There are certain sermons you hear or read that determine how you’re going to understand a passage of scripture for the rest of your life. For me, one such sermon is Reinhold Niebuhr’s homily on today’s reading from 2 Corinthians, “As Deceivers, Yet True” published in his 1937 collection, Beyond Tragedy. In the passage we just heard read, Paul talks about the contradictory ways in which the early Christians were seen by the outside world.
In honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true [2 Corinthians 6.8]
Reinhold Niebuhr was using the King James Version of the Bible, hence his slightly different language: “By honour and dishonour, by evil report and good report: as deceivers, and yet true.” [2 Corinthians 6.8] Here is what Niebuhr says about this passage, or what he calls Paul’s description of “the character, the vicissitudes, and the faith of the Christian ministry”. He says:
[W]hat is true in the Christian religion can be expressed in symbols which contain a certain degree of provisional and superficial deception. Every apologist of the Christian faith might well, therefore, make the Pauline phrase his own. We do teach the truth by deception. We are deceivers, yet true.” [Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy¸ p. 3]
In the same way that a visual artist misrepresents three-dimensional reality in order to portray it on a two-dimensional canvas, so the Christian church has had to talk in partial truths in order to represent a larger, paradoxical truth. In Niebuhr’s words, “It must be made into a symbol of something beyond itself.” [Beyond Tragedy, p.6] In my way of putting it: the truth of the Gospel so far transcends our understanding of it that we can only talk about it in half truths. So all preachers are, in one way or another, liars. But we lie to tell the truth.
In the same way that a visual artist misrepresents three-dimensional reality in order to portray it on a two-dimensional canvas, so the Christian church has had to talk in partial truths in order to represent a larger, paradoxical truth. In Niebuhr’s words, “It must be made into a symbol of something beyond itself.” [Beyond Tragedy, p.6] In my way of putting it: the truth of the Gospel so far transcends our understanding of it that we can only talk about it in half truths. So all preachers are, in one way or another, liars. But we lie to tell the truth.
This is the way it is with Ash Wednesday. As the first day in the 40-day season of Lent, this is a penitential occasion, a day on which we reflect on our sinfulness. It is true that we are sinners, that we are selfish, that we are limited and mortal, that we are dust and to dust we shall return. “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” [Isaiah 53.6] We cannot give a full account of ourselves without acknowledging that we each see the world from a limited and partial point of view which places ourselves at the center and everyone else on the periphery. The focus of Ash Wednesday is very much on our limitations.
But to say only this does not do justice to the fullness of the paradox. So we are deceivers, yet true. Because the other side of this equation is Easter and resurrection and what they say about our goodness and worth. God’s raising of Jesus from the death to which we put him is a profound sign of how important we are to God. We are made in God’s image, endowed with God’s blessing and purpose. As fallen and sinful and selfish as we are, there is more to our story than our sin. So we need to keep the other side of this paradox in mind as we observe the first side of it. All we like sheep have gone astray. And Christ is risen as the promise of our resurrection. Two things that seem contradictory are true at once. Ash Wednesday makes no sense without Easter. Easter makes no sense without Ash Wednesday.
All of the great ideas of Christian faith and life stand in tension with what look to us like their opposites: justice and mercy, faith and works, judgment and forgiveness. It is a perversion of the fullness of the Gospel to emphasize one over the other. Some traditions exclusively emphasize God’s judgment and so turn Christianity into a stern, merciless and joyless enterprise. Others over-emphasize God’s mercy and so become purveyors of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”. Only the Christian communities that try to hold on to both sides of the equation even begin to get it right. You and I are sinners. And God loves us. Both things are true at the same time. Today we concentrate on the sinful part. But hold on, because even in this Lenten period we will see evidence of God’s deep and abiding love for us. And then there will be Easter, which will put everything in its proper perspective.
We come soon to the part of the service where ashes are imposed on our foreheads and the priest says, “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” When I was younger I heard that sentence as exclusively bad news. I heard that sentence telling me I was nothing, that I was dirt, that I was going to die. As I have gotten older, I hear it telling me something else. It tells me that I am of the earth and so good. Like all living creatures, I am subject to the limits of time and space. All of us are “but flesh, a breath that goes forth and does not return.” [Psalm 78.39] The sentence that imposes ashes on my forehead tells me that as a mortal, finite creature, I stand in the middle of a tension that is too big and complex for me to take in all at once. It tells me that all, finally, will be well.
We, all of us Christian folk, are deceivers yet true. Over the course of our lives we navigate contradictions that confuse us. To help us in that work we have been given this forty-day period of Lent in which we are asked by God to look inward, past our exterior deception, toward our inner truth. If you think you have no sin you deceive yourself. And if you think your sin is the most important thing about you, you deceive yourself yet again. Lent is a time of self-examination, of repentance, of fasting. But we do those things not for their own sake but in the service of the divine love that calls us forward toward Easter. Lent is a time when we are given the opportunity to peel back our masks and see ourselves as God sees us: as limited, mortal, often selfish and lost creatures who nevertheless are unique and precious to God. Both things are true. And we can’t really see them without a bit of smoke and mirrors.
We are deceivers, yet true. God knows you as you are and loves you as you are. May this Lent be a season when you come, if only a glimpse at a time, to know and see yourself as God does. Amen.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Homily: 5 Epiphany [February 7, 2010] Christ Church Cranbrook
At the end of last week Kathy and I made a quick trip to Washington, D.C. to attend a milestone birthday party for a close high school friend of mine who lives in Georgetown. We didn’t have much time there, but we were able to spend Friday afternoon in my favorite place in Washington, the National Gallery of Art. A number of favorite artworks are there, and my intention was to spend the afternoon revisiting them. But as often happens to me in museums, something changed my plans. As I walked down the capacious open hallways of the Gallery’s first floor, my attention was immediately arrested by a large, circular painting I’d never noticed before: Fra Angelico’s and Fra Filippo Lippi’s 15th century version of The Adoration of the Magi. It’s a huge circular painting, called in Italian a tondo, and it rests inside an ornate gold-painted frame. For some reason, the picture drew me away from my familiar intended path and caused me to spend a half an hour looking at it.
This is the painting that we’ve reproduced as an insert in your bulletin today. It depicts the event we observe on January 6, the feast of the Epiphany, familiarly known as the Adoration of the Magi. This is the story, in Matthew’s Gospel, that tells us how three wise men came from the east bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the cradle of the infant Jesus. Symbolically, this story suggests that the divine glory manifest in Jesus will be made known to the whole world. It is from the Epiphany, or manifestation of God’s glory in Jesus, that this season of Epiphany gets its name. God’s glory is unstoppably on display. The first stage in God’s self-manifestation is to the Magi. As the season progresses we see God’s glory spreading through the ministry of Jesus to the church, to the whole human community, and finally to nature itself.
So here I was at the National Gallery unexpectedly caught up by a painting I’d never seen before. I didn’t know this painting existed. I didn’t expect to spend so much time looking at it. The picture literally drew me toward itself. Seeing it was, frankly, a religious experience that I’d like to share with you. So please take up this small reproduction and look at it with me for a moment. I’ve never preached with visual aids before, so please bear with me!
Now there are several people in this congregation who know a good deal more about visual art than I do, so I’m not going to presume to attempt saying anything intellectually fancy about this painting. But there are a few things that jump out at me. The first is that peacock on the stable’s roof. The second is the line of those five nearly naked men on the wall just to the left of the peacock. The third is the frightened young man in the lower right hand part of the circle. Don’t ask me about that weird, dog-like creature at the bottom. I’m sure he’s symbolic of something, but of what I haven’t a clue. I know I’ve never seen anything like him in the American Kennel Club listings.
