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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!

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, 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, 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.

As preached to the Church of the Ascension during our service of Morning Prayer, the second Sunday after the Epiphany, January 20, 2013.

Psalm 36:5-10
Isaiah 62:1-5
Canticle 11
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
John 2:1-11

This is the collect for the commemoration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., celebrated either on April 4 or January 15:

“Almighty God, by the hand of Moses your servant you led your people out of slavery, and made them free at last; Grant that your Church, following the example of your prophet Martin Luther King, may resist oppression in the name of your love, and may secure for all your children the blessed liberty of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.”

The collect uses the term prophet to describe the Rev. Dr. King because King filled in the twentieth century the function which in ancient Israel was held by the prophets: acting as an intermediary between God and the people.

Isaiah Ben-Amoz was a Jewish prophet who preached in Judah in the eighth-century B.C.E., but the book of the Bible which bears his name was probably written by many different authors over the course of two centuries. Scholars divide the book into three main parts: the first consisting of Isaiah’s prophecies and material added by his 7th-century disciples, the second addressing the Jews of the Babylonian Captivity in the mid-sixth century.

The third portion, known as Trito-Isaiah or simply Third Isaiah, is the portion from which our first lesson and canticle were taken. It is a collection of poetry, probably itself composed by multiple authors shortly following the return from the exile of the Babylon Captivity, prophesying “the restoration of the nation of Israel and a new creation in God's glorious future kingdom” (Wikipedia) to “a Jewish community in late sixth century Judah struggling to rebuild itself” (The Inclusive Bible).

The eschatological vision of the New Jerusalem was one of hope for the Jews who had witnessed the destruction of their beloved, sacred city and its temple. It would be a chance for the sovereign authority of the Jewish God to be established once and for all and for both the righteous and the wicked to receive their just desserts. This, of course, is one of the functions of a prophet: not only to relay God’s displeasure with the inequities of the people, but also to provide them with a motivating vision of the fulfillment of God’s Will. For the Rev. Dr. King, this motivating vision was of course his “dream” of a nation where children would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, a world marked by racial reconciliation, economic justice, and active peacemaking. For the Jewish prophets of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E., it was the New Jerusalem.

In a Hebrew Scripture reading this morning, the biblical author(s) use the image of a bride to describe the New Jerusalem and its special relationship with God the Creator and Ruler. For us Christians, we cannot but help but view this image through the lens of our traditional understanding of the Church--one, holy, catholic, and apostolic--as the Bride of Christ. For we remember that just as in the biblical conception of marriage the spouses leave their parents to cleave to each other and become one flesh, so too has Christ, in the mystery of the Incarnation, come to us from God the Parent to cleave to humanity and become one flesh with us.

We are the Bride of Christ. We are the New Jerusalem--right here, at the Church of the Ascension in Gloucester City. We are the builders of the Kin-dom of God.

It is of course true that without the amazing free gift of God’s grace, we are utterly powerless in the face of sin and death. This is simply good theology, the clear and constant teaching of the Church across the ages, from Saint Augustine of Hippo to the Protestant Reformers. But it is just as true that with the free gift of grace we are empowered to act as God’s agents in building the kindom. This, too, is the clear and constant teaching of Mother Church. Saint Augustine wrote an entire book called De Civitate Dei, or The City of God, in which he put forth both a theology of history and a challenge to human society to pursue what he called the City of Heaven.

As St. Teresa of Avila famously wrote, Ours are the eyes with which Jesus looks compassion on this world, Ours are the feet with which Jesus walks to do good, Ours are the hands, with which Jesus blesses all the world.

We are the hands and feet of Jesus because we have been mystically incorporated into the very Body of Christ through the sacrament of our baptism. Just as Jesus transformed that water into wine back at the wedding in Cana, so too has Jesus transformed us into new wine, to go out and get the world drunk on the good news that Jesus is Lord.

Because that is what the power of the Holy Spirit is like. Remember the disciples on the day of Pentecost: the crowd saw them, speaking in tongues, and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

This is a message of hope, but it is also a message of awesome responsibility. What does it mean for us who have been taught by Jesus to pray for the coming of God’s kindom, that the will of God may be done on Earth, to put our actions behind those prayers? To not only recite those words, but to live them? To heed the prophetic voices of our generations--and to be those voices for others? To work towards a world marked by peace and by justice--instead of war and division? To receive the love of Christ, our collective spouse, and to transmit it to each other?

