Cole J. Banning

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 to the Church of the Ascension during our service of Morning Prayer, this twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost, November 18, 2012.

1 Samuel 2:1-10
1 Samuel 1:4-20
Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25
Mark 13:1-8

In Joss Whedon’s 2005 science-fiction film Serenity, the disheveled spaceship captain and smuggler Malcolm Reynolds, who had lost his Christian faith in an interplanetary civil war, kneels down in front of a statue of the Buddha while disguised as a woman and mockingly says, “Dear Buddha, please bring me a pony and a plastic rocket.” This comment is, I think, evocative of the discomfort both Christians and non-Christians alike sometimes have with petitionary prayer. After all, isn’t Christianity a religion about selflessness and self-sacrifice and love of neighbor? How could we possibly make that fit with getting down on our knees and giving God our grocery list of needs and wants?

That sentiment might only be intensified over these last few weeks as so many so relatively close to us find themselves without their homes or livelihoods. When they have lost so much, we might be wary to bring our own petty wants before the LORD. I think this is what prompted one of my friends to post as their facebook status:

I don't care if your electricity is restored, please stop praying
- God

I should note this was almost immediately after the hurricane, before the utter seriousness of people going weeks without power made itself clear. But when I objected that I couldn’t imagine God ever saying “please stop praying,” no matter how superficial the subject of the prayers might be, I was told, “but it was still funny.” I’ve listened to friends complain about their mother-in-law’s habit of praying for finding good parking spaces, or their sibling’s prayers for the success of his business. Countless times I’ve encountered critics pointing to two groups of fans of rival sports teams, or rival political candidates, praying to the same God that their respective team will win, as if that was nothing more than an absurdity.

It would be wonderful if we were all perfect people whose only desires were high-minded, for world peace and an end to global poverty. But we’re not perfect people; we’re human beings, our very nature wounded by the reality of sin.

But that’s okay. Because that’s where Jesus Christ, who is a perfect person, the only perfect person, comes in. And because of this, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes, “Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering.” This refers, of course, to our ultimate hope, that we will come to share in Christ’s resurrection. But it also applies to all of our little hopes, our petty desires, our secret wishes, our hopes for the future. We approach God as who we are, wanting what we want, and it is a good and rightful thing to put those needs and desires before the LORD, that God’s will might be done. We trust in Jesus to wash us clean.

For me the best example of this is found in Psalm 137, in which the psalmist prays that the heads of babies might be dashed upon the rocks. Clearly, this is not a righteous desire for a person to have. But given the historical context of the psalm, amidst the Babylonian captivity, it is arguably a very human one. And so Scripture provides us with this example set among many examples of how to pray of a person in their human brokenness reaching out to God from within that human brokenness.

The great Hindu activist Mahatma Gandhi put it this way: “Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”

The God who took on our human nature and was born of the Blessed Virgin Mother in order to suffer a painful death on a cross wants to be invited into our suffering, our longing, our weakness. Don’t get me wrong, God is present with us in our suffering whether we extend that invitation or not, whether we are aware of it or not. But that doesn’t mean God doesn’t appreciate being given the invitation anyway.

These are the dynamics at work in our Hebrew scripture passage this morning.

By many standards, Hannah had a comfortable life, with a husband who loved and supported her. But that wasn’t enough to satisfy her. She wanted a son--a daughter wasn’t good enough!--in order to keep her husband’s other wife from mocking her.

And so, as is good and right, she brought her desire before the LORD, that God’s will might be done. And “in due time Hannah conceived and bore a son. She named him Samuel, for she said, ‘I have asked him of the LORD.’”

No doubt Penninah too prayed to the LORD, asking God that she might earn the love and favor of her husband which had been given to Hannah instead. And yet, unlike Hannah, Penninah did not receive what she had asked for. Indeed, there is a story found in the Jewish midrash which provides a fate even worse for Penninah: “Hannah would give birth to one child, and Peninnah would bury two; Hannah bore four, and Peninnah buried eight. When Hannah was pregnant with her fifth child, Peninnah feared that now she would bury her last two children.”

