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As preached at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Tuesday, March 26, 2024.

Isaiah 49:1-7
Psalm 71:1-14
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
John 12:20-36

In our epistle this evening, St. Paul describes the proclamation of the crucified Christ as a “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.”

In his book Reflections on the Psalms, famed Anglican author C.S. Lewis describes a “stumbling block” he encountered as a young Christian, “in the demand that we should praise God. Still more [he writes] in the suggestion that God himself demanded it. We all despise the man who demands continued assurance of his own virtue, intelligence or delightfulness; we despise still more the crowd of people ‘round every dictator, every millionaire, every celebrity, who gratify that demand. Thus a picture, at once ludicrous and horrible, both of God and His worshippers, threatened to appear in my mind. [. . .] It was hideously like saying, ‘What I most want is to be told that I am good and great.’ [. . .] It was extremely distressing. It made one think what one least wanted to think. Gratitude to God, reverence to Him, obedience to Him,” those Lewis thought he “could understand; [but] not this perpetual eulogy.”

Lewis described this as “[t]he miserable idea that God should in any sense need, or crave for, our worship like a vain author presenting his new books to people who never met or heard of him. Even if such an absurd Deity could be conceived, He would hardly come to us, the lowest of rational creatures, to gratify His appetite. I don't want my dog,” Lewis remarks, “to bark approval of my books.”

I think young Clive Staples could be forgiven for this brief bout of thinking this “absurd Deity” might be the God of Christianity, because I think there are Christian theological systems, promulgated even today, which make God out to be exactly thus.

Under this account, the entire history of salvation: the Creation, the Fall, the revelation to the prophets, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection, the Ascension, Christ's second coming in glory, the general resurrection and the judgment of the living and the dead, the new heaven and new earth, are all simply means employed by God to accomplish God's own self-glorification. God is simply too great, the argument goes, too perfect, too glorious to be concerned with anything else than the glory of God.

It is sinfully prideful, this account tells us, for us to seek glory for ourselves because we are human and inferior. But it’s okay–necessary, even–for God to desire God’s own glorification because God is perfect and divine and superior.

I don’t know that I’m quite prepared to go so far as to say this account is wrong so far as it goes. Certainly as a philosophical and theological system it’s impressively consistent. But that might be part of the problem: God is too great–too glorious!--to be fully contained within any system. When we get too caught up in preserving God’s metaphysical perfection, we sometimes lose track of God’s compassionate nature as revealed in Scripture.

Now, God is glorious, and it is only natural and right that God's glory should evoke in us the desire to glorify God exemplified by the psalmist’s words in our psalm this evening: “Let my mouth be full of your praise and your glory all the day long.” After all that is one of the major reasons why we are gathered here tonight, and every other time we come together in liturgical worship: to join our voices with the company of heaven to proclaim the glory of God’s Name. Later in this service we will pray in the Prayers of the People, Form III “[t]hat [God’s] Name may be glorified by all people.” May we do so with sincerity, and may God in God’s glory hear our prayer with patience, mercy, and compassion.

The theologians might be correct in saying that God's glorification would be a sufficient end in and of itself. But this evening’s Gospel passage suggests something different, or at least something more. After an angelic voice announces the glorification of the Name of God, Jesus says, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine.”

And Jesus immediately continues, “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.” New Testament scholar and Church of England bishop N.T. Wright explicates this passage by pointing out that Jesus’ death on the Cross is the “way in which [God’s] glory is fully revealed; and it will also be the victory over ‘this world’s ruler’, the dark power that has held the nations captive. This is Jesus’ answer to the arrival of the Greeks. Once [Jesus] has died on the Cross, ‘all people’”--both Jew and Gentile–”will be free to come to [Christ] and so discover the living and true God.”

The glorification of God’s Name through the Cross, then, is not simply an attempt to satisfy a massive divine ego. It is instead, for us. And the fact that Jesus says this after Greeks, not Jews, come to meet Jesus and worship him, reinforces that it is for all of us.

The glorification of God’s Name is the means by which all are drawn to Jesus. God’s Name is glorified so that we might have the opportunity to take note of that glorification and turn away from that which separates us from God’s glory, so that we may ourselves participate in that glory. The purpose–or at least a purpose–of the glorification of God’s name is the ultimate glorification of humanity.

Jesus glorified God’s Name for us, and when we participate in that glorification, when we glorify God’s Name through worship and service, we do so for God, but we also do so for ourselves and for each other. We proclaim the word of the Cross which St. Paul describes in our epistle reading as “God’s power” and “God’s wisdom.” We fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah in our first reading: “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

Now, when we start talking about something being “for” something else, we’re always on complicated philosophical ground. It’s certainly true to say that the glorification of humanity accomplishes the further glorification of God’s Name. But reducing the purpose of the former to the latter alone distorts the nature of divine glory, which always expresses itself in the form of overflowing love.

The Scriptural account attests that God’s glory does not primarily lie in God being impossibly above human beings, set apart and superior. Instead, Scripture tells us that the paradoxical nature of divine glory is that it lies in God’s very willingness to set it aside, to debase Godself in solidarity with humanity.

We are now four days away from the Easter Vigil, when we will once again say that word we typically don’t say during Lent, a word which translated into English means “praise the Lord.” And when we do, it will escape from my lips and I hope from yours because the burden of holding it in a moment longer will become more than we can bear, because through grace we recognize the ineffable glory of our God who seeks glorification not for God’s own sake, but for ours.

Amen.

As preached at the Advent Vespers service at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Tuesday, December 19, 2023.

Psalm 126
Deuteronomy 30:11-14
Hebrews 10:35-11:1
Mathew 25:9-14

Some of you might remember that I gave a sermon on this Gospel passage this past spring, for the second Sunday of Easter. And I’m glad that I did, because if I didn’t I would be tempted to give the sermon I gave then tonight. But that sermon was an Easter sermon, and this–this is an Advent sermon.

To look at this passage about St. Thomas and the disciples in the upper room through an Advent lens, we need to put ourselves in the sandals of the disciples in the wake of the Crucifixion, to put aside our preconceptions and understandings shaped by two thousand years of Christian tradition and theology.

The death of Jesus would have been shocking to His disciples, in the way that the sudden and unexpected death of a close friend is always shocking. But it would not have been paradigm-shifting, at least not in the way we might think.

It is not at all clear that any of the disciples, let alone all of them, truly understood Jesus’ fully divine nature. The first explicit mention of Jesus as God in the Gospels--indeed, the only truly explicit mention in the entire Bible--is in our Gospel reading this evening, after the Resurrection, when St. Thomas addresses Jesus as “My Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28).

So if the apostles were shocked, it was not so much that Jesus died on the Cross. They understood perfectly well that if you nail a human to a cross and leave them upon it, that person will die within days. Indeed, they understood that all humans die eventually. If the apostles were shocked at Jesus’ death, it was not that Jesus died, but that God let Jesus die.

Scripture makes clear that the disciples did understand, if imperfectly, that Jesus was both the promised Messiah and the Son of God. They knew that Jesus was the Savior sent by God to liberate and save the oppressed people of Israel. That Jesus’ revolutionary movement seemingly ended in defeat with a death upon the cross would have seemed to them to indicate the ineffectualness of God. It was only with the appearance of the Risen Christ that the fullness of God’s plan was finally made known to the disciples–first to the women, then to the other disciples, and then to St. Thomas.

Of course, we have the benefit of hindsight. The Church clarified long ago her Christological and Trinitarian doctrines, and so we do understand (albeit still imperfectly, if possibly not quite so imperfectly) and receive as essential doctrine that Jesus was and is God, fully divine and fully human, of one being with the Father and part of the indivisible Godhead which is the Holy Trinity.

For us, with the benefit of hindsight, the truly paradigm-shifting event is neither the Crucifixion nor the Resurrection but the Incarnation. (Remember, this is an Advent sermon.) The shocking fact is not that Jesus died, or even that Jesus rose again on the third day; it’s that Christ made himself vulnerable to death by becoming incarnate of Mary His mother, the God-bearer, and became human. Christ’s giving of himself for us (Gal 2:20) did not happen on the Cross, at least not primarily: it happened in the creche, with the first gasping breath of the baby Jesus.

In the creche Christ enters into our human condition, making Himself vulnerable to pain, suffering, and death, and on the Cross He actually suffers in a way which is immediate, real, and extreme. He experiences not only being human, but the very worst of that which it entails. The Cross, then, makes explicit what was already implicit in the creche.