Peacocks, though, are another matter. Because it is beautiful and multi-colored, the peacock, like the butterfly, has long been a symbol of the Resurrection. That’s one reason why the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor raised them at her farm in Georgia. So this painting, set near the beginning of the Jesus story, calls our attention to the end of it. The One who is born in the stable and laid in a manger at Christmas and adored at Epiphany is the same One who will be crucified on Good Friday and raised at Easter. The peacock is there to call our attention to the divine significance of this humble birth: the infant Jesus is glorious because of what his life portends. He will be a living manifestation of God’s loving purpose, and his death and resurrection will be a foretaste of our eternal destiny.
Even more interesting to me in this picture, though, is the line of the five pale men wearing loincloths standing atop the wall toward the left side of the painting. That they are nearly naked suggests that they are probably beggars. That their skin is so whitishly pale suggests that they are lepers. Whatever they are, they are atop a wall and seemingly cut off from the rest of the people, therefore excluded from society. Yet as lonely and miserable as they are, they cannot help but be caught up in the joy of the moment. They too look toward the infant Jesus with expectation and with praise.
And then there is the frightened young man in the lower right part of the painting, the one immediately behind Joseph. He holds up his right hand shielding his downcast eyes, as if something in the vision of the baby Jesus is too much for him. While everyone else looks either up to heaven or toward the child, this person looks away, as if this vision presents him with something he cannot fully make himself take in.
Now the reason I asked that this painting be duplicated is not only that I wanted to share it with you, but more importantly because I felt that as I read this morning’s Gospel Fra Angelico’s tondo helped me understand something of what Luke is trying to tell us in his account of the miraculous catch of fish. [Luke 5.1-11] They are two different stories from two different Gospels, but they make the same points. In today’s Gospel, Jesus gets into a boat near the shore. Though the fishermen had been out all night fishing, they had caught nothing. Jesus tells them to go farther out and let down their nets. Peter scoffs in disbelief, but he obeys Jesus and is astonished by the number of fish they bring up. They catch so many fish that their nets break and the boat threatens to sink. When Peter realizes the size and extent of this miraculous catch of fish, he falls to his knees in front of Jesus. And what he says is both surprising and authentic. He doesn’t say, “Thank you, Jesus, for helping me catch so many fish.” Rather, he says, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" In reply, Jesus tells him not to be afraid, for soon he will be fishing for people.
The same three things that we saw in the painting are being told us in the story. We have an Epiphany painting and an Epiphany Gospel, and they both attest to the same deep truths. As with the peacock at the stable, the point of the story is not the catch of the fish but the deep and transcendent love and power of God. As with the five poor lepers in the painting, so with the size and abundance of the catch: God’s glory makes itself known in the expansive and limitless abundance of the whole creation. And as with the young man’s inability to look at the glory revealed in the cradle, so Peter cannot take the divine glory he has just seen. Something about the direct experience of God frightens as much as it draws us. "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!"
As we move together toward the culmination of this season of glory and light, I believe that God wants us to take in the three powerful truths depicted and spoken to us in this painting and in Luke’s Gospel account. The miracle story, like the peacock in the painting, points us toward what this whole divine drama is about. Easter, Resurrection, new life, hope and transformation—these are the big truths of the Christian life. In our own personal struggles, sometimes even in our church disagreements, we forget why we are here in the first place. We’re here because Christ is risen and we shall be, too. God has offered each and all of us new and abundant life with one another in Christ. Because we are risen with Christ, we are transformed, a “new creation”, as Paul calls it. So we are free to live hopeful, generous, compassionate, lives free of anxiety and fear. There is nothing we need fear—not even death. The presence of the peacock in the painting helps us remember what life with God in Christ is all finally about. You are loved, accepted, and saved. You can live your life without fear.
Those five leprous beggars remind us, as does the size of the catch of fish, that God’s call does not just extend to us. We have been given this gift of hopeful, fearless life so that we may invite others into it. Like the fishers in Luke’s story, God has called us to be people who cast the net expansively and inclusively, inviting not just oriental potentates but the full range of the human community into our life and fellowship. God invites everyone to the table. God wants the beggars and the lepers seated right next to the three wise men at the dinner table. We need, in our households and in our church, to practice that kind of radically welcoming hospitality. The promise is that when we do that, our nets will be full to the point of breaking.
And then there’s Peter’s response to Jesus, depicted in the young man who shields himself from the cradle’s glow. "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" When
God’s light shines on us, it illuminates those parts of us we’d rather not acknowledge. Every time God appears directly in the Bible, the first response is usually an experience of personal unworthiness. Who am I to be the recipient of such a glorious and transcendent presence? Yet that is the deep and paradoxical truth of the glory of God as made manifest in this season. God loves those parts of you that even you yourself cannot stand to look at. The light of the Resurrection shines on the totality of who we are. There is nothing about you that God cannot love and heal and bless. Resurrection means you and I can be fearless not only in facing out but in facing in. God’s judgment is a clarifying and healing judgment. God calls us to face into and love ourselves and each other as we are, so we can move forward together toward a future of blessing and promise and hope.
Let us bask together in this divine glory, made manifest in Jesus and in each other. Let us spread the invitation to this banquet to all God’s creatures, especially those we don’t usually make room for around our dinner tables. And let’s acknowledge that though we may see parts of ourselves we’d sooner ignore, God already is working to heal and bless them. A picture is worth a thousand words. This painting preaches these truths better than I can. May it help us take in our Gospel story and keep us centered on the depth and breadth and transformative power of God’s love for you, for me, and for the world. Amen.
This is the painting that we’ve reproduced as an insert in your bulletin today. It depicts the event we observe on January 6, the feast of the Epiphany, familiarly known as the Adoration of the Magi. This is the story, in Matthew’s Gospel, that tells us how three wise men came from the east bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the cradle of the infant Jesus. Symbolically, this story suggests that the divine glory manifest in Jesus will be made known to the whole world. It is from the Epiphany, or manifestation of God’s glory in Jesus, that this season of Epiphany gets its name. God’s glory is unstoppably on display. The first stage in God’s self-manifestation is to the Magi. As the season progresses we see God’s glory spreading through the ministry of Jesus to the church, to the whole human community, and finally to nature itself.
So here I was at the National Gallery unexpectedly caught up by a painting I’d never seen before. I didn’t know this painting existed. I didn’t expect to spend so much time looking at it. The picture literally drew me toward itself. Seeing it was, frankly, a religious experience that I’d like to share with you. So please take up this small reproduction and look at it with me for a moment. I’ve never preached with visual aids before, so please bear with me!
Now there are several people in this congregation who know a good deal more about visual art than I do, so I’m not going to presume to attempt saying anything intellectually fancy about this painting. But there are a few things that jump out at me. The first is that peacock on the stable’s roof. The second is the line of those five nearly naked men on the wall just to the left of the peacock. The third is the frightened young man in the lower right hand part of the circle. Don’t ask me about that weird, dog-like creature at the bottom. I’m sure he’s symbolic of something, but of what I haven’t a clue. I know I’ve never seen anything like him in the American Kennel Club listings.
Peacocks, though, are another matter. Because it is beautiful and multi-colored, the peacock, like the butterfly, has long been a symbol of the Resurrection. That’s one reason why the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor raised them at her farm in Georgia. So this painting, set near the beginning of the Jesus story, calls our attention to the end of it. The One who is born in the stable and laid in a manger at Christmas and adored at Epiphany is the same One who will be crucified on Good Friday and raised at Easter. The peacock is there to call our attention to the divine significance of this humble birth: the infant Jesus is glorious because of what his life portends. He will be a living manifestation of God’s loving purpose, and his death and resurrection will be a foretaste of our eternal destiny.
