THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT: YEAR A

March 12, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Exodus 17:1-7

Psalm 95

Romans 5:1-11

John 4:5-26, 39-42

 

The image running throughout today’s readings is that of water: a necessity of human life. We human beings can go without food for several weeks before we starve to death. But without water to drink we die of thirst within a few days. Human survival depends on the availability of water to drink.

 

Today’s Old Testament reading [and Psalm] recalls a crisis occasioned by the lack of water. This part of the Book of Exodus tells of the wanderings of the Hebrews led by Moses into the desert after their escape from Egypt. 

 

At one point the Hebrews come to a place called Rephidim, where there’s no water. The people start grumbling against Moses: “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?” 

 

This moment represents a crisis not merely of physical thirst but also of faith. Just a short time earlier, God liberated the Israelites from captivity in Egypt by opening a path through the Sea. But even after this miraculous escape, the Hebrews are doubting that the same Lord who delivered them from dying at the Egyptians’ hands can also deliver them from dying of thirst in the wilderness.

 

Moses cries out to the Lord, “What am I going to do? These people are ready to stone me.” In response, the Lord tells Moses to go before the people to the rock at a place called Horeb, and strike it with his rod. When Moses does so, water comes gushing out of the rock, and the people drink.

 

This provision of water in the desert solves two problems at once. At the physical level, the people are saved from dehydration and death. And at the spiritual level, God reaffirms his continuing presence and commitment to provide for his people wherever they go.  So, the stream of water gushing from the rock of Horeb becomes a sign: not only of survival and life, but also of God’s providence and care.

 

In the Gospel reading, the image of water bears the same kind of double meaning. Jesus is traveling through Samaria. Wearied with his journey, he sits down by a well. A Samaritan woman comes to draw water. So, tired and thirsty as he is, Jesus asks her for a drink. 

 

But when she questions how it is that he, a Jew, is crossing all kinds of national, religious, and ethnic boundaries by asking her, a Samaritan, for a drink of water, he takes the conversation to a whole new level. “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

 

What follows is one of those wonderful dialogues of double meaning so typical of John’s Gospel in which someone totally misunderstands what Jesus is saying because they’re using the same words in completely different ways. In ancient Palestine, “living water” meant the kind of water you get from a spring or a running stream: fresh, clear water that flows, gurgles, and bubbles: not like the murky still water that stagnates in wells and cisterns.

 

When Jesus tells the woman that he can give her living water, it sounds like a pleasant alternative to what’s in the well. “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.” She’s probably being sarcastic, doubting that Jesus can give her any such water, just as the Hebrews once doubted that God could provide water in a barren desert.

 

But Jesus isn’t speaking of literal water. Pointing at the well, he says, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

 

Although the Samaritan woman doesn’t get it, Jesus is speaking of a spiritual gift that only he can give. The point is that, whether we realize it or not, just as our bodies thirst for water, so our spirits thirst for God. And Jesus is saying that he’s come to offer us a new relationship with the God who alone can quench our deepest thirst of our souls. 

 

In today’s epistle reading Saint Paul says, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.” Here Saint Paul likens God’s love to a stream of water poured out into the parched interior landscape of our souls to make us blossom and flourish.

 

Both Jesus and Saint Paul are using the image of water to describe the gift of the Holy Spirit. Just as Moses gave the Israelites water flowing from the rock, so Jesus gives us flowing rivers of grace and peace. And just as physical water sustains the biological life of our bodies, so God’s Spirit imparts eternal life to our souls.

 

After this woman’s encounter with Jesus, many Samaritans in the city come to believe in Jesus on account of her testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” Clearly, she did receive the living water that Jesus was offering her. Earlier on, she doubted Jesus, just as the Israelites doubted Moses in the wilderness. But just as the Israelites ended up drinking water from the rock, so the Samaritan woman and her neighbors ended up drinking of God’s Spirit.

 

At those times in our lives when we feel spiritually dry and arid, we may even feel abandoned by God and tempted to doubt him. Then, more than ever, we do well to remember the Israelites in the wilderness, and the Samaritan woman at the well. Despite their doubts, questions, and fears, they received what they needed in the end. Likewise, we may trust God in Christ to quench our spiritual thirst with springs of living water welling up to eternal life.

SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT, YEAR A

March 5, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Genesis 12:1-4a

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

John 3:1-17

 

Some versions of Christianity have been criticized for making salvation too easy. Simply profess your faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior and you’re guaranteed a place in heaven. And I suppose that if faith is reduced to canned formulas – however sincerely recited – the criticism has some merit. But today’s readings offer us a picture of faith that’s so much more challenging and exciting than that.