When St. John writes that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son” (Jn 3:16) the evangelist is not referring to the Crucifixion alone, but to the Incarnation, to the 33-year-long event of the incarnate God living in the world. God the Father sent Christ into the world--not out of the world, but into!--that the world might be saved through him (Jn 3:17).

Just as Jesus almost certainly was not born on the 25th of December, St. Thomas probably didn’t die on the 21st of December, the date upon which we commemorate him. But when, back in the 9th century, the shortest day and longest night was chosen for his feast day, I think those who made that choice were onto something. The feast of St. Thomas signals that the long wait of Advent is coming to a close, that soon we will be celebrating the great feast of the Incarnation which is Christmas.

In many ways, our lives in the 21st century parallel the experience of St. Thomas in the upper room. Christ is already Risen, has already won the victory over death and sin. Scripture and sacred tradition testify this to us just as the other disciples did to Thomas. And yet, we and Thomas understandably remain skeptical. We yearn for the moment when the completion of Jesus’ victory will be made fully manifest to us.

And so we wait, an Advent people. We remember his death, we proclaim his resurrection, we await his coming in glory. None of us know the day or hour of when Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead. But our celebration of Christmas at the close of the Advent season is an expression of our belief that our waiting is not in vain, that one day we will face our Lord and Savior face to face, flesh to flesh, just as St. Thomas did. We stand at our watchposts, as the prophet Habakkuk puts it in our first reading. “For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come.”

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. Amen.

As preached at the service of Evening Prayer on Saturday, June 17 at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ.

Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7
Psalm 116:1, 10-17
Romans 5:1-8
Matthew 9:35-10:23

During the pandemic, Fr. Todd, Jonathan W---, and I had a Zoom book club going on in which we would read theology books and discuss them on Monday nights. At one point it was my turn to choose the next book, and I chose this, The Crucified God, because I already owned it and had been wanting to read something by the author, Jürgen Moltmann, for some time. Jonathan and Fr. Todd agreed and so I opened the book to read the introduction and first chapter, and found this inscribed into the first page. For those of you who cannot see, which is probably everybody, it says “George E. Council, 3/83.”

I don’t know what 3/83 means–is it the third of 83 books? Did he procure it in March of 1983?--but George E. Councell (pictured in my icon above) was of course the 11th bishop of New Jersey. He was ordained to the episcopate in 2003 and retired in 2013, being succeeded by our current bishop, William Stokes. Bishop Councell sadly passed away in 2018.

This book passed into my ownership at a diocesan convention where, knowing that he wanted to downsize his theological library, Bishop Councell set out a large number of his books, free to a good home. My parents will attest that I am constitutionally unable to refuse a free book, and the rest is history.

Sharing the contents of his library was only one of the ways that Bishop Councell shared his faith in Christ during his episcopate. In 2008, Bishop Councell laid his hands on me in the sacrament of confirmation. While some traditions allow priests to confirm under certain circumstances, in the Episcopal Church confirmation is exclusively the responsibility of the sacred order of bishops. And of course, Bishop Councell preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ in his leadership of the diocese by both word and example.

Our prayerbook catechism describes the ministry of a bishop as representing Christ and his Church, particularly as apostle, chief priest, and pastor of a diocese; guarding the faith, unity, and discipline of the whole Church; proclaiming the Word of God; acting in Christ’s name for the reconciliation of the world and the building up the Church; and ordaining others to continue Christ’s ministry.

Empowered by the holy grace of God, Bishop Councell fulfilled all of these roles faithfully and lovingly, as has Bishop Stokes after him.

In our Gospel reading this evening, Jesus summons the Twelve and gives to them a special authority. Anglicanism understands our current bishops to exist in continuity with the Twelve and to inherit their authority, even if there is not always agreement over the exact mechanism of that continuity. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey describes “the essential function of the Apostles” as having a “two-fold significance”:

They are “sent” to bear witness to the historical events [of Jesus’ ministry], and they are officers of the one people of God, which is behind and before all local communities. As time goes on the form of the ministry develops; while in the apostolic age there was a local ministry of presbyter-bishops and deacons and a “general” ministry of Apostles, a change takes place, and in the second century century there appears the ministry of Bishops with a growing emphasis upon their necessity as links with the Apostles. [. . . ] And if the Apostles, by their place in the structure, set forth the Gospel, then there will be needed in subsequent ages a similar ministry [. . .] with a similar relation to the Gospel and the Body [i.e., the Church]. The Apostle, and the Bishop after[wards], is the link with the historic events and the organ of the one Body [of Christ].

Alongside the Scriptures, the Creeds, and the dominical sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, the order of bishops is one of the four elements considered essential to the nature of the Church by Anglicans. It is so important that we in the United States call our Anglican province “the Episcopal Church,” where “episcopal” derives from the Greek “episcopos,” bishop.

As I’m sure most of you are aware, one week from today the office of the Bishop of New Jersey will pass from Bishop Stokes to our bishop-elect, the Rev. Canon Dr. Sally French, as she is ordained to the sacred order of bishops and becomes the 13th Bishop of New Jersey. She will also, of course, be the first ever female Bishop of New Jersey.

The episcopate, the order of bishops, exists as a visible sign of both the unity and the diversity of the universal Church: one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. It is only appropriate that the episcopate represent the entire range of genders and gender identities, of sexual orientations, of races and ethnicities and nationalities.

Jesus did not die just for the salvation of thirty-three year old Palestinian Jewish men, but for all of us. Just as Christ’s role as the firstborn of creation, the perfect model of all human beings, is not limited by the contingent features of his earthly existence, neither is our capacity to participate in his priesthood so limited.

Church of England bishop and Biblical scholar N.T. Wright articulates this concept by pointing out that “[p]art of the point of the new creation launched at Easter was the transformation of roles and vocations: from Jews-only to worldwide, from monoglot to multilingual (think of Pentecost [which we celebrated just a couple of weeks ago]), and from male-only leadership to male and female together.”

It is a contingent historical fact that the disciples named in Scripture as “The Twelve” were all men. And yet the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of St. Paul all speak of many women filling leadership roles in the early Church, performing the functional equivalent of Archbishop Ramsey’s description of the role of Apostle. Of particular significance are Mary of Magdala and the other women who stood as witnesses to the resurrection and conveyed that good news back to the Twelve, acting as “apostles to the apostles.” In St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, there is a mention of a Junia who is “well known” or “outstanding” “among the apostles,” which some interpret as Biblical evidence that the apostolate in the early-Church was not limited to a single gender.

In any case, patriarchy quickly reared its ugly head, and even the Church was not immune, resulting in nearly two millennia of an all-male episcopate. It has only been within my own lifetime that women have begun taking their place within the sacred order of bishops, starting with the ordination and consecration of the Rt. Rev. Barbara Harris in 1989, and even now it remains not without controversy, even within Anglicanism. Out of the 40 autonomous provinces which make up the world-wide Anglican Communion, only twelve have consecrated female bishops.

Jesus’ command to the Twelve in our Gospel reading is to “Go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, declare publicly that the kingdom of heaven has arrived. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse people with skin diseases, cast out demons.” Bishop-Elect French will probably not have much call to raise the dead or heal lepers, but you can be certain that she will declare publicly that the kingdom of heaven has arrived. And while she most likely will not perform literal exorcisms, she will continue in her predecessors’ example, leading our diocese to confront head-on the demons of poverty, bigotry, and gun violence.

I invite all of us to support our new bishop with our prayers and actions as she starts her new ministry as apostle, chief priest, and pastor of our diocese, proclaiming the Word of God which cannot be chained, but is living and active.

Amen.

As preached at the weekend Eucharists at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Saturday, April 15 and the morning of Sunday, April 16. Long-time readers of this blog might recognize large portions of this sermon as being lifted from this unpreached sermon, written thirteen years ago. I thought about writing a completely new sermon, but I couldn't imagine saying anything else on this text without saying this first.

Acts 2:14a, 22-32
Psalm 16
1 Peter 1:3-9
John 20:19-31

The second Sunday of Easter is my favorite Sunday in the entire liturgical year. Part of the reason is because the message it gives us is not simple to decipher or easy to hear; it challenges us, invites us to engage the story of St. Thomas just as Thomas engaged the physical body of the Risen Christ: fully, critically, and reverently.

