Scripture for the 3rd Sunday after the Epiphany includes Jonah 3:1-5,10; I Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20
I can’t hear these scripture readings today without imagining how they might look as cartoons in The New Yorker.
Jonah would be sulking as he obeys God’s order to summon to repentance the people of great urban Nineveh (the New York City of its day). There’s a particular cartoonist I have in mind. He would make Jonah squat and stout, a protest sign over his shoulder with “REPENT!” in bold letters—I’m betting the cartoonist would make those Hebrew letters, knowing that Jonah had no intention of making it easy for these pagan Assyrians to escape divine judgment. Jonah is sulking because of what God has directed him to say, words that Jonah was eager to see come true—“Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”—but to be shouting them as a warning that Israel’s adversaries might heed and change their ways and remain the annoyingly greatest city of that time, to have become an agent of Nineveh’s brighter future… that would really have frosted Jonah.
That’s one cartoon. The next one I can’t see yet, but surely someone in that talented department would know what to do with St. Paul’s peculiar words—peculiar, at least, these 20 centuries after they were spoken—“The appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none…” (You know, I could swear we never heard this passage when we were using the Prayer Book table of Sunday readings; but now that we follow the new Revised Common Lectionary, we’re hearing some fresh language!) St. Paul’s outburst sounds like the Gospel of Click and Clack, the Car Talk brothers, whose lives came to grief when they married and acquired mothers-in-law.
And if there’s a third cartoon to be had out of our Gospel from Mark, I imagine it focusing on old Zebedee, father of the suddenly-missing fishermen James and John. “Where ARE those boys? They were here just a minute ago…” Perhaps he would be shown grumbling something like, “Must be that Occupy Galilee movement…”
I don’t mean to diminish the message today, when I imagine rendering these readings in less-serious ways. Cartoons are highly effective vehicles for revealing meanings and messages.
At St. Luke’s, Worcester, where I served before coming here, there are two stained glass windows in the church. One is located just to the right of the preacher in the pulpit. It is full of cartoons, drawn by Al Banx, former cartooner for Yankee Magazine. He taught Sunday School at St. Luke’s, and there are his drawings of all the stories unique to Luke’s Gospel. The Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, and more. And there they were. If the preacher proved dry that day, your eyes had only to shift left and you’d be in the Funnies.
Cartoons invite us to cross from one side of our brain to the other. They spark our own imagination. And they tap the deep well of humor that can free people to consider life in a fresh way, uniting them in a moment of laughter.
Laughter is often what I hear in the background when scripture is read aloud. Sometimes, laughter takes us right to the heart of what Jesus means, right to the edge of what the Spirit of God has for us… and wants of us. You might call this the Norman Cousins approach to scriptural hermeneutics.
Applying this to today’s readings yields mixed results. There’s no question that as the Book of Jonah spins out the huge fish story of Jonah, someone’s tongue is in his cheek. This is pure unalloyed yarn-spinning—but purposeful. One purpose is to poke fun at the tribal instinct and xenophobic biases of human beings who are geographic neighbors on planet earth, but act as if they aren’t and shouldn’t be. And the greater purpose of this little book in the Hebrew Bible is to bear witness to the universal mercy and grace of God. The Book of Jonah presents a Deity Without Borders. And if its author gets us chuckling at ourselves (that we can be as narrow-minded and self-willed as Jonah), he’s doing that to persuade us to do some reappraisal of our own theology and ask if it’s broad-minded enough to represent the heart and will of God. The spirit of this little book is much like that old hymn: “For the love of God is broader than the measure of the mind, and the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind…”
Is anyone chuckling in the background of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians? Not so much, no. His puzzling words seem to devalue the marital bond and contradict our priorities. But priorities—establishing and honoring faithful priorities—is a central theme in Paul’s correspondence with the Church at Corinth. In today’s brief portion, he unsettles every form of settling that church leaders might be tempted to treat with priority. “For the present form of this world is passing away,” he declares.
Therefore, travel light, he urges. Find and use your freedom to follow and obey the Holy Spirit, whatever may be asked of you. Let nothing tie you down or tie you up, nothing—not your marital status (whatever it is), your emotional state (whatever that may be), your daily work (whatever it is), your possessions (whatever they are or are not), or your dealings with the world (whatever they are)—let none of these distract you from your highest and deepest allegiance to the Spirit of God.
Paul does not say, “So get rid of all those lesser allegiances.” In the chapters around our little portion today, he says clearly, “I don’t want your many allegiances to make you anxious. I don’t want you worrying. Use your present circumstances, whatever they are, to glorify God. In his own words, “In whatever condition you were called, brothers and sisters, there remain with God.” And, arching over all his words like a rainbow, is his proclaiming of good news: “Remember that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God. You are not your own. For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.” In your present circumstances, your present condition.
This is not the stuff of laughter. But it is the stuff of fulfillment and joy.
Paul’s pastoral advice is that we should bloom where we’re planted. This makes eminent sense in a religion that starts among fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. Yes, Jesus calls them away from their boats, but he casts their higher calling in terms of their day jobs. “Follow me, fisherman Simon and fisherman Andrew, and I’ll make you fish… (and the pause here is important)… for people!”
That, by the way, is for me a laugh-aloud moment in the reading of that Gospel. Can’t you picture Simon and Andrew at least snorting a chuckle at Jesus’s promise? Surprise can do that to a fellow. “What? You see us doing what? You’re kidding, right?”
In another story, Jesus does something very similar. When he calls Matthew, he goes right to the tax accountant’s desk and couches his call in the imagery of his prospect’s day job: “Follow me, and I’ll make you account… for the boundless generosity of God!” Now, I know I’ve taken some liberties in retelling that moment, but something like that happened, and can’t you hear laughter igniting within earshot as Matthew’s friends and foes find their own reasons to picture it hard to imagine a tax man as an apostle? Even more unlikely than expecting a fisherman to become an ambassador.
How did you first hear him call you? How might he call you now… to bloom where you’re planted, to glorify God in your present circumstances… and to laugh at the surprises that come in company with the Christ who works extraordinary results when the ordinary is honored and fulfilled.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Monday, January 16, 2012
Martin Luther King: What Might He Say Now?
Scripture for the 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany includes I Samuel 3:1-20, I Corinthians 6:12-20, and John 1:43-51. On this Sunday before Martin Luther King Day, a Williams sophomore (Corey) selected and read an excerpt from one of Dr. King’s sermons, in lieu of the second scripture reading.
We’re grateful to Corey for helping us today to hear the voice of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hearing a portion of the Drum Major Sermon was both stirring and challenging. After that, with what temerity would a preacher try to preach more?
Perhaps to briefly imagine what Dr. King would be paying attention to today, if he were alive. I’ve thought of him three times this past week. Each time I’ve said to myself, “He would be speaking to this situation.”
First was signaled by the headline, ”Social tensions rising,” reporting that relations and perceptions between the rich and the poor in the United States have reached an intensity of antagonism not seen in a quarter century. “Americans now see more social conflict over wealth inequality than over the hot-button topics of immigration, race relations, and age,” writes AP reporter Hope Yen. She expects we’ll hear more, as this issue moves to the forefront of the presidential campaign.
Dr. King would speak to this. What might he say? In the sermon we heard today, he spoke to those ambitious disciples of Jesus, John and James, the Sons of Thunder, who wanted to be greatest among the twelve. His words could be directed today to people at both ends of the socio-economic ladder, and all in-between: “You want to be great? Wonderful. You want to be important? Wonderful… I want you to be first in love. I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to be first in generosity.” Dr. King would, I believe, issue a unifying challenge like that. And wouldn’t it be good, right about now, to hear a unifying voice in our land?
The second time I thought of him was hearing of the alleged defilement of Afghan corpses by United States Marines. Dr. King would speak to that. He might remind us of a man who was spat upon, beaten, and nailed to a cross, a man who fulfilled the role of the suffering servant foretold by the prophet, a man who was despised and rejected. Dr. King would remind us that this man “stands as the most influential figure that ever entered human history,” affecting the life of the human race more than all the armies, all the navies, all the parliaments, all the kings, by modeling and teaching reverence for life, even, as Dr. King said in his sermon, “when we will be victimized with what is life’s final common denominator—that something we call death.”
And the third time I thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., was reading the article “Humankind’s Most Savage Cruelty,” written by Williamstown resident and King biographer Stewart Burns, published in the current issue of Sojourners Magazine. Burns, who has spoken here and is known to many of us, writes in this article about human trafficking of children.
If the most important thing we know about slavery is that it is a thing of the past, then we are ignorant about the world we inhabit. “Enslavement of children and adults, mostly female, has spread to virtually every country in the world, with the number of host nations—slave states—doubling since 2001. Worldwide at any given time, Burns says, more than a million children are trapped in some form of trafficking. He speaks of the 300,000 child soldiers who are fighting in more than a dozen countries, and he estimates that there are as many as 100,000 girls trafficked as sex slaves within the United States, “truck stops are the most lucrative 21st-century brothels,” he says, in “the land of the free whose (amended) Constitution prohibits slavery.”
“What is the responsibility of a great nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality—yet drenched for much of its history in the blood and tears of chattel slavery—to destroy once and for all the global holocaust of labor and sexual servitude? What is the moral mandate of a great, if imperfect, people who eventually vanquished their own slavery, to apply similar democratic and nonviolent tools to fight the modern slavery that has spread wildly with the collapse of the Soviet empire, the dominance of the globalized free market, and the entrenchment of desperate poverty? What is the responsibility of an American citizen, a global citizen, who can no longer tolerate the hollowness of easy human rights pledges while millions of children and women are raped and wrecked as disposable commodities?”
Dr. King would have ready and demanding answers to these questions raised by our neighbor Stewart Burns. Perhaps King’s sermon that we heard today guides us to our own answers, if I may paraphrase the question he put to himself: “What is it that we would want said of us?” Not so much as eulogy, but as commentary on us and our society in this 21st century that is as much in need of emancipation as was the 19th century, as much in need of achieving universal human rights as was the 20th.
Don’t we want it said of us that we were willing to be united, to care less about our place on the socioeconomic ladder, to extend our passion and compassion beyond our own most hotbutton issues, and be united “so that we can make of this old world a new world”?
