Homily: The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany [January 28, 2024] St. James, Newport Beach

            I haven’t been near a microphone around here since the events of last November—the Diocesan Convention at which St. James’s parish status was approved, and the following Sunday when the vestry was elected and Cindy was called as your rector—so before I do anything officially preachy I’d like simply to say how happy I was to be part of the process that led to all that and how much I love, admire, and respect you and your rector. Her perseverance and leadership have been extraordinary. If Cindy hadn’t been here, St. James never would not have survived the onslaught it received, and this place would be a Shake Shack right now. Congratulations all around.

In August of 1973 I went east from Los Angeles so I could start seminary at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I spent the few weeks before the start of school getting to know the other new students wandering around.

One of these was a Nigerian man named Joseph Omonije whom I soon befriended. He was reputed to be a tribal king back in his homeland.  I soon found this rumor not so hard to believe.

            One day after the start of school, I went to the Harvard Coop and bought a fancy binder for a project I was doing.  As I walked back onto the campus, Joseph saw and stopped me.

            “Hey! Where did you get that?”

            “Down in the Square at the Coop.”

            “You go down there now and get me one too!”

            Without even thinking about it, I turned right around and headed back down Brattle Street towards Harvard Square. About halfway there, I stopped and said to myself, “What am I doing? He’s not a king; he’s a student like me. Let him get his own fancy binder.” But not, of course, in those precise words.

            This encounter with Joseph taught me something about authority. Whatever else he had, Joseph Omonije had authority. When he spoke, you had to take him very seriously. Whether he had a claim on you was another matter.

 

            As we hear in today’s Gospel, Jesus had  authority. He preached and taught in a way that was surefooted and authentic. In our Gospel for this morning, we are told that the people at Capernaum “were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” [Mark 1.22]  In the Judaism of Jesus’s day, the supreme religious authority was vested in the Torah, the law of Moses, the first five books of the Bible.  The scribes were a class of Bible experts who would study the scriptures, render opinions, and resolve disputes about how to interpret Jewish law.  When the crowd at Capernaum says that Jesus does not teach like the scribes, what they mean is that he does not ground his teaching in a claim of professional expertise or an appeal to someone else.  He teaches as one who knows what he’s doing, with authority.  He knows how to tell you something in a way that you will be sure to take it in. And he tells you truth that he knows personally, not that he heard from someone else. 

            According both to Mark and the crowd, Jesus has “authority”.  The Greek word that we translate “authority” is exousia, and exousia (authority) is always contrasted in the New Testament with another Greek word, dunamis, which means “power”.  In the Gospel stories of Jesus, we are told that he has authority, meaning that he speaks and teaches with an inner sense of the right to do so. In the Bible’s understanding, authority comes from within.  It is an orientation toward what one is doing, a sense that one is entitled and privileged to do it.  Jesus teaches as one with authority, not like the scribes.  He does not talk or sound like someone who has spent his entire life in the library.  He talks about God not with textual evidence and citations but from a living inner experience.

            Jesus teaches with authority, with exousia.  What he does not teach with is that other word, dunamis or power.  Dunamis is the word from which we get the word “dynamite”, and it has less to do with inner confidence than it does with the ability to compel somebody to do something.  If I teach with authority, you listen because I’ve convinced you I know what I’m talking about.  If I teach with power, you listen because I’m holding a stick of dynamite to your head.  Bad teachers teach holding the grade book in one hand, threatening students with their power. In the New Testament, power is a military word, authority a spiritual one.  Caesar acts with dunamis, with power.  Jesus acts with exousia, with authority.

            One of the problems with being a Christian is that we have received this authoritative teaching of Jesus all wrapped up in a system of ecclesiastical power.  It is perhaps only one of the ironies of the Jesus movement that what began as a critique of power (the state power of Caesar, the religious power of the scribes) became, for centuries, embodied in a world-historical power-projecting institution.  When Christianity moved from an outsider movement to the official religion of Western culture, it became hopelessly enmeshed in questions of power.  Look, for example, at the title Cindy now carries as the presiding priest of this parish.  “Rector” comes from the Latin word, rex:  king, ruler, power-wielder. (We’re all delighted she has this title, and in my time I had it too. And we’re delighted that she has the wisdom to understand the true source of her authority. But we should remember that much in the church’s governance is a vestige of the days when we thought of ourselves in worldly terms.)  The Jesus we meet in the scriptures is not interested in power.  He lets Caesar and Herod argue about that.  The Jesus of Mark’s Gospel is interested in authority.