During this time of transition, it is an especially good time for us to reflect on what, precisely, is the role the Spirit has in mind for us in the coming of the kindom of God. What is our congregational charism?

Whatever it is, I know one thing: so long as we are always seek to be motivated by love, we cannot go far wrong. As I was driving home from work this morning, I was listening to On Being on NPR and thinking to myself, “I really need to come up with a conclusion to the sermon I’m giving in two and a half hours.”

On the radio program, poet Elizabeth Alexander read from the poem she had read at President Obama’s first inauguration in 2009. “What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance,” she read.

And that’s pretty much what it comes down to, isn’t it? One might find Alexander’s poetry trite--I remember not being particularly impressed with it when I heard it back in 2009--but it’s impossible to disagree with the sentiment. Jesus’ resistance notwithstanding, perhaps the Blessed Virgin Mother knew what she was doing when she caused the ministry of Jesus to be initiated at that wedding in Cana, amidst a ritual focused on love and covenant. Because the reasons the image of the Bride of God has remained so powerful across the ages doesn’t have anything to do with notions of gender or sexual orientation, with headship or submission. It’s about love and covenant.

Amen.

Amos 7:7-17
Psalm 82
Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37

Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.

So goes our Confession of Sin, the prayer with which we began this service, which is structured to begin with confession and end with thanksgiving. It’s a familiar prayer to us, because it also appears in the mass, either at the beginning in the Penitential Order or before the Offertory as part of the Prayers of the People. Following the direction of St. Paul’s exhortation, we turn to God for forgiveness and absolution before approaching the Lord’s Table in the Eucharistic liturgy.

Amos had a vision of God setting a plumb line in the midst of the people of Israel, a weighted string used as a vertical reference line, metaphorically speaking a standard for judging their moral correctness at a time when their failure of that test was very much a foregone conclusion. So too are we as Christians called to a holiness we are fundamentally incapable of keeping through our own power. Thus the inescapable necessity of our confession and subsequent absolution.

When the authors of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer were working on the revised confession of sin prayer for the Rite II services, they chose to make explicit that the standard we were failing to meet was that of the greatest commandments identified by Jesus in today’s gospel passage: “We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.”

The first of those commandments would be one well known to Jesus’ audience, especially to the expert in the law who questioned Jesus. It’s a quote from the Torah book of Deuteronomy and appears in the Shema Yisrael--the one which appears in the Gospel According to Saint Mark, the first phrase of the shema is quoted as well:

Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

To love God with all one’s heart, and with all one’s soul, and with all one’s strength, and with all one’s mind means to love God with one’s entire person -- physical, mental, and spiritual. But what does it mean to love God, in practical terms, when God’s very Being defies the very possibility of our comprehension? After all, as Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote long ago, si comprehendis, non est Deus -- “if you understand, that isn’t God.”

We live in an age where there are almost as many different, warring understandings of Who and what God is -- or isn’t! -- as there are people to hold to them. As a consequence of religious freedom and a long list of social factors, the diversity of opinion which exists on questions of ultimate reality and the sacred is truly unprecedented.

Over the last month and a half, we have listened in our lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures to stories of how different understandings of the divine quite literally warred with each other, often with massive amounts of violence involved. The way the story is told, it’s almost like a sporting event. There’s the home team: Elijah, Elisha, Amos. And there’s the away team: Ahab, Jezebel, the priests of Baal, Amaziah. When our team “wins” we’re supposed to cheer; when “their” team scores a goal we’re supposed to hiss.

But is it really supposed to work that way?

Jesus’ answer to the lawyer in our Gospel reading today might suggest otherwise to us. The Samaritans were a people who held a different theological understanding than did the Jews of Judea, different in a way which seems small and trivial to us but which was the world to the Jews and the Samaritans themselves. You might remember the Gospel we heard two weeks ago, in which Jesus was refused entrance to a Samaritan city “because the face of Jesus was set toward Jerusalem.” The disciples wanted to “command fire to come down from heaven and consume them” but Jesus turned and rebuked them.

And now, a mere chapter later in the Gospel According to Saint Luke, Jesus uses a Samaritan as the example of the ideal neighbor, even above the puritanical obedience to the Jewish purity laws found in the refusal of the priest and the Levite to make themselves unclean by touching blood. Jesus is asked what is necessary to inherit eternal life, and the answer doesn't seem to presuppose that theological correctness is any necessary prerequisite.