 

In the epistle, the Apostle Paul holds up the Patriarch Abraham as the model of faith: “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” We’ve already encountered Abraham in the Old Testament reading from Genesis, when he was still known by his original name of Abram.

 

Contemporary readers are apt to miss the profoundly shocking quality of God’s call to Abram: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation …”

In the Ancient Near East, respectable deities didn’t do things like that. The gods and goddesses of Egypt and Mesopotamia were conservative upholders of the social and political status quo. Such societies held a place for everyone, and everyone knew their place. Kings were kings, nobles were nobles, artisans were artisans, merchants were merchants, and slaves were slaves – because the gods said so. You were born, lived, and died in your appointed station in life all according to divine decree.

 

Against this background, God’s call to Abram represented an unheard-of upheaval of the settled social universe. Abram was called to leave behind all those things that gave people in the ancient world their deepest sense of belonging and identity: “country and kindred and father’s house.” Moreover, God’s promise to make a no-account upstart like Abram into a great nation, a blessing to all the families of the earth, likely seemed downright subversive and revolutionary.

 

Abram’s faith can be fully appreciated only in relation to this radical disruption of everything that has given his world order and stability. He leaves it all behind to venture forth into an unknown future based solely on trust in God’s promise. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann writes that the three most shocking words in the Old Testament are those in our first reading today: “So Abram went …”

Thus begins the journey of faith. Christian theology has long made a distinction between two equally valid and necessary types of faith, faith-as-belief and faith-as-trust. Faith-as-belief entails intellectual assent to the teachings that the Church proposes to us as true. But faith-as-trust is more relational, implying a personal relationship with the God in whom we believe.

 

British theologian Alister McGrath distinguishes two more types of faith, which he describes as faith-as-commitment and faith-as-obedience. All these images of faith – belief, trust, commitment, and obedience – help us to understand the fullness of what faith really involves. But as I reflect on the story of Abram, what comes to my mind is a fifth image, namely faith as adventure.

 

In the Book of Genesis, the story of Abram’s life unfolds as a series of adventures that begin with his response to God’s call. An adventure, after all, is a journey into the unknown: evoking excitement and exhilaration, on one hand; fear and trembling, on the other.

 

It’s long seemed to me that an essential aspect of Christian faith, of following Jesus, is precisely this sense of adventure—of being called out on a journey into an unknown future in which we let go of the pretense of being in control of our lives and entrust ourselves to the care of a God who leads us literally God knows where.

 

In today’s Gospel, Nicodemus is called to a similar adventure of faith. This Pharisee and ruler of the people approaches Jesus under cover of darkness for a bit of discreet theological dialogue. His opening address seems sincerely polite and respectful: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no-one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.”

 

But those words represent an attempt to pigeonhole Jesus, to fit him into the ready-made categories and definitions of Nicodemus’s pre-existing worldview. In response, Jesus takes Nicodemus on a roller coaster ride of startling new ideas and images: new birth, the Spirit blowing where it wills, a serpent lifted up in the wilderness.

 

Nicodemus is left dizzy, befuddled, bemused, and confused. He’s a teacher of Israel and yet he does not understand these things. He began by acknowledging Jesus as a teacher come from God; but Jesus ends by describing himself as so much more than Nicodemus ever imagined: the Son of God sent into the world to bestow eternal life on all who believe in him.

 

Nicodemus is thus called to leave behind the settled pattern of assumptions, beliefs, and values that has given his life order and meaning. The evidence in the rest of John’s Gospel indicates that Nicodemus does in fact become a disciple. And so, perhaps in that nighttime encounter Nicodemus takes the first steps on his journey into the unknown, into his own adventure of faith.

 

I remember my own first sense of being summoned to this adventure. In my early twenties, when I was a graduate student in Washington DC, a friend invited me to the local Episcopal Church, and I went. Having grown up as an agnostic in a non-churchgoing family, I hadn’t been to a Sunday morning church service in years. And against all expectations I found myself profoundly moved by the liturgy, though I couldn’t really say why. 

 

Later that afternoon, as I was remembering my experience that morning, I felt a strong desire to return to that church the following week. Combined with this powerful sense of attraction was an equally clear feeling of trepidation borne of the intuition that I’d brushed into into contact with a reality over which I had no control, but which certainly had the power to change my life and take it in directions I didn’t know and might not want. (Little did I know!) Despite these misgivings, I did return the following Sunday, and so began a journey that continues to this day.