Even more interesting to me in this picture, though, is the line of the five pale men wearing loincloths standing atop the wall toward the left side of the painting. That they are nearly naked suggests that they are probably beggars. That their skin is so whitishly pale suggests that they are lepers. Whatever they are, they are atop a wall and seemingly cut off from the rest of the people, therefore excluded from society. Yet as lonely and miserable as they are, they cannot help but be caught up in the joy of the moment. They too look toward the infant Jesus with expectation and with praise.
And then there is the frightened young man in the lower right part of the painting, the one immediately behind Joseph. He holds up his right hand shielding his downcast eyes, as if something in the vision of the baby Jesus is too much for him. While everyone else looks either up to heaven or toward the child, this person looks away, as if this vision presents him with something he cannot fully make himself take in.
Now the reason I asked that this painting be duplicated is not only that I wanted to share it with you, but more importantly because I felt that as I read this morning’s Gospel Fra Angelico’s tondo helped me understand something of what Luke is trying to tell us in his account of the miraculous catch of fish. [Luke 5.1-11] They are two different stories from two different Gospels, but they make the same points. In today’s Gospel, Jesus gets into a boat near the shore. Though the fishermen had been out all night fishing, they had caught nothing. Jesus tells them to go farther out and let down their nets. Peter scoffs in disbelief, but he obeys Jesus and is astonished by the number of fish they bring up. They catch so many fish that their nets break and the boat threatens to sink. When Peter realizes the size and extent of this miraculous catch of fish, he falls to his knees in front of Jesus. And what he says is both surprising and authentic. He doesn’t say, “Thank you, Jesus, for helping me catch so many fish.” Rather, he says, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" In reply, Jesus tells him not to be afraid, for soon he will be fishing for people.
The same three things that we saw in the painting are being told us in the story. We have an Epiphany painting and an Epiphany Gospel, and they both attest to the same deep truths. As with the peacock at the stable, the point of the story is not the catch of the fish but the deep and transcendent love and power of God. As with the five poor lepers in the painting, so with the size and abundance of the catch: God’s glory makes itself known in the expansive and limitless abundance of the whole creation. And as with the young man’s inability to look at the glory revealed in the cradle, so Peter cannot take the divine glory he has just seen. Something about the direct experience of God frightens as much as it draws us. "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!"
As we move together toward the culmination of this season of glory and light, I believe that God wants us to take in the three powerful truths depicted and spoken to us in this painting and in Luke’s Gospel account. The miracle story, like the peacock in the painting, points us toward what this whole divine drama is about. Easter, Resurrection, new life, hope and transformation—these are the big truths of the Christian life. In our own personal struggles, sometimes even in our church disagreements, we forget why we are here in the first place. We’re here because Christ is risen and we shall be, too. God has offered each and all of us new and abundant life with one another in Christ. Because we are risen with Christ, we are transformed, a “new creation”, as Paul calls it. So we are free to live hopeful, generous, compassionate, lives free of anxiety and fear. There is nothing we need fear—not even death. The presence of the peacock in the painting helps us remember what life with God in Christ is all finally about. You are loved, accepted, and saved. You can live your life without fear.
Those five leprous beggars remind us, as does the size of the catch of fish, that God’s call does not just extend to us. We have been given this gift of hopeful, fearless life so that we may invite others into it. Like the fishers in Luke’s story, God has called us to be people who cast the net expansively and inclusively, inviting not just oriental potentates but the full range of the human community into our life and fellowship. God invites everyone to the table. God wants the beggars and the lepers seated right next to the three wise men at the dinner table. We need, in our households and in our church, to practice that kind of radically welcoming hospitality. The promise is that when we do that, our nets will be full to the point of breaking.
And then there’s Peter’s response to Jesus, depicted in the young man who shields himself from the cradle’s glow. "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" When
God’s light shines on us, it illuminates those parts of us we’d rather not acknowledge. Every time God appears directly in the Bible, the first response is usually an experience of personal unworthiness. Who am I to be the recipient of such a glorious and transcendent presence? Yet that is the deep and paradoxical truth of the glory of God as made manifest in this season. God loves those parts of you that even you yourself cannot stand to look at. The light of the Resurrection shines on the totality of who we are. There is nothing about you that God cannot love and heal and bless. Resurrection means you and I can be fearless not only in facing out but in facing in. God’s judgment is a clarifying and healing judgment. God calls us to face into and love ourselves and each other as we are, so we can move forward together toward a future of blessing and promise and hope.
Let us bask together in this divine glory, made manifest in Jesus and in each other. Let us spread the invitation to this banquet to all God’s creatures, especially those we don’t usually make room for around our dinner tables. And let’s acknowledge that though we may see parts of ourselves we’d sooner ignore, God already is working to heal and bless them. A picture is worth a thousand words. This painting preaches these truths better than I can. May it help us take in our Gospel story and keep us centered on the depth and breadth and transformative power of God’s love for you, for me, and for the world. Amen.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Homily: 4 Epiphany [January 31, 2010] Christ Church Cranbrook
When we left Christ Church Cranbrook in 1981, Kathy and Oliver and I moved to Southern California. The next year I became Vicar of St. Aidan's in Malibu where I served for the balance of the 1980s while going to graduate school at UCLA. Malibu was a tough assignment, but somebody had to do it! As you can imagine, there were a lot of colorful characters in Malibu, but one of the best of them was a parishioner named Edna Cox. Edna was a widow whose husband had patented several inventions, and so she had the resources to be a generous supporter of many causes in the community. One day when I was visiting her, she said, "Now, son, I never pledge, but I'll give to any special project you have. So when you see something you think the church really needs, just ask me."
A few weeks after this visit, Edna and I were standing at the back of the church as the closing hymn was ending. Now St. Aidan's is a nice, small, 1960's church building situated on a hillside across the Pacific Coast Highway from Paradise Cove. It has an unparalleled natural vista, but at that time it also had some of the ugliest church furnishings you could imagine. The chief offenders in that line were a pair of hideous tall gilt candlesticks on the altar that looked like they were intended for impaling parishioners in arrears on their pledges. Though they were obviously expensive, these Viking style weapons of doom were unspeakably ugly. So, remembering Edna's offer of generous help with any special project I might have, I sidled up to her and said, "You know, Edna, we've got to do something about those God-awful candlesticks."
Edna paused for a moment, looked me straight in the eye, and replied, "I gave those God-awful candlesticks." As you can imagine, I was deeply embarrassed, but luckily for me Edna was both a generous and forgiving person. We laughed over this conversation many times in the ensuing years. Those candlesticks are still there.
Whenever I read today’s Gospel, I remember this interchange, and I take some comfort that Jesus himself seemed to have had issues about controlling his speech. Certainly, Jesus's words today to the home town crowd were not chosen to win friends and influence people. The two stories he tells-one about the prophet Elijah being sent in a drought and famine to help not an Israelite but a Philistine, the other about the prophet Elisha healing not a Jew but a Syrian from leprosy-these stories were obviously deeply offensive to a hometown crowd of pious people who believed themselves to be God's elect. In the first part of this story, which we heard last week, Jesus audaciously claimed himself to be the embodiment of Israel's Messianic hopes; today he goes on to tell God's chosen people that they weren't really all that special. Hearing that, I don't feel so bad. At least I didn't tell Edna Cox I was the Messiah.
Whatever the reason, Jesus's words riled up the hometown crowd. Luke puts it this way: "When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff." [Luke 4.28-29] We always think of Jesus as the very model of a teacher and preacher. Yet here he was eliciting such rage from the Nazareth synagogue that they responded to his words not with admiration but with a desire to kill. What was going on?