(Stewart Burns’s article appeared in the February 2012 issue of “Sojourners”.)
We’re grateful to Corey for helping us today to hear the voice of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hearing a portion of the Drum Major Sermon was both stirring and challenging. After that, with what temerity would a preacher try to preach more?
Perhaps to briefly imagine what Dr. King would be paying attention to today, if he were alive. I’ve thought of him three times this past week. Each time I’ve said to myself, “He would be speaking to this situation.”
First was signaled by the headline, ”Social tensions rising,” reporting that relations and perceptions between the rich and the poor in the United States have reached an intensity of antagonism not seen in a quarter century. “Americans now see more social conflict over wealth inequality than over the hot-button topics of immigration, race relations, and age,” writes AP reporter Hope Yen. She expects we’ll hear more, as this issue moves to the forefront of the presidential campaign.
Dr. King would speak to this. What might he say? In the sermon we heard today, he spoke to those ambitious disciples of Jesus, John and James, the Sons of Thunder, who wanted to be greatest among the twelve. His words could be directed today to people at both ends of the socio-economic ladder, and all in-between: “You want to be great? Wonderful. You want to be important? Wonderful… I want you to be first in love. I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to be first in generosity.” Dr. King would, I believe, issue a unifying challenge like that. And wouldn’t it be good, right about now, to hear a unifying voice in our land?
The second time I thought of him was hearing of the alleged defilement of Afghan corpses by United States Marines. Dr. King would speak to that. He might remind us of a man who was spat upon, beaten, and nailed to a cross, a man who fulfilled the role of the suffering servant foretold by the prophet, a man who was despised and rejected. Dr. King would remind us that this man “stands as the most influential figure that ever entered human history,” affecting the life of the human race more than all the armies, all the navies, all the parliaments, all the kings, by modeling and teaching reverence for life, even, as Dr. King said in his sermon, “when we will be victimized with what is life’s final common denominator—that something we call death.”
And the third time I thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., was reading the article “Humankind’s Most Savage Cruelty,” written by Williamstown resident and King biographer Stewart Burns, published in the current issue of Sojourners Magazine. Burns, who has spoken here and is known to many of us, writes in this article about human trafficking of children.
If the most important thing we know about slavery is that it is a thing of the past, then we are ignorant about the world we inhabit. “Enslavement of children and adults, mostly female, has spread to virtually every country in the world, with the number of host nations—slave states—doubling since 2001. Worldwide at any given time, Burns says, more than a million children are trapped in some form of trafficking. He speaks of the 300,000 child soldiers who are fighting in more than a dozen countries, and he estimates that there are as many as 100,000 girls trafficked as sex slaves within the United States, “truck stops are the most lucrative 21st-century brothels,” he says, in “the land of the free whose (amended) Constitution prohibits slavery.”
“What is the responsibility of a great nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality—yet drenched for much of its history in the blood and tears of chattel slavery—to destroy once and for all the global holocaust of labor and sexual servitude? What is the moral mandate of a great, if imperfect, people who eventually vanquished their own slavery, to apply similar democratic and nonviolent tools to fight the modern slavery that has spread wildly with the collapse of the Soviet empire, the dominance of the globalized free market, and the entrenchment of desperate poverty? What is the responsibility of an American citizen, a global citizen, who can no longer tolerate the hollowness of easy human rights pledges while millions of children and women are raped and wrecked as disposable commodities?”
Dr. King would have ready and demanding answers to these questions raised by our neighbor Stewart Burns. Perhaps King’s sermon that we heard today guides us to our own answers, if I may paraphrase the question he put to himself: “What is it that we would want said of us?” Not so much as eulogy, but as commentary on us and our society in this 21st century that is as much in need of emancipation as was the 19th century, as much in need of achieving universal human rights as was the 20th.
Don’t we want it said of us that we were willing to be united, to care less about our place on the socioeconomic ladder, to extend our passion and compassion beyond our own most hotbutton issues, and be united “so that we can make of this old world a new world”?
(Stewart Burns’s article appeared in the February 2012 issue of “Sojourners”.)
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Copying the Christ
Scripture for the 1st Sunday after the Epiphany includes Genesis 1:1-5, Acts 19:1-7, and Mark 1:4-11
“Into what then were you baptized?”
Paul’s question just begs to be used by the preacher today.
But first, did you hear about the association of 3000 file-sharers in Sweden who successfully petitioned the Swedish government to be declared a religion? Every week, they encourage their members to gather to share music files, video files, whatever—they consider their files to be holy, and they consider copying to be a sacrament. Their 20-year-old leader announced last week the success of their petition, and the name of their religious movement: Koptimism.
Into what then were you baptized?
In fact, Christian baptism , to a large degree, encourages—even mandates—copying. The same words constitute the same covenant, each time the sacrament is administered. What has stood the test of time by demonstrating fidelity to the vision and teaching and Spirit of God in Jesus Christ remains the standard to which members of his body are held, not by the requirement of law but by grateful response to gift, by grace. Mystical expression is given to this central process of imitation in the question and answer in the baptism of a child: “Will you by your prayers and witness help this child to grow into the full stature of Christ? …I will, with God’s help.”
Into what then were you baptized? Paul needed to ask that question because God’s Spirit was causing the earliest Christian movement to evolve, and Paul would be among its catalysts and midwives. But into what would the Jesus movement develop? In the encounter we heard today, he had found in Ephesus a small house church of a dozen or so disciples of Jesus who apparently had first been disciples of John the Baptizer. Notice how quick they are to describe their baptismal experience as being John’s baptism.
Without demeaning that experience, Paul simply tells them that as strong a foundation as John’s baptism was, baptism in the name of Jesus Christ does more for people. That could sound arrogant, but the utter simplicity of Paul’s language suggests that he is dealing with facts on the ground.
Fact: the movement led by John the Baptizer preceded Jesus’s public ministry—more accurately, the Jesus movement overlapped the John the Baptizer movement and may be said to have come out of it. The Baptizer’s movement was so significant that it is where we first meet Jesus in the Gospels of Mark and John. While the opening salvo in Luke and Matthew is the dramatic birth at Bethlehem, what reveals Jesus as Son of God in Mark and John is his baptism by John the Baptist.
Fact: John’s baptism called people to repent of their greed, their me-first-ism, their brutality, their cynical going-along-with-the-crowd. John’s baptism called them to repentance and to ethical awakening, persuading them that the prophetic call to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with God was the divine call to them, was within their reach, and to reach for this God-given power would save them and their society from its worst fate. John’s baptism was a wake-up call to confront a corrupt culture by daring to recognize and take best ethical choices.
Fact: John got specific about that. When he preached to the crowds, “Bear fruits worthy of repentance!” they shouted back, “What should we do?” “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” Act like family, especially with strangers; where there is need, meet it and meet in return the coming of the kingdom of God.
When tax collectors came to be baptized and asked John what they should do, he didn’t miss a beat: “Collect no more than what the law allows.” Soldiers likewise, when they were still wet from the Jordan, heard this challenge: “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”
Wouldn’t you love to see God send John the Baptizer to Washington, to our members of Congress and then down to K Street for a chat with the lobbyists?
Fact: John knew his place, knew his role to be an agent of change. He was not the One, capital O, to be believed-in, trusted for all time as Savior and Messiah. John made it clear that this anointed One was coming, and John wasn’t worthy even to wash his feet. Which is a way of saying what Paul communicates to that little gang in Ephesus: What you hear first when you are baptized in Christ is not what you must do or must stop doing; first, you hear what God in Christ is doing for you, and that is giving you the very Spirit that unites the heart of God with the heart of Jesus, the very Spirit that makes Jesus who he is. Out of that incalculable gift flow all sorts of ethical promptings and passions, yet what is primarily happening in baptism is that God is giving God’s own self to people; and out of that inestimable gift flow spiritual gifts, spiritual powers, and these are what unite people to comprehend and practice not their own self-invented missions in life, but to imitate the great mission of God, to restore all people to unity with one another and with God.
Paul has a shorthand way of summing-up all that by asking, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” “We’ve never heard of that,” they replied. What lies behind Paul’s question is his confidence that his calling, his part in the mission of God, is to make sure that people aim high enough—and deep enough—in identifying who it is they are to emulate, and what it is they are to copy.
Into what then were you baptized? Into an association of file-sharers who say the same prayers and sing the same hymns and copy cultural customs that they consider to be holy?
If we’re tempted to think that Koptimism misses the mark of religion, let’s keep making sure that our association in the name of Christ aims higher and deeper. Let’s consider more critically the cultural copying we do in the name of being Episcopalians, and put to the test of God’s central mission our beautiful liturgy, our comfortable words, our familiar agendas and ways of doing things, saying things, accumulating things.
Because, in case we haven’t noticed, the world is not beating a path to our door. And, judged by how we’re inclined to spend our time and our money, the path the church beats towards the world is too often paved with good intentions, and our GPS too often programed to keep us on familiar pathways while the central mission of God mandates our embrace of unfamiliar ways to reach, say, twenty year olds.
Perhaps what persuaded the Swedish government to recognize their newest religion was the sharing. Maybe the Koptimists have it right, not about copying being a sacrament, but about sharing being the foundation of religious life. In our me-first world, sharing what is valuable is exactly what we all most need to emulate and excel in. Baptized into the life of Jesus Christ, we are called to share what we value more than files, more than second coats and surplus food. We are called to share the Holy Spirit, the faith that is in us, and the central mission of God.
The church that equips her people to do this sharing copies the Christ, and beats a broad path to the world.
“Into what then were you baptized?”
Paul’s question just begs to be used by the preacher today.
But first, did you hear about the association of 3000 file-sharers in Sweden who successfully petitioned the Swedish government to be declared a religion? Every week, they encourage their members to gather to share music files, video files, whatever—they consider their files to be holy, and they consider copying to be a sacrament. Their 20-year-old leader announced last week the success of their petition, and the name of their religious movement: Koptimism.
Into what then were you baptized?
