hope that he would disabuse me of any thoughts of ordination and tell me to do something else with my life since obviously I was so totally unsuited to the priesthood. Instead, he just smiled and said, “I’ve been wondering when you would come to talk about this.” In a sense, then, he was Eli to my Samuel. In so many words, he told me not to ignore the call I was hearing but rather to pay attention and listen.

The point is that the Christian life is not a solo endeavor. Relationships in the Body of Christ are crucially important. We all need others to be Eli and Philip to us, strengthening our faith and helping us discern all the different ways in which God is speaking to us. Then, having received this gift, we in turn need to make ourselves available to be Eli and Philip to others. And we need to keep on building a parish community that nurtures and fosters these relationships of spiritual friendship: a community in which we all help each other to know the Lord and to hear his voice.

Sermon for the Confession of Saint Peter

Sunday 18 January 2015 (at the 10 o'clock Solemn High Mass)

Matthew 16:13-19

In its present form, the feast of the Confession of Saint Peter is a fairly recent addition to the Church calendar. Up until 1960, the Roman Church kept January 18th as the Feast of Saint Peter’s Chair at Rome. In the apse at the back of St. Peter’s Basilica stands the magnificent Bernini bronze sculpture encasing the chair traditionally identified as the one on which Saint Peter sat to preside at worship as the first Bishop of Rome.

The bishop’s chair is, of course, an item of great symbolic significance. In Judaism, rabbis would sit in a chair to teach. The Gospels describe Jesus sitting down to teach – most notably as he delivers the Sermon on the Mount. And so the apostles and bishops of the earliest church likewise would preside at worship from a seat from which they would teach and which came to symbolize both the content of their teaching and their teaching authority.

In the early centuries of Church history, the great see cities of the Christian world were careful to preserve the chairs on which their founding bishops had sat. According to Eusebius, writing in the fourth century, Jerusalem preserved the chair of Saint James, and Alexandria preserved the chair of Saint Mark. In the late second century, Tertullian wrote: “Visit the apostolic churches in which the very chairs of the apostles preside in their places. If you are near Italy, there is Rome.” 

One of the Latin words for chair, cathedra, is the root of the English word cathedral, the church where the bishop has his chair. So, the Feast of St. Peter’s Chair celebrated Saint Peter’s teaching authority as the first Bishop of Rome – authority which was believed to be derived from our Lord’s words in today’s Gospel: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.”

In the old Roman calendar, January 18th was identified as the date when Saint Peter first presided over an assembly of the faithful after his arrival in Rome. A second feast of Saint Peter’s Chair at Antioch was kept on February 22nd. According to Gregory the Great, after leaving Jerusalem, Peter went first to Antioch where he stayed for seven years; and then he went to Rome, where he lived twenty-five years before his martyrdom during the persecution of the Emperor Nero.

Records indicate that during the pontificate of Pope Damasus in the fourth century, a wooden chair, identified as that of Saint Peter, was kept in the baptistery in old Saint Peter’s Basilica. Following baptisms, the pope would sit on the chair, and the newly baptized would be brought to him to receive an anointing with oil, known as the consignatio, or Sacrament of Confirmation.

During the Middle Ages, the Chair of Saint Peter would be brought from the baptistery to the High Altar on February 22nd, which was believed to be the anniversary of the date on which Peter had confessed Jesus to be the Christ and was in turn identified by Jesus as the rock on which he would build his Church. At their enthronements, also, new Popes would be seated on this chair, brought from the baptistery to the high altar for the occasion.

In the seventeenth century, to preserve this precious relic, Pope Alexander VII had it encased in the Bernini sculpture in which it sits today. In 1867, however, it was exposed for veneration by the faithful, and photographed. The photographs show a very medieval-looking chair that has been added to and embellished over the centuries with panels of acacia wood and inlaid ivories. Nonetheless the original frame of oak, much worm-eaten, is also clearly visible; and there is no reason to dismiss the possibility that this is the frame of the chair on which Saint Peter sat as he began his ministry as the Bishop of Rome.

In 1960, the Roman Catholic Church abolished the January 18th Feast of St. Peter’s Chair, keeping it instead on February 22nd. In the 1970s, however, a number of churches of the Anglican Communion, including our own Episcopal Church, added a Feast of the Confession of Saint Peter to their calendars on January 18th to mark the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

So we’ve come full circle. In its current form, the feast of the Confession of Saint Peter is a fairly new addition to the Church Calendar. Nonetheless, a rich history stands behind it. Its trajectory begins with Peter confessing Jesus to be the Messiah, the Christ, at Caesarea Philippi. It continues through Peter’s subsequent ministry as bishop first at Antioch and then at Rome. The Chair of Saint Peter symbolizes both his teaching and his teaching authority, grounded in the faith that expressed itself in his original Confession of Jesus as the Christ.

I encourage us all to observe the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity between now and next Sunday. Pray not only for the healing of the divisions of the sixteenth-century Reformation, but also for reunion between the historic Churches of the Christian East and West. It seems to me that here in Rhode Island we are significantly lacking in ecumenical interaction and cooperation – including joint worship service – and I wish we could do more.

Beginning the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity with the feast of the Confession of Saint Peter reminds us that Christian unity cannot be predicated on good feelings and warm relationships alone, nor even on cooperation in matters of shared pastoral concern and social witness. Genuine Christian unity must also rest upon the rock of the faith and teaching of the apostles, of whom Peter was the acknowledged leader and spokesman. In our search for Christian unity, then, we can do no better than to seek to re-appropriate and re-immerse ourselves in this shared heritage of apostolic faith and teaching symbolized by the Chair of Saint Peter at Rome.

Sermon for the Epiphany

THE EPIPHANY OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST

Tuesday 6 January 2015

At Saint John's Church, Newport, RI

Epiphany follows logically after Christmas. At Christmas, we celebrate the Incarnation. God the Son came down from heaven and was born in Bethlehem so that he could redeem us by sharing in our human condition, living and dying as one of us, to free us from sin and death and lead us to eternal life.