Part of the congregation's reaction to Jesus has to do with his being a local boy returned home to preach for the first time. "A prophet is not without honor except in his own country." For some in the synagogue, Jesus's very familiarity worked against him. But there's more to it than that. When the local crowd begins to disbelieve him, he tells them stories about God's seeming preference for outsiders. "You think you're special," he seems to say, "but God cares as much for Philistines and Syrians—people you have traditionally defined as your enemies--as he does for Jews." If you believe you're special, hearing someone say you're not is probably not going to stir them to sign up for your fan club.
Today is the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, a day whose theme is Peace. In our collect for today, we asked God to "mercifully hear the supplications" of God's people, and "in our time grant us God's peace." Because of this collect, the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany has traditionally been a Sunday on which Episcopal churches pray for peace. All of us look for peace-international peace, interpersonal peace, interior peace. Given what we've seen and heard in today's Gospel, what might this Sunday have to say to us in 21st century America about our desire for peace? I hear two things.
The first thing I hear is that words matter. There are a couple of places in the New Testament where Jesus loses his cool and speaks in provocative ways. If you believe, as I do, that we see Jesus grow and mature over the course of the Gospel narratives, then perhaps it's not irreligious to suggest that at this early moment in his ministry Jesus was not quite the master of himself that he was in his more mature teaching moments such as the Good Samaritan story (which makes essentially the same point). Jesus evoked the rage of the crowd here, and I'm not so sure that we're supposed to see that as a good thing. Certainly their reaction is uncalled for. But telling a group of observant Jews that God loves Philistines and Samaritans better is a bit like yelling fire in a crowded theater. Later on in the Gospels, Jesus is no less forceful, but he is more tactful. After this, he no longer hurls fighting words at his adversaries. Rather, the more he matures, the more he turns their own fighting words back on them.
So point one is that if we want peace we need to use words that promote peace. This does not mean that we need to be weak or naive or to compromise our principles. But there are ways for people with opposing interests to learn to live with each other and actually work together for the common good. At his best, Jesus always proceeds out of an acknowledgment of the good intentions of the other. As Reinhold Niebuhr often observed, nobody in this world thinks they are doing evil. Everyone pretty much operates out of their sense of the good. It's only in melodrama and cartoons that the villain acts out of pure malignity. As Christians, our task is to make common cause between us and other people's best selves, and that means trying to see the world from their best intentions, from their point of view. One strong way to promote peace is to speak respectfully to and of everyone--even of people who stand for principles with which you strongly disagree.
The other thing I hear in this story is our need to expand our notion of who is in and diminish our notion of who is out. The Nazareth congregation erupts in rage because Jesus has equated them with Philistines and Syrians. But what if their definition of themselves had been big enough to see Philistines and Syrians not as "others" but as "themselves"? Again, as Reinhold Niebuhr often observed, we human beings are better in our relations with those close to us than we are with those at a distance. We empathize and identify with people we know. We fear those who are radically different or removed from us. As long as I stand inside a very small circle and define that space as the boundary of what is regular or normative, leaving everyone outside it defined as abnormal or deficient--if I see myself as the normal human being and everyone else as somehow less than me or an aberration-then I'm cleaving to a modern version of the Nazareth congregation's horror at being equated with a Syrian or a Philistine. You and I have more in common not only with each other but with people radically different from us than we think we do. Our task, as followers of Jesus, is to expand the diameter of the circle of people we think of as being like us, of those with whom we share a common human identity.
It's easy (and not particularly admirable) to love and accept people like ourselves. It's work to love and accept the other in ourselves, to see the self in the other. The constant clash of cultures we experience today makes contemporary living a challenge, because every day we are presented with images of people whose worlds and realities look very different from our own. But if we want God to give us peace in our time, we will need both separately and together to look for the best in the other, and we'll need to see the other in ourselves. And that is as true for a church, a community, a family, a workplace, as it is for the arena of international relations. Walt Kelly was not entirely joking when he had Pogo say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
Our nation is polarized. There are real enmities and conflicts in the world. Christians are not called to be naive about those things. But we are called to be the people who look for the best in each other and in those around us. When God looks at you, God sees you as God would have us see each other: God sees you as your best self, operating out of your best intentions, as one worthy of God's grace and care and protection. So—and this may sound audacious--let's try to be a bit more like God. Let's speak to each other--at home, at work, in the civic square and marketplace, in the public and international arenas, even in church--in words that are respectful of that divine image incarnate in every human being. And let's push that circle each day to be a little bit wider, so that we come to see our self in the other, the other in our self. Amen.
A few weeks after this visit, Edna and I were standing at the back of the church as the closing hymn was ending. Now St. Aidan's is a nice, small, 1960's church building situated on a hillside across the Pacific Coast Highway from Paradise Cove. It has an unparalleled natural vista, but at that time it also had some of the ugliest church furnishings you could imagine. The chief offenders in that line were a pair of hideous tall gilt candlesticks on the altar that looked like they were intended for impaling parishioners in arrears on their pledges. Though they were obviously expensive, these Viking style weapons of doom were unspeakably ugly. So, remembering Edna's offer of generous help with any special project I might have, I sidled up to her and said, "You know, Edna, we've got to do something about those God-awful candlesticks."
Edna paused for a moment, looked me straight in the eye, and replied, "I gave those God-awful candlesticks." As you can imagine, I was deeply embarrassed, but luckily for me Edna was both a generous and forgiving person. We laughed over this conversation many times in the ensuing years. Those candlesticks are still there.
Whenever I read today’s Gospel, I remember this interchange, and I take some comfort that Jesus himself seemed to have had issues about controlling his speech. Certainly, Jesus's words today to the home town crowd were not chosen to win friends and influence people. The two stories he tells-one about the prophet Elijah being sent in a drought and famine to help not an Israelite but a Philistine, the other about the prophet Elisha healing not a Jew but a Syrian from leprosy-these stories were obviously deeply offensive to a hometown crowd of pious people who believed themselves to be God's elect. In the first part of this story, which we heard last week, Jesus audaciously claimed himself to be the embodiment of Israel's Messianic hopes; today he goes on to tell God's chosen people that they weren't really all that special. Hearing that, I don't feel so bad. At least I didn't tell Edna Cox I was the Messiah.
Whatever the reason, Jesus's words riled up the hometown crowd. Luke puts it this way: "When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff." [Luke 4.28-29] We always think of Jesus as the very model of a teacher and preacher. Yet here he was eliciting such rage from the Nazareth synagogue that they responded to his words not with admiration but with a desire to kill. What was going on?
Part of the congregation's reaction to Jesus has to do with his being a local boy returned home to preach for the first time. "A prophet is not without honor except in his own country." For some in the synagogue, Jesus's very familiarity worked against him. But there's more to it than that. When the local crowd begins to disbelieve him, he tells them stories about God's seeming preference for outsiders. "You think you're special," he seems to say, "but God cares as much for Philistines and Syrians—people you have traditionally defined as your enemies--as he does for Jews." If you believe you're special, hearing someone say you're not is probably not going to stir them to sign up for your fan club.
Today is the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, a day whose theme is Peace. In our collect for today, we asked God to "mercifully hear the supplications" of God's people, and "in our time grant us God's peace." Because of this collect, the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany has traditionally been a Sunday on which Episcopal churches pray for peace. All of us look for peace-international peace, interpersonal peace, interior peace. Given what we've seen and heard in today's Gospel, what might this Sunday have to say to us in 21st century America about our desire for peace? I hear two things.
The first thing I hear is that words matter. There are a couple of places in the New Testament where Jesus loses his cool and speaks in provocative ways. If you believe, as I do, that we see Jesus grow and mature over the course of the Gospel narratives, then perhaps it's not irreligious to suggest that at this early moment in his ministry Jesus was not quite the master of himself that he was in his more mature teaching moments such as the Good Samaritan story (which makes essentially the same point). Jesus evoked the rage of the crowd here, and I'm not so sure that we're supposed to see that as a good thing. Certainly their reaction is uncalled for. But telling a group of observant Jews that God loves Philistines and Samaritans better is a bit like yelling fire in a crowded theater. Later on in the Gospels, Jesus is no less forceful, but he is more tactful. After this, he no longer hurls fighting words at his adversaries. Rather, the more he matures, the more he turns their own fighting words back on them.