Even before I was baptized a Christian–perhaps especially before I was baptized a Christian–the Gospel passage we heard today resonated with me as I put myself in the sandals of a skeptical St. Thomas. Even today, 16 years after my baptism, the challenges which it has given me in the past only serve to enrichen and deepen my response to it in the present.

These are the words of Jesus the Christ to the doubting St. Thomas: "Blessed are they who have not seen and yet believe."

In a world where ignorance and uncritical thinking are commonplace, where religious intolerance is rampant and fanaticism begets horrific violence, where people reject the scientific evidence on various subjects including the efficacy of vaccines or of masks, these are challenging words. It seems, after all, like the absolutely last thing this world needs is more uncritical belief without evidence.

But as I've reflected over this Gospel passage over the years, these are also words that have come to bring me much hope and joy. Imagine all the things Jesus could have said, but didn't. Jesus could have cursed St. Thomas, just as Jesus had cursed the fig tree which had not born fruit out of season. Words of reprimand, of condemnation, of anger or disappointment, could have followed. Jesus could have berated St. Thomas for his lack of belief.

But none of those things happened. Instead: "Blessed are they who have not seen and yet believe."

But the truest, deepest source of joy isn't just that we aren't, say, damned to eternal torment in hell forever for our doubts, for our unbelief. It's this: that when Thomas reached out for a deeper, relational connection with Christ, demanded to see and touch and feel Jesus, the Risen Christ appeared. We are not required to hold blind faith, to believe without seeing. When we need Jesus, when we ask for Jesus, Jesus shows up. Every time, without fail, just like Jesus did for St. Thomas.

Well, maybe not just like. If you expect Jesus to show up bodily in front of you, to give you a chance to put your fingers in Jesus' side, you're probably going to be disappointed--probably. I suppose I can't, and I won't, rule out the possibility completely--but if it happens to you, you're probably best off not telling me about it, because I probably won't believe you. If you're looking for some grand supernatural violation of the natural order of God's creation, you're going to be disappointed; at best, you'll get a violation of the established rules as we currently understand them. And if you expect "proof" for some set of propositional truths, to the exclusion of some other set of propositions, some final demonstration that you're right and everyone else is wrong, you're almost certainly going to be disappointed. Faith, at least as I've come to understand it, doesn't work like that.

"First of all," writes the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff in his book Liberation and Ecology, "comes the experience of mystery, the experience of God":

Only afterward does faith supervene. Faith is not primarily adhesion to a teaching that gives access to revelation and the supernatural. Then faith would be tantamount to ideology, in the sense of an idea or belief inculcated in someone from outside. This extrinsic character of so-called faith can give rise to various forms of fundamentalism and religious warfare. All groups tend to affirm their own truths to the exclusion of all others. Faith is meaningful and possesses truth only when it represents a response to an experience of God made personally and communally. Then faith is the expression of an encounter with God which embraces all existence and feeling--the heart, the intellect, and the will.

This may well be the purest description of my personal theology as has ever been written; I know that those words have been written on my heart ever since I first read them as a college student 19 years ago, in 2004. (If you've done the math, you know that was about 3 years before my baptism.) And I cannot think about the story of St. Thomas without thinking of the words of Boff I've just read.

Jesus' appearance to St. Thomas did not put an end to the possibly of doubt or disbelief. Imagine what we might wonder were we to find ourselves in Thomas' sandals. Is it really Jesus--and not, say, Jesus' identical twin? Or a clone? Could it be a trick with mirrors, or a delusion of the mind? Can we be sure that Jesus really died, and wasn't just resuscitated by some scientifically-explainable process (and never underestimate the ingenuity of scientists in constructing explanations, it's what they do)?

Jesus' appearance to St. Thomas did not make these questions impossible. Instead, it made them irrelevant. Because in that moment, the reality of Christ's presence transcended all necessity to explain how or whether or why.

But if we cannot expect the Risen Christ to show up bodily in our living rooms and instruct us to touch Christ's wounds, then how, then, can we experience Christ in the twenty-first century? How do we have the type of experience St. Thomas did? Where do we find this sacred mystery? Primarily, we can do this through the Sacraments, the outward and visible signs of inward, invisible grace--and most especially the Eucharist, the sacrament of Christ's Body and Blood, where we receive Jesus Christself into us in order to strengthen and renew our identity as Christ's mystical Body. We encounter Christ communally and relationally, through our relationships with others, our work for justice and works of mercy: we see Jesus in the face of the stranger who is the least of our sisters or brothers or siblings. And also in solitude and contemplation, through prayer and sacramentals--but like with Thomas, our engagement with Christ must necessarily begin with our engagement with our community, in our challenging and being challenged by our sisters and brothers and siblings in Christ.

All of these things sustain us and make possible the type of holistic faithful response Boff talks about. They don't prove some truth claim and disprove some other; they don't have to, because what they're doing is far more important. That we know Christ is so much infinitely more important than that we know that Christ exists. That we know the Father is so much more important than that we know the Father exists. That we know the Spirit is so much more--well, I think you get the idea.

Thomas rejected holding a truth claim about Christ in favor of knowing the Christ, feeling and touching and seeing the Christ. And Jesus showed up. Jesus always shows up.

It must be acknowledged that even though Jesus always shows up, it doesn't always feel like Jesus has shown up. Sometimes, this is a consequence of us turning away from Christ, of pushing God away, but more often it is simply the natural symptom of exhaustion and despair.

At our lowest, it's easy to feel abandoned by God. This is so natural and human that even Jesus felt that way on the Cross. I believe with all my heart that even in those moments–especially in those moments–that God is present in our lives, but I have no fancy words of persuasion, no clever proof, to convince someone who doesn't experience Christ's Presence in their life that Jesus is indeed there.

I was a philosophy major; I’ve studied those sorts of supposed proofs. They had impressive names: the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, the teleological argument. I have to say I found the content of the arguments themselves far less impressive, far less persuasive. I suppose I hold out hope that one day a version of one of these arguments might be put forth which accomplishes what I believe they have hitherto failed to do, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

And the interesting thing is that even if such a proof were to exist, how little it would in the end actually prove. It might get us to a First Cause, a Prime Mover, a Necessary Being. But probably not to the God of the Matriarchs and the Patriarchs, the God who delights in our joys and who shares in our suffering, the God whose great works have been attested to in the Holy Scriptures. In short, not to Jesus Christ. That requires relationship: asking Jesus to show up, and being receptive when–not if, but when–Jesus does show up.

Now, don't get me wrong, there's an important role for theology, in using the tools of Scripture, tradition, and natural reason to interrogate my experience of God and your experience of God in an attempt to arrive at objective truth. Such a process was used by the early Church to formulate the historic creeds which we affirm as basic Christian orthodoxy. But such an exercise must always begin with the presence, the experience of God, or else it ends up lacking reality. It becomes a mere logic puzzle, akin to figuring out how a fictitious farmer gets his fictitious cabbage and fictitious goat and fictitious wolf across a fictitious river using a fictitious boat.

So faced with a person who cannot detect the presence of Jesus in their life, I can only testify to the ways–the small, subtle yet meaningful ways–that God has been present in my life, and pray that Jesus will make Christself known to those persons in the fullness of time.

Jesus tells us that Thomas' type of faith isn't the only type of faith which is valid or acceptable to God: "Blessed are they who have not seen and yet believe." This is no doubt an important corrective to the temptation to judge the faith of others, to declare it too uncritical, too simple, too uninformed or unenlightened. I have known Episcopalians who needed that correction, and there have been times when I’ve needed that correction.

But I firmly believe--I cannot but believe--that those of us who are called to the faith of St. Thomas are blessed, too. How can we not be, when Jesus always shows up?

I love the second Sunday of Easter because it is this truth--that Jesus shows up, that Jesus always shows up--which fills me with joy like no other New Testament message can. The story of St. Thomas speaks to me so powerfully on a personal level, it is his story which fills me with hope like no other New Testament story can, because in Thomas I find a vision of a mature, questioning, critical faith which is not thwarted, but rather manages to find its fulfillment in Christ's Presence.

Jesus shows up. Jesus always shows up.

Alleluia!

On April 15 & 16, I will be preaching at all three of the weekend Eucharists (5:30pm on Saturday, 8am and 10:30am on Sunday) at my parish, St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ. All three services should be livestreamed on St. Thomas' twitch page, here and will be available online for asynchronous viewing for a short time afterwards.

