ASSUMPTION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY

Sunday, August 15, 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt

In the Episcopal Church calendar, today’s feast is called simply Saint Mary the Virgin. In the Roman Catholic Church, its official name is the Solemnity of the Assumption. In the Orthodox Churches it’s the Dormition of the Theotokos, that is, the Falling Asleep of the God-Bearer.

By whatever name it’s known, August 15^th has been observed in both East and West since the early centuries of Christianity as a feast commemorating the mysterious circumstances surrounding the end of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s earthly life. 

The Episcopal Church does not explicitly acknowledge Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven. Nonetheless, today’s Collect in the Prayer Book hints at it: “O God, who hast taken to thyself the blessed Virgin Mary, mother of thy incarnate Son …” The Collect then proceeds to ask that we may share with her the glory of God’s eternal kingdom—the glory into which, it is implied, she’s already been taken up.

Even though the Roman Catholic Church proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption only as recently as 1950, the belief is documented as dating back to the early centuries of Christianity. According to Saint John of Damascus, writing in the eighth century, during the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon in 451, the Byzantine Emperor asked the Patriarch of Jerusalem for the body of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Relics of the saints were in high demand in those days; the churches in most cities possessed and treasured the bones and other keepsakes of their founding Apostles. It would thus have been a great coup for Constantinople to have taken possession of Mary's mortal remains.

But to the Emperor’s surprise, the bishop explained that no bodily relics of the Blessed Virgin were to be found anywhere. He then related the Jerusalem Church’s local tradition that when Mary was coming to the end of her earthly life, all the Apostles but one—I’ll come back to this presently—returned to the Holy City from their missionary travels to bid her farewell. Having peacefully fallen asleep, she was carried through the streets on a bier to her final resting place, and laid in a tomb. 

The one missing Apostle was Thomas, who arrived three days later, and asked that Mary’s tomb be opened so that he could pay his respects. (Just as Thomas had been absent from the Upper Room on the first Easter Day, so he was absent from Mary’s funeral and interment.) When they opened the tomb, however, they found it empty. In some versions of the story, the gathered apostles then saw a vision of Mary being lifted to her waiting Son in the heavens. And in a few further versions, on the way up, she dropped her sash or waistband down to Thomas below, furnishing the doubting disciple with incontrovertible proof of her Assumption.

I hasten to add that none of this is attested anywhere in Scripture, so as Anglicans we’re free to make of it what we will. Interestingly, when Pope Pius XII defined the dogma of the Assumption as binding upon Roman Catholics seventy-two years ago, he did not explicitly cite any of these apocryphal traditions. His argument was instead a theological one: that since Mary was full of grace and without sin, it was inconceivable that God would allow her to decay in the tomb. But again, as Anglicans we’re not required to believe in Mary’s Assumption if we remain unpersuaded, and neither are we prohibited from believing in it if we find ourselves so inspired.

Either way, whether we take it as literal truth or symbolic image, a scriptural key to understanding the Assumption’s meaning for us is John 14:3 where, at the Last Supper, Jesus says to his disciples: "In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? When I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also."

In other words, the Assumption is not about Mary alone. It depicts not only Mary being taken into heaven at the conclusion of her earthly life, but also our own future resurrection (on the Last Day) and assumption into God’s presence following the completion of our earthly lives. Mary is thus sometimes referred to as the “First of the Redeemed”—or, we might say, the advance representative of redeemed humanity in heaven.

The Feast of the Assumption celebrates the hope of eternal life for all who are united to Christ. It’s that simple, really. In the Apostles’ Creed we recite the words: I believe in the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Those words teach us that the world to come is not some ethereal realm of disembodied spirits, but rather the restoration of the material creation in all its glorious physicality.

To be fully human is to live in the body. God created us for embodied existence in a material world, which in the beginning he proclaimed to be “very good.” It follows that to fulfill the promise and potential of our creation, our redemption must be a bodily redemption. Only then can the life of the world to come bring about the perfection of our humanity in communion with God. As Jesus rose from the dead, so in the last day he will raise us as well—in bodies that are somehow continuous with those of this life, yet wonderfully restored, transformed, and made new, no longer subject to corruption, decay, and death.

Mary’s Assumption is best understood in the context of this hope. Just as Jesus rose not just in spirit but in the fullness of his bodily existence, so when the time came for Mary to fall asleep, God took her to himself in both body and soul.