 

We mistake the nature of faith if we think that it’s all the comfort of settled convictions and established certainties in a well-ordered and predictable universe. Yes, faith does involve assent to the truths that God has revealed in Scripture and entrusted to the teaching and preaching of his Church. But it’s also a journey that is simultaneously exciting, fascinating, unsettling, risky, and sometimes downright scary – yet always rewarding and totally worthwhile. In today’s readings, then, Abram and Nicodemus offer two glimpses of this quality of faith as adventure.

FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT, YEAR A

February 26, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

 

Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-17, 25-3:7

Romans 5:12-21

Matthew 4:1-11

 

One aspect of the biblical mindset that may seem strange to us today is what’s been called the idea of corporate personality. Saint Paul presupposes this idea in his Letter to the Romans: “For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.”

 

Again and again, throughout Scripture, the biblical writers use the same one name to refer both to an individual person and to the collective group of people represented by that individual. A case in point is the name “Israel,” which designates both a specific individual—the son of Isaac, the son of Abraham—and the entire nation descended that individual’s twelve sons, the Twelve Tribes of Israel. In the Bible, then, Israel is both one and many.

 

Likewise, Saint Paul uses the name “Adam” to refer both to the first parent of all humanity and all of us who’re descended from him. In the fifteenth chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall be made alive.” In Paul’s mind, then, it wasn’t only Adam who sinned in the beginning. We’re all implicated in his disobedience. He sinned in us, we sinned in him, and we’ve inherited and are still living with the consequences of his sin.

 

We don’t need to read the Genesis story literally to recognize the fundamental truth of Paul’s insight. In the original Hebrew, the name “Adam” means something like “humankind” or “humanity.” The biblical account of the Fall accurately describes the human predicament by means of these symbolic figures of Adam and Eve. We’ve collectively disobeyed God and, more than anything else, we need to be reconciled to God and to one another.

 

Conversely, Paul describes Jesus Christ as the new Adam, the progenitor of a new humanity reconciled and restored to communion with God. Unlike Adam and Eve, we have reliable evidence that Jesus of Nazareth actually existed as a historical person. But, here again, in Paul’s thought Christ is also a representative figure: someone who accomplishes in us what we can’t accomplish by ourselves. So, when we’re united to Christ in Holy Baptism, we come to share in his righteousness, and we’re brought into his right relationship with God his Father in heaven.

 

This fluidity and interchangeability between the one and the many in the biblical thought-world may seem strange to our modern western individualistic mindset. But think of how we talk about our sports teams. When the Eagles win a football game, we often say, “we won,” rather than “they won.” In a very real sense, the team plays and wins as a representative body, so that all Eagles fans everywhere share in their victory. (Admittedly, though, when our favorite team loses, we’re more likely to say, “they lost,” than “we lost”—which speaks volumes about our fallen human condition.)

 

If this can be true of a football team, how much more true it is of Christ! On the cross he offers the one, full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice that reconciles fallen humanity to God. He does so not so much as our substitute as our representative. He catches us up into his self-offering; he dies in us, and we die in him. And then, on Easter morning, he rises from the dead, again as our representative, so we share in his victory over sin and death. Such is the clear teaching of the New Testament.

 

Christ’s Temptation in the wilderness, recounted every year on the First Sunday in Lent, is best understood in light of this notion of corporate personality. In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us the words, “Lead us not into temptation.” Paradoxically, after his baptism Jesus is led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to fast forty days before being tempted by Satan. That is, he's led into the very situation he teaches us to pray that we might be spared.

 

The reason is not that he needs to be tempted for his own sake, as if somehow to establish his worthiness to undertake his earthly mission. Instead, he undergoes these temptations for our sakes, as our representative. By his obedience, he reverses and undoes Adam’s disobedience. The well-known hymn, “O love how deep, how broad, how high,” attributed to Saint Thomas à Kempis, puts it well:

 

For us baptized, for us he bore 

His holy fast and hungered sore;

For us temptation sharp he knew,  

For us the tempter overthrew.

 

Going out into the wilderness, moreover, Jesus is figuratively returning to the place where the Israelites sinned against God by grumbling and complaining during their forty years of wandering on the way from Egypt to the Promised Land. Resisting the devil’s temptations with aptly chosen quotations from the Torah he reverses Israel’s disobedience. Here again, the idea of corporate personality comes into play: Christ is the representative person who fulfills Israel’s vocation to faithfulness and obedience—just as God chose Israel to be the representative nation that would fulfill humanity’s vocation to love and serve God.

 

Down through the centuries, biblical commentators have offered various interpretations of the devil’s three temptations. One interpretation that I find particularly helpful is that they’re enticements to forsake trust in God and to try to solve all of humanity’s problems by the exercise of three types of power: economic, religious, and political.