“Who is my neighbor?” Jesus is asked, and answers: the Samaritan. The Muslim. The Hindu. The Wiccan. The Buddhist. The Scientologist. The Daoist. The Satanist. The Mormon. The atheist.

Amos said to Amaziah, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet's son,” denying “that he belonged to the class of professional prophets; his vocation is due to the personal intervention of the Lord.” God is not limited to expressing truth in those places where we already expect to find it. All people are among God’s children, for whom Christ lived and died, and the work of the Holy Spirit can be found in all peoples and places.

Furthermore, the deep spiritual and philosophical insights of those of other faiths, or of no faith at all, can often be used to deepen and enrich our own Christian understanding and spirituality. For example, the descriptions of an intellectually compelling “Zen Catholicism” put forth by the Roman Catholic monk and priest Thomas Merton in his writings on the intersections of Zen Buddhism and Christian mysticism played a crucial role in my own conversion to Christianity.

Our proper recognition of those elements of truth and sanctification found in all faiths ought not, however, be allowed to lead us into the sort of theological relativism in which Christianity is merely “true for us” and one faith is just as good as other.

When I finish this sermon, we will stand up and affirm our faith in the words of the Apostles’ Creed, the creed of our baptismal covenant which we renewed just two weeks ago as we welcomed two new members into the Body of Christ. We will say “I believe” with confidence, pride, and thanksgiving, as is good and right. These are the truths, however we may understand them, that God has revealed to us through the person of Jesus -- who identifies Christself in the Gospel According to St. John as the “way, the truth, and the life” -- and through the writings of the Holy Scriptures and the traditions of Mother Church. We affirm these tenets boldly and without flinching.

To do otherwise would be to give in to the dangerous idea that religion is little more than personally meaningful -- or, at best, communally meaningful -- ritual and theology a discipline without a subject. That is the fatal quicksand which threatens to consume our “Spiritual But Not Religious” age. Our ultimate commitment must always be to the radical power of eternal truths and self-consuming love.

But it must be to truth and love even above tradition or doctrine. And those ends are always best served when people with different understandings can come together in humility, admitting that we each but “see through a glass darkly,” to teach and learn from each other without animus or coercion; to challenge the beliefs of others and have our own beliefs be challenged in turn, amidst a welcoming environment of respect and toleration; to love and serve one another as neighbors, as full citizens of the Kin-dom of God.

All people who seek truth and love with sincere hearts are on the same team, and that team is God’s team even if its members might not agree on just Who God Is -- or isn’t. Indeed, in many ways a devout member of a different faith, or a principled person of no faith, can be said to be doing the will of God much more perfectly than can a lackluster Christian.

Saint Paul writes that he and Saint Timothy have prayed without ceasing for the Christians in Colossae “asking that [they might] be filled with the knowledge of God's will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that [they might] lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to [God], as [they bore] fruit in every good work and as [they grew] in the knowledge of God.” So too ought to be our own prayer for ourselves! For all of us, no matter what our religion or lack thereof might be, have plenty of room to grow in our knowledge of God.

Many of you are no doubt familiar with the old joke about a group of people who, having passed from this world into the next, are met by St. Peter at the pearly gates for a tour of heaven. As the tour goes on St. Peter takes them through the Baptist section of heaven, where everyone is giving glory to God in fully staid dourness, and the Pentecostal section, a crazed ecstatic frenzy of dancing and speaking in tongues, and so on. They come to our own Episcopalian section, with is an elegant dinner party with fine wines and exquisite food. As they come to a certain group way off to themselves, St. Peter draws the group closer and whispers, "Now, for this next group, we need to be really quiet. They are the Catholics and they think they're the only ones here.”

I repeat this joke now not in order to single out our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers and siblings for criticism. Indeed, I would argue that it grossly misrepresents actual Catholic doctrine on the subject. But I repeat it because there is a sense in which we are all -- Protestant and Catholic, liberal and conservative -- guilty of acting as if we have an exclusive monopoly on salvation, of falling into the sin of thinking we have found the formula -- the words or the actions or the beliefs -- by which one can alone properly solicit the grace of God, that only we have gotten it right. When we do that, we idolatrously place our own conception of God in front of the infinite and ineffable reality of Who God Is.