Today, some of us may experience the same difficulty visualizing Mary's Assumption as we do Christ's Ascension. For we no longer think of heaven as a place somewhere up there, in the sky. The important point, however, is that somehow, in a mysterious way that defies explanation, Mary has been taken up, in the fullness of her humanity, into the fullness of God’s presence. 

The life that Mary lives with God as the first of the redeemed is none other than the life we’re all called to share in the age to come. In the meantime, we enjoy a living relationship with her here and now. She prays to her Son for us. We may certainly entreat her prayers on our behalf. And her prayers will help us towards our heavenly destination, where she and all the angels and saints are waiting for us, and from which they cheer us on as we make our pilgrimage through this life in this world.

PROPER 14, YEAR B

Sunday 8 August 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N.J.

I Kings 19:4-8

Psalm 34:1-8

Ephesians 4:25-5:2

John 6:35, 41-51

The image or theme running through today’s readings can be summed up as “food for the journey.” 

In the Old Testament reading from the First Book of the Kings, Elijah’s journey into the wilderness recapitulates that of the Israelites out of Egypt centuries before. The parallels are remarkable. Just as the Children of Israel fled to escape death at the hands of Pharaoh, so Elijah flees to escape death at the hands of the wicked Queen Jezebel. Just as the Israelites murmured against Moses and Aaron, saying that it would have been better to have died in Egypt than of starvation and thirst in this wilderness, so Elijah falls into despair and asks God to take his life. Then, just as God gave the Israelites water from the rock and rained down manna from heaven, so an angel of the Lord appears to Elijah by night and gives him a cake baked on hot stones to eat and a jar of water to drink. 

And finally, perhaps the most direct parallel of all, just as the bread from heaven enabled the Israelites to continue their journey to Mount Sinai, so in the strength of that food Elijah travels forty days and forty nights to Horeb the Mount of God—traditionally identified as one and the same place as Mount Sinai. Just as the Israelites received God’s Law at Sinai, beginning their new life as the People of the Covenant, so at Horeb Elijah will hear the still small voice, making clear that his mission as a prophet has not ended but is only just beginning.

The good news in the juxtaposition of these two stories is that God never asks us to undertake any journey in his Name without providing us with everything necessary to complete it. He gives us food for the journey. So, as we think about the various journeys on which we find ourselves, both individually and collectively, the challenge is to examine how far we really trust God’s providence to supply us with all we need to see us through.

The interim period between rectors in a parish a kind of a journey. God has asked you and me both to undertake the journey of this transition process together, with all its steps, tasks, meetings, and other items to mark off the checklist. Just as the Israelites grumbled in the wilderness, so perhaps we’ve all done a bit of grumbling of our own. Why does this process have to take so long? We’ve never had to do it this way before! 

Nonetheless, we’re being asked to trust God to lead us through what is for most of us largely unfamiliar terrain, provide us with what need on the way, and bring us safely to our destination. As Psalm 34 puts it: “The angel of the Lord encompasses those who fear him, and he will deliver them; taste and see that the Lord is good, happy are they that trust in him.”

Speaking of angels: In this parish we have a powerful angelic patron, Uriel, the fourth archangel—after Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael—and we may trust that he will watch over us, protect us, and provide for us on the way, just as that unnamed angel of the Lord brought food and water to Elijah. (Perhaps it was Uriel. Who knows?)

Moreover, we have each other as companions on this journey. We’re all in this together. In the reading from the Epistle to the Ephesians, Saint Paul gives us good advice on how to conduct ourselves on the way: “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as Christ forgave you … Walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

That reference to Christ giving himself as an offering and sacrifice reminds us that for this journey, and for all our journeys, he has provided the most precious food and drink imaginable. The Fathers of the early Church understood the manna in the wilderness as an anticipatory sign or foretaste of the Holy Eucharist.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells the people, “Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven that a man may eat of it and not die … If anyone eats of this bread he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

These words of our Lord are fulfilled here and now, and every Sunday and weekday, when we gather to break the Bread and offer the Cup in his Name. In the late fourth century, in a sermon to his congregation in Milan, Saint Ambrose said this: “You ask me why God does not rain down manna as he did on our ancestors … If you reflect, you will realize that he does, even daily, rain down manna upon his servants … How much more excellent this is than what went before! Those who ate that manna, or bread, are dead, but he who eats this bread will live forever …”

The consecrated bread and wine of the Holy Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ, are food and drink not only for the journeys that God asks us to undertake in this life, but also for the greatest journey of all. In the Church’s Last Rites, it’s no accident that the Communion of the dying is called Viaticum, which means “food for the journey.”