So point one is that if we want peace we need to use words that promote peace. This does not mean that we need to be weak or naive or to compromise our principles. But there are ways for people with opposing interests to learn to live with each other and actually work together for the common good. At his best, Jesus always proceeds out of an acknowledgment of the good intentions of the other. As Reinhold Niebuhr often observed, nobody in this world thinks they are doing evil. Everyone pretty much operates out of their sense of the good. It's only in melodrama and cartoons that the villain acts out of pure malignity. As Christians, our task is to make common cause between us and other people's best selves, and that means trying to see the world from their best intentions, from their point of view. One strong way to promote peace is to speak respectfully to and of everyone--even of people who stand for principles with which you strongly disagree.
The other thing I hear in this story is our need to expand our notion of who is in and diminish our notion of who is out. The Nazareth congregation erupts in rage because Jesus has equated them with Philistines and Syrians. But what if their definition of themselves had been big enough to see Philistines and Syrians not as "others" but as "themselves"? Again, as Reinhold Niebuhr often observed, we human beings are better in our relations with those close to us than we are with those at a distance. We empathize and identify with people we know. We fear those who are radically different or removed from us. As long as I stand inside a very small circle and define that space as the boundary of what is regular or normative, leaving everyone outside it defined as abnormal or deficient--if I see myself as the normal human being and everyone else as somehow less than me or an aberration-then I'm cleaving to a modern version of the Nazareth congregation's horror at being equated with a Syrian or a Philistine. You and I have more in common not only with each other but with people radically different from us than we think we do. Our task, as followers of Jesus, is to expand the diameter of the circle of people we think of as being like us, of those with whom we share a common human identity.
It's easy (and not particularly admirable) to love and accept people like ourselves. It's work to love and accept the other in ourselves, to see the self in the other. The constant clash of cultures we experience today makes contemporary living a challenge, because every day we are presented with images of people whose worlds and realities look very different from our own. But if we want God to give us peace in our time, we will need both separately and together to look for the best in the other, and we'll need to see the other in ourselves. And that is as true for a church, a community, a family, a workplace, as it is for the arena of international relations. Walt Kelly was not entirely joking when he had Pogo say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
Our nation is polarized. There are real enmities and conflicts in the world. Christians are not called to be naive about those things. But we are called to be the people who look for the best in each other and in those around us. When God looks at you, God sees you as God would have us see each other: God sees you as your best self, operating out of your best intentions, as one worthy of God's grace and care and protection. So—and this may sound audacious--let's try to be a bit more like God. Let's speak to each other--at home, at work, in the civic square and marketplace, in the public and international arenas, even in church--in words that are respectful of that divine image incarnate in every human being. And let's push that circle each day to be a little bit wider, so that we come to see our self in the other, the other in our self. Amen.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Homily: 2 Epiphany [January 17, 2010] Christ Church Cranbrook
I grew up in Southern California, where it almost never snows and where all the stores have always been open on Sundays. When I moved to Boston to go to seminary I had to learn how to deal with two unfamiliar realities. The snow seemed at first like an astonishingly beautiful gift, though after a time its novelty did wear off. The closed supermarkets and liquor stores took some more getting used to. The Sunday closures required a level of planning that had never been asked of me before. In L.A. if it’s Sunday and you’re having people over--even if it’s a Sunday in February--you just run over to Von’s or Ralph’s and buy some groceries and a bottle of wine. In 1970’s Massachusetts it was more complicated.
One Sunday night in winter in my first year in seminary I invited a group of people to my apartment for dinner on a Sunday night. I had gone to the market the day before and bought the food and a very fine wine specially chosen for the occasion—those of you old enough to remember those days will recall the ubiquitous half-gallon jug of Gallo Hearty Burgundy. Because I was lazy or forgetful, I left the two bottles of Gallo Hearty Burgundy-worth a combined total of about four dollars--in the car on Saturday, figuring that I would bring them up on Sunday. It snowed on Saturday night. Sunday afternoon I went to the car, grabbed both bottles of wine, and headed toward the dormitory. I slipped on the ice, dropped and broke both bottles of wine, and watched helplessly as the snow turned deep hearty shade of red.
That this was a tragic social disaster only dawned on me as I began to realize that I could not run out to the liquor store to buy two more bottles of wine. A seminary dinner party without wine—even rotgut—was unimaginable in those days. I was terrified that I would be seen as a cheap and inhospitable host. But the story has a happy, if not particularly dramatic ending. I swallowed my pride, called up my guests, and explained the situation. To my relief and surprise, they understood perfectly, and each person brought enough wine to the party so that the social embarrassment I feared--of hosting a wineless dinner party--never became a reality.
Something like what I experienced—deliverance from humiliation—is at work in today’s familiar Gospel account of Jesus’s turning water into wine. Today is the Second Sunday after the Epiphany, and as this season progresses we watch God’s glory spread out from Bethlehem to Judea to the world much as that Hearty Burgundy spread out in the Massachusetts snow. And whatever else we say about Jesus’s miracle at the wedding in Cana of Galilee, the first thing we need to see is that the impetus for this miracle is Jesus’s and more importantly his mother’s sense of compassion. In ancient Near Eastern culture, where hospitality was a central value, to run out of wine at a marriage feast would be a devastating social humiliation. Jesus cares about people in every aspect of their being, especially their dignity. God cares enough about each one of us to preserve and protect our proper sense of our own worth.
In one way or another, all our readings today are about transformation. Israel is transformed from a forsaken people to a beloved one. The church in Corinth begins to see that everyone in the community—not only its leaders--has purpose and value. In Cana of Galilee, water is changed into wine. Something ordinary is transformed into something extraordinary. In the presence of Jesus, his companions see everyday realities imbued with a new and heightened significance. It’s not only that the hosts are saved from humiliation. It’s also that a new, deeper dimension of life suddenly opens up before everyone around Jesus. This is what John’s Gospel means when it calls this event a “sign”. Water changed into wine has given us a glimpse into the nature of things and into the nature of the One who is at work behind and in and through them.
One of the things God wants us to get in this season which celebrates the spreading of Jesus’s glory is that you and I are constantly surrounded by wonder and beauty, but something keeps us from seeing them. We are distracted—by the chaos of our own inner life, by the tumult of outer events. We are, as individuals and as a culture, afflicted with attention deficit disorder. We do not know what is really going on within us. We have our attention focused on things that are trivial. Something about the presence of Jesus calms the people around him down and reveals to them the glory of the world in which they live and move and have their being. It’s not so much that the world has changed. It’s truer to say that their attitude toward it has. They take it in and see it, if only briefly, for what it is.
After a lecture, the great Zen master D. T. Suzuki was once asked about the experience of enlightenment. How is life different after enlightenment from what it was before? He thought a while and then answered, “Life after enlightenment is much like life before enlightenment--only after enlightenment one is walking two inches off the ground.” The world is the same, but you see it in a new way. If we were constantly aware of how beautiful and precious life and the world are, we probably would not be able to get anything done. So we’ve developed ways of shutting off, filtering out the luminous quality of the everyday. Those ways are helpful in the short run but they do us spiritual damage in the long run. We don’t value things in themselves. We don’t value people in themselves. We experience life as fragmentary, alienated, without purpose.