And so, truly sorry, we turn to God and humbly repent, and ask that for the sake of God’s Holy Begotten One, Jesus Christ, God might have mercy on us and forgive us; that we might delight in God’s will, and walk in God’s ways, to the glory of God’s Name.

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.

This is the text I preached off of for the children's sermon at both the Church of the Holy Spirit and the Church of the Ascension. As you might imagine, the actual sermons I gave were significantly different than each other, as a result of having two somewhat different audiences.

Revelation 7:9-17
Psalm 34:1-10, 22
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12

Today we celebrate All Saints’ Day, which was on Tuesday. Most of the time we celebrate one saint at a time, or maybe two or three or a certain group of people, but on All Saints’ Day we celebrate ALL the saints. Does anyone know how many saints that is, how many saints there are all together?

Well, there were twelve disciples, right? And Joseph and Mary, Jesus’ mom and dad, so that’s at least fourteen. What other saints can you think of?

What about the saint we usually celebrate with a party at the beginning of next month? He wears red and sometimes likes to give presents to kids.

In this book [hold up Holy Women, Holy Men], there’s a couple hundred different saints that we celebrate at different parts of the Church year, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You know what that means, the tip of the iceberg?

Icebergs are big blocks of ice, right? And when they float in the water, you can only see a little piece of them floating on top of the water--most of the ice is underwater, where you can’t see it. The people in this book, and all the saints with “Saint” in front of their name, they’re the tip of the iceberg--the part that’s easy to see. But what makes an iceberg such a big deal is all that part that’s under the water, that you can’t see but is still there. With the saints, we call that entire iceberg--all the saints put together--the “communion” of saints.

In the passage [X] read from the Revelation, which is a very weird book from the very back of the Bible, St. John the Divine--there’s another one!--talks about a “a great multitude [that means ‘a lot’] that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages.”

We don’t actually know how many saints there are, but there’s a lot of them, probably in the billions. That’s a lot of saints, isn’t it?

What do you think you need to do to become a saint?

Do you think saints make mistakes sometimes?

Did you know St. Nicholas punched somebody? He was at a big meeting of all the Church leaders, and they were trying to work out the Trinity--the relationship between God, and Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Somebody said something he disagreed with, and he got so mad that he just punched the guy. That wasn’t a very good thing for him to do, was it?

Will you pray with me?

“Lord, we thank You for Your saints. We pray that we may be inspired by their example, so that we may join them in Your Presence. Amen.”

Proper 14 Year A

Psalm 105, 1-6, 16-22, 45b
Romans 10:5-15
Matthew 14:22-33

I want to tell you a story about an Italian teenager named Chiara Offreduccio. Chiara was the oldest daughter of a wealthy nobleman, engaged to a man of wealth, destined to a life of pleasure and leisure--until she heard the teachings of a local preacher, who spoke of the need to live a life of simplicity, in voluntary poverty, and to serve the poor. She ran away from home and became an important leader in the new movement started by that local preacher.

The town was Assisi, the year was 1212, and the name of the preacher was Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone, better known to us as St. Francis. We recognize the contributions of Chiara to the Church this Thursday, when we celebrate the feast day of Saint Clare of Assisi.

The life of St. Clare of Assisi exists as a shining example of the Franciscan values of simplicity and care for the poor. Yet we must remember she was able to live such a life of saintly virtue only by defying those authorities which her 13th-century culture claimed to have rightful power over her: her father, her promised husband. To be accounted righteous under that culture, that Law, it would have been necessary for her to submit to those powers. But Clare knew there was a higher righteousness she was called to obey, one which made no distinction between male and female, leading her to write the first monastic rule known to have been written by a woman.

For first-century Jews, the Law by which their “righteousness” would be judged would have been theMosaic Code, the rules set down in the Torah. It’s this desire to be counted as “righteous under the Law” which leads the priest and the Levite to pass by the bloodied man in the street in Jesus’ famous parable, for touching such a man would have rendered them ritually unclean. And thus it was left to a Samaritan--a heretic!--to respond in a neighborly way and render aid.

St. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, reminds that Jewish culture, the culture of the priest and the Levite, that for them too, there was a higher righteousness, a righteousness of the heart, of faith. Now there are many, especially among our siblings-in-Christ of a more Calvinist persuasion, who would have us believe that all St. Paul is saying is that people who “believe in” Christ go to heaven, and people who don’t go to hell. But I think St. Paul’s message is far more beautifully challenging than that.