Yet we would never have known what Christ had done for us, we would never have been able to accept his offer of new life, unless somehow his Incarnation had been revealed to us. Without some clear public manifestations or signs of who he was, Jesus would have lived and died like any other First Century Jewish rabbi, without anyone recognizing his true identity as the Son of God.

So, it was necessary not only for the Son of God to take human flesh and come among us, but also for his divine identity to be revealed and made manifest to those among whom he came. The word Epiphany simply means “showing forth” or “manifestation.” And the Feast of the Epiphany begins a season in the Church Year when we celebrate the signs, illuminations, and manifestations that point to Christ and tell us who he is.

Thus, in the Gospel according to Saint Luke, Christ is not merely born in Bethlehem, but his birth is immediately announced by angels to shepherds in the fields. There’s not only a birth but also an announcement of who’s been born: a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.

Similarly, Saint Matthew’s Gospel describes the Wise Men from the East who see his star and come bearing gifts for the newborn King. The point of the star, by the way, is to show that even the world of nature, the very cosmos itself, heralds the Messiah’s birth. And the Wise Men from the East signify that the recipients of this Good News are not only the children of Israel, but all the nations. It’s not enough for the Christ simply to arrive: his arrival must be made known to the whole world.

In the coming weeks, we shall be looking at other signs by which Christ’s identity as the Son of God is made manifest to those around him: the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove at his baptism in the Jordan River; his many miracles of healing; his Transfiguration with dazzling light on the holy mountain. All these signs point behind the outward appearance of the man, Jesus of Nazareth, to the inward reality of the Incarnate Son of God.

Christianity is a religion of signs and symbols. We practice a sacramental faith, in which inward and spiritual realities are made known by outward and visible signs: water in baptism, bread and wine in the Eucharist, oil in anointing, rings in marriage, the sign of the cross in absolution, the laying-on-of-hands in confirmation and ordination. These sacramental signs are, if you will, epiphanies showing forth inward and spiritual graces. And like the star that guided the wise men in their pilgrimage, their purpose is always to lead us to Christ.

Epiphany, then, is a feast with a profoundly evangelistic message. It’s not enough for Christ simply to be present as a carefully guarded secret in the most private recesses of our inner lives. Rather, he must be made manifest in us. Those around us must be able to see in us the signs of his life. The wise men from the East were led to Christ by the sign of a star in the heavens; we are called to be signs by which the world may be led to Christ.

The wise men offered gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. According to the early Church Fathers, these gifts manifest or show forth three aspects of who Christ is: gold as the sign of his kingship; frankincense, which is burned in worship, as the sign of his divinity; and myrrh, the oil used to anoint the dead, as the sign of his cross and passion.

But another possible interpretation of the three gifts concerns what we can offer Christ as we seek to serve him and let him make himself manifest in our lives.

Gold symbolizes our earthly treasure. As Christians, we’re called to serve Christ by giving generously to fund the mission and ministry of his Church.

Frankincense symbolizes our worship and prayer. We serve Christ by our faithful attendance at Mass on Sundays and Holy Days, and by our participation in the Church’s daily round of prayer and devotion.

And what of myrrh? In the Bible, the oil of anointing is often used as a metaphor for good deeds and morally upright behavior. And that really completes the picture. In addition to our offerings of earthly treasure, and our worship and prayer, we make Christ manifest to the world by lives of moral integrity and by deeds of compassion and loving kindness towards those less fortunate than ourselves.

So, the Feast of the Epiphany draws our attention once again to the various signs by which Christ is made manifest to us: a star in the heavens; Sages from the East bearing gifts; a ewer of water poured out into a baptismal font; bread and wine changed into his Body and Blood. But if Christ is to be made manifest in our society today, it can only be through us. Our calling as the People of God is open ourselves up to the leading of the Holy Spirit so that Christ may make us his Epiphany to an unbelieving world.

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas

Jesus among the Doctors
Duccio di Buoninsegna (c. 1255 -- c. 1318)

Luke 2:41-52

Saint Luke’s account of the finding of the child Jesus in the Temple is the only episode we have in the canonical Gospels from what are sometimes described as Our Lord’s “hidden years.” Apart from this one incident, the New Testament skips from the infancy of Jesus to his baptism at the River Jordan, conventionally reckoned to have occurred when he was about thirty years old.

Some of the non-canonical apocryphal Gospels do feature fantastic stories of Our Lord’s childhood, such as the boy Jesus fashioning twelve clay birds and then causing them to come to life and fly away, or striking his playmates dead with a wave of his hand when they tease him. By comparison, Luke’s account of Mary and Joseph losing Jesus and then finding him three days later in the Temple is simple and prosaic by comparison -- and yet so much more profound.

Although this story is not devoid of symbolic elements, nonetheless in its basic outline it’s entirely plausible as the description of an incident that could really have happened. Jews living in Judea were expected to go up to Jerusalem three times a year for the great festivals of Pesach (Passover), Shavuot (the Feast of Weeks), and Sukkot (the Feast of Booths). For those living in places further away but still within reasonable traveling distance, such as Galilee, the requirement was reduced to once a year, at Passover.

In the way he tells the story, Luke is emphasizing that Jesus was brought up in the traditions of Judaism in an observant household. Luke is careful to make this point all along in his infancy narrative, noting both that Jesus was circumcised on the eighth day after his birth, and that after forty days Joseph and Mary brought him up to the Temple to present him to the Lord, as required by the Torah.

Even the detail of Jesus getting left behind by mistake is credible in the context of the times. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem often involved populations of entire villages traveling together, so Mary and Joseph could easily have assumed that he was elsewhere in the party. In his commentary on this passage, the Venerable Bede speculates that since even in the same caravan men and women customarily traveled separately, Mary and Joseph could each have assumed that Jesus was traveling with the other. 