God did not give Hannah what she asked for and deny Penninah because God loved Penninah any less than Hannah. Nor was it because Hannah knew some special way to pray in order to ensure the result she wanted, to force God’s hand. No, it’s just that, in this fallen world, it’s a simple fact that we don’t always get what we want, no matter how hard we pray, no matter who we are.

And no matter what the Rolling Stones might say, neither do we even always get what we need. Every fifteen seconds, a child dies from hunger-related causes somewhere on Planet Earth. That’s a problem worth praying over. But prayer alone isn’t going to the solve the problem.

Prayer is not a magic spell or a letter to Santa. God is not a genie in a bottle.

Hurricane Sandy did not hit the shores of our region because people didn’t pray hard enough. Nor was it to punish the godlessness of the New York-New Jersey metropolitan region. Barack Obama was not re-elected President because God likes Democrats better than Republicans. Nor was it to pave the way for the Antichrist, as Texas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffries suggested before the election.

Our Lord Jesus Christ warns us against this type of superstitious thinking in today’s Gospel passage. The earliest written of the four canonical gospels, St. Mark’s gospel was probably written in the immediate wake of the Roman destruction of the Jewish temple, the center of Jewish life and religion. Like a flood-displaced North Jerseyan or our Texan pastor, the Jewish community found their very world turned upside down and inside out. Part of the evangelist’s task, then, was to help them understand how to make sense of the significance of this sort of event of seeming apocalyptic proportions in terms of their Christian faith and practice. And Jesus says, “Do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.”

Do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.

Jesus warns us against those who come in the name of Christ and yet lead many astray, the pastors and pundits who would turn hurricanes into instruments of a wrathful God and elections into the first phase of the apocalypse, who would have us make a false choice between religion and science, who twist and pervert our faith so it stands in opposition to the God-given gift of human reason, who use our scriptures and traditions as weapons with which to bludgeon.

Hurricane Sandy hit our shores because a tropical storm came in contact with a cold front which intensified it and propelled it towards our region. Barack Obama was re-elected President, for better or worse, because he received more votes in the electoral college than did his opponent.

Do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.

Christian prayer is not--or at least should not be--an attempt to flatter a capricious deity into giving us what we want. Instead, it is a chance to enter into relationship with the Triune God who, as Parent, Child, and Spirit, always exists in and as relationship. True relationship works both ways, which means that in some mysterious way I do not pretend to understand, our prayers have the ability to transform God. But equally important is the fact that we need to be open to being transformed ourselves when we pray. This is the very essence of prayer.

Amen.

As preached to the Church of the Ascension in Gloucester City during the Celebration of Christmas Lessons and Carols on Jan. 1, 2012 C.E.

Genesis 3:1-15
Isaiah 40:1-11
Numbers 6:22-27
Galatians 4:4-7
Philippians 2:5-11
Luke 2:15-21

So here we are, the Eight Day of our voyage through the (relatively short) season of Christmas, the Feast of the Holy Name. “When the eight day arrived for the child’s circumcision, [the child] was named Jesus.” This, the first shedding of Jesus’ blood, stands of course as a prefiguring of the Cross. It also stands as a powerful testimony to the truth of the Incarnation, that God became fully human, suffering out of love all the pains and frailties that we suffer out of sin.

We know that we are subject to injury, to pain, to illness, to temptation, and ultimately to death because of sin, because of our own turning away from God’s Love. The account of the Fall found in the Book of Genesis expresses this important truth in figurative terms. Yet Jesus was without the stain of that sin, and still Jesus’ blood was able to be shed, first at the circumcision and ultimately at the crucifixion.

Just as “in the free, overflowing rapture of [God’s] love, God makes a creation that is other than [God]self” (Jürgen Moltmann) in the Genesis accounts, in the Incarnation our loving God empties Godself, taking the form of a slave.

Think of the sacrifice! The omnipresent Christ becoming limited to a single human body in a single place; the omniscient Christ needing to learn and grow as human children do; the omnipotent Christ made weak and helpless. And then, on the eighth day, well, you know.