St. Paul writes: “if you believe in your heart that God raised Jesus from the dead, you will be saved.”

The heart--Greek kardia, from which our English word “cardiology” derives--was not the seat of intellectual activity for St. Paul’s audience. That would have been the mind--the psyche, from which we get “psychology.” Of course, neither was it simply an organ pumping blood through the body. Instead, it represented a person’s will: the volitional faculty that made a human being capable of self-determining, the center and seat of spiritual life. This suggests to me that “believing in one’s heart that God raised Jesus from the dead” is less about the intellectual assent to a checklist of propositions about Jesus of Nazareth than it is about allowing one’s actions to be ruled by the power and compassion of the Risen Christ, allowing ourselves to be transformed by grace--that amazing, unearned gift which is the birthright of every Christian by virtue of our baptism--to make our lives a living testimony to the compassion and power of the Lord alive in us, paving the way for our salvation here on Earth: our right relationship with God and with God’s church.

Similarly, for a Christian in St. Paul’s time to “confess with one’s lips that Jesus is the Lord” was a radical act likely to result in alienation from family and outright persecution from society at large. It was to announce oneself not answerable to the worldly powers which sought to control and oppress, but to the one Lord, Jesus Christ, and Christ’s teachings of love of God and neighbor. Such a Christian would be actively living out their principles in a powerful and dangerous way.

For us in twenty-first century America, in a world of Christian privilege and cultural hegemony where every U.S. President for as long as any of us here can remember has at least nominally been a Christian, where we probably get many of our Christian holy days off of school or work, to merely announce our self-identity as Christians falls far short of what St. Paul had in mind; indeed, in many ways it represents its very antithesis. Katharine Jefferts Schori, our Presiding Bishop here in the Episcopal Church, has spoken of what she calls “the great Western heresy - that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It's caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of all being.”

Jefferts Schori later clarified her remarks by noting, “If salvation is understood only as ‘getting right with God’ without considering ‘getting right with all our neighbors,’ then we've got a heresy on our hands.”

What it would look like for this parish of the Church of the Ascension, here in Gloucester City, to occupy as radical a place in our twenty-first century culture as did the early Church in the first and second centuries, or the community of Sts. Francis and Clare in the thirteenth? What would it look like for us to confess with our lips that Jesus is Lord in a way which lives up to the true depth of St. Paul’s challenge? To proclaim a Jesus who stands in challenge to a twenty-first century “righteousness of Law” which seeks to divide us according to gender or race instead of unite us in one Body, tells us to fear the stranger instead of to love them as neighbor and as sibling, values the worth of a human being by the size of their house, their checkbook, or their pocketbook, instead of extolling the value and dignity of every human person as a beloved child of God Almighty, made in the divine image?

Mike King, a progresssive evangelical author and blogger, has written about two models of evanglelization. The first he calls believe-behave-belong: "If we can just get people to believe the gospel, they will begin behaving properly, and eventually they can belong to our churches." But King suggested that a different model exists, belong-behave-believe, where "evangelism happens quite naturally when we are entrenched in faith communities that are actively caught up in cooperating with God’s compelling work of restoration--restoration between people and God; between people and their own brokenness; between people and other people; and restoration of all creation. As our God invites us into the divine fellowship of the Trinity [King writes], so we should invite people to join us in community.”

Some of you here today are visitors to this church. Some of you have come to see me preach. Some of you have come only to hear me preach. I hope I have communicated to all of you that you are welcome here--today, next Sunday, next month, whenever. Chances are, I haven’t as well as I could have, so let me reiterate it now: the Episcopal Church welcomes you.

Whoever you are, whatever you are, wherever else you go to church, whatever you believe or don’t believe, whatever you have done or may do in the future, the Episcopal Church welcomes you. As slogans go, it’s not particularly profound or sexy, but at its heart it represents the crux of what it means to be Christian. For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek: the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all.