In fact, Christian baptism , to a large degree, encourages—even mandates—copying. The same words constitute the same covenant, each time the sacrament is administered. What has stood the test of time by demonstrating fidelity to the vision and teaching and Spirit of God in Jesus Christ remains the standard to which members of his body are held, not by the requirement of law but by grateful response to gift, by grace. Mystical expression is given to this central process of imitation in the question and answer in the baptism of a child: “Will you by your prayers and witness help this child to grow into the full stature of Christ? …I will, with God’s help.”
Into what then were you baptized? Paul needed to ask that question because God’s Spirit was causing the earliest Christian movement to evolve, and Paul would be among its catalysts and midwives. But into what would the Jesus movement develop? In the encounter we heard today, he had found in Ephesus a small house church of a dozen or so disciples of Jesus who apparently had first been disciples of John the Baptizer. Notice how quick they are to describe their baptismal experience as being John’s baptism.
Without demeaning that experience, Paul simply tells them that as strong a foundation as John’s baptism was, baptism in the name of Jesus Christ does more for people. That could sound arrogant, but the utter simplicity of Paul’s language suggests that he is dealing with facts on the ground.
Fact: the movement led by John the Baptizer preceded Jesus’s public ministry—more accurately, the Jesus movement overlapped the John the Baptizer movement and may be said to have come out of it. The Baptizer’s movement was so significant that it is where we first meet Jesus in the Gospels of Mark and John. While the opening salvo in Luke and Matthew is the dramatic birth at Bethlehem, what reveals Jesus as Son of God in Mark and John is his baptism by John the Baptist.
Fact: John’s baptism called people to repent of their greed, their me-first-ism, their brutality, their cynical going-along-with-the-crowd. John’s baptism called them to repentance and to ethical awakening, persuading them that the prophetic call to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with God was the divine call to them, was within their reach, and to reach for this God-given power would save them and their society from its worst fate. John’s baptism was a wake-up call to confront a corrupt culture by daring to recognize and take best ethical choices.
Fact: John got specific about that. When he preached to the crowds, “Bear fruits worthy of repentance!” they shouted back, “What should we do?” “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” Act like family, especially with strangers; where there is need, meet it and meet in return the coming of the kingdom of God.
When tax collectors came to be baptized and asked John what they should do, he didn’t miss a beat: “Collect no more than what the law allows.” Soldiers likewise, when they were still wet from the Jordan, heard this challenge: “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”
Wouldn’t you love to see God send John the Baptizer to Washington, to our members of Congress and then down to K Street for a chat with the lobbyists?
Fact: John knew his place, knew his role to be an agent of change. He was not the One, capital O, to be believed-in, trusted for all time as Savior and Messiah. John made it clear that this anointed One was coming, and John wasn’t worthy even to wash his feet. Which is a way of saying what Paul communicates to that little gang in Ephesus: What you hear first when you are baptized in Christ is not what you must do or must stop doing; first, you hear what God in Christ is doing for you, and that is giving you the very Spirit that unites the heart of God with the heart of Jesus, the very Spirit that makes Jesus who he is. Out of that incalculable gift flow all sorts of ethical promptings and passions, yet what is primarily happening in baptism is that God is giving God’s own self to people; and out of that inestimable gift flow spiritual gifts, spiritual powers, and these are what unite people to comprehend and practice not their own self-invented missions in life, but to imitate the great mission of God, to restore all people to unity with one another and with God.
Paul has a shorthand way of summing-up all that by asking, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” “We’ve never heard of that,” they replied. What lies behind Paul’s question is his confidence that his calling, his part in the mission of God, is to make sure that people aim high enough—and deep enough—in identifying who it is they are to emulate, and what it is they are to copy.
Into what then were you baptized? Into an association of file-sharers who say the same prayers and sing the same hymns and copy cultural customs that they consider to be holy?
If we’re tempted to think that Koptimism misses the mark of religion, let’s keep making sure that our association in the name of Christ aims higher and deeper. Let’s consider more critically the cultural copying we do in the name of being Episcopalians, and put to the test of God’s central mission our beautiful liturgy, our comfortable words, our familiar agendas and ways of doing things, saying things, accumulating things.
Because, in case we haven’t noticed, the world is not beating a path to our door. And, judged by how we’re inclined to spend our time and our money, the path the church beats towards the world is too often paved with good intentions, and our GPS too often programed to keep us on familiar pathways while the central mission of God mandates our embrace of unfamiliar ways to reach, say, twenty year olds.
Perhaps what persuaded the Swedish government to recognize their newest religion was the sharing. Maybe the Koptimists have it right, not about copying being a sacrament, but about sharing being the foundation of religious life. In our me-first world, sharing what is valuable is exactly what we all most need to emulate and excel in. Baptized into the life of Jesus Christ, we are called to share what we value more than files, more than second coats and surplus food. We are called to share the Holy Spirit, the faith that is in us, and the central mission of God.
The church that equips her people to do this sharing copies the Christ, and beats a broad path to the world.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Word Into Silence: Three Christmas Homilies
Three Christmas homilies are grouped here, from Christmas Eve 2011, Christmas Day 2011, and the Feast of the Holy Name 2012. Each relates to Dom John Main’s rich little book, “Word Into Silence” (Continuum, 2005).
I. Christmas Eve
Readings for Christmas Eve include Isaiah 9:2-7, Titus 2:11-14, Luke 2:1-20
‘Tis the season to give a gift. And it’s no secret that giving a gift may be its own reward. We are gratified when a loved one’s delight, a receiver’s pleasure, shows us we’ve gotten it right. We have it on high authority that it is more blessed to give than to receive. Many an offertory in many a church has opened with that message, the pastor hoping it will be taken to heart… but inherent in the story of this holy night is the deeper truth that without mindful honest appreciative receiving, a gift gets tossed out, the baby with the bathwater.
We all get gifts that we struggle to receive. Each Christmas, a dear friend sends Diana and me a cd, usually a recording of esoteric music that has spoken to his heart. Sometimes, it doesn’t ring our bells, and that cd finds its way onto a shelf but not often into the player. I will admit that when that slim package arrives, I wonder what century it will take me back to, and do I really want to go there? It is not always easy to receive a gift mindfully, openly, appreciatively.
I suspect that Christmas comes to many of us in a like way. We think we know what to expect, and while we’re willing to be surprised we tend to play the disc as background to our own busyness. If there are surprises given with the gift, if there’s something that would be of inestimable value to us, some movement, some sweet harmony or graceful passage of light, we may not notice it. We play the disc, judge that it is much what we thought it would be, and shelve it for another year.
To receive anything mindfully, openly, appreciatively, I might have to trust that the giver knows me and might have a clue about what will benefit me—perhaps what I like, but likelier what I could rise to and learn from and try. After all, friends who keep feeding us the same-old same-old don’t help us grow.
Consider, then, what God gives on this holy night. In a time of protracted war and recurrent terrorism… at a place where displaced people occupy a few square feet they temporarily call their own as they face a system that shows no care for them… in the cold of a night with no fire burning but the stars above… at the crossroads of ancient animosities and culture wars… and imbedded with sentient beings clucking and neighing and mooing their truth that all creation waits with eager longing… in just these ways that seem so slim in hope, in this fullness of time God empties the treasury of heaven into the womb of Mary and there is born not an alien being but one who shows us who and whose we are.
My Advent reading of Benedictine Dom John Main has been helping me appreciate what God gives. God gives us this child Jesus who will show us that we are called to the same awareness, the same knowing, the same union with God that he himself cherishes. Here is John Main’s language:
“When he sends the Spirit into our hearts, Jesus transmits to us everything that He receives from the Father. He withholds nothing, neither any secret or intimacy of personal love. By His very nature He is impelled to give all of Himself, and the power, the urgency of the love-impulse radiating from the Father make it impossible for Jesus to retain any area of special privilege, of non-communication. The building up of the Body of Christ is precisely the consuming desire of Jesus to flood every part of our human consciousness with His Spirit. Nothing can prevent that desire from being satisfied except man’s own unwillingness to receive, to acknowledge, to awaken to this gift of God’s personal love.”
There is the heart of the Christian mystery. To be given Jesus is to be given not a crèche figure to hold, but the very life of Jesus. To be given Jesus is to be given God, not ideas about God packaged as a creed to end the matter, but God to know and love and experience as the beginning and end of all our material being.
John Main’s slim little book is titled, “Word into Silence,” and his purpose is to get us to pray without words, occupying silence because there, he says, we are saved from superstition and from cynicism because there, he says, we find a personal inner balance, a spiritual self-control that emanates from the self of Jesus.
The centering process of silent prayer, he says, is the awakening of our own spirit to the Spirit of Jesus. It cannot be received like a packaged cd sent from outside. “Our awakening is, in itself, the awareness of our participation in the life of God, of God as the source of our personhood, the very power by which we are enabled to accept God’s gift of our being. It is therefore a free response, an utterly personal communication, a free acceptance.”
Imagine God’s delight when we receive this gift on this holy night mindfully, openly, appreciatively.
(The passage from Main comes from pages 45-46.)
II. Christmas Day
Readings for Christmas Day include Isaiah 52:7-10, Hebrews 1:1-4, and John 1:1-14
The four Gospels present the arrival of Jesus in two different ways. St. Luke and St. Matthew tell us the familiar Christmas story, with Luke providing most of the splendor. Luke tells of the birth of Jesus as if he were filming the event for viewing in 3-D. Without Luke, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas.
St. Mark and St. John don’t seem to know the story of Jesus’s birth. The first glimpse of him they give us is at his baptism, when he is a grown man. But about John’s version that we have heard today, it’s truer to say that the first way he speaks of our Lord is to present him as the Word, the Word of God, in one place we hear that this Word is God, at another that this is the divine Word of wisdom as if a personal presence accompanying God at the creation of the universe, the Word that in time becomes flesh, fully human, full of grace and truth. All this John gives us in the first 18 verses of chapter one, the Prologue. Without John, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas.
A prologue is an opening speech or poem spoken at the start of a play, setting the stage for the action. In competitive cycling, a prologue is a short time trial before a race, to identify a leader.
How does John’s majestic poem set the stage for his telling the big story of our leader Jesus?