The 2nd Sunday of Easter (or "Low Sunday") is one of my favorite days in the liturgical year, in which we read the account in John's gospel of Jesus revealing Christself to the doubting Thomas (pictured in my icon), so I'm especially excited to be giving these (full-length) sermons. (Well, giving one sermon three times, but you get my meaning.)

I will, of course, post the transcript of my sermon here some time afterwards. (Although if you read my unpreached sermons many years back, much of it might be familiar to you!)

As preached at the Advent Evening Prayer ("with young preachers") service at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Tuesday, November 29, 2022.

Psalm 19
Deuteronomy 30:11-14
Romans 10:8b-18
Mathew 25:9-14

One of the peculiarities of this service of Evening Prayer is that the collect of the day is relegated to later on in the service, instead of the beginning, but if you had listened to it and to our readings today you might come to the conclusion that St. Andrew must not be mentioned all that much in the Bible beyond the story of his initial call. And if you had thought this, you would have been more or less correct.

The feast of Andrew the Apostle, then, is a good opportunity to reflect on what exactly it means to be called, and what each of us here today is called to do and to be.

Part of our calling is common to all Christians. God calls to us with the free, unmerited gift of grace, and enabled by that grace, our task is to respond to it with faith. St. Paul fleshes out exactly what this entails in this evening’s epistle: we respond to grace by confessing with our mouths and having faith in our hearts. But, of course, this only pushes back the questions. How much confession is enough? After all, we also have to use our mouths for other things, like eating and breathing and communicating many important things besides Jesus’ lordship. And what does it mean to have faith in our hearts? It is not intellectual certainty or emotional fervor, but an obedience to God which informs our will and expresses itself in our actions.

Similarly, when St. Paul tells us to confess Jesus’ lordship with our mouths, he does not mean only with our mouths. A Christian is called to make not only their words or beliefs but their entire lives into a confession of Jesus’ lordship.

The Book of Common Prayer 1979 elaborates on our common call as Christians in the catechism, which tells us that “the duty of all Christians is to follow Christ; to come together week by week for corporate worship; and to work, pray, and give for the spread of the kingdom of God,” and in our baptismal covenant, in which we promise to “continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers; persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord; proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ; seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves; and strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.”

But while Advent might be a time for Christmas cookies, there are no cookie-cutter Christians: each of us lives out the specifics of our calling as Christians in a context which is uniquely our own, utilizing our own particular strengths and weaknesses. How do we know what God is calling each of us to do as individuals? How do we figure out the specifics of how to confess Jesus’ lordship with our entire lives, to live out each of the promises of our baptismal covenant?

Some of the saints received majestic visions or dramatic revelations informing them of their vocations. One thinks of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, or St. Francis in the broken-down church of San Damiano, with Jesus speaking to him from the crucifix: “Rebuild my church.” Others seem to have been on the Earth with a conviction about what they were put here to do already fixed in their minds, knowing from an early God who and what God was calling them to be.

But what for those of us--the majority, I think--for whom God seems to be largely silent?

Arguably, Saint Andrew’s case was more like ours than some of the saints mentioned above. He was faced not with a majestic figure of Jesus in a white robe right out of a Tide commercial, haloed and surrounded by a choir of angels, but by a disheveled, slightly manic young man shouting at his fishing boat from the shore. Nor was Jesus holding a sign that said “I am the Messiah”--not that first-century Palestine was exactly lacking in false messiahs even if he had been.

The first and most important way we understand the specifics of what God is calling us individually to do is through prayer. It is right and good for us to put our needs and desires, and the needs and desires of others, before the Lord so that God’s will might be done, and to thank God for the many good things that God has given to us and to others. But it is at least as important to carve out time and space in our prayer lives to listen to what God might be saying to us. Whether it is as part of our online contemporary prayer group which meets on Mondays at 4pm on Zoom, or a few minutes of silent meditation before the start of the day, or some other practice, carving out time and space in our busy lives to listen to God is an important element of discerning our calling.

Indeed, for many of the saints just mentioned who seemed to receive their own calling with supernatural clarity, it is likely they were able to do so precisely because they had already mastered the practice of contemplative prayer.

And, lest I be convicted of hypocrisy, let me be the first to acknowledge that this is a practice at which I am spectacularly horrible.

So, then what?

We turn to the same norms of knowledge as we do for any other question. There's the Holy Scriptures and the sacred tradition, of course, although if the question is what city to move to or what job to take, we might not find all that much directly applicable. We have our faculty of natural reason, which is a fancy way of saying we need to figure it ourselves. We have our personal experience and the collected wisdom of our communities–our churches, our families, our friends. We blunder through life as best we can, taking each day as it comes–and if Scripture tells us anything about the apostles, it’s that they were spectacularly good at blundering.

The wonderful thing about God’s loving grace is that it grants us the freedom to not know all the answers. Sometimes all we have is the conviction that where we are is not where God wants us to be, and it can take years or even decades to figure out where we should be. Sometimes we are granted the comfort of knowing that we are doing the work we were given to do, at least for now. And sometimes we are taken to places we’d rather not go. There’s a reason why the liturgical color for an apostle is red.

Sometimes we might not be able to see the big picture of our lives, but we know enough of the little things God wants us to do to be able to make it through the day, the week, the year. And sometimes we are just entirely, completely clueless.

Like Andrew, we might be outshone by a sibling or a friend. We might not experience the fame or fortune or glory that secretly or not so secretly we really would like to have. But we can rest confident that God has called us, is calling us, will never stop calling us to where He wants us to be, and that if we trust in Him then there is no need for fear or distress, no matter how long it takes us to get there.

As preached at the midweek Eucharist at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Wednesday, March 9, 2022.

Hebrews 10:32-39
Psalm 124
Mathew 25:9-14

Today we commemorate five martyrs from the beginning of the 3rd century. Perpetua was a 22-year-old noblewoman, newly married with an even newer infant child. Felicity was a pregnant slave. Revocatus was a male slave, and Secondulus and Saturninus were freee men. All five were catechumens, Christians receiving instruction in the faith in preparation for baptism.

While in prison, Perpetua kept a diary, a document which we still have today–or at least a document claiming to be her diary. In it, she tells how her father visited her in prison and begged her to recant her Christianity. She refused him, holding fast to her faith, and a few days later she was baptized in prison. In her diary, she describes how she suffered physically due to the heat, rough prison guards, and not being allowed to breastfeed her child. Felicity, the slave, gave birth to a daughter in prison. Secondulus died in prison, and the others were put to death in the arena.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned how I had in common with St. Paul the fact that I am a convert. I share with Perpetua and her companions that I have been a catechumen. My own catechumenate was more honorary than anything else: I met with my sponsor and my priest and we watched and discussed together a short video about baptism. I think they figured that four years of Catholic high school followed by another four in college studying religion and participating in my university’s Newman Community was sufficient preparation/

The season of Lent is the traditional period of the catechumenate, when adult converts prepare, as I did at least in theory, to be baptised and received into the Church at the Easter Vigil. It’s appropriate then, that this year and most (but not all) years, that this feast falls within the Lenten season.

The catechumenate prepares for the catechumen for the sacrament of baptism, and the sacrament of baptism prepares us for a life of Christian living. In the case of the five saints we commemorate tonight, it was a very brief life, but their deaths by martyrdom represented the culmination and fulfillment of the promises they made in their baptism.

Might I suggest that even for we who have already received the sacrament of baptism, whether as infants or as catechumens, we might still use the season of Lent as preparation, to prepare to renew the vows of our baptismal covenant at the Easter Vigil.

As preached at the midweek Eucharist at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Wednesday, January 26, 2022.

Acts 26:9-21
Psalm 67
Galatians 1:11-24
Mathew 10:16-22

I suppose it is something I have in common with St. Paul that we are both converts. Although it is not quite so easy to say what precisely it was I converted from. Nor was my conversion much like St. Paul's. His conversion was sudden, dramatic, and unexpected. Mine . . . was not.

Still, the idea of a conversion experience as a stunning, life-changing moment of clarity looms large within the Protestant imagination. There are Christian traditions which strongly emphasize this idea of conversion, to the point of considering it normative, a prerequisite for truly being a Christian.

Indeed, it is from this tradition that we get the beloved hymn Amazing Grace, which speaks of a discrete “hour I first believed” which separates a past of blindness from a present of sightedness, a past of “lostness” from a present of “foundness.”