            And it is the authority, not the power, of Jesus that causes the crowds to follow him.  In today’s Gospel he casts out a demon.  In other stories he heals people, curing lepers and paralytics and restoring sight to the blind.  Jesus can do these things not because he has a certificate from an institution telling him he can.  He does these things because of his own internal connection to and grounding in a relationship with God.  He does not force or compel people to be well.  He draws them toward wellness because of the depth and quality of his inner life made visible in his outward actions.

            Back in my teaching days I once tried to explain to my students the difference between “moral” and “moralistic”.  What I finally came up with was this:  “moral” people say, “I ought”.  “Moralistic” people say, “thou shalt”.  A truly moral person is concerned with his or her ethical obligation in a particular situation.  A moralistic person wants to tell you what you should do.  It is Christianity’s tragedy that we have often confused the two:  over time, we’ve behaved less as a moral movement and more as a moralistic institution. Jesus taught not as one with moralistic power—the ability to compel other people’s assent—but as one with moral authority. He openly lived the Gospel he proclaimed from within.  He drew other people into the expanding circle of his enfolding love.

            There are, for me, two implications for us in all this.  One has to do with our shared, Christian community stance toward the world.  The other has to do with how we, as individual people appropriate God’s authority in our lives.

            As to the first: as a community, the church is called to be moral, not moralistic.  We are called to exercise authority, exousia, not power, dunamis. If we think we are still a world-historical power-projecting institution, we are kidding ourselves. There is lots of bad news in the decline in church membership and attendance across the globe these days, but hidden in all that loss is at least one gleaming nugget of good news.  We are no longer the official religion of the western world.  Therefore, we are free to live again as the church lived before Constantine.  We can become, again, the Jesus movement, a group of fragile, faithful women, children, and men called into new life in the fellowship of Jesus and his table.  As a body, we are now free from the burden of telling other people what to think.  We can turn to the much more energizing and illuminating task of standing for what we believe:  justice, compassion, inclusivity, love.  

            Freedom from having to live from power is our greatest gift as a people.  As individuals, there is also an implication in the shift from power to authority, and living into it starts with seizing an insight in Thomas Merton’s book New Seeds of Contemplation:

Each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with all its own characteristics and its private qualities and its own inviolable identity, gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and now, in the circumstances ordained for it by His Love and His infinite Art. (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 30)

 

            You are who you were created to be. When you speak and act out of your authentic self, you do so with authority. Jesus had it, and so can you. Live your life not with power but with authority, with joy and generosity and compassion and hope.  Resist the impulse to tell other people how to live, what to think, or to go get them fancy binders at the Coop. Live from your authentic self, out of what you know to be true.  If we all did that, we’d be just like Jesus.  And everyone around us would be astounded.  Amen.

 

 

Foreward to "Night Owl Prayers" by Rob Lee [January 4, 2024]

            So much of life happens at night.

            We Christians who have inherited the great traditions of the Protestant Reformation have also internalized some unfortunate habits of thought. The Reformers thought of God as light, and they routinely pictured growing knowledge of God as illumination, being filled with light. In our hymns, sermons, and prayers night and darkness became synonymous with sin and death. Our tradition proposed that the life-giving time for work and purpose was the day.

            In the wider and longer Christian tradition there have been other ways of figuring our encounter with God. For earlier theologians and mystics, God was perhaps most clearly to be found in the dark, in the mystery of human suffering and struggle. One of the constant modes of talking about God has been the apophatic way—describing God negatively by what we cannot say. 

“All I know is a door into the dark.” That is how poet Seamus Heaney begins “The Forge”, a poem overtly about a blacksmith but more deeply about the process of self-discovery and making art. The sparks that fly off the anvil are only visible to us because they emerge from near-total darkness. Like the theologians and mystics who preceded him, Heaney spent a lot of time in the dark and emerged with a compelling vision of life and its possibilities.