Yet something new is also happening here. Up until now in the infancy narratives, Jesus has remained silent. As an infant he could say nothing, so others did all the talking for him. Between them, the angel Gabriel, Mary's cousin Elizabeth, the angels and shepherds in the fields, and Simeon and Anna in the Temple, have made some extravagant claims on his behalf: he is “the Son of the Most High …” “a Savior, who is Christ the Lord,” “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel.”

But now, Jesus speaks, and his first recorded words in Scripture are: “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Here he claims for himself the filial relationship with his Father in heaven that up to now others have ascribed to him. He is the Son of God. The Jerusalem Temple is his Father’s House.

(Notice that the Church offers children the opportunity to do something similar at about the age of twelve or older. If we were baptized as infants, our parents and godparents made the baptismal vows on our behalf. That was fine, but sooner or later there comes a point when we must own those promises for ourselves, and claim the relationship with God into which baptism has initiated us. So, in the Sacrament of Confirmation we reaffirm our baptismal vows and receive the strengthening of the Holy Spirit through the bishop’s laying-on-of-hands.)

In telling the story, also, Luke conveys something of the tension that is beginning to emerge in Our Lord’s relationship with his earthly family. His remaining behind in the Temple causes Mary and Joseph no small amount of distress, as Mary herself voices in the words, “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.” As a son, he has clearly defined duties to his parents. Luke duly notes that after this incident Jesus returned to Nazareth and was obedient to them. At the same time, however, his growing awareness of his filial relationship with his Father in heaven has introduced the claims of a higher loyalty: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”

Here the boy Jesus gives an anticipatory hint of the conflicts that his disciples will experience between earthly loyalties and obedience to God’s will. Later in the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly warns his disciples that they must be willing to give up everything that stands in the way of following him – and that sometimes faithful discipleship will entail conflict with members of their own families and even the sundering of family relationships.

Early Christian commentators on this passage liked to point out two more details of the story from the viewpoint of Mary and Joseph. First, they found Jesus in the Temple after three days of searching. Whether or not Luke intended it in telling the story, the three days struck the early Church fathers as an overwhelmingly obvious symbolic anticipation of our Lord’s Resurrection from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion and death. The losing-and-finding of Jesus in the Temple thus exemplifies the basic pattern of death and resurrection that shapes all Christian experience.

Second, the place where they found him was none other than “his Father’s House.” When we feel that we’ve lost sight of Jesus, and don’t know where to find him, that detail gives us a clue as to where to look: namely in the Church, the assembly of the faithful gathered for worship.

Listen to the words of the third-century Christian writer Origen of Alexandria:

“He is not found as soon as sought for, for Jesus was not among his kinsfolk and relations … nor in the company of the multitude … Learn where those who seek him find him, not everywhere, but in the Temple. And then seek Jesus in the Temple of God. Seek him in the Church, and seek him among the masters who are in the Temple. For if you will so seek him, you shall find him. They found him not among his kinsfolk, for human relations could not comprehend the Son of God; nor among his acquaintances, for he passes far beyond all human knowledge and understanding. Where then do they find him? In the Temple! If at any time you seek the Son of God, seek him first in the Temple, thither go up and you shall find Christ, the Word, and the Wisdom of God” (quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea).

Saint Stephen, Deacon and Protomartyr (Transferred)

Rembrandt, Stoning of Saint Stephen, 1625

Have you ever heard of “The Witness Days?” The term was unfamiliar to me until a few days ago. It refers to the multiple commemorations of martyrs surrounding the seasons of Advent and Christmas: Saint Andrew on November 30, Saint Thomas on December 21, Saint Stephen on December 26, the Holy Innocents on December 28, and Saint Thomas Becket on December 29.

The Greek word martyr means “witness,” and in the Church’s tradition it has come to signify those holy men and women who bore witness to Christ unto death. This church is dedicated to the Protomartyr, or first martyr, Stephen. Although Saint Stephen’s Day is the day after Christmas, the Prayer Book permits us to celebrate it on the Sunday following because it is our patronal feast.

Every year, many commentators remark on the seeming incongruity between the celebration of the Lord’s Nativity and the commemoration of Stephen’s grisly martyrdom, execution by stoning, the very next day. So much of the devotional imagery and language surrounding Christmas focuses on the angelic hymn extolling peace on earth. Yet the stoning of Stephen on December 26 and, even more, the slaughter of the Holy Innocents on December 28, seem to belie that promise.

So, this morning, it seems appropriate to reflect on this apparent discontinuity. The juxtaposition of Christmas Day, and Saint Stephen’s Day stands to teach us much about the nature of the Christian faith.

The first point to note is that the coming of the Christ child into the world provokes deadly opposition. He comes as the Prince of Peace, the bearer of God’s Kingdom. But that prospect presents itself as a threat to the ruling powers of this world. The birth narratives in both Matthew and Luke’s Gospels both emphasize this point in very different ways.

In Matthew, on learning from the wise men of the recent birth of one born to be King of the Jews, King Herod the Great immediately orders the slaughter of all the male children aged three years and under in the vicinity of Bethlehem. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph escape in the nick of time and take refuge in Egypt.

In Luke, by contrast, the note of opposition is sounded in the form of a warning by the old man Simeon, when Joseph and Mary take Jesus up to the Temple in Jerusalem to present him to the Lord forty days after his birth. After hailing the child as the long-awaited Messiah, “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel,” Simeon foretells, “Behold, this child is set for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against … that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed.”

Simeon is saying that the coming of Christ into the world precipitates a crisis in the classical sense of the word. The word “crisis” comes from the Greek verb “to judge” or “to decide” and it signifies a time when a difficult or important decision must be made, often for or against something or someone. Related to the words “critic” and “critical,” it suggests a time requiring the exercise of critical judgment. The coming of Christ into the world confronts people with the existential question of how they will respond to him – by accepting or rejecting him – and in so exercising their human judgment they invoke divine judgment upon themselves in the process.