But for many Christians, even for converts like me, these binaries simply do not adequately represent our Christian experience. It is not so much that we were lost and are found as that we are continually in the process of becoming found, of coming to see. If I were to speak of a “before” and an “after,” the turning point would not be my conversion but my baptism, when I was made regenerate through sacramental grace. Now I am still becoming found and coming to see, but I do so as a member of a community of faith, of Christ’s mystical Body, indelibly marked as his own.

To put aside the notion that some distinct conversion experience ought to be normative to Christian experience, we need only look to St. Paul’s own ministry.

St. Paul ministered to converts whose conversion experience mirrored his own, flashy and dramatic. I’m thinking of the Phillippian jailer who, when Paul and his companions were set free from prison by an earthquake, fell down before them, trembling with fear, asking them what he must do to be saved, and then was baptized with his entire household before the night was over.

But St. Paul also ministered to converts whose conversions were less dramatic, who were converted not by showy miracles but by reason and persuasion. The Acts of the Apostles tell us of a sermon he gave at the Areopagus in Athens, in which he quotes Greek philosophers and poets in order to explain and defend the teachings of Christianity to an interested but skeptical crowd. And St. Luke tells us that “some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.”

St. Paul was wise enough to recognize that the path by which he came to Christ might not be the path everyone was called to follow. He reached out to the people he encountered where they were, and showed them the love of Christ in the ways he thought would make the most sense to them.

The importance of the Conversion of St. Paul lay not in a flashy miracle on the road to Damascus, but in the further conversions that his conversion enabled, and in those who were converted by those converts, and so on, stretching across the globe and across millennia. What is important is not how we were brought to Christ, but that we have been called to him and claimed as his own, and St. Paul was an important early part of the process of that happening.
Amen.

As preached at the midweek outdoor Eucharist at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Wednesday, November 17, 2021.

Ephesians 4:1-6
Psalm 122
Mathew 19:27-29

Hilda of Whitby was born in 614 C.E. into the royal family of a small Anglian kingdom located in modern-day Yorkshire. When she was an infant, her father was poisoned, and when she was a toddler, her kingdom was conquered by a nearby kingdom creating the kingdom of Northumbria, spanning what is now northern England and southern Scotland. Hilda was brought up in the Northumbrian court, and when the King of Northumbria converted to Christianity when Hilda was thirteen, Hilda was baptised along with the entire court. When Hilda was 19, the king died in battle, and Hilda accompanied the widowed Queens to her home in Kent, where she--the queen--founded a convent and became an abbess.

In The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written circa 731 C.E., the Venerable Bede continues Hilda’s biography with these words:

When she had resolved to quit the secular habit, and to serve [Christ] alone, she withdrew into the province of the East Angles, for she was allied to the king there; being desirous to cross over thence into Gaul, forsaking her native country and all that she had, and so to live a stranger for our Lord's sake in the monastery of Cale, that she might the better attain to the eternal country in heaven. For [Hilda’s] sister Heresuid, mother to the king of the East Angles, was at that time living in the same monastery, under regular discipline, waiting for an everlasting crown; and led by her example, she continued a whole year in the aforesaid province, with the design of going abroad; but afterwards, Bishop Aidan recalled her to her home, and she received land to the extent of one family on the north side of the river Wear; where likewise for a year she led a monastic life, with very few companions.

After this she was made abbess in the monastery called Heruteu [and] being set over that monastery, began immediately to order it in all things under a rule of life, according as she had been instructed by learned men; for Bishop Aidan, and others of the religious that knew her, frequently visited her and loved her heartily, and diligently instructed her, because of her innate wisdom and love of the service of God.

When she had for some years governed this monastery, wholly intent upon establishing a rule of life, it happened that she also undertook either to build or to set in order a monastery in the place called Streanaeshalch, and this work which was laid upon her she industriously performed; for she put this monastery under the same rule of monastic life as the former; and taught there the strict observance of justice, piety, chastity, and other virtues, and particularly of peace and charity; so that, after the example of the primitive Church, no one there was rich, and none poor, for they had all things common, and none had any private property. Her prudence was so great, that not only meaner men in their need, but sometimes even kings and princes, sought and received her counsel; she obliged those who were under her direction to give so much time to reading of the Holy Scriptures, and to exercise themselves so much in works of justice, that many might readily be found there fit for the priesthood and the service of the altar. (Trans. A. M. Sellar)

When I think about Hilda’s life, I can’t help but compare her to another sainted abbess, one roughly equidistant in time between us and Hilda: my own patron, Clare of Assisi. Clare was born into a wealthy Italian family, but ran away from home as a teenager to escape an arranged marriage and join St. Francis’ monastic community in Assisi.

Hilda’s life story is certainly less flashy or romantic than Clare’s, but I think that it is precisely that lack of romance that I find attractive about Hilda. I can admire Clare for having such a firm sense of her own vocation at the age of 19, but at least at this point in my life, I can’t really identify. The life of Hilda, who seems to have been often swept up in the events of the tumultuous political history of 7th-century England without much real opportunity for self-determination, seems much more familiar to me.

And yet Hilda faced each new event in her life with faith, perseverance, and compassion for others. She lived “a life worthy of the calling to which [she had] been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love” as St. Paul puts it in our reading this evening. She did what she was able to do when she was able to do it, trusting in God, and with God’s grace that proved to be more than sufficient.

For those of us who have enough difficulty figuring out what God requires of us today or tomorrow, yet alone a decade or several decades from now, I think we can draw inspiration from Hilda to trust in God as we navigate the ebbs and flows, the changes and challenges, of our own lives, to give us the grace sufficient for what God is calling us to do, and the wisdom to discern what to do next.

Amen.

As preached at the midweek outdoor Eucharist at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Wednesday, May 12, 2021.

Isaiah 45:21-25
Psalm 47
Philippians 2:5-11
Psalm 98

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy Cross, you have redeemed the world. Amen.

While the cross was not the only, or even the primary, symbol used by the early Christians to represent their faith, it has emerged across the millennia of sacred tradition as the central image.

The Cross stands as a triumphant symbol of victory: of Christ’s victory over sin, death, and hell. Constantine infamously had a vision of the Cross accompanied by the words “by this sign, conquer,” and Christians have regrettably often throughout our history drawn on this triumphalist understanding of the Cross in order to pursue conquest and holy war.

But the Cross also, and paradoxically, stands as a symbol of submission, humility, and weakness: of Christ’s submission to the temporal power of the secular and religious authorities, to the outrage and anger of the mob, and ultimately to the power of death itself. It represents the culmination of the kenosis, the self-emptying, which Christ undertook in the Incarnation. It is the final and irrefutable proof of Christ’s true and full humanity, that in Jesus, God truly became one of us, sharing in our mortal frailty and weakness in divine solidarity. We venerate the Cross to identify with Christ and Christ's suffering, but the Cross's significance comes from his identification with our suffering.

To us as Christians, the Cross represents our calling to model the sacrificial love demonstrated by our Lord and Savior. All three synoptic gospels quote Jesus as saying that a crucial (pun intended) element of Christian discipleship is denying ourselves, picking up our own crosses, and following him. The Cross calls us to compassion, obedience, and nonviolence, even and especially in the face of persecution

The Cross, a terrible instrument of capital punishment, is a symbol of death: not only Jesus’ physical death, but our own death to sin which we share with and in him through our baptism. St. Paul in his letter to the church in Galatia tells us that by the Cross the “world”--the system of powers which seek to distort the goodness of the created order and separate us from God--is crucified to us, and we are crucified to the world.

It is the paradoxical character of the Cross as a symbol of death and weakness which led St. Paul to remark in his second letter to the church in Corinth that the message of the Cross was "foolishness to those who are perishing"--but also to those being saved it is the very power of God. By Christ's holy Cross, he redeemed the world, and may we be called by that symbol of redemption to participate in it as agents of God's wondrous grace.

Amen.

As preached at the midweek outdoor Eucharist at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Wednesday, June 16, 2021. As usual when I'm preaching on the life of a historic saint, much of the biography is cribbed from Wikipedia.

Acts 1:1-11
Psalm 37:3-6, 32-33
1 Corinthians 4:1-5
John 4:19-24

Evelyn Underhill was born in 1875 and grew up in London. Initially an agnostic, she gradually began to acquire an interest in Neoplatonism and from there was increasingly drawn to Catholicism against the objections of her husband, eventually becoming a prominent Anglo-Catholic. She gained prominence as an Anglican lay leader of spiritual retreats, a spiritual director for hundreds of individuals, guest speaker, radio lecturer and proponent of contemplative prayer. She was the first woman to lecture to the clergy in the Church of England as well as the first woman officially to conduct spiritual retreats for the Church. She was a prolific author and published over 30 books, many on religion and spiritual practice, in particular Christian mysticism.