The manna in the wilderness strengthened the Israelites for their journey first to Mount Sinai and then to the Promised Land. The bread and water provided by the angel strengthened Elijah for his forty-day journey to Mount Horeb. But Horeb, Sinai, and the Promised Land can legitimately all be read as symbolic figures of heaven itself. And in the Holy Eucharist, Jesus gives us himself as food and drink for our journey through the wilderness of this world to our final goal and destination in the next.

PROPER 13, YEAR B

Sunday 1 August 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N.J.

Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15

Psalm 78:23-29

John 6:24-35

The recurring image in today’s readings is that of bread from heaven. In the reading from Exodus, the Israelites murmur against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. Despite their liberation from bondage and the gift of freedom, they complain that death at the Lord’s hand in Egypt, where they sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full, would have been better than being brought out to die of hunger in the desert.

The real crisis is not one of hunger, however, but of faith. The people’s grumbling bespeaks a lack of trust in the Lord who delivered them to continue to provide for them.

In response, God rains down from heaven a fine, flake-like substance that distills on the ground from the early morning dew. The word “manna” means “What is it?”—to which Moses replies, “It is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat.”

The miracle’s real purpose goes beyond satisfying the people’s hunger to building their faith in God’s loving care and providence. As God says to Moses, he’s providing this bread from heaven so that “you shall know that I am the Lord your God.”

Ever after, the children of Israel remembered the manna in the wilderness as a sign of God’s goodness and mercy. As Psalm 78 joyfully sings, “He rained down manna upon them to eat and gave them grain from heaven. So mortals ate the bread of angels; he provided for them food enough.”

The manna ceased after 40 years when the Tribes of Israel crossed the River Jordan into the Promised Land. Nonetheless, a belief grew up in later centuries that one of the signs of the coming of the Messiah, and the dawning of God’s kingdom on earth, would be a resumption of the manna, the bread from heaven. This belief just may lie in the background of today’s Gospel, where the crowd challenges Jesus: “What sign do you do that we may see, and believe you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”

What we encounter in this reading is one of those wonderful dialogues of double meaning, so typical of John’s Gospel, where people focus on a word or image’s literal meaning, while our Lord employs its spiritual meaning instead.

After the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand in the wilderness by the multiplication of five loaves and two fish, the people have followed Jesus back to Capernaum. Remarking that they seek him because they ate their fill of the loaves, and are perhaps hoping for more free meals, Jesus admonishes them: “Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life …”

Commenting on this verse around the end of the fourth century, Saint Augustine of Hippo says this:

It is as if he said to them, “You seek me to satisfy the flesh, not the spirit.” How many seek Jesus for no other objective that to get some kind of temporal benefit! One has a business that has run into problems, and he seeks the intercession of the clergy; another is oppressed by someone more powerful than himself, and he flies to the church. Another desires intervention with someone over whom he has little influence. One person wants this, and another person wants that. The church is filled with these kinds of people! Jesus is scarcely sought after for his own sake … Here too he says, you seek me for something else; seek me for my own sake. He insinuates the truth that he himself is that food … “that endures to eternal life.”

Then, in response to the crowd’s request for a never-ending supply of what he’s just described as the true bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world, Jesus boldly declares: “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.”

Reflecting on this bold statement down through the centuries, the Church has discerned two ways in which Jesus is the Bread of Life: by Word and by Sacrament. 

Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus quotes the Book of Deuteronomy: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” But Jesus is himself the Word-made-flesh, and we feed on the Bread of his Word whenever we hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest his teachings.

In addition to feeding us with his Word, Jesus gives us his sacramental Body and Blood as food and drink for eternal life. Just as ordinary bread and wine sustain and nourish us for the life of this world, so the Body and Blood of Christ sustain and nourish us for the life of the world to come.

So, Jesus admonishes us, “Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life.” Now, does that mean that it’s wrong to ask God for things in this life that fall short of God himself? Despite what Augustine says in the passage that I just read, the answer is: Not necessarily.