 

“If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” This is the temptation of economic power. Master nature, and build up your support base by giving the masses bread. “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from the pinnacle of the Temple so that his angels will catch you.” This is the temptation of religious power. Manipulate God’s people into following you by miraculous signs and wonders. “All the kingdoms of the earth and their glory I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” This is the temptation of political power—of the kind that comes from selling your soul to the devil. 

 

In all three cases, the temptation is to use the type of power in question for a specifically human agenda divorced from God’s will. And in all three cases, the remedy is trust in God, obedience to God’s commandments, and the sacrifice of human self-will in surrender to God’s will.

 

By undergoing and resisting these temptations on our behalf, Jesus makes it possible for us to resist these same temptations ourselves. In a mysterious but profoundly real way, we’ve already undergone and resisted these temptations in him, and he’s undergone and resisted them in us. The good news is that Christ has definitively won the human struggle against diabolical temptation on our behalf. All we need is to claim and live into his victory, which is what this season of Lent is really all about.

ASH WEDNESDAY

February 22, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 
“Remember that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.” With these words, ashes are marked on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday, one of the Church Year’s two principal Fasting Days (the other being Good Friday). The ashes serve as outward signs of our repentance and our commitment to keeping a good Lent, marked by acts of penitence and self-denial; of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
 

“Remember that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.” These words hark back to God’s words to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in the third chapter of Genesis. There, after the serpent successfully tempts Adam and Eve to disobey God and eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree, God pronounces three curses: first upon the serpent, then upon the earth, and finally upon the first parents themselves.

 

To Adam in particular, God declares: “Because you have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it’ … cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life … In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground; for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

 

We don’t need to read the Genesis creation story literally to appreciate its profound theological truth. Somehow, something has gone terribly wrong with us and with our world. War in Ukraine, earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, catastrophic weather resulting from human-induced global warming.

 

None of this is God’s fault. God didn’t intend his creation to be this way. But human disobedience and rebellion have brought all this about. We’ve been cast out of paradise and have incurred a death sentence: “you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

 

On Ash Wednesday, the priest has the unenviable duty of re-pronouncing this ancient curse on the faithful who come forward to receive their ashes. The traditional formula is actually, “Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return.” Here, the word “man” really means “human being,” and signifies our common descent from Adam, to whom these words were first spoken. In the original Hebrew, moreover, the name Adam is derived from adamah, which means “ground” or “earth,” reminding us that in the beginning God formed the first man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, so that he became a living being. 

 

The crucial point is that Adam’s death is not part of a natural cycle but rather the consequence of his rebellion and fall; the words accompanying the imposition of ashes mean not merely, “You’re going to die,” but, more specifically, “You’re going to die because of your sin”—the sin, that is, in which we all share as members of a fallen human race living in a fallen world.

 

So, the first point to get clear about our ashen crosses is that they’re markers not only of fasting and repentance, but also of sin and guilt, of mortality and death. Now, if that were the end of the story, we could only despair. It’s not the end of the story, of course, but our first need is to recognize the truth of our situation so that we can dispose ourselves to receive God’s forgiveness, grace, and healing. And that really is the point of today’s liturgy: to accept in all humility the truth of who we are apart from God. The word “humility” derives from the Latin humus, earth. We’re from the earth, condemned to return to the dust whence we came.

 

These first words of our Lenten journey are, however, by no means the last. In fifteenth chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul writes explicitly of the contrast between the first Adam and the second Adam, that is, Jesus Christ: “The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.” 

 

It’s a remarkable passage. “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.” In a few minutes, we shall receive a cross of ash upon our foreheads, signifying our membership in Adam, the man of dust. But at our baptism we received another cross on our foreheads, not of ashes but of the oil of chrism, and the words then spoken were: “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.” The cross of chrismation thus signifies our membership in Christ, the man from heaven.

 

So, these two signings of the cross point to our two identities: who we are in Adam, and who we are in Christ. On one hand: “Thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” On the other hand: “Thou art sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.” Our baptism carries the promise that even after we return to the dust, after the pattern of Adam, so there awaits us the glory of resurrection and eternal life, after the pattern of Christ.

 

Today, on Ash Wednesday, we acknowledge our old identity in Adam, the man of dust. But in forty days’ time we shall conclude this season of Lent at the Great Vigil of Easter by blessing the waters and renewing our baptismal vows in celebration of the Lord’s Resurrection. In between, the Church invites us to undertake a journey of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving to reclaim and live into our new identity in Christ, the man from heaven. God has given us the desire to be here now at the starting point; pray that he will likewise grant us the grace of perseverance to finish the course that we begin today.