She was responsible for introducing the forgotten authors of medieval and Catholic spirituality to a largely Protestant audience and the lives of eastern mystics to the English-speaking world. She believed that the mystical life should be accessible to the average person, a view for which she received criticism.

When I became Episcopalian, I wasn’t familiar with Underhill’s work or life. I was familiar with later, male, Roman Catholic theologians interested in mysticism, such as Thomas Merton and Leonardo Boff--the latter of whom Father Todd and I recently read in our Monday night book club, but, speaking as a feminist, an Anglo-Catholic, and someone interested in mysticism, the discovery of Evelyn Underhill was a very pleasant surprise. Indeed, since she came of age at the turn of the twentieth-century, during the Edwardian era (another particular interest of mine), she in many ways paved the way for the later theologians and mystics with which I was already familiar.

It fell to the twentieth-century Christian mystics to describe their own subjective, inner experience within a context which was increasingly willing to write it off as unreal or imaginary--or worse, as the symptom of some kind of psychological disorder. It fell to them to mount an intellectual defense of foregrounding personal religious experience, in conversation not only with theologians but also with secular thinkers including philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists. They also entered into dialogue with mystics and mystical thinkers from non-Christian faiths.

For many of us, I think, we are not Christians so much because we have been convinced by theological arguments or apologetics, but because of the way we have directly experienced the divine, the way God has spoken to our hearts, the ways we have encountered Jesus in our lives. For Underhill,

In mysticism that love of truth which [is] the beginning of all philosophy leaves the merely intellectual sphere, and takes on the assured aspect of a personal passion. Where the philosopher guesses and argues, the mystic lives and looks; and speaks, consequently, the disconcerting language of first-hand experience, not the neat dialectic of the schools. Hence whilst the Absolute of the metaphysicians remains a diagram —impersonal and unattainable—the Absolute of the mystics is lovable, attainable, alive.

We owe it to the twentieth-century mystics, and to Underhill in particular, for carving out an understanding of what it means to experience, and to talk about experiencing, the presence of God among a context of doubt, skepticism, and religious pluralism.

May we draw upon the faithful service of Evelyn Underhill as we ourselves seek to worship our God in spirit and in truth. Amen.

As preached at the midweek outdoor Eucharist at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Wednesday, May 12, 2021.

Acts 1:1-11
Psalm 47
Ephesians 1:15-23
Luke 24:44-53

The feast of the Ascension has a special significance to me because my last parish--my first parish, the parish where I was baptised and confirmed--was the Church of the Ascension in Gloucester City.

( images of the Church of the Ascension under the cut )

And as someone who as a child (and, let's face it, still as an adult) often had my "head in the clouds," as my parents or teachers might have described, I have a certain degree of sympathy for the disciples in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles. I was (and am) often far more focused on the abstract, the intangible, even the outright imaginary than on the "down-to-earth" tasks with which I was faced. And so I can imagine what it felt like for the Galilean disciples to be criticized by angels even as they continue to crick their necks staring up into the sky at the spot where they last saw Jesus.

Heaven, of course, is not “up” in any physical or spatial sense. We can send probes and satellites and even spaceships into the sky, Elon Musk can set up a passenger service to Mars, and they will never reach Jesus, just like we don’t need to drill into the Earth’s core in order to reach hell.

Church of England bishop and theologian N. T. Wright describes heaven as

God’s space, which intersects with our space but transcends it. [. . . A] further dimension of our world, not a place far removed at one extreme of our world. It is all around us, glimpsed in a mystery in every Eucharist and every act of generous human love. We are reminded of it by the beauty of the created order, which in its very transience points beyond itself to the fuller beauty which is God’s own beauty, and which [God] intends one day to bring to birth, as we say so frequently, ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’

When Jesus ascends into heaven, he is answering the Galilean disciples’ question about when the kingdom will be restored to Israel. In ascending to heaven, in taking his throne at the right hand of the Father, Jesus establishes his kin(g)ship over all the Earth. As St. Paul tells us in our epistle reading, Jesus is

far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

And when Jesus comes again to judge the living and the dead, the last veil between heaven and Earth will be removed.

How often are we guilty of the same thing as the disciples, then, of “looking up toward heaven” instead of living fully as members of Christ’s kin(g)dom here on Earth? The temptation is real. It’s far easier to place our hope “up there” instead of the messy realities we face in this world, to really believe that the kin(g)dom of heaven is present not just in the life to come, not just in our tabernacles and sanctuaries and lych gates, but in slums and prisons and hospitals.

Jesus is King, and he sits on his throne at the right hand of the Father. He has won the victory over death, over sin, over hell, and he has gone to prepare a place for all who, despite our unworthiness, are willing to accept it.

Amen.

As preached at the midweek outdoor Eucharist at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Wednesday, April 28, 2021.

Isaiah 52:7-10
Psalm 2:1-13
Ephesians 4:7-8,11-16
Mark 1:1-15

St. Mark’s Gospel is many Christians’ favorite gospel. They are attracted to its brevity, its ability to get right to the point, its terse pacing. It is the first-century equivalent of a page-turner.

Now, my own tastes have always run towards the more verbose gospels: the comprehensive narrative of St. Luke, the theological reflections of St. John. But in these midweek sermons, I try to emulate St. Mark.

In our epistle reading today, St. Paul writes that the gift has been given to some that they should be apostles; to some, prophets; to some, evangelists; to some, pastors and teachers. But we should not interpret that as saying that the charism of evangelism was just given to four men two thousand years ago. John the Baptizer preached the good news of the forgiveness of sins before Jesus' ministry had even begun. The author or authors of the book we know as the book of the prophet Isaiah preached the good news of the Messiah, of the suffering servant, of God's Chosen One to bring justification to God's people--centuries before the birth of one Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary. And of course, the first disciples to profess the Resurrection were women.

It is the calling of every generation to find new ways to profess the Good News of Jesus Christ in ways that are resonant to their culture and meaningful in their place and time. Some have been gifted with the charism of evangelization in special measure, but we are all called to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ in our particular way. Part of our baptismal covenant is the promise to “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ”.

What we should take most from the evangelists in general, and St. Mark in particular, is that the Gospel, the evangelion, is good news. In his typical get-to-the-point fashion, St. Mark tells us this in the first sentence of his Gospel: “Here begins the good news of Jesus Christ.”

"How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who brings good news," writes (deutero-)Isaiah. We profess the Good News of Jesus Christ, not only because Jesus commanded us to make disciples from the people of every nation (although surely that is sufficient reason), but because it’s human nature to share good news. It’s such a natural impulse that there are several places in St. Mark’s Gospel where Jesus has to explicitly tell his listeners not to share it, because it wasn’t yet the proper time for it to become publicly known.

I’m dressed casually today because I took the day off work for a doctor’s appointment, where we discussed the fact that--thanks be to God--I successfully lowered my A1C levels over the last three months from 7.8 to 6.2. Father Todd already knew this because I told him and J------- on Monday evening. I told my entire Bible study on Tuesday evening. I told my coworkers while we were in the office on Monday morning. I told my parents on Saturday when I first got the results. When we receive good news, we want to tell other people about it. And what does it say of us if we are more willing to tell others about our medical conditions than about our Lord and Savior?

When we have a particularly good piece of news, for example that of a marriage engagement or the addition to a family of a child through pregnancy or adoption, we might even plan a party or a celebratory dinner. And that’s why we are gathered together this evening, to celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

And so in that spirit of celebration, of joy, of expectation, we raise our voices to join the chorus of the evangelists, the saints and apostles, and the entire host of heaven, as we say:

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Amen.

As preached at the midweek Eucharist at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Wednesday, March 31, 2021.

Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 70
Hebrews 12:1-3
John 13:21-32

When we hear the account of the Passion, we have to wonder: why did Judas betray Jesus?

Was it because he was a coward, afraid of the Roman and Jewish authorities? Or was he a thief, greedy for those thirty pieces of silver? Was he “in on the plot,” conspiring with Jesus and doing what he knew was necessary for the Messiah to be glorified? Was he a disillusioned disciple frustrated by Jesus’ failure to overthrow Roman rule? Was he possessed by the devil?