This Word, this aspect of God’s nature that became flesh in Jesus, is not like the words that we use to speak to one another, or the words that we cannot find to express a mystery, or the words that endlessly lead to more words heaped word upon word in argument or fight or debate or research. The Word that becomes flesh cannot be the words that come pouring out of a singer’s mouth on our i-Pods, or tumble out of our High Definition TVs. Nor can the Word be like those words Jesus told his friends not to babble with, thinking that more or fancier or bigger or better words could influence God to hear them.
What this Word is we’ll find suggested in the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, where what that writer calls Wisdom is described in a way we can imagine John nodding his head at in agreement. Here it is: “…a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, the image of God’s goodness.” (Wisdom 7:26, paraphrased)
Can we trust human words? In some cases, yes. When two people stand in the presence of their families and friends and declare their will to live together in the covenant of marriage, being faithful to the other as long as both shall live, they trust the integrity and intention of the words, “I will.”
When I know I’m not the one to complete a task that means the world to me and I give that task to someone else to do, I must trust that person’s word when she says, “I will do it.”
In my Advent reading of a little book by Benedictine Dom John Main, I was caught up in his description of what it means to trust. “To trust another is to renounce self and place your centre of gravity in the other.”
What Zen wisdom that is! In whatever trusting life calls on me to do, I don’t lend my hope to the person I’m trusting: I invest it, I give it over, and in that movement from my control to their control, I place my center of gravity in the other.
This is what Christmas calls us to do with God. And there is the heart of the Christian mystery. To be given Jesus is to be given not a crèche figure to hold, but the very life of Jesus who holds us, Jesus who is “the reflection of eternal light, the spotless mirror of the working of God, the image of God’s goodness.” To be given Jesus is to be given God, not ideas about God packaged as a creed to end the matter, but God to know and love and experience as the beginning and end of all our material being. God to trust, placing our center of gravity in God in that movement of self-control that is prayer, not to pray in a babbling of words but to pray without words, occupying silence because there we are saved from superstition about words and from cynicism about words. And there we find a personal inner balance, a spiritual self-control that emanates from the self of Jesus.
This is what Christmas calls us to do with God: to place our center of gravity in the most trustworthy Word. This is not an exercise in words: it is a wordless standing in the light, allowing perfect love to hold our off-centered hearts into centeredness, welcoming truth that awakens us to freedom, to love.
(The passage from Main is found on pages 45-46.)
III. Feast of the Holy Name
Readings for the Feast of the Holy Name includes Numbers 6:22-27, Galatians 4:4-7, and Luke 2:15-21
Last night, a wedding happened here. Elizabeth and Mikal made vows to each other, in the name of God and in the company of a hundred or so of their friends and family. Names were central to their entering the covenant of holy matrimony. First, I called them by name as I asked them to make their declarations of consent to have one another as husband and wife. Then they named each other as they made their vows to take and receive one another from that day forward, until they are parted by death.
Before naming the partner, each began his or her vow with the words, “In the name of God,” and then named himself or herself as the agent of the vow. Clearly, names are important to covenants that unite people.
And this day in the Christian year calls us to start the calendar year focused on the holy name of Jesus. We’re told that this name came to him not by Mary and Joseph thumbing through a book with a title like “What Shall We Name Our Baby?”, but by the archangel Gabriel announcing that headquarters had already chosen the name for this baby: Jesus.
Jesus is the English form of the latin Iesus, starting with an I, transliterating the Greek Iesou which gives us the abbreviated monogram that looks like IHS, the Greek e resembling an English lower-case h.
The original Hebrew form of the name was Joshua, or more fully Yehoshuah, a name that mean “God saves.” This name was pretty common in the 1st century. The historian Josephus, chronicler of the 1st century, mentions nineteen people named Jesus. While it’s natural for us to revere that name, the Spanish-speaking world is right not to have retired that number. Keeping Jesus in circulation as a popular name recognizes the fact that God selected a name just as down-to-earth as Henry, or Joe, or Samuel.
The readings we’re given today may be the shortest in the year. Aaron’s priestly blessing, the most ancient benediction we know, is described as the way to put God’s name upon the people. As you consider your own part in the priesthood of all believers, imagine what a whole new year gives you by way of opportunity to bless people you work with, live near, struggle with, admire, know well or barely know. Put God’s name on every person you face, and see how blessing flows, both ways.
Psalm 8, one of my favorites, sketches in awe the whole created order, complete with moon and stars, sheep and oxen, birds and fishes, exclaiming that God’s name is exalted in all aspects, all species, all spheres, all ecosystems, all climates, all continents. Encyclopedic and all-embracing is to be our comprehending love and active stewardship.
St. Paul weighs in, addressing God with a most intimate name, Abba, an Aramaic word meaning “father”, but some would say its meaning is closer to “Dad,” perhaps even “Daddy”, and is meant to be a term of endearment. Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Our Father…” (though the word there is the Greek “pater”). Writing to the Galatians, Paul says that God’s Spirit, moving so intimately in the human spirit, liberates us from slavery (whatever has us in its grip), frees us, changes our status to become children of God, heirs of God, bearers of God’s likeness.
My preaching this Christmas has been shaped by reading in Advent the little book “Word into Silence” by Dom John Main. It is a book about prayer, wordless silent prayer in which we turn our whole being towards the Other. He capitalizes the O in Other, as if giving God another important name.
Fully facing the otherness of God, he says, we develop our capacity to welcome the otherness of our neighbor. As we let God just be, so we learn to let our neighbor just be, not to manipulate her but rather to reverence her. For this reason, Main calls prayer “the great school of community.” In prayer, we discover “the true glory of Christian community as a fraternity of the anointed, living together in profound and loving mutual respect. Christian community is in essence the experience of being held in reverence by others and we in our turn reverencing them.” Some of us, on entering church, genuflect. Perhaps we should practice that towards one another, a sign of recognizing the holy in one another, in keeping with what Main is saying.
“This reverence for each other reveals the members of the community as being sensitively attuned one to the other on the wavelength of the Spirit, the same Spirit that has called each of us to fullness of love. In others I recognize the same Spirit that lives in my heart, the Spirit that constitutes my real self. In this recognition of the other person, a recognition that remakes my mind and expands my consciousness, the other person comes into being as he really is, in his real self, not as a manipulated extension of myself. He moves and acts out of his own integral reality and no longer as some image created by my imagination. Even if our ideas or principles clash, we are held in unison, in dynamic equilibrium, by our mutual recognition of each other’s infinite lovableness, importance, and essential unique reality.”
There’s a vision of church for the new year. There’s a conception of our baptismal covenant, from when the cross of Jesus was signed on our forehead naming us his. And there’s an understanding of how we practice the priesthood of all believers so as to bless all people we encounter, putting God’s name to worthy purpose.
(The passage from Main is found on pages 78-79 of “Word Into Silence”.)
I. Christmas Eve
Readings for Christmas Eve include Isaiah 9:2-7, Titus 2:11-14, Luke 2:1-20
‘Tis the season to give a gift. And it’s no secret that giving a gift may be its own reward. We are gratified when a loved one’s delight, a receiver’s pleasure, shows us we’ve gotten it right. We have it on high authority that it is more blessed to give than to receive. Many an offertory in many a church has opened with that message, the pastor hoping it will be taken to heart… but inherent in the story of this holy night is the deeper truth that without mindful honest appreciative receiving, a gift gets tossed out, the baby with the bathwater.
We all get gifts that we struggle to receive. Each Christmas, a dear friend sends Diana and me a cd, usually a recording of esoteric music that has spoken to his heart. Sometimes, it doesn’t ring our bells, and that cd finds its way onto a shelf but not often into the player. I will admit that when that slim package arrives, I wonder what century it will take me back to, and do I really want to go there? It is not always easy to receive a gift mindfully, openly, appreciatively.
I suspect that Christmas comes to many of us in a like way. We think we know what to expect, and while we’re willing to be surprised we tend to play the disc as background to our own busyness. If there are surprises given with the gift, if there’s something that would be of inestimable value to us, some movement, some sweet harmony or graceful passage of light, we may not notice it. We play the disc, judge that it is much what we thought it would be, and shelve it for another year.
To receive anything mindfully, openly, appreciatively, I might have to trust that the giver knows me and might have a clue about what will benefit me—perhaps what I like, but likelier what I could rise to and learn from and try. After all, friends who keep feeding us the same-old same-old don’t help us grow.
Consider, then, what God gives on this holy night. In a time of protracted war and recurrent terrorism… at a place where displaced people occupy a few square feet they temporarily call their own as they face a system that shows no care for them… in the cold of a night with no fire burning but the stars above… at the crossroads of ancient animosities and culture wars… and imbedded with sentient beings clucking and neighing and mooing their truth that all creation waits with eager longing… in just these ways that seem so slim in hope, in this fullness of time God empties the treasury of heaven into the womb of Mary and there is born not an alien being but one who shows us who and whose we are.
My Advent reading of Benedictine Dom John Main has been helping me appreciate what God gives. God gives us this child Jesus who will show us that we are called to the same awareness, the same knowing, the same union with God that he himself cherishes. Here is John Main’s language:
“When he sends the Spirit into our hearts, Jesus transmits to us everything that He receives from the Father. He withholds nothing, neither any secret or intimacy of personal love. By His very nature He is impelled to give all of Himself, and the power, the urgency of the love-impulse radiating from the Father make it impossible for Jesus to retain any area of special privilege, of non-communication. The building up of the Body of Christ is precisely the consuming desire of Jesus to flood every part of our human consciousness with His Spirit. Nothing can prevent that desire from being satisfied except man’s own unwillingness to receive, to acknowledge, to awaken to this gift of God’s personal love.”
There is the heart of the Christian mystery. To be given Jesus is to be given not a crèche figure to hold, but the very life of Jesus. To be given Jesus is to be given God, not ideas about God packaged as a creed to end the matter, but God to know and love and experience as the beginning and end of all our material being.
John Main’s slim little book is titled, “Word into Silence,” and his purpose is to get us to pray without words, occupying silence because there, he says, we are saved from superstition and from cynicism because there, he says, we find a personal inner balance, a spiritual self-control that emanates from the self of Jesus.