LAST SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY, YEAR A

February 19, 2023

Christ Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Exodus 24:12-18

Matthew 17:1-9

 

One of the perennial questions of religion and philosophy concerns how we can know God. Some thinkers argue that since God is infinite, we simply cannot know God as he is in himself. For God infinitely surpasses our finite human understanding.

 

From this premise it follows that all our names and images for God are arbitrary symbols or metaphors that fall infinitely short of the divine reality they purport to describe. Some people draw the implication that no one religion can get us any closer to God’s inexhaustible mystery than any other, because all religious teachings are at bottom futile attempts to describe the indescribable. Others draw the further implication that if we find the received images and language for God unhelpful, we’re free to change them to make them more consonant with our own experience because, after all, they’re only arbitrary metaphors. God can only be known, if at all, in a mystical experience of silence and emptiness beyond all words and images.

 

Now, while I do believe that many mystics are blessed with real experiences of the divine, nonetheless I think that the approach to God that I’ve just described is fundamentally mistaken and misses the point on a grand scale. C. S. Lewis once remarked that talking about the human search for God is like talking about the mouse’s search for the cat. It gets things the wrong way round completely.

 

For knowledge of a God who transcends all our capacities of understanding can never come as our own achievement, but only when this God chooses to reveal himself to us. And the fundamental premise of traditional western monotheistic religion is that the unknown and unknowable God has indeed condescended to make himself known to us in a way accommodated to our limited cognitive capacities.

 

Today’s scripture readings illustrate how God makes himself known. The holy God of Israel reveals himself, first, in the Old Testament reading to Moses and the Israelites on Mount Sinai and, then, in the Gospel reading, to the disciples Peter, James, and John on the Mount of the Transfiguration.

 

When we were children, we may have learned the mnemonic “Stop, look, and listen.” Or perhaps: “Stop, look, listen, learn.” 

Stop. In both our readings today, God’s self-revelation follows a pause in people’s regular activities. The Israelites stop at the foot of Mount Sinai; and God bids Moses come up on the mountain and wait. Similarly, Jesus interrupts his journey to Jerusalem to take the disciples Peter, James, and John up a high mountain apart—traditionally identified as Mount Tabor in southern Galilee. In a similar way, we need periodically to stop whatever we’re doing to give God the time and space to make his presence known to us.

 

Look. In both instances, there follows a vision of God’s presence and glory. A cloud covers Mount Sinai, and the glory of the Lord appears “like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel.” Similarly, on Mount Tabor, Jesus is transfigured with the of divine glory in the presence of the three disciples. His face shines like the sun; his garments become white as light; Moses and Elijah, two of the great figures from Israel’s sacred history, appear talking with him; and a bright cloud overshadows them all.

 

In both cases, the supernatural phenomena of cloud, light, and fire function as the visual manifestation of God’s presence, known in Hebrew as kabod, in Greek as doxa, in English as glory. The larger point is that we begin to know God when God reveals his presence at particular times in particular places. It may not happen as dramatically as in these two readings, but I suspect that most of us remember times when we could feel God’s presence, and we knew that he was near.

 

But in both readings, the revelation doesn’t end with the visual. In the Bible, God never shows up just to give people meaningful spiritual experiences. Instead, he invariably makes his presence known to get our attention because he’s got something to say. So, after we stop and look, it’s time to listen.

 

On Mount Sinai, the fire and the cloud are the prelude to the gift of God’s law, given through Moses to the children of Israel inscribed on two stone tablets. Likewise, in the Gospel reading, the vision culminates in the voice speaking from the cloud: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.” In both cases, it’s as though God is saying, “Now I’ve got your attention: Listen up!” The revelation of God’s glory prepares us to hear and receive God’s Word. And therein lies a challenge for us. We need to come to church, say our prayers, and read our Bibles in the lively expectation that God has something to say to us. And we need to keep our ears open to hear God’s Word in our world today.

 

But even hearing God’s Word isn’t the end. For the Israelites encamped at the foot of Mount Sinai, the giving of the Law isn’t the conclusion of their journey but only the beginning. The long, forty-year pilgrimage to the Promised Land lies ahead. Similarly, for the disciples, the Lord’s Transfiguration isn’t the end but only the beginning of their journey. For they’re on the road to Jerusalem, where there awaits the Lord’s betrayal, arrest, condemnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. For this reason, we commemorate the Transfiguration on the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, as we prepare to begin our liturgical and spiritual journey through the Season of Lent towards Holy Week and Easter. 

 

So, to return to our original question: We come to know God most of all when we respond in faith and obedience by following where he leads. It’s a dynamic process in which God always takes the initiative, but in which we also have our own definite role to play. 