Part of the reason Jesus deals with ordinary things in his teaching—lamps, mustard seeds, fig trees, sparrows—is that he wants to show us that God is not someplace else. God is present and at work in and around you now. Jesus’s teaching, in John Updike’s words, gives “the mundane its beautiful due.” The way toward living a wholesome, holy, peaceful Christian life is less complicated than we make it. The task is not to go try to find it someplace else. The task is to see the glory present in the here and now. Jesus had this gift: unlike the rest of us, he was totally present to every person and thing in his experience.
This week we have all watched in increasing sadness and horror as the extent of the Haitian earthquake disaster has made its way into our minds and hearts. And one of the stirring things about this week has been watching the way so many people in the United States and around the world have responded to the deep human need as seen in the faces of those displaced and wounded and bereaved by this terrible event. There are times when people can seem so self-interested and heartless that you begin to wonder if they have any fellow feeling at all. And then there are times like this, when we see so many people acting out of their highest values and their most compassionate impulses.
When Jesus changed water into wine he acted generously to prevent a disaster from happening. In performing that transformation, Jesus also revealed the beauty inherent in the stuff of the world. He gave the mundane its beautiful due. One of the things we learn as we live with and listen to Jesus is the depth of his understanding of the fragility and beauty not only of things but of people. Jesus revealed the wine-like quality in water. He did that because he treasured the divine essence of the people he had come to serve.
Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In the last sermon he preached, at Washington Cathedral, Dr. King said this:
We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. . . . This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.
Something like what Dr. King was getting at is going on in our church’s and our nation’s response to the people of Haiti today. “We are tied together in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” What can we do but reach out, as Jesus did, to respond to suffering at once so profound and so close?
We go through life shielding ourselves from the beauty of the world as expressed in people, nature, things. We shield ourselves from its pain and tragedy, too. Sometimes occasions are so dramatic that they claim our attention, open us up to that beauty and that tragedy, and demand that we respond. These occasions have a ministry to us: they break us open both to feel the pain and celebrate the joy of what it means to be alive in this beautiful but broken world. The earthquake in Haiti is an occasion like that. Through this terrible event we have been given what Frederick Buechner calls a “fierce blessing”: the opportunity to respond with hope, compassion, and love. That opportunity is God’s gift to us in this hard yet gracious moment. We can together and separately support the many relief efforts now underway in Haiti. In this event God reaches out to us asking only that we take hold of moment and respond in generous love and compassion. A blessing is within our reach. Let us not drop it and watch it bleed slowly out in the snow. Amen.
One Sunday night in winter in my first year in seminary I invited a group of people to my apartment for dinner on a Sunday night. I had gone to the market the day before and bought the food and a very fine wine specially chosen for the occasion—those of you old enough to remember those days will recall the ubiquitous half-gallon jug of Gallo Hearty Burgundy. Because I was lazy or forgetful, I left the two bottles of Gallo Hearty Burgundy-worth a combined total of about four dollars--in the car on Saturday, figuring that I would bring them up on Sunday. It snowed on Saturday night. Sunday afternoon I went to the car, grabbed both bottles of wine, and headed toward the dormitory. I slipped on the ice, dropped and broke both bottles of wine, and watched helplessly as the snow turned deep hearty shade of red.
That this was a tragic social disaster only dawned on me as I began to realize that I could not run out to the liquor store to buy two more bottles of wine. A seminary dinner party without wine—even rotgut—was unimaginable in those days. I was terrified that I would be seen as a cheap and inhospitable host. But the story has a happy, if not particularly dramatic ending. I swallowed my pride, called up my guests, and explained the situation. To my relief and surprise, they understood perfectly, and each person brought enough wine to the party so that the social embarrassment I feared--of hosting a wineless dinner party--never became a reality.
Something like what I experienced—deliverance from humiliation—is at work in today’s familiar Gospel account of Jesus’s turning water into wine. Today is the Second Sunday after the Epiphany, and as this season progresses we watch God’s glory spread out from Bethlehem to Judea to the world much as that Hearty Burgundy spread out in the Massachusetts snow. And whatever else we say about Jesus’s miracle at the wedding in Cana of Galilee, the first thing we need to see is that the impetus for this miracle is Jesus’s and more importantly his mother’s sense of compassion. In ancient Near Eastern culture, where hospitality was a central value, to run out of wine at a marriage feast would be a devastating social humiliation. Jesus cares about people in every aspect of their being, especially their dignity. God cares enough about each one of us to preserve and protect our proper sense of our own worth.
In one way or another, all our readings today are about transformation. Israel is transformed from a forsaken people to a beloved one. The church in Corinth begins to see that everyone in the community—not only its leaders--has purpose and value. In Cana of Galilee, water is changed into wine. Something ordinary is transformed into something extraordinary. In the presence of Jesus, his companions see everyday realities imbued with a new and heightened significance. It’s not only that the hosts are saved from humiliation. It’s also that a new, deeper dimension of life suddenly opens up before everyone around Jesus. This is what John’s Gospel means when it calls this event a “sign”. Water changed into wine has given us a glimpse into the nature of things and into the nature of the One who is at work behind and in and through them.
One of the things God wants us to get in this season which celebrates the spreading of Jesus’s glory is that you and I are constantly surrounded by wonder and beauty, but something keeps us from seeing them. We are distracted—by the chaos of our own inner life, by the tumult of outer events. We are, as individuals and as a culture, afflicted with attention deficit disorder. We do not know what is really going on within us. We have our attention focused on things that are trivial. Something about the presence of Jesus calms the people around him down and reveals to them the glory of the world in which they live and move and have their being. It’s not so much that the world has changed. It’s truer to say that their attitude toward it has. They take it in and see it, if only briefly, for what it is.
After a lecture, the great Zen master D. T. Suzuki was once asked about the experience of enlightenment. How is life different after enlightenment from what it was before? He thought a while and then answered, “Life after enlightenment is much like life before enlightenment--only after enlightenment one is walking two inches off the ground.” The world is the same, but you see it in a new way. If we were constantly aware of how beautiful and precious life and the world are, we probably would not be able to get anything done. So we’ve developed ways of shutting off, filtering out the luminous quality of the everyday. Those ways are helpful in the short run but they do us spiritual damage in the long run. We don’t value things in themselves. We don’t value people in themselves. We experience life as fragmentary, alienated, without purpose.
Part of the reason Jesus deals with ordinary things in his teaching—lamps, mustard seeds, fig trees, sparrows—is that he wants to show us that God is not someplace else. God is present and at work in and around you now. Jesus’s teaching, in John Updike’s words, gives “the mundane its beautiful due.” The way toward living a wholesome, holy, peaceful Christian life is less complicated than we make it. The task is not to go try to find it someplace else. The task is to see the glory present in the here and now. Jesus had this gift: unlike the rest of us, he was totally present to every person and thing in his experience.
This week we have all watched in increasing sadness and horror as the extent of the Haitian earthquake disaster has made its way into our minds and hearts. And one of the stirring things about this week has been watching the way so many people in the United States and around the world have responded to the deep human need as seen in the faces of those displaced and wounded and bereaved by this terrible event. There are times when people can seem so self-interested and heartless that you begin to wonder if they have any fellow feeling at all. And then there are times like this, when we see so many people acting out of their highest values and their most compassionate impulses.
When Jesus changed water into wine he acted generously to prevent a disaster from happening. In performing that transformation, Jesus also revealed the beauty inherent in the stuff of the world. He gave the mundane its beautiful due. One of the things we learn as we live with and listen to Jesus is the depth of his understanding of the fragility and beauty not only of things but of people. Jesus revealed the wine-like quality in water. He did that because he treasured the divine essence of the people he had come to serve.
Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In the last sermon he preached, at Washington Cathedral, Dr. King said this:
We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. . . . This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.
Something like what Dr. King was getting at is going on in our church’s and our nation’s response to the people of Haiti today. “We are tied together in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” What can we do but reach out, as Jesus did, to respond to suffering at once so profound and so close?