In another commentary on today’s Gospel, Augustine’s near-contemporary Saint Ephrem of Syria offers another take on the question. He says this:

Our Lord made bread in plenty from just a little bread in the desert and changed water into wine at Cana. He first sought to accustom their mouths to his bread and his wine until the time would come for him to give them his blood as well as his body. He allowed them to taste a superabundance of transitory bread and wine, so that he might excite them to a superabundance of his living body and blood … He gave us lesser things to entice us to come and receive this supreme [gift] … These lesser realities of bread and wine … were pleasing to the mouth, whereas that of his body and blood is of benefit to the spirit. He enticed us with … things that are pleasing to the palate to attract us to that which vivifies the soul.

I find that image of the Lord enticing us by means of lesser gifts to desire the greater gifts too lovely for words. Many writers on the Christian spiritual life down through the centuries, such as St. John of the Cross, have also suggested that when God seems to be withdrawing the lesser gifts, such as the joys and consolations of the beginner’s life of prayer, it’s not because he’s punishing us but because he wants to draw us in deeper. Like the crowd in today’s Gospel, we want an unending supply of temporal loaves and fishes, but he wants to give us nothing less than himself—for he is the Bread of Life, and we who come to him shall not hunger, and we who believe in him shall never thirst.

ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEDICATION

Sunday, July 25, 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt

Today is the one day of the liturgical year when we celebrate the gift of this church building. Most Sundays, the building is the medium through which we direct our attention to higher things. When we look through a pair of binoculars or a telescope, our attention is usually not on the apparatus itself but on whatever we’re looking at through it. Similarly, the church building is a kind of lens through which we lift our hearts and minds to God in heaven. But today we step back, as it were, to give thanks for the architectural setting of our worship and devotion. 

In confirmation classes, I’ve often asked young people to define “church.” They usually say something like the place where we go to Mass on Sundays. That answer kicks off a discussion of the various meanings of the word—not just a building but also a parish community, and indeed the whole body of all Christians everywhere throughout the world, the Church Universal. It often comes as a new thought to them that we are the Church and the Church is us.

If there’s a danger of thinking of “church” solely as the building, however, we can also go too far in the opposite direction. I once attended a clergy gathering in which an earnest young evangelical curate voiced the opinion that the church building is—and I quote—“just a tool.” His argument was that so long as we’re doing the Church’s work, proclaiming the Gospel, and engaging in Christian mission, it doesn’t matter whether we meet in a cathedral, a storefront, a warehouse, or a gymnasium. He warned that congregations with beautiful churches often end up worshiping the building rather than God. I suppose he had a point. Yet it seems to me that he was overlooking at least three profound truths.

First, the consecration of a church really does make a difference. Today we commemorate the consecration of this building 114 years ago by Bishop John Scarborough on July 25, 1907. What was then the Manasquan Mission had been holding services at Margaret Oglesby’s Sandown estate in Sea Girt since 1901, and then in this building since its construction in the Spring of 1903. But according to ecclesiastical law, the building could only be consecrated once the construction loan was paid off and it was owned free and clear, which happened in December 1906. Mrs. Oglesby then wrote to Bishop Scarborough requesting that the dedication be scheduled for the following summer, during the height of the season, when worshipers and donors were most likely to be in town. And the rest is history.

A consecrated church can never be thought of in purely instrumental or utilitarian terms, as we might think of a civic auditorium or convention center. Before July 25, 1907, this building was really no more than an ecclesiastical meeting hall. But from that date, it was a church in the true sense of the word: a place set apart as holy ground and sacred space, where the God whom heaven and earth cannot contain has promised to make himself specially present and available to his people.

Second, there’s a deep and intimate relationship between a church building and a worshiping congregation. Over the years, the community shapes the building’s physical appearance—adding a stain glass window here or a statue there, and undertaking periodic renovation and remodeling projects. The parish history says that when this building was first constructed, the interior was “plain as plain.” But then the memorial gifts started coming in. So, gradually, the building’s physical characteristics came to reflect and express the very human stories of its people, their joys and heartbreaks.

Conversely, in subtle and subliminal ways, the building shapes the community. Because God has created us as embodied creatures and not as disembodied spirits, our material surroundings profoundly influence our spiritual lives. As we worship in a particular place over the years, its physical surroundings become a component of our identity, part of who we are. I submit that if the same community of people were to worship over the years in a different church building, their corporate character would be different—not necessarily worse or better, but different. So, it’s a reciprocal relationship: the community shapes the building; and the building shapes the community.