Those who decide for Christ in this moment of crisis must expect to suffer opposition and persecution just as Christ himself suffered opposition and persecution. Our Lord says as much on multiple occasions. For example, in Matthew 10:34 he declares: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

These words remain as true today as in the early centuries of Church history. Throughout the world, more Christians are suffering persecution and martyrdom than ever before. In the twentieth century more Christians suffered martyrdom than in all the previous centuries combined; and the twenty-first century is shaping up to be as bad or worse.

Commentators often remark on the similarities between the trial and stoning of Stephen in the Acts of the Apostles and the trial and crucifixion of Our Lord in the Gospel passion narratives. Stephen is tried before the Sanhedrin, just as Jesus was. False witnesses testify against him, just as they testified against Jesus. At the critical moment in the trial, Stephen looks into heaven and declares, “Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God,” just as, at his trial, Jesus had declared, “from now on the Son of man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God.” Stephen is cast out of the city to be stoned, just as Jesus was taken outside the city walls to be crucified. Finally, Stephen’s dying prayers, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” and “Lord, do not hold this sin against them,” directly echo our Lord’s words from the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” and “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!”

So, just as Christ came into the world ultimately to suffer death on the cross, so those of us who call ourselves Christians may well find ourselves called to suffer opposition and persecution for our witness to Christ. Insofar as we bear such adversities patiently and with love, we become more and more conformed to Christ, more and more united with him in his sufferings, just as Stephen was, and hence all the more effective in our witness.

Notice how boldly Stephen testifies before the Sanhedrin. He doesn’t mince words. It’s disappointing how contemporary church members often seem embarrassed to be Christians and feel compelled to make excuses for their faith. “Yes, I’m a Christian, but not like those dreadful fundamentalists …“ “Yes, the Church has committed its share of crimes with its inquisitions and crusades, but my church isn’t like that …” Enough already! That kind of talk just buys into and internalizes the hateful propaganda the world has always used to persecute and oppress us, from the days of King Herod until now. Better to take a leaf from Saint Stephen’s notebook and bear witness to Christ without excuse, and without apology.

And it is precisely Christ’s Incarnation – his birth at Bethlehem and his subsequent life, death, and resurrection – that enables us to bear such witness to him faithfully. Here is the deepest linkage of all between Christmas Day and St. Stephen’s Day. In today’s Old Testament reading, Jeremiah prophesies bravely against the inhabitants of Jerusalem at great risk to himself. But in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Stephen has gained something that Jeremiah lacked: namely the knowledge that Jesus will be with him in bearing whatever suffering he may have to endure. Thus dying with Jesus, Stephen gains the assurance of rising with Jesus in glory.

CHRISTMAS 2014 -- At the Midnight Mass

John Duns Scotus, 1266-1308

Christmas is the feast that we Anglicans celebrate best. The glories of the Anglican musical and liturgical tradition come into their own with the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, singing the festival of nine lessons and carols, showcasing choral gems from David Willcock’s arrangement of Cecil Frances Alexander’s “Once in Royal David’s City” to Harold Darke’s setting of Christina Rossetti’s “In the Bleak Midwinter.”

Attempting to explain why it is that Anglicans celebrate Christmas so splendidly, some commentators point to the central place of the Incarnation in Anglican theology and spirituality. I find this explanation entirely persuasive. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. At Christmas we take particular delight in recounting the story of his taking flesh in all its vivid and earthy detail: the inn, the stable, the manger, the shepherds, the angels, and the animals.

And yet – from time to time I hear church members make slightly supercilious and denigrating remarks about the celebration of Christmas. It’s all well and good to commemorate the birth of Jesus, they say, but the theological significance of Christmas pales in comparison with that of Holy Week and Easter. Our Lord’s death on the cross and resurrection are what really matter to Christian faith.

To evaluate such claims, we need to look a bit more closely at the classical Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. At Bethlehem, God the Son, the eternal Second Person of the Holy Trinity, came down from heaven to be born at a particular place in a particular time, to share in our human nature, and to participate in our human condition. But why?

The standard and indeed correct answer is that he came to save us from sin and death. In the biblical account, Adam and Eve disobeyed God and the whole human race inherited the guilt of their sin. We need not read the story of Adam and Eve literally to understand it as a definitive interpretation of the human condition. We are fallen creatures, held captive by sin, unable by our own efforts to redeem ourselves or to live as God intended when he created us. So in the Incarnation Christ came among us to redeem us by dying on the cross.

One possible implication of this account, however, is that Christ’s conception and birth of the Virgin Mary have significance only as preliminaries to his atonement. To suffer and die for us, he had first to be born as a human being. A further implication is that if Adam and Eve had not sinned, the Incarnation would not have taken place.

In the medieval West, this line of thinking even led some to regard the fall of Adam and Eve as a good thing for having occasioned the great blessing of Christ’s coming into the world. In the hymn known as the Exsultet, sung by the deacon at the blessing of the Paschal Candle during the Easter Vigil, we encounter the famous lines: “O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer!”

The fifteenth-century English carol “Adam lay ybounden,” expresses the same basic idea. If Adam had not sinned by taking the apple in the Garden of Eden, then our Lady (the blessed Virgin Mary) would never have become Queen of Heaven. So the carol concludes: “Blessed be the time / That apple taken was / Therefore we moun singen / Deo gratias!”

This view became widespread in the Christian Church, at least in the West. But from the beginning a number of theologians of impeccable orthodoxy took the opposite view: that even if Adam and Eve had never fallen, the Incarnation would likely have taken place anyway. Saint Irenaeus made this suggestion in the second century, and Saint Maximus the Confessor developed it in the seventh. Both theologians proposed that, even before the Fall, God created the world with the precise intention of becoming incarnate in it as a human being.