We go through life shielding ourselves from the beauty of the world as expressed in people, nature, things. We shield ourselves from its pain and tragedy, too. Sometimes occasions are so dramatic that they claim our attention, open us up to that beauty and that tragedy, and demand that we respond. These occasions have a ministry to us: they break us open both to feel the pain and celebrate the joy of what it means to be alive in this beautiful but broken world. The earthquake in Haiti is an occasion like that. Through this terrible event we have been given what Frederick Buechner calls a “fierce blessing”: the opportunity to respond with hope, compassion, and love. That opportunity is God’s gift to us in this hard yet gracious moment. We can together and separately support the many relief efforts now underway in Haiti. In this event God reaches out to us asking only that we take hold of moment and respond in generous love and compassion. A blessing is within our reach. Let us not drop it and watch it bleed slowly out in the snow. Amen.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Homily: 1 Epiphany [January 10, 2010] Christ Church Cranbrook
One of the things they don’t teach you in seminary is what to say in your first sermon. So in the absence of a better idea, let me tell you about my dogs.
Kathy and I moved here a week ago accompanied by our two terriers, Sandie and Tessie. Sandie is a champion cairn terrier, bred as a show dog and raised by a breeder friend of ours. Tessie is a Scotch terrier, purchased from a breeder in Ohio and raised from puppyhood by us. Sandie is a pure dog. He is focused on protecting the rectory territory and hunting critters who venture into his line of sight. Tessie is socialized to people—she has more IQ points than either Kathy or me, and is able to predict and interpret our every move.
Now here’s the embarrassing thing. Sandie, who was raised by others, is perfectly well-adjusted. Tessie, who was raised entirely inside our household, is as neurotic a dog as you’ll ever meet. That probably tells you all you need to know about the Hall family.
When I think about the uniqueness of Sandie and Tessie, I realize that as particular and precious as their own individuality is, it pales in comparison to that of human beings. Sandie and Tessie are complicated and unique, and they’re dogs! Imagine the depth and beauty of what God is up to in the fashioning of a person. We humans are made in God’s image, and as with snowflakes, no two of us are alike. Think of what that says about us. Think of what that says about God.
Today is the First Sunday after the Epiphany, also known as the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord. It is a day on which we are asked to think together about Jesus’s baptism and our own. It is a day on which we are asked to renew our own baptismal vows. That you and I begin our new life and ministry with each other on this particular day is a sign of what God is doing in the here and now. It may be coincidence, or it may be more than that. But it’s not overstating it to say that everything I know and believe about the church and its mission is summarized and expressed in this day which celebrates both Jesus’s baptism and ours.
Here’s how Luke puts it in today’s Gospel:
Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." Luke 3. 21-22
As I understand today’s message, it comes at us in three ways: Jesus was baptized. You and I have been baptized. We are renewing our baptismal covenant today. Let me say three things about that.
First: Jesus was baptized. Generations of Christians have asked themselves why Jesus needed to submit to the baptism of John the Baptist. John preached a baptism for repentance and the remission of sins. As a sinless person, why would Jesus need to do something like that?
The answer, I think, is that Jesus understood baptism to be something beyond a ritual cleansing: he saw it as a commissioning, an “ordination” if you like, to ministry. Immediately after his baptism, Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness and then emerged to live out his ministry: healing the sick, teaching in parables, casting out demons, gathering everyone at his table of abundance and welcome. Jesus got baptized not because he needed to be cleansed but because he wanted to show you and me what a Christian life looks like. A Christian life is one of wholeness, joy, service, compassion, forgiveness, love. The first thing we celebrate today is Jesus’s willingness to show us, through his own baptism, what this sacrament’s implications are for us. You and I will find life’s meaning, as Jesus did, in compassionate generosity toward each other and the world.
Second: you and I are baptized. In baptism, we get a name. “Name this child,” as it used to say in the older prayer books. The next big truth about Baptism is that it recognizes and blesses our own unique God-given individual identity. When the Spirit descends in the form of a dove, Jesus hears the voice say, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." This is the voice that each one of us should hear when our baptismal name is uttered. You are God’s beloved. God is well-pleased with you. Baptism is about mission and ministry; it is also about identity and worth. God has made you as you are and given you the gifts you have and it is good and pleasing to God for you to be you. Most of us go through life living out of a false self. Thomas Merton once defined salvation as the finding and accepting of our authentic self. In Baptism you are called not only to be generous and compassionate to others; you are called to be generous and compassionate to yourself. Your identity is a divine gift, and your life’s task is to accept it, to know it, to live into it and share your wisdom, questions, and insight with the rest of us.
And then there’s this third thing, the renewing of our Baptismal Covenant. A scholar I admire very much once said that the church is itself created by this sacrament of Baptism. In renewing our Baptismal Covenant, we are reaffirming this relationship we have with each other as the Body of Christ in the world. In this covenant relationship we have agreed that we will bring the fullness of our individual ministries and the fullness of our several unique identities into this parish community. I believe that God is doing something unique in you and in your life that God is not doing anywhere else. I believe that we can only become the people God calls us to be by making this place an open, loving, compassionate community where everyone feels accepted, valued, and loved exactly as they are. I believe that it is out of this experience of acceptance and love that we reach out to heal the pain and hurt that surrounds us in the world. At its best, a parish church is a community where all of our individual identities are brought into a gathered celebration of mission, uniqueness, and love. And the test of that will be whether we, our households, our community, our world are the better for our being here.
I hope it is apparent how deeply happy Kathy and I are to be back here. We began our married life here—we came to Birmingham and Bloomfield a week after our wedding in 1978. Our son Oliver was born here, and it was here that I began to develop skills and interests that have stayed with me my whole working life. Christ Church Cranbrook has long stood in my mind and heart as the image of what a parish church at its best can be. At the same time, I know that time has delivered a lot of blows to the Detroit area and that many people in this congregation are hurting personally and financially.
Jesus came on the historical scene at a time, like this one, of real economic privation. First century Palestine had many of the economic and social problems of twenty-first century Detroit. People were hungry, homeless, poor, and without a sense of their ability to control their own destinies. The conventional wisdom of Jesus’s day held that you get yourself through hard times by grasping onto and hoarding what is yours and hunkering down to protect yourself and what you have from others. Jesus upended everything by preaching the reverse. He said that when women and children and men opened their hearts and tables and houses to each other there would miraculously be enough to go around. As a sign of that he fed 5,000 people with five barley loaves and two fish.
You and I are together at a challenging and exciting moment in the history of this parish and the region we live in and serve. These are certainly hard times. But if we have learned anything from following Jesus, it is that the way through hard times lies not in selfishness but in generosity. You and I can get through anything if we do it together. Accepting everyone’s divine uniqueness, feeling the joys and pains of each other and the world are the ways toward both personal and social wholeness. This is a truth we learn over and over again by hearing the story of Jesus’s life and ministry as enacted in the Gospels. This is a truth we know because we have been given a name, a mission, and a community in our Baptism.
We come now to the renewal of our Baptismal Covenant and to the sacrament where we gather around that same table to which Jesus invited everyone—his companions, the hungry, the sick, the privileged, the outcast—to gather and share the abundance of God’s blessings. As you share this meal at Jesus’s table, remember who you are and to whom you belong. You are, as Jesus was, God’s beloved, a person endowed with unique, divine dignity, someone with whom God is now and will forever be well pleased. And you are a companion of Jesus, one who is invited to share the bread and wine as signs of God’s compassionate commitment to you and the world we all share. God’s promise is not that life won’t deal us hard blows. God’s promise is that we will survive those blows and indeed thrive to transcend them as we reach out in love and compassion to each other and the world. For that promise, and for the love which sustains it, we proceed in the Eucharist to give thanks. Amen.