Luckily for us, Rob Lee has spent a lot of time there, too. Uniquely for a preacher and writer, Rob’s “night job” has allowed him time to pursue his ministerial and scholarly vocations during the day. But he has been keenly observant during those hours, and the result is the gem-like prayers on offer in this prayerbook for night owls. He has seen life in all its nighttime manifestations, and his empathic imagination has allowed him to enter into the hearts and minds of those who, in the words of my church’s prayer book, “work or watch or weep” at night. The result is a collection of prayers which at once give voice to our own nighttime needs and open us up to what other people are going through as well. These prayers both speak for us and speak for others to us.

I recently had the opportunity to see a museum exhibit which put two contrasting Renaissance paintings in the same room. One pictured a saint receiving divine illumination from the sun. The other showed a philosopher looking intently into the dark. The spiritual life is like that. There is not only one way to encounter the divine. So the Reformers weren’t wrong: God is light. But God is something else, too. Sometimes the light can overwhelm the things we are trying to see. The mystics weren’t wrong, either: God is unknowable, and is often revealed in what we cannot (or would not) take in. 

Of all the thoughtful, prayerful people I know, Rob Lee is uniquely qualified to conceive and write a book like this. His life and ministry have led him into engagement with a range of people many of us in ministry only read and hear about. Rob is at once theologically learned, pastorally sensitive, and committed to an inclusive vision of God’s liberating justice. The prayers on offer here reflect his personal authenticity and active compassion. Using them in the spirit in which they are given will help each of us grow more fully into what Thomas Merton called our “authentic selves”.

“All I know is a door into the dark.” Rob Lee’s prayers are little doorways into the dark of a night where both God and human need are revealed. They are keenly observed, compassionately expressed, and artfully written. This book is a gift from one who lives and works in that time of night of which most of us are unaware. God is up to something at night and up to something in this beautiful book. Receive it as the gift it is, and use it as your own doorway into the ways in which God is working in the nights and days of your life. As we faithfully persevere in praying Rob’s prayers you, I, and the world will be healed.

Homily: The Third Sunday of Advent [December 17, 2023] Church of the Heavenly Rest, New York City

I am so grateful to Bob Dannals for extending the invitation to be with you this morning. My name is Gary Hall, and I am a retired priest who can’t seem to stop working. I served in my time parish rector, seminary professor and dean, and finally Dean of Washington National Cathedral. My wife Kathy and I live in my home town of Los Angeles now, and so I deeply appreciate Judi Counts’ yearly invitation to spend December as priest in residence at the House of the Redeemer five blocks north of here on 95th St, a few doors east of Fifth Avenue. If you don’t know the House of the Redeemer, check it out. We offer services at 8 am and 5:30 pm five days a week, and also serve as a retreat house and conference center. The place is a gem, and I’m proud to be associated with it. Please come to one of our services or check us out online.

I had a kind of a shock a few days ago. Upon coming out of a room into a hallway, I saw an open door with a frail looking old man looking back at me. I paused to let him exit his door first, but he didn’t move. It took me a while to realize that I was looking not at another door but at a mirror. The frail old man I saw was, in fact, me.

While I still tend to imagine myself as a hearty thirty-five year-old, it took an encounter with a big mirror to show me how I really am. Mirrors often lie to us, but they can also tell us the truth. Artists and prophets do the same.

One day last week, Kathy and I took the train to New Canaan, Connecticut to visit the architect Philip Johnson’s famous glass house. I had seen pictures of this house for years, but it wasn’t until we were standing in it that I understood the place’s true magic. It’s a small house, built of glass, surrounded by 50 acres of landscape. Like the jar in the Wallace Stevens poem, the house organizes and gives shape to the world

around it. The landscape reveals itself to you because of the way the house helps you see it.

This is, of course, how art functions. It teaches us to see. In the same way, this is how biblical prophecy functions. My late friend and lifelong mentor Harvey Guthrie was a priest and Old Testament scholar. In his seminary lectures about prophets, he was careful to disabuse us students of our preconceptions. Conservative Christians think prophets predict the future. Progressive Christians think they “speak truth to power”. In Harvey’s way of thinking, they do neither. Instead, in his words

[One is a] prophet not in the sense that he calls us to reform or exhorts us to pursue a program or predicts what is to be. Israel’s prophets   did not essentially do any of these things. They verbalized what was there in their times. The prophet sees reality and verbalizes it and finds that it can be affirmed—and that that affirmation involves the fulfillment of one’s self.