Medieval scholastic theologians debated the question with enthusiasm, as they were wont to do. In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas took the negative position, pointing out that Scripture consistently describes the Incarnation as a remedy for human sin – as, for example, in I Timothy 1:15, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” Yet after concluding that the Incarnation would probably not have taken place if humanity had not sinned, Thomas immediately adds that God’s power is not limited, so that God could have become incarnate under any circumstances he chose.

Taking the opposite position, the thirteenth-century Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus argued vigorously that it was unfitting for God’s greatest deed ever of becoming incarnate to have been contingent upon Adam’s sin, such that if Adam had not sinned, the Incarnation would have remained undone. (In subsequent years, as in so many other theological controversies, the Dominicans tended to follow Aquinas, while the Franciscans tended to follow Scotus.)

But why would God have become incarnate as a human being apart from the purpose of redeeming fallen humanity? All the writers I’ve mentioned propose in different ways that by becoming incarnate and participating in our human nature, God communicates his infinite life, wisdom, and love to us finite human beings. He shares in our human life so that we may share in his divine life, and so fulfill the purpose for which he created us: to live in union with him for eternity.

We should exercise due caution about making any sweeping claims on this question. The suggestion that God would have become incarnate even in the absence of human sin is a contrary-to-fact hypothetical speculation. We can never know the answer for sure because, as it happened, humanity did fall, and Christ did come into came into the world to save us from our sins. What we can say, perhaps, is that if we had not sinned, then Christ would not have had to suffer and die on the cross. The Incarnation of the Son of God may well have taken place anyway but would likely have taken a very different course.

So, we’re left with a speculation, but an edifying speculation all the same. At Christmas, we give thanks to God for sending his Son into the world to save us from sin and death. At the same time, the possibility that he would have come anyway, even apart from the Fall, confirms our characteristically Anglican intuition that Christmas cannot be reduced to a mere prerequisite to Holy Week and Easter. This festival celebrates a mystery that to some extent stands independently and in its own right.

To put it bluntly, even apart from Holy Week and Good Friday, there might well still be Christmas. Even if he had not had to suffer and die on the cross, the Son of God might still have been born as one of us, to teach us, enlighten us, and bring us to the fullness of eternal life and joy in God’s presence. This evening’s celebration proclaims that promise and that hope, in which we do well to rejoice with all the enthusiasm we can muster.

Sermon for Advent 1, Year B

Michelangelo, The Last Judgment
Sistine Chapel, 1536-1541

One December several years ago, I attended a luncheon with a group belonging to a local community organization. And I was having a pleasant chat with the lady sitting next to me, who, seeing my clerical collar, identified herself as a member of [a local] Congregational Church.

Towards the end of lunch, she turned to me and said in a confidential tone that in the past week or so the scripture readings in her church had been all about the Apocalypse, the Second Coming of Christ, and the Last Judgment. She was clearly puzzled and even a bit disturbed. Did I have any idea why this might be? Then she remarked, “I thought we UCCs didn’t DO the Apocalypse!” (UCC referring, of course, to the United Church of Christ, to which the Congregational Church belongs.)

I explained that it was Advent, and that her church was obviously using the Revised Common Lectionary – which appoints these very readings during the season. I pointed out that one of the great achievements of the ecumenical movement to date is the existence of such a common lectionary used by many different denominations so that, despite our continuing separation and disagreements, we’re at least hearing the same readings on Sunday mornings. At the same time, I wondered to myself: how many Episcopalians would instinctively share her sentiments?

What are we to make of the apocalyptic imagery in so much of both the Old and New Testaments? One option is literalism. In today’s Gospel, our Lord describes the sun being darkened, the stars falling from heaven, and the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. He emphasizes the need to read the signs of the times, so that when we see these things taking place, we know that the end is near. But then he immediately qualifies this assertion by warning that no-one knows the exact day or hour, so we need to stay awake and watch at all times.

Down through history, groups of Christians have developed elaborate timetables for the Second Coming, identifying contemporary world politics and leaders with the apocalyptic events and figures described in these Scripture passages. Various sects have worked out comprehensive theologies of the tribulation, rapture, and millennium. About fifteen years ago, the best-selling Left Behind series gave a detailed fictional description of what it would be like to live through the end times.

It’s tempting for Episcopalians and mainline Protestants to be superciliously dismissive of such biblical literalism. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I suppose, would be a liberalism that simply discounts the apocalyptic material in Scripture as reflecting an outdated and anachronistic worldview with no relevance for how we should believe, think, and live in today’s world. My UCC conversation partner at that luncheon was clearly of this mind.

In today’s Episcopal Church, moreover, depictions of divine judgment and wrath are very much out of fashion. All the emphasis is instead on God’s unconditional love for each one of us. The mindset is very much that summed up by H. Richard Niebuhr as the credo of late-nineteenth century liberal Protestantism: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” Not much room for apocalyptic Sturm und Drang in that picture! 

In perhaps typically Anglican fashion, I want to propose a third way, a middle way, of approaching these parts of the Bible. One of the blessings of a lectionary based on the liturgical calendar is that it forces us periodically to wrestle with passages of Scripture we might otherwise overlook or ignore. The Revised Common Lectionary is far from perfect; it doesn’t cover the whole Bible by any means. But it cycles through Scripture in a fairly systematic way, emphasizing those passages that the Church has discerned to be foundational to a complete and balanced grasp of Christian doctrine.

So, every Advent we read and wrestle with these apocalyptic passages, even while acknowledging that we don’t fully understand them. They’re inherently mysterious; I doubt that we shall fully understand their meaning until we experience for ourselves the events they describe. This biblical imagery of Christ returning to judge the living and the dead may refer to future events in this world; or it may refer to what happens after we die, in the next world. We don’t need to have all the cosmological logistics worked out, however, to get the basic message of these readings.