Third, the old canard that “the church is the people, not the building” misses the most profound point of all: namely, that the Church is a mystery. It cannot be reduced to any particular building or community. It’s greater than the sum of its parts. With Christ as its head, it comprises all Christians who’ve ever lived and all those yet to be born. The Church is not just a human institution or sociological movement, but a divine society, a supernatural organism.

Still, today’s liturgy celebrates the Universal Church’s physical embodiment in one particular place: this building. Here we encounter the incarnational principle of the Christian faith: just as the eternal Son of God came down from heaven and made himself present and available to us as the human being Jesus of Nazareth, so the invisible Church, the mystical Body of Christ, takes concrete expression not only in human communities and institutions, but also in material edifices such as cathedrals, churches, chapels, and shrines.

As embodied creatures, our way of knowing spiritual realities is sacramental. We encounter the infinite in and through the finite, the invisible in and through the visible. An ancient liturgical text associated with today’s celebration remarks that these visible buildings “are but the figures” of God’s true House of Prayer in heaven. Nonetheless, it’s precisely in and through these earthly figures that we’re able to catch glimpses of heaven itself.

So, a church building is not just a utilitarian meeting place, but a spiritual home to a living community of faith. A congregation without a church building is not unlike a family without a dwelling—that is, homeless: a condition of deprivation to be remedied at the first opportunity. (Contemporary experiments at “churches without walls” are the exceptions that prove this rule.)

The events of the past year-and-a-half have driven home the reality that the fullness of Christian worship requires gathering in-person, physically, in one place, together. For a period, remote participation by virtual technology was the best we could do; and it was a real blessing, certainly better than nothing. I hope we can continue to make it available for those who really cannot come to church. But it will always remain second-best to actually being here, in these physical surroundings, in the midst of this gathered community.

So today we give thanks for all the ways in which this church building—with its altars, windows, shrines, statues, and memorials—has shaped our lives. We recommit ourselves to its care and upkeep as a gift entrusted to our stewardship by those who’ve gone before us. We give thanks for the parish community that calls it home. Above all, we give thanks for our membership in the Church Universal, of which this building stands as the visible symbol in this time and place.

 PROPER 11, YEAR B

Sunday, July 18, 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N.J.

Jeremiah 23:1-6

Psalm 23

Ephesians 2:11-22

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

“And [Jesus] had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd ...”  I find that one of the most poignant sentences in the Gospels. Its two phrases are worth a bit of exploration in depth: “they were like sheep without a shepherd,” and “he had compassion on them.”

For the original readers of Mark’s Gospel, the phrase “sheep without a shepherd” would have had deep scriptural resonances. In the Book of Numbers, as the aged Moses contemplates his approaching death, he asks God “to appoint a man over the congregation who shall go out before them and come in before them, who shall lead them out and bring them in; that the congregation of the Lord may not be as sheep which have no shepherd.” In response, God appoints Joshua to be Moses’ successor.

Centuries later, the prophet Micaiah foretells the death of King Ahab in battle with the words: “I saw all Israel scattered upon the mountains, as sheep that have no shepherd; and the Lord said, ‘These have no master; let each return to his home in peace.’” In the Old Testament, then, the phrase “sheep without a shepherd” describes a leadership vacuum leaving the people vulnerable and helpless: a totally undesirable situation.

At this point in Saint Mark’s narrative, however, precisely this situation is facing God’s people. As we heard in last week’s Gospel, John the Baptist, a prophetic leader raised up by God, has just been beheaded by King Herod, who’s himself the very opposite of the kind of shepherd that the kings of Israel were meant to be. He resembles more those whom Jeremiah denounces in today’s Old Testament reading: “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!”

In this context, when Jesus comes ashore and sees a great crowd like sheep without a shepherd, he has compassion on them. The dictionary definition of compassion is “sympathetic concern or distress for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.” The English word comes from the Latin passio, suffering, with the prefix co, “with,” and so means “suffering together” or “suffering with.” Compassion involves imagining what it’s like to stand in the shoes of those who are in need or distress, so that we’re moved by an overwhelming desire to help them.