From the 2nd-century apocryphal Gospel of Judas to 20th-century works like The Last Temptation of Christ and Jesus Christ Superstar, we remain fascinated with Judas, trying to work out, with very little success, why he did what he did. And yet Judas remains an enigma.

The Scriptural accounts concerning Judas raise more questions than they provide answers, right down to two mutually contradictory accounts of Judas’ death: he takes his own life by hanging himself in the Gospel of Matthew, while in the Acts of the Apostle he dies in an agricultural accident.

And yet when we examine our own motivations, are they really any clearer than Judas’? “I don’t understand what I do,” St. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “for I don’t do the things I want to do, but rather the things I hate. [. . .] What happens is that I don’t do the good I intend to do, but the evil I do not intend. But if I do what is against my will, it is not I who do it, but sin that dwells in me” (7:15, 20-21). Anyone who has tried to stick to a diet--or, for that matter, a Lenten, devotion--can sympathize. Sometimes it really does feel like Satan has entered into us.

St. Paul referred to himself as “the worst of the sinners” because he recognized that what separates any one of us from Judas is, at best, a matter of degree. Hopefully, none of us have knowingly and deliberately brought about the death of a friend, but who has not committed some lesser betrayal, perhaps for reasons we couldn’t really explain even to ourselves?

And yet God draws divine glory even from our human brokenness. Jesus allowed himself to be betrayed and denied and doubted by his friends, by his disciples, because that was what was necessary for him, God’s Chosen One, the perfect image of what a human being ought to be, to be glorified. Jesus demonstrated his full humanity by being subject to his fellow human beings, even when they turned against him and put him to death on a Cross. And in this, he was and is glorified, and we are glorified with him. Our brokenness, our inability to do good, our flawed humanity are all redeemed in Jesus’s perfect humanity. We are, as the author of Hebrews writes in our second lesson, enabled to “lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and [. . .] run with the perseverance the race that is set before us.”

Amen.

As preached at the midweek outdoor Eucharist at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Wednesday, February 3, 2021.

Malachi 3:1-4
Psalm 84
Hebrews 2:14-18
Luke 2:22-40

As many of you know, my parents live down the shore, and when I visit them, I usually worship at St. Simeon's-by-the-Sea, North Wildwood. So when my atheist mother asked me to explain who St. Simeon was, I told her the story we just heard in our Gospel reading: that Simeon had been promised by God that he would live to see the Messiah, and had lived to a venerable age waiting around the Temple in Jerusalem for the Messiah to appear. When he at last saw the infant Jesus, he was then able to die satisfied.

"He should have stayed far away from Jerusalem!" responded my mother. "Then he would have lived forever!"

That's the logic of the world. But Simeon knew better. Anna knew better. They knew that the secret to eternal life didn't lay in staying away from the temple, away from Jerusalem.

Simeon and Anna knew--either consciously or unconsciously--that the secret to eternal life lay in Jerusalem, in the temple, specifically in the little baby child who had been brought by its parents, Joseph and Mary, to be presented to God at the temple: the incarnate God before the transcendent God, God the Son before God the Father. They knew that the life and death of that little baby would be the vehicle for God's ultimate victory over sin and death.

Our Gospel reading ends with what is perhaps my favorite verse in St. Luke's Gospel--"the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him"--because it underscores the beauty and paradox and mystery and sacrifice of the Incarnation. The omnipotent God, born as a weak baby who needs to grow and become strong. The omniscient God, born as a foolish and ignorant baby who needs to learn and and grow in wisdom and knowledge. The omnipresent God, born as a tiny baby, so small you can hold it in your arms, who needs to grow tall. (Holds hand several inches above head.) Well, tall. (Holds hand at chin level.) Jesus was probably short by modern standards.

The unchanging God, needing to grow and change and adapt. The infinite God, made finite and limited.

The Definition of Chalcedon is an ancient credal formula we use in the western Church to help us understand the relationship between Jesus' full humanity and his full divinity. It tells us that just as Jesus is of one being with the Father according to his divinity, he is also of one being, consubstantial, with us according to his humanity. We share an essence with Jesus Christ.

So when Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to be presented at the temple, we are being presented to God as well. We are dedicated. We are consecrated. We are made holy.

Amen.

( two images under the cut )

As preached at the midweek outdoor Eucharist at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Wednesday, January 20, 2021.

Acts 4: 8-13
Psalm 23
1 Peter 5:1-4
Matthew 16:13-19

You are the Messiah, says St. Peter to Jesus: the Son of the Living God.

The late Catholic priest Richard P. McBrien described Jesus Christ as “the great sacrament of our encounter with God and of God’s with us. The Church, in turn, [he writes] is the sacrament of our encounter with Christ and of Christ's with us. And the seven sacraments, in their turn, are sacraments of our encounter with the Church and of the Church's with us. Indeed, the other members of the Church are sacraments of encounter for us and we for them because, in the Christian scheme of things, we experience and manifest the love of God through love of neighbor.”

And so it is fitting that from this encounter between St. Peter and Jesus, in which the apostle recognizes Jesus as not only the Messiah, but the unique divine Son of the Living God, the establishment of the Church flows naturally--perhaps even inevitably.

It is through our relationship with Jesus Christ, as meditated through our relationships with each other, that our identity as Church emerges. Through our baptisms we were made members of the Church which was established upon St. Peter’s rock.

When we come together to break bread together as Christ commanded us to do in memory of Him, we do so as His Church--one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. In the sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood we recognize and confess alongside St. Peter that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed King, the Only Begotten of the God Who Lives.

When we preach and listen to the Word of God, we do so as Christ’s mystical body. And when we then depart in peace to love and serve the Lord, we carry that identity with us, as the eyes and hands and feet of Jesus Christ on Earth. And when we do so, we do so secure in the promise that Jesus gives to St. Peter: that the gates of Hades will not prevail against us. Temptation and weakness and fear will not prevail against us. Avarice and greed and lust for power will not prevail against us. Racism and intolerance will not prevail against us. Sickness and death will not prevail against us.

In short, sin will not prevail against us. It cannot. For we are the Church of Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed King, the Firstborn of the Living God.

Amen.

( image of me preaching under the cut )

As preached at the midweek outdoor Eucharist at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Wednesday, January 6, 2021.

Isaiah 60:1-6
Psalm 72:1-7,10-14
Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12

In our Epistle reading, St. Paul speaks of a “mystery” which “was made known to [him] by revelation” and which “has been revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets.”

In theology, the word “mystery” is sometimes used to describe a doctrine which transcends human reason, which defies our ability to comprehend it, like the Trinity or the full humanity and divinity of Christ. But in New Testament Greek, the word translated by the NRSV as “mystery” is simply a secret: knowledge which is hidden and thus needs to be revealed. The word “epiphany”, the name of the feast we celebrate tonight, is derived from a Greek word meaning “to reveal.” The Epiphany is the revelation of the “secret” of God’s universal and limitless love for humanity, both Jew and Gentile alike.

It was not enough for God to love the world so much as to send God’s only Begotten One into that world, into this world, to live and die as one of us, so that through Christ the world might be saved; no, God wants us to know that we are God’s beloved, that we might rejoice in this knowledge; that we might give thanks for this knowledge; that we might be transformed by this knowledge.

This secret knowledge was made known to different people in different ways, to each in the way they were best equipped to understand it. To the Magi, it was through astronomical phenomena; to St. Thomas, our patron, it was through the holes in the hand and side of the physical body of the Risen Christ; to St. Paul, it was through a blinding vision of Christ on the road to Damascus. And despite St. Paul’s claim that the secret wasn’t made known to human beings until New Testament times, there are passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, tonight’s passage from Isaiah and our psalm among them, that suggest that perhaps some people might have had at least an inkling.

And to us? How is this secret revealed by God to us, two thousand years removed from the little Baby Jesus asleep in his creche? What metaphorical star do we follow in our attempt to grapple with the mystery of God’s love for us? The answer to that is going to be slightly different for each one of us, but here are some suggestions.

The secret of God’s love for humanity is revealed in the natural, created order, in the beauty of this winter evening. It is revealed in the face of the least of these: the stranger, the prisoner, the immigrant, the destitute, the child. It is revealed in the bonds of love and community; it is revealed in silent contemplation and prayer. It is, of course, revealed in the writings of the Holy Scriptures, in the Church mothers and fathers, in the saints and the prophetic witnesses whom we commemorate on other Wednesday nights.