That message is that the future belongs to God. Sooner or later, whether in this world or the next, we shall face Christ as our Judge. And that is good news. A universe without judgment is a universe in which our choices between good and evil, right and wrong, ultimately don’t matter. But the God-given freedom and dignity of the human person are such that our choices do matter; actions have consequences, even eternal consequences.

We hear a lot today about the need for accountability and transparency in political, economic, and organizational life. Well, the Last Judgment will be the ultimate in accountability and transparency. There we shall render account for all the choices we ever made in this life. There, perhaps as never before, we shall see ourselves as we really are.

Both Scripture and Tradition warn us to live our lives in such a way as to be always prepared for that Day of Judgment. Today’s Gospel states this theme clearly: “What I say to you I say to all: Watch!” The further good news, however, is that our Judge is also our Advocate. In the end, we escape eternal perdition not by proving ourselves worthy of heaven, which is impossible, but by casting ourselves on God’s mercy. God manifests his love for us not by pretending that our sins don’t matter or that they never happened, but by forgiving us. Indeed, our sins matter so much that Christ paid the price of them upon the cross. To be prepared for the Last Judgment, then, we need to repent, and place our whole trust in Christ as the agent of God’s forgiveness and mercy.

Faith and repentance, then, are the keys to being prepared. But they depend in turn upon constant recollection of the Judgment that awaits us. Otherwise we get distracted and caught up in the concerns of the present moment. So again, our Lord warns us: “Watch therefore – for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning, lest he come suddenly and find you asleep.”

During Advent, the Church asks us to attend to those passages of Scripture that warn us of our need to stay awake and alert, so that we may live in such a way as to be prepared to meet him and face his judgment at any time – whether in an hour from now or a hundred million years from now. In the coming Sundays and weekdays of the season, we shall have the opportunity to explore further what it means to be a people prepared for the Advent of the Lord.

Sermon for Proper 28, Year A

Matthew 25:14-30

It’s perhaps providential that the appointed Gospel on Stewardship Sunday should be one of the great parables of stewardship. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the Master who entrusts his property to his servants stands as a figure of Christ who entrusts us with all our material possessions and spiritual blessings in this life. The Master's going away on a long journey represents Christ’s Ascension into heaven at the end of his earthly life. And the Master’s long-delayed return and settling of accounts with his servants points towards Christ’s Second Coming and the Last Judgment, when we shall be raised from the dead to give an accounting of our stewardship of the gifts entrusted into our care.

Beyond that, interpretations of this parable have tended to go in one of two directions. First is the economic interpretation, associated with what Max Weber called the Protestant ethic. By this reading, the parable justifies the accumulation of earthly wealth and the enjoyment of material prosperity as signs of God’s favor. To those who have, more will be given; to those who have not, even what they have will be taken away. That’s good news for the rich: not such good news for the poor.

Second is the moralizing interpretation. Even though the word “talent” in Greek means a huge sum of money, and has absolutely nothing to do with the ability to paint, sing, or do needlepoint, innumerable sermons on this parable exhort us to use our God-given gifts to the best of our ability. That is good advice in itself, but it’s not really the message of today’s Gospel.

We generally fail to realize how shocking and scandalous this parable would have been to our Lord’s original audience. They didn’t understand economics the way we do. We’re apt to admire the first two servants who invest their money and double their return for their good business sense. And we’re apt to scorn the servant who buries his money in the ground just as we scorn people today who stuff their life savings away in their mattresses. After all, money loses value over time with inflation and you’ve got to keep it wisely invested just to stay even.

That’s how we think; but people in the ancient world thought very differently. They didn’t have the same understanding of inflation as we do; and they saw nothing wrong with burying treasure in the ground. In fact, the rabbis taught that when someone entrusted you with a large sum of money, burying it for safekeeping was the most morally responsible action you could take. Indeed, one who buried such money in the ground was released from liability if the money was lost.

Moreover, the operating assumption in the ancient world was that the supply of this world’s goods was finite, limited, and already distributed. So, if you were not born rich, the only way you could get rich was by making someone else poor. People who became wealthy through their business dealings were thus universally suspected of fraud, deceit, or theft. Financial success was not the badge of respectability that it is today: quite the opposite.

So, our Lord’s original audience likely regarded the first two servants, who double their money, as shady and dishonest characters—just like their master who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he has not winnowed. The great scandal of the parable is that these disreputable servants are the ones who end up being rewarded, while the honest servant, who’s done the right thing by burying his money safely in the ground, is the one who ends up being punished.

Now, what could our Lord possibly mean by telling such a transgressive story? Well, I would propose that the parable challenged its original audience, just as it challenges us, to imagine a different kind of world, governed by different kinds of economic laws, with a different kind of wealth, denominated in a different kind of currency. We live in an economic world governed by finitude and scarcity. In such a world, there are circumstances in which hoarding treasure makes perfect sense. We’d better guard what we have or others might take it from us.

But maybe the talents in the parable represent a different kind of treasure: not commodities to be invested or hoarded, but rather gifts to be shared. Our Lord has entrusted into the care of his Church great spiritual treasures—the Gospel, the Sacraments, and all the gifts of grace. He intends us to share these treasures and spread them abroad liberally. And when we do share them—freely, generously, and abundantly—we find that unlike material wealth and possessions, which diminish the more we give them away, these spiritual gifts keep on multiplying back to us until the day when the Master returns and bids us enter into his joy.

What special insights might this parable offer us today, on Stewardship Sunday? Well, first, consider the key difference between the two servants who enter into the joy of the Master, and the servant cast into outer darkness. The first two servants exhibit bold generosity of spirit and a willingness to risk everything in their Master’s service, while the third is motivated by fear, insecurity, and the desire to protect himself by eliminating all risk. Similarly, when we consider how much we can afford to pledge to the financial support of our Church, we need to cultivate that same spirit of generosity and willingness to take risks in the Lord’s service.