 

Stop, Look, Listen, Learn. Then follow. And when the going gets tough, those initial moments of epiphany or transfiguration give us the assurance we need to persevere by affording us a glimpse and a foretaste of the glory that awaits us at our journey’s end.

SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY

February 12, 2023

Christ Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Ecclesiasticus 15:11-20

Psalm 119:9-16

I Corinthians 3:1-9

Matthew 5:21-24, 27-20, 33-37

 

Today’s appointed Scripture readings invite us to reflect on the place of God’s commandments in our individual lives and in our life together as the Church. The Collect of the Day asks that in keeping God’s commandments we may please him in both will and deed. The Old Testament reading from Ecclesiasticus affirms that God has created us with the ability to keep his commandments if we choose to do so. Psalm 119 sings of God’s commandments as a source of joy: “I have taken greater delight in the way of your decrees than in all manner of riches.”

 

In today’s reading from the Sermon on the Mount in St. Matthew’s Gospel, moreover, Jesus gives us his unique interpretation of God’s commandments. He repeats the formula, “You have heard that it was said to the men of old … But I say to you …”

 

These sayings have traditionally been called the “antitheses,” contrasting the old teaching of the Jewish Law with his new teaching: “You have heard that it was said … ‘You shall not kill …’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment … You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart… Again you have heard that it was said… ‘You shall not swear falsely …’ But I say to you, ‘Do not swear at all …”

 

The Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine argues that it’s more accurate to call these sayings “extensions” than antitheses. Jesus is neither contradicting nor negating the earlier commandments, but rather hedging them about with even stricter prohibitions. She points out that the true antithesis to “You shall not kill” is not “Refrain from anger,” but “Lock and load.”

 

Levine further suggests that here Jesus is engaging in the rabbinical practice of the time known as “building a fence around the Torah.” That is, the best way to avoid breaking a big commandment is to avoid the little infractions that can lead up to it. For someone with an alcohol problem, for example, it’s more effective to avoid that first drink rather than to try to figure out whether you’ve had enough after two or three. In the same way, it’s best not to take that first step down the slippery slope towards murder or adultery by willfully indulging feelings of anger or lust. Just don’t go there, Jesus is saying, and you probably won’t get there.

 

Easier said than done! Down through the centuries, Christian ethicists and teachers of moral theology have struggled with the seemingly impossible idealism of what our Lord teaches here. After all, most of us manage to refrain from murder, adultery, and perjury most of the time. But how realistic is it to expect everyone to remain innocent of those occasional angry or lustful thoughts? How does the prohibition on killing apply to members of the armed forces whom we may ask to kill enemy combatants on our behalf in a just war? And doesn’t the prohibition on oaths undermine the entire fabric of our financial and legal systems which rely on signed contracts, sworn testimony, affidavits, and the like?

 

The Church proposed different solutions to this problem at various times in its history. The medieval Western Catholic Church maintained what was in effect a double standard by which the highest ideals of the Sermon on the Mount were held to apply to monks and nuns who had taken the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but not to ordinary Christians living in the world. Vowed religious were called to lives of genuine holiness; for the rest of us it would do to obey the Ten Commandments, come to Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation, and make our confession at least once a year before receiving Communion at Easter. In this way, we could just about make it into heaven if only by the skin of our teeth.

 

At the time of the sixteenth century Reformation, Martin Luther argued that the Sermon on the Mount’s main purpose was to convict us of our sinful condition by setting before us standards so unattainable that we’d realize that we can only be saved by casting ourselves on God’s mercy and accepting in faith the forgiveness Christ has obtained for us by his sacrifice on the cross. The twentieth century American theological ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr suggested that the Sermon on the Mount constitutes an “impossible ideal” that nonetheless has the value of spurring us on to ever-greater moral and spiritual effort even though its perfect fulfillment always remains just beyond our grasp in this life.

 

Rather than a double standard or impossible ideal, however, I’d like to propose that the Sermon on the Mount represents the goal or end point that we can spend our entire lifetimes growing into. The decisive clue in today’s readings comes in the passage from First Corinthians where Saint Paul speaks of Christian maturity as a process of development. He writes that as yet he can address his readers only as babes in Christ: “I fed you with milk, not solid food; for you were not ready for it; and even yet you are not ready …” The good news comes at the end, where, after pointing out some of the community’s very real failures and shortcomings, Paul nonetheless concludes: “you are God’s field, God’s building.”

 

The promise conveyed in these words is that the field will yet bear fruit, and the building’s construction will yet be completed. Think about that promise in relation to this parish community of Christ Church, Woodbury. We are God’s field, God’s building: a work in progress, and God isn’t finished with us yet!