 

As do mirrors and artworks, prophets tell us how things are. We live in a world of appearances. We look around us and think the world to be stressful and bleak. But the prophet sees beyond appearances. The bleakness is an illusion. Something bigger, deeper, and better is going on. That is what we hear in Isaiah’s words:

 

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,

because the Lord has anointed me;

he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,

to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives,

and release to the prisoners;

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,

. . .

to comfort all who mourn . . .

 

Later on, in Luke’s gospel, Jesus will use these words to announce his own ministry. He is among us, as Isaiah was, to tell us how things actually are. If we saw truly, we would wear “the oil of gladness instead of mourning”. Things are, and will be, OK.

Now at one level, all this sounds kind of crazy. You could argue that prophets are out of touch with reality—that they’re whistling in the dark, living in a fantasy world. But prophets are not dreamers. They are the clear-eyed souls in every generation who see things as they are. And what they see is the persistence of hope in a world of despair, justice in a time of bad faith, love in a climate of hate. These aren’t just greeting card pieties. They are the deepest most powerful truths of life.

And in the Gospel for today, we see the compelling figure of John the Baptist. He was clearly one impressive person. In the words of last Sunday’s gospel, “Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.” John would stand out anywhere. Even in Southern California, a man walking around dressed like that and calling people to repent would attract attention. And yet today’s gospel tells us, “He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.” John the Baptist may have been the last preacher in Christendom to make and understand that distinction.

The good news from John the Baptist this morning is that God is doing something big and beautiful and new. He is telling us that God is up something. The coming of Jesus will change our lives. As Julian of Norwich put it, “All shall be well.” Great. But how do we live into that hopeful wellness in a cynical, contentious age?

The key to our making the gospel hope real lies for me in our psalm this morning, Psalm 126. This is one of my two or three favorite psalms. It comes from the time of Israel’s exile in Babylonian captivity. It was written in a time of utter hopelessness.

1 When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, *

then were we like those who dream.

2 Then was our mouth filled with laughter, *

and our tongue with shouts of joy. . . .

6 Those who sowed with tears *

will reap with songs of joy.

7 Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed, *

will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves.

 

Think, as you hear it, about the time line projected by this psalm. The singers of it are speaking in the present moment of Babylonian captivity. And yet they sing exuberantly about God’s liberation. They talk about it not in the future tense (as a wished event) but in the past tense (as a completed event). “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, “they announce, “then were we like those who dream.” They go on to describe mouths filled with laughter and tongues with shouts of joy. The hoped-for fulfillment is proclaimed as an achieved fact. The exiled Israelites will dare to live as if their liberation has already happened. Even though they are imprisoned now, they will choose to live in that captivity as free people. And living as free people will help bring about their ultimate liberation.

         Whenever we say this psalm in our liturgy I find my heart and imagination stirred. What would it mean for me, for you, for all of us to live as if what we most deeply long for were already a reality? Think of all the forces of life that oppress us—from political and social forces beyond our control to our own bad habits to the physical illnesses and inevitable losses we suffer and grieve. What would it mean for our lives if we were to choose to act as if our prayers had been answered, as if God’s promises had already been fulfilled? I don’t mean that in some fairy tale way—I mean it in the way the early Christians meant it when they chose to live not in the oppressive control of Rome but in the freeing light of the resurrection. Caesar was not their king; Jesus was. They lived as citizens of his reign and enacted God’s abundant blessing even in times of privation. They were free even in captivity.

The Advent season is our opportunity to reclaim and orient our lives around the promises at the center of the Gospel. Our hope is one proclaimed in the midst of pain as the place where God’s promises become real.  

These prophetic truths will find their perfect fulfillment at Christmas. But for the next eight days, let us live together in Advent hope. God is up to something good and big and deep for us, for those we love, and for our world. Our calling as Jesus’s companions is to hold on to that hope and make it ours, to live as free people even in moments of darkness and pain. That is a tall order, but we are up to it, because before us there is Jesus, one who lived that way himself. As he comes towards us now, let us keep our eyes on Jesus and learn from him how to live lives of wholeness, blessing, and peace in what is, when we see it truly, a beautiful and generous world.

So when you next step out of a door into the shocking view of yourself in a mirror, remember: Jesus sees you, loves you, knows you, and is coming toward you. All shall be well. Amen.