Second, notice the transformation of relationships that takes place at the end of the parable. The Master bids the two servants, “Enter into the joy of your Master.” That invitation implies that henceforth they are no longer servants but partners, fellow heirs with the Master in a joint inheritance. This point is of crucial importance for us. So often, conversations on pledging seem to presuppose a dichotomy between “us” and “them.” That is, we, the representatives of the institutional Church, stand up here and try to persuade you, the members of the congregation, to part with more of your hard earned income than you think you can afford, and you, in turn, occasionally give us pushback and tell us why we shouldn’t be so demanding. That kind of “us versus them” dynamic is a lose-lose proposition for everyone concerned.

The crucial breakthrough takes place when we replace this “us versus them” dynamic by a collective taking of responsibility, which acknowledges, “we’re all in this together.” That is, this is our parish, no-one else is going to support it but us, and we all need to do whatever we can to ensure that it has the financial resources it needs to fulfill its mission, even at the cost of significant risk and sacrifice to ourselves. When we accept collective responsibility for stewardship in such a spirit of love and generosity, then we may be confident that when our Master returns we shall hear the words, “Well done good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your Master.”

THE SUNDAY AFTER ALL SAINTS

(Sermon at the 10 am Mass)

Towards the end of his classic work The Shape of the Liturgy, Dom Gregory Dix describes a tomb of one of the saints of God. He writes:

           “There is a little ill-spelled ill-carved rustic epitaph of the fourth century from Asia Minor:— ‘Here sleeps the blessed Chione, who has found Jerusalem for she prayed much’. Not another word [Dix continues] is known of Chione, some peasant woman who lived in that vanished world of Christian Anatolia. But how lovely if all that should survive after sixteen centuries were that one had prayed much, so that the neighbors that saw all one’s life were sure that one must have found Jerusalem!”

Here Dix sums up a large part of the meaning of our annual commemoration of All Saints. Throughout the Christian year, we remember the great heroes and heroines of the faith: apostles, evangelists, missionaries, martyrs, confessors, virgins, visionaries, widows, monks, nuns, kings, queens, and founders of religious orders and houses of charity. Many of them are well known to history, and we can read not only their biographies but also their own words in their own writings.

But then, on All Saints Day, we pause to remember also the countless forgotten holy ones of God, most of whom don’t even have an epitaph. As the collect puts it, today we celebrate all God’s righteous servants, known to us, and unknown.

Sometimes I wonder, though, what Dix’s blessed Chione was really like. Even though she prayed much, I like to imagine Chione having her idiosyncratic quirks and crotchets, her annoying habits, and perhaps even her moral weaknesses. Maybe her family, friends, and neighbors found aspects of her personality irritating. But still, they were sure that she’d found Jerusalem. She’d prayed much, and that was enough.

A common misconception is that a saint is one who has displayed complete moral rectitude and spiritual perfection in this earthly life. After a number of years of cycling through the Church’s calendar of saints at our weekday Masses, one builds up a degree of familiarity with their lives and personalities, and one discovers that many of them were far from perfect.

Consider Saint Nicholas, whose life provides the inspiration for the popular figure of Santa Claus. Nicholas was a bishop in Asia Minor, what is today Turkey, in the fourth century. He was by all accounts a good and kind bishop, who took special care of the poor in his diocese, and was known for giving gifts to their children. He suffered imprisonment and torture in the persecution under the emperor Diocletian, but was released upon the accession of the emperor Constantine.

When Nicholas attended the Council of Nicaea in 325, he became so enraged at the heretical teaching of the presbyter Arius, that he walked across the room and punched Arius in the face – an act for which his fellow bishops suspended him from the exercise of his episcopal ministry for a time, and for which he repented, even though in the end the Council confirmed his view and condemned Arius’s teaching as heresy.

Nicholas was a real saint, but his besetting sin – at least according to this legend – was anger. He was not perfect. The same can be said for many of the saints we commemorate throughout the church year. They were not perfect. They had their share of besetting sins and moral shortcomings.

Why then do we honor them as saints? The designation saint suggests not that they were morally or spiritually perfect, but rather that God’s grace was visibly at work in their lives. After they died, people remembered them as those who had made God’s presence known and manifest to all those around them. I suspect we’ve all encountered at least one or two such people. When we spent time in their presence, we found our own faith strengthened. They made us feel good about being Christians. Their example made us more hopeful about the potentialities of our own life in Christ.

The good news is that sainthood is not some ideal of perfection attainable only by an elite few. We don’t have to be perfect in this life to be saints. When we get to heaven, we shall be made perfect. Otherwise we could not bear the pure brightness of divine glory. But in this life, we’re still in via, on the way, works in progress. Nonetheless, as baptized members of the Body of Christ we’re all called to be saints. That’s why the Mass of All Saints Day is one of the occasions during the Church Year when we renew our baptismal vows.

In his autobiography The Seven Story Mountain, Thomas Merton recounts a conversation with a Catholic friend in the months following his conversion and baptism. As they were walking together, his friend turned and demanded to know:

               

           “What do you want to be, anyway?’

                  I could not say [Merton continues], “I want to be Thomas Merton the well-known writer of all those book reviews … or Thomas Merton the assistant instructor of Freshman English … so I put the thing on the spiritual plane where it belonged, and said: “I don’t know. I guess what I want is to be a good Catholic.”

                  “What do you mean, you want to be a good Catholic?”

                  The explanation I gave was lame enough, and expressed my confusion, and betrayed how little I had really thought about it all. [He] did not accept it.

                  “What you should say”—he told me—“What you should say, is that you want to be a saint.”

                  A saint! The thought struck me as a little weird. I said: “How do you expect me to become a saint?”

                  “By wanting to,” [he said] simply.