Even so, the English translation fails to capture the force of the verb in the Greek text rendered here as “he had compassion.” More literally, it says—Wait for this—that he was “moved in his bowels,” a phrase presupposing the ancient idea of the bowels as the seat of the deepest human emotions. This verb thus describes an almost physical, visceral, gut-wrenching reaction. A more idiomatic if slightly sanitized translation into contemporary English might be “his heart went out to them,” or “they broke his heart.”

Jesus himself uses this same verb in three of his parables. First is the parable of the Unforgiving Servant, where a king discovers that one of his servants owes him the astronomical sum of ten thousand talents. When the servant cannot pay, the king orders him sold into slavery along with his wife and children, and all his possessions to be sold as well. When the servant falls on his knees and begs for patience, the king “out of compassion” forgives the whole debt.

The second parable is the Prodigal Son, who takes his share of his father’s inheritance, and goes off to a far country where he wastes everything. After hitting rock bottom, he decides to return to his father’s house and offer his services as a hired hand since he considers himself no longer worthy to be called a son. But when the old man sees him far off, he’s filled with compassion, runs to embrace him, and orders the whole household to celebrate the Prodigal’s return with a great feast.

The third parable is the Good Samaritan. On the lonely winding road from Jerusalem down to Jericho, a traveler is attacked by robbers who beat him, strip him, take all his possessions and leave him by the roadside to die. A priest and a Levite, respected religious leaders, deliberately pass by on the other side of the road to avoid him. But then a Samaritan, a hated enemy of the Jewish people, comes along and has compassion on him. He binds the man’s wounds, sets him on his beast, and brings him to an inn to recover.

In all three parables, the one who has compassion—the master, the father, the Samaritan—stands as a figure of God. For compassion and mercy are among God’s chief characteristics.

Indeed, one of the classical heresies formally condemned by the early Church is the mistaken idea—but an idea that we unfortunately still often hear expressed today—that the God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath and vengeance, while the God of the New Testament is a God of love and forgiveness. Those tempted to believe this might consider that of the 43 occurrences of the Hebrew word for compassion in the Old Testament, in 29 instances—that is, about two thirds of the time—it’s used as a positive attribute of God. The God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are one and the same: a God merciful and compassionate.

And nowhere does the divine compassion shine forth more brightly than in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. And so, today’s Gospel concludes: “Wherever he came, in villages, city, or country, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and besought him that they might touch even the fringe of his garment; and as many as touched it were made well.”

As Christians, we’re called to follow Christ’s example. Compassion for the poor and needy, the sick and the dying, the homeless and prisoners, and migrants and refugees, is one of the classical Christian virtues. As Saint Paul writes in his Letter to the Colossians: “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience.”

Before we can effectively show compassion to those less fortunate than ourselves, however, we need to take on board how much God has already had compassion on us. Before we can assume the role of the forgiving master, the welcoming father, or the Good Samaritan, we need to recognize in ourselves the indebted servant, the prodigal son, the wounded man lying by the roadside.

The good news is that whenever we’re most tempted to feel abandoned, lost, and scattered, like sheep without a shepherd, Jesus sees us and has compassion. As God promises his people in today’s reading from Jeremiah, “‘I will set shepherds over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing,’ says the Lord.” And in that reassurance of God’s compassion for us, we find the strength and courage to reach out and share that same compassion with others.

PROPER 10, YEAR B

July 11, 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N.J.

Amos 7:7-15

Psalm 85:8-13

Ephesians 1:3-14

Mark 6:14-29

Today’s readings highlight the scriptural phenomenon of prophecy. Throughout the Bible, God raises up prophets to speak his Word and reveal his will, calling his people to faith and repentance.

Our Old Testament reading is taken from Amos, who’s not the first prophet named as such in the Bible—that distinction arguably goes to Eldad and Medad in the Book of Numbers—but biblical scholars do believe the Book of Amos to be the oldest of the prophetic books in the Old Testament, dating to the eighth century B.C.

And our Gospel reading recounts the death of John the Baptist, whom the Christian tradition reckons as the last of the Old Testament prophets (even though he’s not explicitly mentioned in the Old Testament itself). So, between Amos and John the Baptist, we span the career of Old Testament prophecy.

The Catholic Christian tradition also teaches, however, that the age of prophecy did not end with the closing of the biblical canon. Down through the centuries, God has raised up prophetic voices in every generation to bear witness to the truth of his Word and to extrapolate the Gospel’s implications for each new era’s challenges.