 

To return to the beginning, today’s Collect reminds us that God is the strength of all who put their trust in him, and because of the weakness of our mortal nature we can do nothing good without him. Nonetheless, with the help of his grace we can please him both in will and deed by keeping his commandments.

 

“In will and deed.” Notice that’s exactly what Jesus is talking about in today’s Gospel: not just doing what’s right in our outward actions, but also willing the good in our inmost hearts. So, by the movement of the Holy Spirit, our Lord is gradually refashioning us into the very people he describes in his Sermon on the Mount. All we need to do is yield to his grace, and go with it!

FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY, YEAR A

February 5, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Habakkuk 3:2-6, 17-19

Psalm 27

I Corinthians 2:1-11

Matthew 5:13-20

 

The readings, prayers, and hymns during this season after the Epiphany emphasize the manifestation or showing forth of God’s light and glory, his power and wisdom. In today’s Old Testament reading, the prophet Habakkuk describes a wondrous vision of the Lord’s appearance from the East: “God came from Teman, and the Holy One from Mount Paran. His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise.” The psalmist likewise sings of God’s glory: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear?”

 

But interspersed with these glimpses of glory are also moments when the divine light becomes hidden and obscured. So, after joyfully exclaiming, “His brightness was like the light, rays flashed from his hand,” Habakkuk makes an abrupt turnaround: “and there he veiled his power.” The prophet goes on to describe a time of plague and pestilence, of a shaking of the earth, and a leveling of the mountains and hills.

 

So, we encounter a pattern of first the showing forth and then the veiling and darkening of God’s light and glory. Writers on the Christian spiritual life often describe this alternation between periods of light and darkness as one progresses in the way of prayer. It can be very upsetting and unsettling to move from the light into the darkness, although it may be necessary for our continued growth in faith, hope, and love. So, the psalmist sings of his desire to behold the fair beauty of the Lord, and pleads in verse 10: “O hide not thy face from me, nor cast thy servant away in displeasure.”

 

In his First letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul takes this image of the hiddenness of God’s wisdom and power to a deeper level. He writes of imparting a wisdom not of this age or of the rulers of this age, but a secret and hidden wisdom of God. “None of the rulers of this age understood this,” he writes, “for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” In other words, those who crucified Jesus couldn’t see his glory, which remained veiled from their sight. But along with all the other apostles, Paul’s proclamation of the Gospel aims at revealing Christ’s light and glory to all who have eyes to see it.

 

And so, in today’s Gospel Jesus similarly contrasts the light and darkness by the image of a lighted lamp, which can either be hidden under a basket or set on a stand to give light to all in the house. And he tells us that it’s our unique calling as his disciples, members of his Body the Church, to manifest his glory to the world. “You are the light of the world … Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”

 

In other words, in precisely the times when God seems to have hidden himself, when the light of his glory seems veiled from sight so that the world lies in darkness, then it’s our Christian vocation to be that lamp set on a stand so that it gives light to all in the house—precisely by means of our good works: such as caring for the sick and dying, feeding the hungry, and sheltering the homeless. Whatever the Church’s crimes and sins may have been down through the centuries, and there have been many, it’s also indisputable that from the beginning the Church and its members have been the chief purveyors of hospitals, clinics, schools, orphanages, feeding ministries, and homeless shelters—especially in those times and places where no-one else was willing to care for society’s weakest and most vulnerable members. In all these ways, the Church has fulfilled its vocation, however imperfectly, of being the light of the world.

 

If that seems like a tall order, well, that’s because it is. The good news here, however, is that we’re not in this alone. The good works that will move people to give glory to our Father in heaven are those that we perform not in our own strength, but in the power of the Lord. So, the prophet Habakkuk concludes his oracle: even when the crops fail and the flocks and herds are decimated, “yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like hind’s feet; he makes me tread upon my high places.”

 

Notice how this image of God setting us up in a high place recurs in today’s readings. The psalmist sings of taking refuge in the Lord’s Temple on Mount Zion in Jersualem: “For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his tabernacle … and set me up upon a rock of stone. And now he shall lift up my head above mine enemies round about me.” And, of course, Jesus takes up a similar image when he speaks of his Church as a city set on a hill that cannot be hid.

 

But most of all, notice that Jesus’ exhortations in today’s Gospel take the form not of telling us to become something that we’re not, but rather to live more fully into the reality of who we already are. He doesn’t say, “Strive to become salt and light,” but rather, “You are the salt of the earth … You are the light of the world …” The challenge is to realize our true identity by letting our light shine out for all to see rather than by hiding it away. 