It’s a challenge that all of us who are baptised members here at the Church of the Ascension--we who are listed in the collective, right on the front of our bulletins, as ministers in this church--need to live up to. We have been sent to proclaim Jesus Christ to the world--and, as Clare’s mentor Francis famously said, to, when necessary, use words--so that others may say of us that verse from the Book of Isaiah which St. Paul quotes: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”

Living our lives so as to be counted righteous under the Law is safe, comfortable, risk-free. It is not easy to go against the teachings of our parents, our culture, our worldly authorities, the logic of empire which has co-opted much of Christianity. It is tempting to want to play it safe, to not want to leave the safety of our boat. But as our gospel passage this morning demonstrates, to allow ourselves to be paralyzed by fear is to sink for sure. It is only by marching ever forward, leaving safety behind us and exposing ourselves to risk, embracing the truly radical option represented by the righteousness of the heart, that we will be empowered to do what the world tells us is impossible.

Amen.

As preached to the congregation of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Gloucester City, at their Morning Prayer service on the 8th of August, 2010. . . .

Proper 14 (Sunday Closest to August 10), Year C

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

Many of my friends, including all of my housemates, are members of a nearby congregation operating under the Brethren in Christ, so most Sunday evenings I find myself worshipping with them at their weekly Public Meeting. Their style of worship there is fairly different than ours here; sometimes it seems that they think it is more important for sacred music to be loud than pretty. It’s really not at all my style of worship at all, really, and at times I find myself more alienated than uplifted.

Back during Lent, I was at the public meeting, and I’m surrounded by these energetic figures, fellow twenty-somethings who are just exploding with their love for Christ, and I’m left completely cold. And then I was blessed to look over to my right and I see a married couple I know, about my age, and on the husband’s lap is their then-eight-month-old daughter, gleefully smiling and clapping.

Holy Scripture talks about the hardening and softening of hearts. I think that’s the best way of describing what happened: the Spirit softened my heart. Seeing that baby girl take such innocent joy in worshipping the Lord helped me recenter my focus away from my own own nitpicks about the theology of the lyrics or the aesthetics of the melody, and back towards God.

When I got home, I got on my computer and posted a status update to my Facebook: “Cole Banning has been inspired by the faith of a child.”

It got me thinking about what that means, the faith of a child. The phrase is of course biblical: Jesus tells us in Saint Matthew’s Gospel that it is a necessary condition for entering the Kingdom of Heaven. But what is it, exactly?

Often it seems we use it to mean a totally uncritical acceptance, belief without doubt, so-called “blind faith.” But that’s not what happened in the case of Baby Lydia. Her faith was far from blind. Instead, it was a response to what she saw and heard in front of her. Even as a baby, even prior to her acquisition of language, she was able to recognize the goodness of God’s creation and respond by giving praise to glory to God in the simple ways available to her, by participating in our worship, in what our Psalm today calls “the sacrifice of thanksgiving.”

I wonder sometimes where that notion of a child’s faith being blind or uncritical comes from. I’m not a parent, but one thing I know about children is that they’re constantly questioning. It’s an iconic image: the young child, incessantly asking “why?” Why this? Why that? And when given an answer, responding to that answer with the question “why?” and if one is willing to answer that too, once again meeting the answer with “why?” unto infinite regress. “Why?” “Why?” “Why?” This is not an uncritical faith but rather a faith which seeks to learn, to grow, to challenge what it is told.

In our epistle reading, the author of Hebrews talks about the great faith of Abraham and Sarah and their family. I think that Abraham had the faith of a child. When we think about Abraham, we tend to think about his obedience, obedience which was important and a right and goodful thing. But I think we can appreciate the passage from Hebrews best if we remember that Abraham’s faith was larger than just obedience, a relationship with God that consisted of more than just Abraham following commands.

In our reading from the Hebrew scriptures, there is a reference to Sodom and Gomorrah, the two cities which the Torah tells us God destroyed in a rain of fire and brimstone. The Torah also tells us that Abraham argued with God over the fates of Sodom and Gomorrah: he negotiated, bargained. “Will you save the cities if there are 50 righteous people to be found?” “Will you save the cities if there 45?” “What abouty forty?” Talk about the faith of a child! I’m reminded of a child at a cookie jar: “Can I have a cookie, Mommy? Can I have two cookies? Three? Three and a half?”

Abraham, while always remaining obedient to the will of God, was at the same time willing to challenge God, to question God, in his attempt to understand God’s will.

Jacob, Abraham and Sarah’s grandson whom Isaiah also mentions, wrestled with the angel of the LORD at Penuel. When God revealed Godself to Moses, the descendent of Abraham and Sarah and the great leader of Israel who only saw the promised kingdom from afar, Moses too argued. He said, “I don’t think I can do this, God.”