Within the last hundred years, for example, four figures come to my mind as authentic modern-day prophets: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian who courageously opposed Hitler in Nazi Germany and was hanged in Sachsenhausen concentration camp just as the war was ending; the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who led the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, and worked to end racial discrimination and segregation, all the while condemning violence and advocating nonviolent means of protest and resistance; Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, who spoke out on behalf of human rights for the poor and oppressed, and was shot dead while saying Mass in March 1980; and Desmond Tutu, the Anglican Archbishop of Capetown, whose activism helped end the apartheid regime in South Africa and pave the way for majority rule in 1994. 

So, there we have an ecumenical assortment: a Lutheran, a Baptist, a Roman Catholic, and an Anglican! We don’t have to agree with everything that they each said or did. None of them was infallible. (I certainly don’t agree with much of what Desmond Tutu has said about topics other than South Africa.) But we can still acknowledge all four of them as genuine prophetic voices raised up by God in our age. And there have been many others.

Now, at this point in the sermon, the great temptation would be for the preacher to exhort us to discern how God is calling us all to take our place in the Church’s prophetic ministry and find our own prophetic voices to denounce injustice and advocate for change in our own time and place. But I’m going to resist that temptation—because I think it’s a mistake. On the contrary, we’re probably not all called to be prophets. The Church, the Body of Christ, has room for many different callings, both lay and ordained, and prophetic witness on behalf of social justice is a ministry to which some but not all are called.

As Christians, however, we are all called to be alert, open, and attentive to the prophetic voices raised in our midst. Even if we don’t speak up ourselves, we need always to listen. Today’s Old Testament reading holds up the negative example of the priest Amaziah, who tries to silence Amos: “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah and eat bread there, and prophesy there, but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.” When a genuine prophet comes into our midst, Amaziah shows us how not to respond!

More tragically ambiguous is King Herod in today’s Gospel. When John the Baptist rebukes him for marrying his brother’s wife—a clear violation of the Jewish Law—he has John arrested and put in prison. But he intends John’s imprisonment as a kind of protective custody because his wife Herodias wants John dead. And so, Mark writes, “Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and kept him safe. When he heard him, he as much perplexed; and yet he heard him gladly.” For all Herod’s faults, there’s something worthy of admiration there. When God sends a genuine prophet into our midst, we may find what that prophet says perplexing and even disturbing. But we do well to give the prophet an extended hearing, being quick to listen and slow to judge. (Unfortunately, however, Herod puts himself in a position where he can be manipulated into having John beheaded anyway.)

The further question is how to distinguish between true and false prophets. For in addition to the authentic prophetic voices I mentioned earlier, we can probably all call to mind deceivers who’ve led their followers astray with often catastrophic results. Think, for starters, of Jim Jones, who orchestrated the Jonestown mass suicide in Guyana in 1978, with the loss of over 900 lives.

Well, it so happens that down through the centuries, the Catholic tradition has developed guidelines for discerning the truth or falsity of claimed revelations, visions, and prophecies. 

One key test is whether the would-be prophet stands to gain anything personally from his words and actions. When the priest Amaziah tells Amos to go back to Judah and eat bread there, he’s insinuating that prophesying is Amos’s way of making a living and enriching himself. And Amos is quick to disavow being any kind of prophet-by-trade: “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees …” We get the sense that Amos would much rather be back at home working the farm. Nevertheless, this is something he’s constrained to do: “The Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go prophesy to my people Israel.’”

Another sign of authenticity is that the prophet doesn’t necessarily tell people what they want to hear. Neither Amos nor John the Baptist are seeking popularity by flattering their audiences. On the contrary, they know that their witness will be costly and will require great sacrifices. Genuine prophets willing to die fulfilling their mission, and indeed often do.

The decisive test, however, is that the prophet’s words and actions are consistent with God’s Word as already revealed in Scripture. This is certainly true of the prophets in the Bible itself, from Amos to John the Baptist, and it continues to be true down to the present day.

Scripture, as understood and interpreted by the Catholic tradition, supplies the standard by which we assess and evaluate messages delivered by those claimed to be prophets in our time. As Saint Paul writes in today’s reading from his Letter to the Ephesians, “God has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will.” So, in the end, we take our stand with the Psalmist, who declares with joy: “I will listen to what the Lord God is saying, for he is speaking peace to his faithful people, and to those who turn their hearts to him.”

PROPER 9, YEAR B

Sunday, July 4, 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N.J.