 

In this way, solely by God’s grace, we become ever more fully the people that God has created us to be. Our righteousness will exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees (which, contrary to centuries of anti-Jewish preaching, is a very high bar indeed). Christ is the light of the world, and when we reflect his light in our hearts, letting it shine freely, then those who see our good works will glorify our Father in heaven. 

THE PRESENTATION

Thursday, February 2, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

St. Luke 2:22-40

 

The Presentation of our Lord in the Temple, also known as the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin, or Candlemas, concludes the annual Christmas cycle of holy days. The cycle begins on March 25th, with the Annunciation, nine months before the birth; and it concludes today, February 2nd, forty days after the birth. Along the way we celebrate Mary’s Visitation to Elizabeth on May 31st, John the Baptist’s birth on June 24th, the Lord’s Nativity on December 25th, and the Epiphany on January 6th.  

 

Each of these days highlights a different aspect of the mystery of the Incarnation. At the heart of the Christian faith is the good news that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”—that is, God the Son came down from heaven and took flesh to share in our humanity so that we in turn might share in his divinity.

 

At the Lord’s Presentation in the Temple, two figures stand out as representing Israel’s hopes and longings for the coming Messiah: Simeon and Anna. Simeon has received the promise that he shall see the Lord’s Anointed before he dies. When Mary and Joseph bring the infant Jesus into the Temple, Simeon recognizes by divine inspiration Simeon that this is the one.

 

In response, Simeon sings the song we know as the Nunc Dimittis: “Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.” Jesus is the glory of God’s people Israel and a light to lighten the nations. These words give today’s celebration its essential character as a celebration of divine light and glory.

 

But there’s a dark side to what Simeon says next: “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against, that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed.” In other words, Christ’s coming is not all sweetness and light.

 

To understand what Simeon is saying, I think we can do no better than turn to the twentieth-century Swiss theologian Karl Barth. In his Commentary on Romans, published in 1919, Barth set forth what became known as the theology of crisis, and, more broadly, as Neo-Orthodoxy. Over and against the nineteenth-century liberal Protestant optimism cheerfully affirming an innate human capacity to build the kingdom of God on earth by means of progress in education, medicine, science, and technology, Barth and his associates uttered an emphatic “No!” 

 

Following the devastation and slaughter of the First World War, Barth insisted on God’s utter remoteness from a fallen world estranged by sin and rebellion. This infinite chasm between God and fallen humanity could never be bridged from the human side. But the good news was that God himself had bridged this unbridgeable gap by his Word, his Self-Revelation, given first to Israel in the Law and the Prophets, and then finally and definitively in Jesus Christ, the Word-made-flesh.

 

Confronted with the goodness and light of God’s Word, however, human beings experience a profound crisis. For God’s word comes initially as a word of judgment and condemnation. This encounter with the Word exposes our sin, wickedness, and rebellion so that we’re forced to decide whether to come to the light by confessing our sins, or to retreat further into the darkness by insisting on our own worthiness and self-sufficiency. 

 

When we confess our sins and cast ourselves on God’s mercy, however, his word of judgment miraculously transforms into a word of mercy, forgiveness, and affirmation. The paradox is that when we confess our unworthiness God makes us worthy; but when we insist on our worthiness, we dig ourselves deeper in and further estrange ourselves from God.

 

So, to return to Simeon in today’s Gospel, when Jesus brings God’s light into the world many are unable to bear it. The Incarnate Word stands as a sign of contradiction: those who prefer the darkness reject the light which exposes the world’s sins. His Word confronts each of us with the choice whether to accept or reject the truth about God and ourselves; and in so deciding we become our own judges, set either to fall or to rise, as we lay bare the secret thoughts of our innermost hearts.

 

Even more disturbing are Simeon’s words to Mary, “A sword will pierce through your own soul also.” This saying anticipates the sorrow and anguish that Mary will undergo as she witnesses her son dying on the cross: the result of human rejection of the Word-made-flesh. The light and glory that Jesus brings into the world has a price: one that he himself pays in his own blood, and one in which the Blessed Virgin Mary shares by her sorrow and desolation at the foot of the cross. It’s fitting that Candlemas often comes a few weeks before Ash Wednesday. Even as we recapitulate the joy and light of Christ’s Nativity, glance ahead along the road towards Calvary.

 

So, as we join in today’s joyful celebration, we remember the price Jesus pays to bring us his light and glory. His coming into the world confronts each of us with a decision. Simeon and Anna exemplify those who recognize and welcome him as the world’s salvation. We pray for the grace likewise to receive him as the light who lightens the nations and the glory of God’s people Israel.