Fiction writers from Anne Rice in Out of Egypt to Nikos Kazantzakis in The Last Temptation of Christ have written novels trying to imagine what that sort of experience for the young Christ would have been like as Christ “grew in size and strength” (Invlusive Bible) and “increased in wisdom and in years” (NRSV), as two different translations of Luke 2:40 put it. There is no definitive answer to that question, of course, but we should not be surprised that so many authors’ pens have been inspired by the powerfulness of Christ’s sacrifice, confronting and conquering the worst of our human natures-- fear, doubt, depression, reluctance, and perhaps, as in The Last Temptation, even lust--out of love rather than out of sin.

It’s true that here in the western Church we are more likely to talk about Jesus having two natures, one human and one divine, united in one person--what’s called the Definition of Chalcedon--while our siblings-in-Christ in Eastern Orthodoxy are more likely to speak of the humanity and divinity united in a single nature. But the underlying core doctrine--that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine--represents a central orthodoxy for the entire Church catholic in all her branches: Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant alike.

But . . . so what? Hopefully I am my own harshest critic, but I can just imagine a hypothetical parishioner sitting in their pew, going, “Well, it was fun, reading lessons and and singing Christmas carols, but then we had to let the theology geek get up and talk.” Well, that hopefully fictional parishioner would be in good company: no less a personage than the great Protestant reformer Martin Luther himself once wrote: “What is it to me that Christ had two natures?” He did not, of course, mean that the doctrine was altogether unimportant, but his comments represent a tendency we sometime see in some parts of Christianity to view the Incarnation as a mere prerequisite to the Cross, something God had to do in order to accomplish the plan of salvation just as it might be necessary for a high school student to take Algebra I before she can take Algebra II. Roger Olson speaks of it as a “rescue mission”: “its only purpose being to get God the Son onto the cross to change God’s attitude toward us from wrath to love. This,” Olson says, “does not take the truth of the incarnation seriously enough.”

Richard Rohr writes of the Incarnation as “God [. . .] saying yes to humanity in the enfleshment of [God’s] Son in our midst. [. . . A]ll questions of inherent dignity, worthiness, and belovedness were resolved once and forever—and for everything that was human, material, physical, and in the whole of creation.” Rohr reminds us that for St. Francis, St. Clare, and the community they led at Asissi, “incarnation was already redemption.”

Earlier I mentioned the Definition of Chalcedon, the formula we in the western Church use to grasp as best as we are able the holy mystery which is Jesus’ full humanity and full divinity. The full text of the definition as composed at the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451 of the Common Era can be found on page 864 of your Prayer Book, albeit in incredibly small type, but part of that definition--and I’m tweaking the translation a bit here--states that Jesus is “truly God and truly human, of a rational soul and body, of one being with the One whom Jesus called 'Abba' according to the divinity of Christ, and of one being with us according to Christ’s humanity.”

Let’s say that again: by virtue of Jesus’ humanity, we are one in being with Christ. We share Christ’s essence, Christ’s substance, Christ’s being. Talk about a weighty message!

So when Mary and Joseph bring their infant child to be presented at the temple, in a sense it is all of humanity which is being presented before God. When that infant’s blood is shed according to the covenant made with Sarah and Abraham, all of humanity is bound in a New Covenant. And when that child is given the name Jesus--meaning “the LORD brings salvation”--that becomes our name, our promise, our truth.

Amen.