The centering process of silent prayer, he says, is the awakening of our own spirit to the Spirit of Jesus. It cannot be received like a packaged cd sent from outside. “Our awakening is, in itself, the awareness of our participation in the life of God, of God as the source of our personhood, the very power by which we are enabled to accept God’s gift of our being. It is therefore a free response, an utterly personal communication, a free acceptance.”
Imagine God’s delight when we receive this gift on this holy night mindfully, openly, appreciatively.
(The passage from Main comes from pages 45-46.)
II. Christmas Day
Readings for Christmas Day include Isaiah 52:7-10, Hebrews 1:1-4, and John 1:1-14
The four Gospels present the arrival of Jesus in two different ways. St. Luke and St. Matthew tell us the familiar Christmas story, with Luke providing most of the splendor. Luke tells of the birth of Jesus as if he were filming the event for viewing in 3-D. Without Luke, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas.
St. Mark and St. John don’t seem to know the story of Jesus’s birth. The first glimpse of him they give us is at his baptism, when he is a grown man. But about John’s version that we have heard today, it’s truer to say that the first way he speaks of our Lord is to present him as the Word, the Word of God, in one place we hear that this Word is God, at another that this is the divine Word of wisdom as if a personal presence accompanying God at the creation of the universe, the Word that in time becomes flesh, fully human, full of grace and truth. All this John gives us in the first 18 verses of chapter one, the Prologue. Without John, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas.
A prologue is an opening speech or poem spoken at the start of a play, setting the stage for the action. In competitive cycling, a prologue is a short time trial before a race, to identify a leader.
How does John’s majestic poem set the stage for his telling the big story of our leader Jesus?
This Word, this aspect of God’s nature that became flesh in Jesus, is not like the words that we use to speak to one another, or the words that we cannot find to express a mystery, or the words that endlessly lead to more words heaped word upon word in argument or fight or debate or research. The Word that becomes flesh cannot be the words that come pouring out of a singer’s mouth on our i-Pods, or tumble out of our High Definition TVs. Nor can the Word be like those words Jesus told his friends not to babble with, thinking that more or fancier or bigger or better words could influence God to hear them.
What this Word is we’ll find suggested in the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, where what that writer calls Wisdom is described in a way we can imagine John nodding his head at in agreement. Here it is: “…a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, the image of God’s goodness.” (Wisdom 7:26, paraphrased)
Can we trust human words? In some cases, yes. When two people stand in the presence of their families and friends and declare their will to live together in the covenant of marriage, being faithful to the other as long as both shall live, they trust the integrity and intention of the words, “I will.”
When I know I’m not the one to complete a task that means the world to me and I give that task to someone else to do, I must trust that person’s word when she says, “I will do it.”
In my Advent reading of a little book by Benedictine Dom John Main, I was caught up in his description of what it means to trust. “To trust another is to renounce self and place your centre of gravity in the other.”
What Zen wisdom that is! In whatever trusting life calls on me to do, I don’t lend my hope to the person I’m trusting: I invest it, I give it over, and in that movement from my control to their control, I place my center of gravity in the other.
This is what Christmas calls us to do with God. And there is the heart of the Christian mystery. To be given Jesus is to be given not a crèche figure to hold, but the very life of Jesus who holds us, Jesus who is “the reflection of eternal light, the spotless mirror of the working of God, the image of God’s goodness.” To be given Jesus is to be given God, not ideas about God packaged as a creed to end the matter, but God to know and love and experience as the beginning and end of all our material being. God to trust, placing our center of gravity in God in that movement of self-control that is prayer, not to pray in a babbling of words but to pray without words, occupying silence because there we are saved from superstition about words and from cynicism about words. And there we find a personal inner balance, a spiritual self-control that emanates from the self of Jesus.
This is what Christmas calls us to do with God: to place our center of gravity in the most trustworthy Word. This is not an exercise in words: it is a wordless standing in the light, allowing perfect love to hold our off-centered hearts into centeredness, welcoming truth that awakens us to freedom, to love.
(The passage from Main is found on pages 45-46.)
III. Feast of the Holy Name
Readings for the Feast of the Holy Name includes Numbers 6:22-27, Galatians 4:4-7, and Luke 2:15-21
Last night, a wedding happened here. Elizabeth and Mikal made vows to each other, in the name of God and in the company of a hundred or so of their friends and family. Names were central to their entering the covenant of holy matrimony. First, I called them by name as I asked them to make their declarations of consent to have one another as husband and wife. Then they named each other as they made their vows to take and receive one another from that day forward, until they are parted by death.
Before naming the partner, each began his or her vow with the words, “In the name of God,” and then named himself or herself as the agent of the vow. Clearly, names are important to covenants that unite people.
And this day in the Christian year calls us to start the calendar year focused on the holy name of Jesus. We’re told that this name came to him not by Mary and Joseph thumbing through a book with a title like “What Shall We Name Our Baby?”, but by the archangel Gabriel announcing that headquarters had already chosen the name for this baby: Jesus.
Jesus is the English form of the latin Iesus, starting with an I, transliterating the Greek Iesou which gives us the abbreviated monogram that looks like IHS, the Greek e resembling an English lower-case h.
The original Hebrew form of the name was Joshua, or more fully Yehoshuah, a name that mean “God saves.” This name was pretty common in the 1st century. The historian Josephus, chronicler of the 1st century, mentions nineteen people named Jesus. While it’s natural for us to revere that name, the Spanish-speaking world is right not to have retired that number. Keeping Jesus in circulation as a popular name recognizes the fact that God selected a name just as down-to-earth as Henry, or Joe, or Samuel.
The readings we’re given today may be the shortest in the year. Aaron’s priestly blessing, the most ancient benediction we know, is described as the way to put God’s name upon the people. As you consider your own part in the priesthood of all believers, imagine what a whole new year gives you by way of opportunity to bless people you work with, live near, struggle with, admire, know well or barely know. Put God’s name on every person you face, and see how blessing flows, both ways.
Psalm 8, one of my favorites, sketches in awe the whole created order, complete with moon and stars, sheep and oxen, birds and fishes, exclaiming that God’s name is exalted in all aspects, all species, all spheres, all ecosystems, all climates, all continents. Encyclopedic and all-embracing is to be our comprehending love and active stewardship.
St. Paul weighs in, addressing God with a most intimate name, Abba, an Aramaic word meaning “father”, but some would say its meaning is closer to “Dad,” perhaps even “Daddy”, and is meant to be a term of endearment. Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Our Father…” (though the word there is the Greek “pater”). Writing to the Galatians, Paul says that God’s Spirit, moving so intimately in the human spirit, liberates us from slavery (whatever has us in its grip), frees us, changes our status to become children of God, heirs of God, bearers of God’s likeness.
My preaching this Christmas has been shaped by reading in Advent the little book “Word into Silence” by Dom John Main. It is a book about prayer, wordless silent prayer in which we turn our whole being towards the Other. He capitalizes the O in Other, as if giving God another important name.
Fully facing the otherness of God, he says, we develop our capacity to welcome the otherness of our neighbor. As we let God just be, so we learn to let our neighbor just be, not to manipulate her but rather to reverence her. For this reason, Main calls prayer “the great school of community.” In prayer, we discover “the true glory of Christian community as a fraternity of the anointed, living together in profound and loving mutual respect. Christian community is in essence the experience of being held in reverence by others and we in our turn reverencing them.” Some of us, on entering church, genuflect. Perhaps we should practice that towards one another, a sign of recognizing the holy in one another, in keeping with what Main is saying.
“This reverence for each other reveals the members of the community as being sensitively attuned one to the other on the wavelength of the Spirit, the same Spirit that has called each of us to fullness of love. In others I recognize the same Spirit that lives in my heart, the Spirit that constitutes my real self. In this recognition of the other person, a recognition that remakes my mind and expands my consciousness, the other person comes into being as he really is, in his real self, not as a manipulated extension of myself. He moves and acts out of his own integral reality and no longer as some image created by my imagination. Even if our ideas or principles clash, we are held in unison, in dynamic equilibrium, by our mutual recognition of each other’s infinite lovableness, importance, and essential unique reality.”
There’s a vision of church for the new year. There’s a conception of our baptismal covenant, from when the cross of Jesus was signed on our forehead naming us his. And there’s an understanding of how we practice the priesthood of all believers so as to bless all people we encounter, putting God’s name to worthy purpose.
(The passage from Main is found on pages 78-79 of “Word Into Silence”.)
Conveying the Treasure of God
Scripture for the 4th Sunday of Advent includes II Samuel 7:1-11,16; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38
The angel Gabriel is a busy fellow. Chief messenger of God, legend also claims that he is guardian of the celestial treasury. As such, I expect we can say that Gabriel is the patron saint of parish treasurers; but I would have thought that God might be above needing a treasury, so let’s take this legend as reminding us that Gabriel got to announce the transfer of God’s greatest treasure from heaven to earth, Jesus, the very Word and will and way of God.
That we have two archangels side by side, Gabriel and Michael, in the windows of our east aisle is intentional and serves the purpose of memorializing Amos Lawrence Hopkins, a Williamstown native who fought in the civil war (hence Michael, captain-general of the hosts of heaven and patron saint of soldiers). After the war, Hopkins became Administrator of Railroads for the entire country, a trustee of Williams College and a member of this parish’s first building committee. (So we can blame him—or give him credit.)
If Michael stands guard as a man of action memorializing another man of action, why is he paired with Gabriel? Remember that Hopkins was in charge of getting the trains to run on time. That takes money and communication, and both are said to be Gabriel’s turf.
While Michael is vested in red of sovereign power, violet of passion and suffering, and gold of sacredness, Gabriel is done out in blue, the Virgin Mary’s color and the color associated with truth, and he’s holding lilies, Mary’s flower. It’s as if his gig in Nazareth left its mark on him forever.
Before he announces to Mary the news that made her weak in the knees, Gabriel the truth-teller makes sure Mary is grounded in truth by reminding her, “The Lord is with you.” This anchors in truth what is being asked of Mary. God does not require without making able. Responsibility is met by grace and exceeded by grace, transforming what feels like obligation into what is privilege.