And God said, “Okay, I’ll send your sister and brother with you to help you.” That’s dialogue: a process which consists of both give and take for both persons involved.

Moses constantly negotiated with God on behalf of the people of Israel. Indeed, we think of Sinai as this place where God’s will was committed to human beings, but it’s instructive to remember that Moses spent forty days and forty nights on Sinai before he brought down the Decalogue: they had a lot to talk about up there.

Isaiah writes: “Come now, let us argue it out, says the LORD.” The underlying metaphor in the Hebrew is that of a law court: Israel is standing trial for its sins. But it presents us with a call to enter into dialogue with God. The Inclusive Bible translates the line as “Let’s look at the choices before you,” while it is rendered in the New American Bible as “let us set things right”: this dialogic encounter with God opens an opportunity for a process of self-discovery that allows us to set order to the way in which we live our lives.

This then is, I think, the picture of authentic Biblical faith which Scripture provides us: a relationship with God which is primarily experiential, rooted in our encounter with the divine: in prayer, in service, and of course in the Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood -- back next week!

Thomas Merton reminds us that “faith is the door to the full inner life of the Church, a life which includes not only access to an authoritative teaching but above all to a deep personal experience which is at once unique and yet shared by the whole Body of Christ, in the Spirit of Christ.”

“Come now, let us argue it out, says the LORD.”

Liberation theologian Leonardo Boff makes a similar point when he writes that “[f]aith 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 the 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.” “Close quote.”

I think this type of response, described by Boff, is the type of response which Jesus describes in our Gospel reading today, being “dressed for action” and having our “lamps lit,” making our treasure in heaven by our works of mercy and charity, through our voluntary poverty. So too in Isaiah when God tells Israel, and us, to cease evil and learn to do good; to seek justice and rescue the oppressed; to defend the orphan and plead for the widow.

This Wednesday is the feast day of Saint Clare of Assisi. Now, Clare is my favorite capital-S Saint because she’s the patron saint of television, which makes her in an indirect sort of way the patron saint of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But Clare, who ran away from her aristocratic family to join Saint Francis in his example of God-devoted poverty, also models for us the Gospel call we’ve heard read today.

But let’s be frank: the type of response we hear called for in today’s readings, that we see in the life of Clare, is not one that can come out of obedience alone, a response only to the mere commands of a perceived spiritual authority. All the threats in the world will do no more than compel us to do -- reluctantly -- the very least of what is called of us.

And that’s not good enough. Isaiah tells how the Israelites’ offering of sacrifices and their keeping of festivals brought no delight in God, for the people had turned away from God’s will in spirit.

The radical commitment we’ve heard described is only possible through being transformed by the Spirt so that we may abide in the love of Christ Jesus. This transformation is the legacy of our baptism, but it is not a free ride. Neither is it some massive mystical revelatory encounter where Jesus appears and sets all our doubts to rest. God knows I wouldn’t mind one of those, but it’s not necessary.

No, instead it takes active participation, both by us and by God, in an authentic encounter grounded in the activities of our everyday lives: coming to church on Sunday, listening to Father and meditating on his words--without necessarily always having to agree with them; praying and reading Scripture throughout the week; performing service for all our sisters and brothers and siblings here on planet Earth through our works of mercy and justice-seeking social action; engaging in conversation and discussion with other members of the Body of Christ--a process which should begin at coffee hour but not end there.

“Come now, let us argue it out, says the LORD.”

We must work to develop our faith lives, to question why we believe what we say we believe and why we do what we do. We cannot be afraid of the difficult questions, or be ashamed of those doubts which are a natural element of a mature faith.

“Come now, let us argue it out, says the LORD.”

We are called to challenge too-simple truths, to reject fallacious authority, to argue with our God. God does not need or want yes-men and yes-women and yes-persons: God is God, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. God wants and needs a family of sisters and brothers and siblings in Christ--a communion of saints.

My hope and prayer for us, therefore, is that we may be inspired by the incredible faith of those who have gone before us that we may be empowered to follow the examples of the matriarchs, patriarchs, prophets, and saints: that of Abraham and Sarah, of Jacob, of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, of Clare and Francis, and -- perhaps most of all -- of that annoying little child, incessantly asking . . . “Why?”

Amen.

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

Entries tagged with sermon: preached

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