1. Godhead. The apophatic denial of God's non-existence.
2. Trinity. God is one Being in three Persons.
3. Chalcedonian Christology. Hypostatic union: Jesus Christ is two natures, one human and one divine, united into one Person.
4. Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience as complementary sources of revelation.
5. The Sacraments. The seven sacraments (baptism, Eucharist, confirmation, reconciliation, ordination, marriage, healing) are the means of sanctifying grace, rites in which God is uniquely active, visible signs of an invisible reality.
6. Ex opere operato. The seven sacraments are efficacious in and of themselves, by the very fact of the actions’ being performed, because Christ is at work in them in order to communicate the grace that each sacrament signifies.
7. Baptismal Regeneration. The salvation of baptized persons (including those baptized by blood or desire, as well as by water) is uniquely mediated through the sacrament.
8. Real Presence. Jesus Christ is really present in the Eucharist. (Radical transignification.)
9. Perseverance of Eucharistic Presence. Real Presence is not dependent on the act of drinking or eating and continues in the consecrated hosts beyond the celebration of the Eucharist.
10. Adorableness of the Eucharist. Worship may be properly rendered to the Blessed Sacrament.
11. One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. The unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity of the Church of Jesus Christ.
12. Apostolic Succession. The spiritual authority placed on the apostles by Christ is passed through history via the institutional rites of the Church, i.e. the consecration of bishops. The one Church of Christ subsists in the apostolic churches as governed by the historic episcopate.
13. Ordained Presbyterate. God specially calls some people (of all genders, races, and sexualities) to undergo the sacrament of ordination; to represent Christ and the Church of Christ, particularly as pastor to the people; to share with the bishop in the overseeing of the Church; to proclaim the Gospel; to administer the sacraments; and to bless and declare pardon in the name of God.
14. Free Will. God has willed that human persons remain under the control of their own decisions. For its part, authentic freedom is an exceptional sign of the divine image within a human being.
15. Sin. The existence of corporate evil—sexism and racism, transphobia and homophobia; poverty and hunger; totalitarianism and fascism—such that human freedom is curtailed and diminished.
16. Sola gratia. Since human freedom has been damaged by sin, only by the aid of God's grace can the Church bring the relationship between God and human beings into full flower.
17. Resistability of Grace. The free wills of human beings may cooperate with God so as to prepare and dispose themselves for the attainment of salvation; human wills can also refuse complying, if they please.
18. Universal Potential for Redemption. The birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are for the benefit of all humankind, not just an elect.
19. Kingdom of Heaven. Through grace, humans are called to use their free will to pray for peace, fight for justice, and build God’s Kin(g)dom on Earth.
20. Intercession of Saints. It is proper to pray to the Saints and ask for their intercessions.

In Essentials of Evangelical Theology, Volume 1, Donald G. Bloesch argues that "real incarnation means that Jesus entered into our historical and cultural limitations though he also transcended the times in which he lived and indeed all historical time in the message that he embodied." He worries that assuming the onmniscience of Jesus of Nazareth "betrays a Monophysite tendency" (140)--that is, it expresses the heretical notion that "the human nature [of Jesus] merged into the divine [nature]" rather than it being the case that "the Son of God adopted human nature and united it with his divine nature in the unity of one person" (128).

Bishop Wright echoes this point: "If we are to locate [. . .] Jesus [. . .] within the world of first-century Judaism, within the turbulent theological and political movements and expectations of the time (and if we are not than we should admit that we know very little about [Jesus]) then we must face the fact that [he was not] teaching a timeless system of religion or ethics, or even a timeless message about how human beings are saved" (178-9).

Thus, asking the question "WWJD" is revealed to be a deeply misleading act, or at least one which might yield answers which would not always perfectly coincide with those to "What does God want me to do?" or "What would the Risen Christ have me do?" (This is sort of the flip side of the fact that asking "What would the Only Child of God, Eternally Begotten from. and of One Being with, the Parent God, do?" doesn't seem very helpful either.)

Note that both Bishop Wright and Prof. Bloesch are far more conservative than I am, theologically--I'm not citing radically revisionist liberal theologians here, but rather well-respected conservative theologians whose location within the orthodoxy of the faith is relatively uncontested. The Scriptural evidence for the non-omniscience of Jesus is, in my opinion, overwhelming--there are relevant passages through all four Gospels (including in St. John, whose Christology is so high that the Johannine community would become the main source of docetism in the early Church) and in the epistles.

But my fundamental argument relies less on proof-texts than it does on poetry. The gravity of the Christ myth in many ways resides precisely within the humanity of Jesus: for me, the central moment of the Passion is Gethsamane, where Jesus, afraid to die, prays to the Parent God:

My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by. Nevertheless, let it be as you, not I, would have it.

If this cup cannot pass by, but I must drink it, your will be done.

Tim Rice re-interprets the prayer in the garden this way:

( GETHSAMENE lyrics )

This is moving stuff precisely because of the power of the paradox: God, omniscient and omnipotent, self-emptied (kenosis) so as to suffer fear and doubt.