But Mary is human, entirely human, and Mary is young, very young, and the timing is all out of joint. Gabriel speaks suddenly of conceiving and bearing and birthing and naming, but at that very moment Mary is engaged but not yet wed, and far from settled. She’s temporarily a displaced person, thanks to the new tax program of Emperor Augustus that put families on the road to return to their ancestral towns for a census. Parents hearing the news of pregnancy usually rejoice and start imagining what color to paint the nursery. “We haven’t even slept together,” protests Mary.
And then… and then. Gabriel reaches into the treasure of God and teaches Mary to recognize how in this moment of truth it is up to her whether to spend her heart and soul on the debit side of the ledger, dwelling on all the impossibilities and finding all the reasons to resist what is asked of her, or to invest her heart and soul in the receipts side of the book of life and recognize all that is positive: the favor of God, the power to conceive, a son already named by God, a throne on which he will sit, the Holy Spirit who will work intimate power within her… for nothing will be impossible with God.
She makes her choice: “Here am I,” she exclaims, diving into the deep end of the pool of God’s treasure, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be. Let it be… Let it be with me according to your word.” And with that assent the mystery of incarnation takes hold within her, and the history of redemption is written no more in the terms of law and its commands, but in the language of love unearned and undeserved, grace, the amazing movement of the treasure of God’s love through the womb of Mary.
The Christmas pageant we shall see this afternoon features a number of dwelling places: an inn where there is no room, another inn where Joseph and Mary hear of a poor substitute, the only vacancy remaining in Nazareth, a manger, a cattle shed (or, some would say, a cave). But the prime real estate at the heart of the pageant will be the place within Mary, the mansion her body makes for the Son of God. In her is fulfilled Nathan’s prophecy that we heard earlier, “…the LORD will make you a house…”
So our collect on this fourth and final Sunday of Advent asks God to wipe clean and sweep out and hose down our conscience, our ethical capacity, our moral vision, our reason for being, our mission purpose, that the real estate of our lives may become Jesus’s home.
May you and I and many be open, this Christmas, to the transforming love, the treasure, of God. And may this treasure free and spark our ethical energy, our moral vision, our faithful purpose, so that the earthen vessels of our lives convey divine treasure to this world.
The angel Gabriel is a busy fellow. Chief messenger of God, legend also claims that he is guardian of the celestial treasury. As such, I expect we can say that Gabriel is the patron saint of parish treasurers; but I would have thought that God might be above needing a treasury, so let’s take this legend as reminding us that Gabriel got to announce the transfer of God’s greatest treasure from heaven to earth, Jesus, the very Word and will and way of God.
That we have two archangels side by side, Gabriel and Michael, in the windows of our east aisle is intentional and serves the purpose of memorializing Amos Lawrence Hopkins, a Williamstown native who fought in the civil war (hence Michael, captain-general of the hosts of heaven and patron saint of soldiers). After the war, Hopkins became Administrator of Railroads for the entire country, a trustee of Williams College and a member of this parish’s first building committee. (So we can blame him—or give him credit.)
If Michael stands guard as a man of action memorializing another man of action, why is he paired with Gabriel? Remember that Hopkins was in charge of getting the trains to run on time. That takes money and communication, and both are said to be Gabriel’s turf.
While Michael is vested in red of sovereign power, violet of passion and suffering, and gold of sacredness, Gabriel is done out in blue, the Virgin Mary’s color and the color associated with truth, and he’s holding lilies, Mary’s flower. It’s as if his gig in Nazareth left its mark on him forever.
Before he announces to Mary the news that made her weak in the knees, Gabriel the truth-teller makes sure Mary is grounded in truth by reminding her, “The Lord is with you.” This anchors in truth what is being asked of Mary. God does not require without making able. Responsibility is met by grace and exceeded by grace, transforming what feels like obligation into what is privilege.
But Mary is human, entirely human, and Mary is young, very young, and the timing is all out of joint. Gabriel speaks suddenly of conceiving and bearing and birthing and naming, but at that very moment Mary is engaged but not yet wed, and far from settled. She’s temporarily a displaced person, thanks to the new tax program of Emperor Augustus that put families on the road to return to their ancestral towns for a census. Parents hearing the news of pregnancy usually rejoice and start imagining what color to paint the nursery. “We haven’t even slept together,” protests Mary.
And then… and then. Gabriel reaches into the treasure of God and teaches Mary to recognize how in this moment of truth it is up to her whether to spend her heart and soul on the debit side of the ledger, dwelling on all the impossibilities and finding all the reasons to resist what is asked of her, or to invest her heart and soul in the receipts side of the book of life and recognize all that is positive: the favor of God, the power to conceive, a son already named by God, a throne on which he will sit, the Holy Spirit who will work intimate power within her… for nothing will be impossible with God.
She makes her choice: “Here am I,” she exclaims, diving into the deep end of the pool of God’s treasure, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be. Let it be… Let it be with me according to your word.” And with that assent the mystery of incarnation takes hold within her, and the history of redemption is written no more in the terms of law and its commands, but in the language of love unearned and undeserved, grace, the amazing movement of the treasure of God’s love through the womb of Mary.
The Christmas pageant we shall see this afternoon features a number of dwelling places: an inn where there is no room, another inn where Joseph and Mary hear of a poor substitute, the only vacancy remaining in Nazareth, a manger, a cattle shed (or, some would say, a cave). But the prime real estate at the heart of the pageant will be the place within Mary, the mansion her body makes for the Son of God. In her is fulfilled Nathan’s prophecy that we heard earlier, “…the LORD will make you a house…”
So our collect on this fourth and final Sunday of Advent asks God to wipe clean and sweep out and hose down our conscience, our ethical capacity, our moral vision, our reason for being, our mission purpose, that the real estate of our lives may become Jesus’s home.
May you and I and many be open, this Christmas, to the transforming love, the treasure, of God. And may this treasure free and spark our ethical energy, our moral vision, our faithful purpose, so that the earthen vessels of our lives convey divine treasure to this world.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Elemental Change
Scripture for the 1st Sunday in Advent includes Isaiah 64:1-9, I Corinthians 1:3-9, and Mark 13:24-37
Our readings today are rich with images of transformation. Isaiah speaks of the visitation of God as if it were fire kindling dry wood, causing a pot of water to boil. God’s movement among us results in elemental change: chemical reaction ignites, physical states change, the unshakeable status quo is shaken, and no one is beyond being affected by what is beyond human expectation. All people may insist on their own ways, but all people are, says Isaiah, like clay on the wheel of a master potter, being shaped by a hand they do not see.
Mark’s Gospel shows Jesus foretelling fearsome transformation of our universe, everything we take for granted acting in opposition to what we expect: the sun to be darkened, and good night, moon! Stars will fall from their places, and the ordering of heaven will become a great swirling cataclysm, as God claps hands to, what, reverse the Big Bang? Clear the decks? However it’s described, this elemental change gathers from the four winds all of God’s people for the ultimate homecoming. And they must be awake and ready for that moment known only to God, or else they’ll miss it.
Which makes it sound as if there’s something God’s people must do at that moment. What is it?
Must they know a secret handshake? Have enough money? Own enough stuff? Know enough answers? Have accomplished enough… accomplishments? Been sufficiently generous?
No. According to Mark’s little parable, God’s people simply must hear the knock on the door signaling that the master of the house has come home and it’s time to throw open the door and welcome him.
That’s a good lesson for a baptismal Sunday. The elemental change that awaits Kimberly Rose this morning requires a pot of water, and the divine energy that touches it and will touch her is the spark of the Holy Spirit that will animate her transformation from being only a child of Eve and Adam (aka Ali and Mitch) into being more: child of God, member of Christ’s Body, inheritor of the kingdom of God.
And in line with Mark’s little parable, what qualifies Kimberly for this changed status that is so beyond human expectation? Nothing that she has done, and nothing that we will have done except to have heard the desire of God to pour out the abundance of divine love, amazing grace, upon this little girl, and to have co-operated with God to throw open the door of this moment for God to come home in her.
That is not where her transformation ends. It is where her elemental change begins. Yet, by the Church’s theology nothing more can ever qualify her for her place at the heavenly banquet. That place will have been set for all time and beyond. It will be for Kimberly to claim her place in the heart of God, and it will be for us, her family and her church family, to model for her what spiritual alertness is, what keeping awake is for, and what allows a good night’s sleep secure in the keeping of God.
These readings given to us to hear on the first day of a new season, Advent, deal in change and transformation. What do they give us for the journey through Advent?
Isaiah invites us to wait for God, because God works for those who wait for a keener timing than their own. This goes hand in glove with Mark’s parable, doesn’t it? Mark urges us to keep alert, keep awake as we experience two dimensions of time, one the kind a clock can measure—and in that kind of time we do the work and love the people we are given—while the other dimension of time is outside and beyond what a wrist watch can measure. It is from there that God works. To be sensitive to God’s time is the interest of both Isaiah and Mark. Mark announces that heaven and earth will pass away in the ticking-down of days and months and years, but the words of Jesus will not pass away. Though spoken once in ordinary time, they are spoken from the heart of God, from beyond time, and so the words of Jesus cradle us, nurse us, stimulate us to gladly do right and remember God in all our ways (to use Isaiah’s language). Our readings today give us the invitation—or is it the demand?—to read and ponder over and savor the Word of God in Advent. Little guide books are waiting for you today, on the back table, to help you do that.
On a day of baptism, we’re reminded of our crucial and central responsibility, to expose Kimberly to the words of Jesus who is the Word of God. On these few and fast days of Advent, we need reminding of how crucial and central it is to each of us that we expose ourselves to this Word, this same hearing of what Jesus says, so we may gladly do what Jesus does and be sensitive to all who knock on our doors in ordinary time, and be alert to the God who gives birth, aware of the shaping work of the master potter, and become more adept at recognizing the touch on our hearts of the one who owns the house we occupy.