And, of course, it is revealed in the sacraments--the outward and visible signs of inward, invisible grace--including the sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood which we come to share together tonight. I do not know all the ways this mystery, this secret has been revealed to each of you, but I give thanks that it has, and pray that it might be so more fully and more deeply each and every day, that it might live in us and transform us and compel us, and that we might be the means through which it might be revealed to others.

Amen.

As preached at the midweek outdoor Eucharist at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro on the evening of Wednesday, December 2, 2020. (Some lines from the biography of de Foucauld are lifted from Wikipedia.)

James 1:1–11
Psalm 73:24-28
John 16:25-33

Vicomte Charles Eugène de Foucauld was born in 1858 in Strasbourg, France. While by all accounts his childhood was full of love, it was also marked by tragedy. At the age of six, he and his younger sister Marie were orphaned and sent to live with his grandmother, who then died of a heart attack. He and Marie were then raised by their other grandparents.

Charles’ young adulthood had an unauspicious start. After being kicked out of a preparatory military academy for being “lazy and undisciplined,” he succeeded at being accepted at the military academy for which he had been being prepared, where he eventually graduated 333rd out of a class of 386.

Continuing to lead an extravagant lifestyle, Foucauld joined the French calvary and was posted to the 4th Regiment of Chasseurs d'Afrique in Algeria. Bored with garrison service he travelled in Morocco, the Sahara, and Palestine. While reverting to being a wealthy young socialite when in Paris, Foucauld became an increasingly serious student of the geography and culture of Algeria and Morocco. In 1885 the Societe de Geographie de Paris awarded him its gold medal in recognition of his exploration and research.

In 1890, de Foucauld joined the Cistercian Trappist order first in France and then at Akbès on the Syrian-Turkish border. He left in 1897 to follow an undefined religious vocation in Nazareth. He began to lead a solitary life of prayer near a convent of Poor Clares and it was suggested to him that he be ordained. In 1901, he was ordained in Viviers, France, and returned to the Sahara in French Algeria. He first settled in Béni Abbès, near the Moroccan border, building a small hermitage for "adoration and hospitality", which he soon referred to as the "Fraternity".

He moved to be with the Tuareg people in southern Algeria. Living close to the people and sharing their life and hardships, he made a ten-year study of their language and cultural traditions, working on a dictionary and grammar.He formulated the idea of founding a new religious institute, under the name of the Little Brothers of Jesus.

In 1916, Charles was killed by tribal raiders during a botched kidnapping.

There are two things we ought to take away from our commemoration of the life and death of Charles de Foucauld. The first is that Charles was not the first flawed person that God has called to sainthood, nor has he been the last. God knows that we are broken vessels, imperfect beings, that we have done terrible things and struggle with temptation. But still God calls us--yes, the four of us here tonight--to saintliness, and provides us with the grace necessary to achieve it, even knowing that sometimes we in our rebellion will resist it. God sees our truest selves and knows what we are capable of with God’s help.

The second thing we should take away is that the life of a saint is more than the sum of its parts. At the time of his death, Charles’ martyrdom must have seemed a meaningless conclusion to a rather eclectic life. But the confraternity he inspired and helped to organize in France, l'Association des Frères et Sœurs du Sacré-Cœur de Jésus, kept his memory alive and inspired an entire family of lay and religious fraternities that have expanded beyond France to include many cultures and their languages on all continents. His dictionary manuscript was published posthumously in four volumes and has become known among Berberologists for its rich and apt descriptions.

It might seem like a little thing, even foolishness, for us to be out here tonight in the cold, gathered together yet socially distanced to share in the sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood. Yet we are here because we recognize that God has called us to be here, that this is where God wants us to be tonight.

Our service here tonight might change the world, alter the course of nations. It probably won’t. But either way, we leave that in God’s hands. We do what we can when we can, no matter how small or insignificant, because we recognize what Jesus tells us in John’s Gospel this evening: that He has conquered the world.

All church buildings in the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey are closed at least until Palm Sunday. This means the suspension of all public church services, including but not limited to weekly celebrations of the Holy Eucharist, during that time. Resources to engage in both Eucharistic and Daily Office services online will be made available, but the details are (understandably) not yet forthcoming.

For those of you who are not aware, I many years ago adopted Clare of Assisi as my personal patron.

Saint Clare of Assisi, Patron Saint of Television and Video,

When you were too ill to go to mass, you were afforded a miraculous vision of the celebration of the Eucharist on the wall of your cell.

We ask that you graciously intercede before God, that we who are likewise kept separate from the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ by sickness may yet receive its spiritual fruits as we partake in the commemoration of the Lord's Supper via video recordings or video conferences.

Pray for us, blessed saint of Assisi, and for the peoples of the world in this time of illness and fear, that we know the comfort and solace of the love of Jesus Christ, and have it shine forth in our lives as it did in yours.

Praise to you and all the saints, and eternal glory to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.

The death of Jesus would have been shocking to His disciples, in the way that the sudden and unexpected death of a close friend is always shocking. But it would not have been paradigm-shifting, at least not in the way we might think.

It is not at all clear that any of the disciples, let alone all of them, truly understood Jesus’ fully divine nature. The first explicit mention of Jesus as God in the Gospels--indeed, the only truly explicit mention in the entire Bible--is after the Resurrection, when St. Thomas addresses Jesus as “My Lord and my God” (Jn 20:28).

So if the apostles were shocked, it was not so much that Jesus died on the Cross. They understood perfectly well that if you nail a human to a cross and leave them upon it, that person will die within days. Indeed, they understood that all humans die eventually. If the apostles were shocked at Jesus’ death, it was not that Jesus died, but that God let Jesus die.

The disciples did understand, if imperfectly, that Jesus was both the promised Messiah and the Son of God. They knew that Jesus was the Savior sent by God to liberate and save the oppressed people of Israel, after all. That His revolutionary movement seemingly ended in defeat with His death upon the cross would have seemed to indicate the ineffectualness of God Himself. It was only with the Resurrection that the fullness of God’s plan was finally made known to them.

Of course, we have the benefit of hindsight. The Church clarified long ago her Christological and Trinitarian doctrines, and so we do understand (albeit still imperfectly, if possibly not quite so imperfectly) and receive as essential doctrine that Jesus was and is God, fully divine and fully human, of one being with the Father and part of the indivisible Godhead which is the Holy Trinity.

For us, with the benefit of hindsight, the truly paradigm-shifting event is neither the Crucifixion nor the Resurrection but the Incarnation. The shocking fact is not that Jesus died, or even that He rose again on the third day; it’s that Christ made Himself vulnerable to death by becoming incarnate of Mary His mother, and became human. Christ’s giving of Himself for us (Gal 2:20) did not happen on the Cross, at least not primarily: it happened in the creche, with the first gasping breath of the baby Jesus.

When St. John writes that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son” (Jn 3:16) the evangelist is not referring to the Crucifixion alone, but to the Incarnation. God the Father sent Christ into the world--not out of the world, but into!--that the world might be saved through Christ (Jn 3:17).

Still, the Cross as a symbol brings into stark relief the realities which were already present within the creche. While it is an interesting theological question whether a peaceful death at age eighty would have been equally effective in terms of our salvation, the fact remains that Jesus' death was especially horrific and painful.

In the creche Christ enters into our human condition, making Himself vulnerable to pain, suffering, and death, but on the Cross He actually suffers in a way which is immediate, real, and extreme. He experiences not only being human, but the very worst of that which it entails.

My Prayer

"This is my prayer: that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best."
-- St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians 1:9-10

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Cole J. Banning

A Faith without Foundations; A Messiah without Metaphysics

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Sermon: Tuesday of Holy Week

Sermon: Thomas the Apostle

Sermon: Proper 6, Year A

Sermon: 2nd Sunday of Easter

Upcoming!

Sermon: Andrew the Apostle

Sermonette: Perpetua, Felicity, and their Companions, Martyrs

Sermonette: Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle

Sermonette: Hilda of Whitby, Abbess

Sermonette: Holy Cross Day

Sermonette: Evelyn Underhill, Theologian and Mystic

Sermonette: The Feast of the Ascension of our Lord

Sermonette: St. Mark the Evangelist

Sermonette: Wednesday in Holy Week

Sermonette: The Presentation of Our Lord

Sermonette: The Confession of Peter

Sermonette: Feast of the Epiphany

Sermonette: Commemoration of Charles de Foucauld, Missionary and Martyr

Prayer to Saint Clare in the Midst of Coronavirus

The Shock of the Crucifixion