                  “I can’t be a saint.” I said. “I can’t be a saint.” And my mind darkened with a confusion of realities and unrealities: the knowledge of my own sins, and the false humility that which makes [us] say that [we] cannot do the things that [we] must do, cannot reach the level that [we] must reach …

                  But he said, “All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what he created you to be, if you will consent to let him do it? All you have to do is desire it.”

What Merton makes clear in this little dialogue is that the first step to becoming a saint is simply consenting to let God make us into the people he has created us to be. The tragedy is that so many people fail to become saints because, deep down, that’s not what they really want.

 Every year, on All Saints Day, I insist on having the hymn “I sing a song of the saints of God.” Behind the surface appearance of a slightly silly children’s Sunday School ditty the lyrics express precisely the same profound spiritual point that Merton makes in The Seven Story Mountain. For the sake of our eternal salvation we need above all to make these words our own: “the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.”

Sermon for Proper 23, Year A

Parable of the Wedding Feast, Russian, 14th Century

Matthew 22:1-14

New Testament commentators sometimes draw a distinction between two types of parables found in the Gospels: parables of grace, and parables of judgment. On the whole, I find it a helpful distinction.

Most of us are familiar with the parables of grace. By means of various images and figures they depict God as infinitely loving, forgiving, and willing to go to any length necessary to rescue and redeem the lost: for example, the father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son; the Shepherd who goes in search of the one lost sheep in the wilderness; the woman who sweeps her house up and down looking for a lost coin. These images of a loving and gracious God resonate well with us. 

But then, in a number of other parables, the happy ending is tempered by images of judgment, condemnation, and punishment. The goats are separated from the sheep; the tares are winnowed from the wheat; and, in today’s Gospel, not only are those who refused to come to the marriage feast put to the sword and their city put to the torch, but even one of the guests gathered in at the last minute is found lacking the required wedding garment and cast into outer darkness.

One strategy that many people adopt in reading the Scriptures today is simply to pay attention to the passages that they like and ignore the ones they don’t like. But that won’t do. If the Bible really is God’s Word as we claim it to be, then we need to wrestle with all of it, not just the bits that appeal to us. We need to take seriously not only the parables of grace but also the parables of judgment.

An ancient technique of interpreting biblical stories is to distinguish the different layers of meaning in the text. The first and most obvious layer is the literal meaning. But at the level of literal interpretation, the parable in today’s Gospel presents us with some details that are puzzling, to say the least.

When the king sends his servants the second time to extend the invitation to his son’s wedding feast, those invited seize the servants, abuse them, and kill them: an extreme way to refuse a dinner invitation. Then it gets totally bizarre. While dinner is getting cold, the king sends his troops to destroy the murderers and burn their city. Declaring that those originally invited were not worthy, the king sends his servants out into the streets to gather in everyone they find. And so we have the surreal picture, almost a dreamscape, of a banquet hall filling with guests, against the backdrop of a night sky lit up by the flames of the burning city in the distance.

For me, the strangest detail of all has always been the man with no wedding garment. After all, these guests have just been gathered from the streets into the wedding hall with no warning. How can anyone expect them to be properly dressed for a wedding?

Some recent commentators suggest, however, that according to the customs of the ancient world, the details of the parable are not as strange or absurd as they first seem. Great banquets and feasts usually didn’t happen at a precise date and time, announced in advance. Guests normally declined the first invitation, because it merely served as a warning that the preparations were under way. So it was customary to send a second invitation when the feast was finally ready. 

Those invited to the marriage feast of the king’s son were almost certainly the nobles and aristocracy of the kingdom. For them, to turn down the second invitation to such a great state occasion was an act of defiance bordering on treason. Their killing of the king’s servants suggests that this is precisely what they were about: rebelling against the authority of both the king and his son. In this light, sending troops to burn their city was a completely plausible response to a political challenge. In the ancient world, this sort of thing happened all the time.

For the original audience, only two features of the story would have come as a surprise. The first was the king’s sending his servants into the streets to invite the common people to the banquet. That would have been unheard of.

The second would have been the guest without a wedding garment. For in marriage feasts in the ancient world, at least according to some commentators, these items of clothing were given to the guests as they arrived. So, the man without a wedding garment has probably refused the garment offered to him at the door. His attitude is perhaps one of stubborn defiance: “if you want me to come in, fine, but you’ll have to take me as I am.” Confronted with a show of such blatant disrespect, the King has no choice but to have him tossed out.

The literal interpretation does not, however, exhaust the parable’s meaning. By his introduction, Our Lord makes it clear that the parable points beyond itself to something greater: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a marriage feast for his son.” The point of the parable is not what it tells us about biblical marriage customs, or the politics of the ancient world, but what it tells us about the kingdom of God.

Read at this level, the parable’s message is that God’s grace abounds in the invitation extended to all people everywhere to come and partake of the feast of the kingdom of heaven. In the end, the king tells his servants to gather everyone in, both bad and good. While everyone without exception is invited, those who end up excluded are precisely those who refuse the invitation. In the parable, those invited make light of the invitation and go off, one to his farm and another to his business. In their minds, they have more important matters to attend to than the wedding feast of the King’s Son. And, if my interpretation is accurate, even the guest cast out at the end could have chosen to accept the wedding garment offered to him as he entered the hall.

So, in the end we have a parable of both grace and judgment. God extends his grace to all of us in the invitation to the wedding feast of his Son. In the Church we understand our weekly and daily celebration of the Holy Eucharist as an anticipatory foretaste of that very same feast: the marriage supper of the lamb. God invites us all to come to Mass and join in the Church’s life of worship, prayer, study, service, celebration, and thanksgiving. 

When we reject that invitation, it is not so much God who judges us as we who invoke judgment upon ourselves. We’re all invited to the wedding feast; every Sunday affords us the opportunity once again to accept the invitation, or to decide that we’ve got more important things to be about. By developing the habit of responding faithfully to God’s invitations in this life, however, we prepare and dispose ourselves to be found worthy in the next.