Our readings today are rich with images of transformation. Isaiah speaks of the visitation of God as if it were fire kindling dry wood, causing a pot of water to boil. God’s movement among us results in elemental change: chemical reaction ignites, physical states change, the unshakeable status quo is shaken, and no one is beyond being affected by what is beyond human expectation. All people may insist on their own ways, but all people are, says Isaiah, like clay on the wheel of a master potter, being shaped by a hand they do not see.
Mark’s Gospel shows Jesus foretelling fearsome transformation of our universe, everything we take for granted acting in opposition to what we expect: the sun to be darkened, and good night, moon! Stars will fall from their places, and the ordering of heaven will become a great swirling cataclysm, as God claps hands to, what, reverse the Big Bang? Clear the decks? However it’s described, this elemental change gathers from the four winds all of God’s people for the ultimate homecoming. And they must be awake and ready for that moment known only to God, or else they’ll miss it.
Which makes it sound as if there’s something God’s people must do at that moment. What is it?
Must they know a secret handshake? Have enough money? Own enough stuff? Know enough answers? Have accomplished enough… accomplishments? Been sufficiently generous?
No. According to Mark’s little parable, God’s people simply must hear the knock on the door signaling that the master of the house has come home and it’s time to throw open the door and welcome him.
That’s a good lesson for a baptismal Sunday. The elemental change that awaits Kimberly Rose this morning requires a pot of water, and the divine energy that touches it and will touch her is the spark of the Holy Spirit that will animate her transformation from being only a child of Eve and Adam (aka Ali and Mitch) into being more: child of God, member of Christ’s Body, inheritor of the kingdom of God.
And in line with Mark’s little parable, what qualifies Kimberly for this changed status that is so beyond human expectation? Nothing that she has done, and nothing that we will have done except to have heard the desire of God to pour out the abundance of divine love, amazing grace, upon this little girl, and to have co-operated with God to throw open the door of this moment for God to come home in her.
That is not where her transformation ends. It is where her elemental change begins. Yet, by the Church’s theology nothing more can ever qualify her for her place at the heavenly banquet. That place will have been set for all time and beyond. It will be for Kimberly to claim her place in the heart of God, and it will be for us, her family and her church family, to model for her what spiritual alertness is, what keeping awake is for, and what allows a good night’s sleep secure in the keeping of God.
These readings given to us to hear on the first day of a new season, Advent, deal in change and transformation. What do they give us for the journey through Advent?
Isaiah invites us to wait for God, because God works for those who wait for a keener timing than their own. This goes hand in glove with Mark’s parable, doesn’t it? Mark urges us to keep alert, keep awake as we experience two dimensions of time, one the kind a clock can measure—and in that kind of time we do the work and love the people we are given—while the other dimension of time is outside and beyond what a wrist watch can measure. It is from there that God works. To be sensitive to God’s time is the interest of both Isaiah and Mark. Mark announces that heaven and earth will pass away in the ticking-down of days and months and years, but the words of Jesus will not pass away. Though spoken once in ordinary time, they are spoken from the heart of God, from beyond time, and so the words of Jesus cradle us, nurse us, stimulate us to gladly do right and remember God in all our ways (to use Isaiah’s language). Our readings today give us the invitation—or is it the demand?—to read and ponder over and savor the Word of God in Advent. Little guide books are waiting for you today, on the back table, to help you do that.
On a day of baptism, we’re reminded of our crucial and central responsibility, to expose Kimberly to the words of Jesus who is the Word of God. On these few and fast days of Advent, we need reminding of how crucial and central it is to each of us that we expose ourselves to this Word, this same hearing of what Jesus says, so we may gladly do what Jesus does and be sensitive to all who knock on our doors in ordinary time, and be alert to the God who gives birth, aware of the shaping work of the master potter, and become more adept at recognizing the touch on our hearts of the one who owns the house we occupy.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Yearning for Unity
Scripture for the Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King Sunday, includes Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Ephesians 1:15-23; and Matthew 25:31-46
The most divided house in America, the United States Congress, was considering last week whether to approve a spending bill that will prevent a government shutdown. Buried in that thick document is one line that defines pizza as a vegetable. You know I’m not making this up. You know this not because of anything you know about me, but because of what we all know can happen in Congress.
The bill’s language would confirm current government policy, which is that two tablespoons of tomato paste spread on a slice of pizza constitutes one vegetable serving. The Department of Agriculture, pushing healthier food for children, has sought a stricter provision, that food must contain half a cup of tomato paste to qualify as a vegetable serving. A spokesman for the American Frozen Food Institute says that this would make it impossible for schools to serve pizza.
The director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has offered her opinion that pizza ought to be served in school cafeterias with a vegetable, not count as one.
Jon Stewart had his way with this imbroglio: At a time when a congressional super-committee is supposed to be agreeing on spending cuts to the tune of a trillion dollars or more, what our divided government may be able to agree upon is… that pizza is a vegetable.
From another divisive setting, we heard this week that Morgan Management is suing the Town of Williamstown and the State Attorney General’s Office, asking the court to declare that the damage done by Tropical Storm Irene was an act of God.
Of these two astonishing developments, this one stuns me more.
If Irene was an act of God, goes the legal argument by the owners of The Spruces mobile home park, then an act of God has caused the mobile home park to cease. I’m not making that up, either. If the park has ceased, then Massachusetts law —which is extremely clear about the obligations of mobile home parks, inconveniently clear for Morgan Management-- Massachusetts law would no longer apply, and Morgan would be free to walk away from Williamstown with no further responsibilities to its tenants.
And one more painfully divisive experience was felt last week, this in the campus community to which we belong by more than neighborly affinity. Words of racial hatred were scrawled on a wall inside a Williams dormitory last weekend, generating a crisis which, thanks to bold initiatives and wise judgment by students and administration, has become the opportunity for truth-telling. Such incidents have happened before, and may happen again. But what may be unique about this one is that the moment was seized, classes cancelled, and 1500 campus members sat on Chapin lawn, allowing the truth-telling to sink deeper than usual, perhaps deeper than ever, and deep is where it must go to reach those depths where bias and learned hatred linger. A gentle drizzle anointed the crowd near the end of that historic gathering, as if heaven were trying to cleanse us all.
See how many instances of divisiveness can be found in our human community, constantly impinging on our daily life. We yearn for unity, long for what breaks down walls that separate us so we may find what binds us all together in perfect freedom and mutual responsibility. We’re hungry for the antidote to paralyzed government, social segregation, and poisonous words.
And along comes today’s Gospel, the summation of Matthew’s teaching about the return of Jesus Christ in glory to set right a world gone wrong. In recent weeks, he has reported several relevant parables of Jesus—wise and foolish bridesmaids whose one task is to be ready when the bridegroom comes, estate managers entrusted with the master’s wealth investing it well or poorly—and now he is done with parables that tease our minds, and instead spreads out before us an apocalyptic vision unlike any in the other Gospels. But, like the parables, this astonishing mural of the end divides people, sheep from goats, some rising to eternal reward, others being cast into the outer gulags of perdition.
Slim pickings for us who yearn for unity. What’s going on in all this division?
For one thing, the first-century church was pulled in two directions by the question, Where is Jesus? One answer is that he has ascended to heaven, and from there will come again to judge the living and the dead. This is the answer given by the gospel-writer Luke at the end of his Gospel. But there is no ascension in Matthew’s Gospel; rather, his closing scene has the eleven disciples gathered around Jesus on a mountaintop, where he tells them, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Jesus is here with us.
But as we see in today’s portion, Matthew crosses the aisle and agrees that there will be a day when Jesus returns to decisively complete his victory over the realm of evil. As year gave way to year and decade to decade, Matthew’s church yearned for something more than the quiet hiddenness of Jesus’s promised presence (had that come to feel like slim pickings?). Surely Christ’s definitive triumphant return would come in a way seen by all, and surely it would happen soon.
Matthew speaks of Jesus Christ as King, sitting on a glorious throne, from which he will admit the righteous to the kingdom of God, the reign of perfect justice they’d long prayed daily would come on earth as in heaven. Perfect justice, of course, is a very sharp sword; and what it will cut away is the demonic this-worldly tyranny of Jesus’s opponents, the counter-kingdom opposed to God’s reign. Listen to my favorite Methodist commentator, Eugene Boring:
“The two kingdoms that are confused and interwoven in the ambiguities of history now stand disclosed at the end of history. There are only these two kingdoms: the Son of Man with his angels and all the blessed righteous, and the kingdom of God prepared from eternity stand on one side; the devil and his angels, the accursed, and the destiny prepared for the devil and his own stand on the other. The kingdom of God is disclosed as the only true kingdom… ultimately only God is King.”
So welcome to Christ the King Sunday, the nickname of this last Sunday in the long season of Pentecost when it seems the Church has no more imagination than to keep numbering its Sundays after Pentecost—this year 23 of them—but oh yes, we must imagine.
Shaped by the realities of his time, Matthew imagined this cataclysmic end of history that would soon close the curtain on a culture of violence and greed, and throw open the long-veiled reign of God’s justice.
Two thousand years later, we can imagine cataclysmic endings, the human race having invented several ways to end life as we know it, one by nuclear technology harnessed to the cause of war, and one by toxic excess in the name of greed. We need to imagine God’s setting-right of a world gone wrong, and it isn’t hard to imagine that in order to unite the human race there must be divided from human community the counter-forces of racial hatred, violence, and greed.
But don’t give up on the pressing need to imagine a dénouement that frees people to find unity, rather than a judgment day that perpetuates division? How does Matthew’s vision of setting the world right help us 21st-century believers? There are three ways.
First, he reminds us that Jesus Christ is the basis for any setting-right that you and I are called to do. We hear that in all the titles of honor given him: Son of Man, Shepherd, Lord, King. And if we are to represent him faithfully in a world where people of other religions—and people of no religion—have different bases for the reconciling work they are called to do, we must remember and practice the basics: to treat others as we wish them to treat us, to be merciful peacemakers with pure hearts, and to act less as teachers and more as learners. All these are Jesus-traits that Matthew urges us to value and imitate, because Jesus Christ is the basis for the reconciling work we have to do.