Ezekiel 2:1-5

II Corinthians 12:2-10

Mark 6:1-13

On this Independence Day, it seems appropriate to reflect on the nature of human freedom. The Fourth of July means a great deal to me personally, because I’m not a native-born American. Instead, when I was twenty years old, I was naturalized as a United States citizen. That choice was an exercise of my freedom to embrace the ideals of liberty, civil rights, constitutional government, and the rule of law that this country stands for. And I’ve never once regretted that decision.

Our Catholic Christian tradition affirms that God created us with free will, the ability to make basic decisions about how to live our lives, including the crucial decision between good and evil: whether to live in accordance with or in rebellion against God’s laws. The readings appointed for today afford penetrating insights into this mystery of human freedom.

The prophet Ezekiel receives the commission to declare the Word of the Lord to a nation that has misused its freedom: “I have sent you,” God declares, “to the people of Israel, to a nation of rebels, who have rebelled against me.” Nonetheless, God respects their freedom. Ezekiel’s mission is not to coerce Israel into obedience but to offer the opportunity to repent. Either way, the choice is theirs: “whether they hear or refuse to hear, they will know that there has been a prophet among them.”

Today’s Gospel sets forth the same divine respect for human freedom. When the people of his hometown Nazareth reject him, Jesus simply remarks that “a prophet is not without honor except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own home.” While marveling at their unbelief, he refrains from performing signs and wonders that would overawe them into submission, much less anything vindictive like calling down fire from heaven to consume them.

Subsequently, when Jesus sends the Twelve Apostles out two-by-two on their mission to Israel’s towns and villages, he instructs them, in effect, to respect the freedom of those whom they visit. If any place will not receive them and refuses to hear them, they’re to confine their response to shaking off the dust of that town from their feet as they depart. 

Again, in today’s Epistle reading, Saint Paul simply accepts the consequences of people’s rejection of his apostolic mission and preaching. “For the sake of Christ,” he writes, “I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities …” 

The common theme running through these readings is that God never forces himself on us. He always respects our freedom—even when we misuse that freedom to reject him, or his Word, or his will for our lives.

Freedom is one of God’s greatest gifts to us. Lest I give the wrong impression, I hasten to add that it’s never an end-in-itself, but always the means to the far greater end of allowing us to make choices that are in our true best interests by contributing to our objective good and our eternal salvation.

The purpose of seeking to remove political bonds of servitude and oppression, as the Founding Fathers of this country did in 1776, is never to set us free to do whatever we want regardless of the consequences, but always to work for the common good in this world, in preparation for eternal blessedness in the next.

The Collect “For the Nation” in the Prayer Book expresses this idea by asking that we may “use our liberty in accordance with God’s gracious will.” The Collect for Peace, traditionally said every day at Morning Prayer, goes one step further, addressing God as the one “whose service is perfect freedom.” And that really expresses the Christian ideal: the goal of freedom is always to fulfill our true purpose in the service of God and not of self—or of any of the other false gods we set up for ourselves in God’s place.

Today’s Scripture readings challenge us to reflect on how well we’ve been using our freedom, for good or for ill, and to resolve to do so in ways that contribute to the common good as well as to our own eternal good. That’s admittedly a tall order. But, as Saint Augustine of Hippo said repeatedly in his Confessions, written towards the end of the fourth century, we rely on God to give what God requires. His refrain there was: “Command what you will, O Lord, and give what you command.”

In today’s Old Testament reading, Ezekiel is not expected to fulfill his difficult prophetic mission on his own strength alone. Instead, as he testifies, “The Spirit entered into me and set me on my feet.” 

In the Epistle reading, Paul writes of his mysterious “thorn in the flesh”—which generations of biblical scholars have spilled gallons of ink proposing various theories to explain, some more outlandish than others. His real point, nonetheless, is that human frailty opens the door to God’s strength: “I will all the more gladly boast of my weakness, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

The mission of the Twelve to the towns and villages of Israel in today’s Gospel meets with success: “So they went out and preached that [all] should repent. And they cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many that were sick and healed them …” 

All these scriptural texts testify to the power of God’s Spirit at work in human life. So, as we celebrate our National Independence today and tomorrow, we do well to remember that it’s by giving ourselves to God’s service, and relying on his strength to accomplish in and through us what we could never achieve on our own, that we find the perfection of our God-given freedom.