Second, Matthew says something more astonishing than anything we have heard recently, and again I’ll let my Methodist commentator say it: In Matthew’s apocalyptic vision, God’s “criterion of judgment is not confession of faith in Christ. Nothing is said of grace, justification, or the forgiveness of sins. What counts is whether one has acted with loving care for needy people. Such deeds are not a matter of ‘extra credit,’ but constitute the decisive criterion of judgment… the ‘weightier matters of the Law.’” To say that Christ is King is to say that his ethics rule.
Third, Matthew makes his whole end-time vision depend on his deep belief that between first and second public appearances, Jesus Christ has never left us. The righteous have no idea that they have fed, welcomed, clothed, and visited him—but we must catch the point that he has been there all along, embedded in these least of our brothers and sisters, his brothers and sisters. Or is it more accurate to say that he is alive in the force-field of loving care between the righteous and the least; and he was there in the void between the self-absorbed and the least. One could even say, true to Matthew’s words, that Jesus Christ has been detained indefinitely among the poor and excluded, willingly and strategically imprisoned with the most vulnerable until the time comes for heaven to set things right on earth.
Isn’t it intriguing, this not-knowing, not-recognizing that shrouds Christ in anonymity? And this strange agnosticism is true equally for the righteous and for the self-absorbed and unresponsive. The first do not know what they have done, and the second have no clue what they have failed to do, until he comes again in public display, disclosing the hearts of all. And, until then, doesn’t that suggest the vocation of the Church, to hold him up so clearly that hearts do open?
We really must imagine what it will take to make right this world gone wrong. Here today, Matthew tells us. He seems to long for division of the human race, and this could cause us not to listen. But if we are to play our part and do what we can, what we must, to help people find their unity with one another and with God, we need Matthew’s wisdom.
And, in a nutshell, it is this: Jesus Christ is our basis for action. Action is required. Self-giving love is that action, and Jesus Christ is right there, in the giving and the receiving.
(M. Eugene Boring’s commentary on Matthew in volume 8 of “The New Interpreter’s Bible” was useful in the preparation of this sermon.)
The most divided house in America, the United States Congress, was considering last week whether to approve a spending bill that will prevent a government shutdown. Buried in that thick document is one line that defines pizza as a vegetable. You know I’m not making this up. You know this not because of anything you know about me, but because of what we all know can happen in Congress.
The bill’s language would confirm current government policy, which is that two tablespoons of tomato paste spread on a slice of pizza constitutes one vegetable serving. The Department of Agriculture, pushing healthier food for children, has sought a stricter provision, that food must contain half a cup of tomato paste to qualify as a vegetable serving. A spokesman for the American Frozen Food Institute says that this would make it impossible for schools to serve pizza.
The director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has offered her opinion that pizza ought to be served in school cafeterias with a vegetable, not count as one.
Jon Stewart had his way with this imbroglio: At a time when a congressional super-committee is supposed to be agreeing on spending cuts to the tune of a trillion dollars or more, what our divided government may be able to agree upon is… that pizza is a vegetable.
From another divisive setting, we heard this week that Morgan Management is suing the Town of Williamstown and the State Attorney General’s Office, asking the court to declare that the damage done by Tropical Storm Irene was an act of God.
Of these two astonishing developments, this one stuns me more.
If Irene was an act of God, goes the legal argument by the owners of The Spruces mobile home park, then an act of God has caused the mobile home park to cease. I’m not making that up, either. If the park has ceased, then Massachusetts law —which is extremely clear about the obligations of mobile home parks, inconveniently clear for Morgan Management-- Massachusetts law would no longer apply, and Morgan would be free to walk away from Williamstown with no further responsibilities to its tenants.
And one more painfully divisive experience was felt last week, this in the campus community to which we belong by more than neighborly affinity. Words of racial hatred were scrawled on a wall inside a Williams dormitory last weekend, generating a crisis which, thanks to bold initiatives and wise judgment by students and administration, has become the opportunity for truth-telling. Such incidents have happened before, and may happen again. But what may be unique about this one is that the moment was seized, classes cancelled, and 1500 campus members sat on Chapin lawn, allowing the truth-telling to sink deeper than usual, perhaps deeper than ever, and deep is where it must go to reach those depths where bias and learned hatred linger. A gentle drizzle anointed the crowd near the end of that historic gathering, as if heaven were trying to cleanse us all.
See how many instances of divisiveness can be found in our human community, constantly impinging on our daily life. We yearn for unity, long for what breaks down walls that separate us so we may find what binds us all together in perfect freedom and mutual responsibility. We’re hungry for the antidote to paralyzed government, social segregation, and poisonous words.
And along comes today’s Gospel, the summation of Matthew’s teaching about the return of Jesus Christ in glory to set right a world gone wrong. In recent weeks, he has reported several relevant parables of Jesus—wise and foolish bridesmaids whose one task is to be ready when the bridegroom comes, estate managers entrusted with the master’s wealth investing it well or poorly—and now he is done with parables that tease our minds, and instead spreads out before us an apocalyptic vision unlike any in the other Gospels. But, like the parables, this astonishing mural of the end divides people, sheep from goats, some rising to eternal reward, others being cast into the outer gulags of perdition.
Slim pickings for us who yearn for unity. What’s going on in all this division?
For one thing, the first-century church was pulled in two directions by the question, Where is Jesus? One answer is that he has ascended to heaven, and from there will come again to judge the living and the dead. This is the answer given by the gospel-writer Luke at the end of his Gospel. But there is no ascension in Matthew’s Gospel; rather, his closing scene has the eleven disciples gathered around Jesus on a mountaintop, where he tells them, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Jesus is here with us.
But as we see in today’s portion, Matthew crosses the aisle and agrees that there will be a day when Jesus returns to decisively complete his victory over the realm of evil. As year gave way to year and decade to decade, Matthew’s church yearned for something more than the quiet hiddenness of Jesus’s promised presence (had that come to feel like slim pickings?). Surely Christ’s definitive triumphant return would come in a way seen by all, and surely it would happen soon.
Matthew speaks of Jesus Christ as King, sitting on a glorious throne, from which he will admit the righteous to the kingdom of God, the reign of perfect justice they’d long prayed daily would come on earth as in heaven. Perfect justice, of course, is a very sharp sword; and what it will cut away is the demonic this-worldly tyranny of Jesus’s opponents, the counter-kingdom opposed to God’s reign. Listen to my favorite Methodist commentator, Eugene Boring:
“The two kingdoms that are confused and interwoven in the ambiguities of history now stand disclosed at the end of history. There are only these two kingdoms: the Son of Man with his angels and all the blessed righteous, and the kingdom of God prepared from eternity stand on one side; the devil and his angels, the accursed, and the destiny prepared for the devil and his own stand on the other. The kingdom of God is disclosed as the only true kingdom… ultimately only God is King.”
So welcome to Christ the King Sunday, the nickname of this last Sunday in the long season of Pentecost when it seems the Church has no more imagination than to keep numbering its Sundays after Pentecost—this year 23 of them—but oh yes, we must imagine.
Shaped by the realities of his time, Matthew imagined this cataclysmic end of history that would soon close the curtain on a culture of violence and greed, and throw open the long-veiled reign of God’s justice.
Two thousand years later, we can imagine cataclysmic endings, the human race having invented several ways to end life as we know it, one by nuclear technology harnessed to the cause of war, and one by toxic excess in the name of greed. We need to imagine God’s setting-right of a world gone wrong, and it isn’t hard to imagine that in order to unite the human race there must be divided from human community the counter-forces of racial hatred, violence, and greed.
But don’t give up on the pressing need to imagine a dénouement that frees people to find unity, rather than a judgment day that perpetuates division? How does Matthew’s vision of setting the world right help us 21st-century believers? There are three ways.
First, he reminds us that Jesus Christ is the basis for any setting-right that you and I are called to do. We hear that in all the titles of honor given him: Son of Man, Shepherd, Lord, King. And if we are to represent him faithfully in a world where people of other religions—and people of no religion—have different bases for the reconciling work they are called to do, we must remember and practice the basics: to treat others as we wish them to treat us, to be merciful peacemakers with pure hearts, and to act less as teachers and more as learners. All these are Jesus-traits that Matthew urges us to value and imitate, because Jesus Christ is the basis for the reconciling work we have to do.
Second, Matthew says something more astonishing than anything we have heard recently, and again I’ll let my Methodist commentator say it: In Matthew’s apocalyptic vision, God’s “criterion of judgment is not confession of faith in Christ. Nothing is said of grace, justification, or the forgiveness of sins. What counts is whether one has acted with loving care for needy people. Such deeds are not a matter of ‘extra credit,’ but constitute the decisive criterion of judgment… the ‘weightier matters of the Law.’” To say that Christ is King is to say that his ethics rule.
Third, Matthew makes his whole end-time vision depend on his deep belief that between first and second public appearances, Jesus Christ has never left us. The righteous have no idea that they have fed, welcomed, clothed, and visited him—but we must catch the point that he has been there all along, embedded in these least of our brothers and sisters, his brothers and sisters. Or is it more accurate to say that he is alive in the force-field of loving care between the righteous and the least; and he was there in the void between the self-absorbed and the least. One could even say, true to Matthew’s words, that Jesus Christ has been detained indefinitely among the poor and excluded, willingly and strategically imprisoned with the most vulnerable until the time comes for heaven to set things right on earth.
Isn’t it intriguing, this not-knowing, not-recognizing that shrouds Christ in anonymity? And this strange agnosticism is true equally for the righteous and for the self-absorbed and unresponsive. The first do not know what they have done, and the second have no clue what they have failed to do, until he comes again in public display, disclosing the hearts of all. And, until then, doesn’t that suggest the vocation of the Church, to hold him up so clearly that hearts do open?
We really must imagine what it will take to make right this world gone wrong. Here today, Matthew tells us. He seems to long for division of the human race, and this could cause us not to listen. But if we are to play our part and do what we can, what we must, to help people find their unity with one another and with God, we need Matthew’s wisdom.
And, in a nutshell, it is this: Jesus Christ is our basis for action. Action is required. Self-giving love is that action, and Jesus Christ is right there, in the giving and the receiving.
(M. Eugene Boring’s commentary on Matthew in volume 8 of “The New Interpreter’s Bible” was useful in the preparation of this sermon.)
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