Kathy and I moved here a week ago accompanied by our two terriers, Sandie and Tessie. Sandie is a champion cairn terrier, bred as a show dog and raised by a breeder friend of ours. Tessie is a Scotch terrier, purchased from a breeder in Ohio and raised from puppyhood by us. Sandie is a pure dog. He is focused on protecting the rectory territory and hunting critters who venture into his line of sight. Tessie is socialized to people—she has more IQ points than either Kathy or me, and is able to predict and interpret our every move.
Now here’s the embarrassing thing. Sandie, who was raised by others, is perfectly well-adjusted. Tessie, who was raised entirely inside our household, is as neurotic a dog as you’ll ever meet. That probably tells you all you need to know about the Hall family.
When I think about the uniqueness of Sandie and Tessie, I realize that as particular and precious as their own individuality is, it pales in comparison to that of human beings. Sandie and Tessie are complicated and unique, and they’re dogs! Imagine the depth and beauty of what God is up to in the fashioning of a person. We humans are made in God’s image, and as with snowflakes, no two of us are alike. Think of what that says about us. Think of what that says about God.
Today is the First Sunday after the Epiphany, also known as the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord. It is a day on which we are asked to think together about Jesus’s baptism and our own. It is a day on which we are asked to renew our own baptismal vows. That you and I begin our new life and ministry with each other on this particular day is a sign of what God is doing in the here and now. It may be coincidence, or it may be more than that. But it’s not overstating it to say that everything I know and believe about the church and its mission is summarized and expressed in this day which celebrates both Jesus’s baptism and ours.
Here’s how Luke puts it in today’s Gospel:
Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." Luke 3. 21-22
As I understand today’s message, it comes at us in three ways: Jesus was baptized. You and I have been baptized. We are renewing our baptismal covenant today. Let me say three things about that.
First: Jesus was baptized. Generations of Christians have asked themselves why Jesus needed to submit to the baptism of John the Baptist. John preached a baptism for repentance and the remission of sins. As a sinless person, why would Jesus need to do something like that?
The answer, I think, is that Jesus understood baptism to be something beyond a ritual cleansing: he saw it as a commissioning, an “ordination” if you like, to ministry. Immediately after his baptism, Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness and then emerged to live out his ministry: healing the sick, teaching in parables, casting out demons, gathering everyone at his table of abundance and welcome. Jesus got baptized not because he needed to be cleansed but because he wanted to show you and me what a Christian life looks like. A Christian life is one of wholeness, joy, service, compassion, forgiveness, love. The first thing we celebrate today is Jesus’s willingness to show us, through his own baptism, what this sacrament’s implications are for us. You and I will find life’s meaning, as Jesus did, in compassionate generosity toward each other and the world.
Second: you and I are baptized. In baptism, we get a name. “Name this child,” as it used to say in the older prayer books. The next big truth about Baptism is that it recognizes and blesses our own unique God-given individual identity. When the Spirit descends in the form of a dove, Jesus hears the voice say, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." This is the voice that each one of us should hear when our baptismal name is uttered. You are God’s beloved. God is well-pleased with you. Baptism is about mission and ministry; it is also about identity and worth. God has made you as you are and given you the gifts you have and it is good and pleasing to God for you to be you. Most of us go through life living out of a false self. Thomas Merton once defined salvation as the finding and accepting of our authentic self. In Baptism you are called not only to be generous and compassionate to others; you are called to be generous and compassionate to yourself. Your identity is a divine gift, and your life’s task is to accept it, to know it, to live into it and share your wisdom, questions, and insight with the rest of us.
And then there’s this third thing, the renewing of our Baptismal Covenant. A scholar I admire very much once said that the church is itself created by this sacrament of Baptism. In renewing our Baptismal Covenant, we are reaffirming this relationship we have with each other as the Body of Christ in the world. In this covenant relationship we have agreed that we will bring the fullness of our individual ministries and the fullness of our several unique identities into this parish community. I believe that God is doing something unique in you and in your life that God is not doing anywhere else. I believe that we can only become the people God calls us to be by making this place an open, loving, compassionate community where everyone feels accepted, valued, and loved exactly as they are. I believe that it is out of this experience of acceptance and love that we reach out to heal the pain and hurt that surrounds us in the world. At its best, a parish church is a community where all of our individual identities are brought into a gathered celebration of mission, uniqueness, and love. And the test of that will be whether we, our households, our community, our world are the better for our being here.
I hope it is apparent how deeply happy Kathy and I are to be back here. We began our married life here—we came to Birmingham and Bloomfield a week after our wedding in 1978. Our son Oliver was born here, and it was here that I began to develop skills and interests that have stayed with me my whole working life. Christ Church Cranbrook has long stood in my mind and heart as the image of what a parish church at its best can be. At the same time, I know that time has delivered a lot of blows to the Detroit area and that many people in this congregation are hurting personally and financially.
Jesus came on the historical scene at a time, like this one, of real economic privation. First century Palestine had many of the economic and social problems of twenty-first century Detroit. People were hungry, homeless, poor, and without a sense of their ability to control their own destinies. The conventional wisdom of Jesus’s day held that you get yourself through hard times by grasping onto and hoarding what is yours and hunkering down to protect yourself and what you have from others. Jesus upended everything by preaching the reverse. He said that when women and children and men opened their hearts and tables and houses to each other there would miraculously be enough to go around. As a sign of that he fed 5,000 people with five barley loaves and two fish.
You and I are together at a challenging and exciting moment in the history of this parish and the region we live in and serve. These are certainly hard times. But if we have learned anything from following Jesus, it is that the way through hard times lies not in selfishness but in generosity. You and I can get through anything if we do it together. Accepting everyone’s divine uniqueness, feeling the joys and pains of each other and the world are the ways toward both personal and social wholeness. This is a truth we learn over and over again by hearing the story of Jesus’s life and ministry as enacted in the Gospels. This is a truth we know because we have been given a name, a mission, and a community in our Baptism.
We come now to the renewal of our Baptismal Covenant and to the sacrament where we gather around that same table to which Jesus invited everyone—his companions, the hungry, the sick, the privileged, the outcast—to gather and share the abundance of God’s blessings. As you share this meal at Jesus’s table, remember who you are and to whom you belong. You are, as Jesus was, God’s beloved, a person endowed with unique, divine dignity, someone with whom God is now and will forever be well pleased. And you are a companion of Jesus, one who is invited to share the bread and wine as signs of God’s compassionate commitment to you and the world we all share. God’s promise is not that life won’t deal us hard blows. God’s promise is that we will survive those blows and indeed thrive to transcend them as we reach out in love and compassion to each other and the world. For that promise, and for the love which sustains it, we proceed in the Eucharist to give thanks. Amen.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Homily: Ralph Adams Cram, Richard Upjohn, and John LaFarge [December 16, 2009]
You haven’t lived until you’ve sat and listened to a string of oral book reports delivered to you with breathless enthusiasm by teenagers who have just discovered Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. Though Ayn Rand’s crazy ideas about individual rights [gathered into a sort of philosophy she called “Objectivism”] have never appealed to me, they are almost always a big hit with high school students, especially those who still nourish the illusion that the entire world is about themselves. Rand defined Objectivism this way: "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." [Atlas Shrugged] A life creed for teenagers who don’t know who they are yet, perhaps, but hardly words for followers of Jesus to live by.
The hero of The Fountainhead is an architect named Howard Roark who chooses to destroy his own creation rather than see it compromised. In many ways Howard Roark has served as the popular image of the visionary architect in American culture, and even though Philip Johnson, Frank Gehry, and Richard Meier are no doubt much nicer people and more socially conscious than Rand’s hero, we nevertheless tend to expect the designers of our major public buildings to be the Romantic individualists emblematized by Howard Roark. You may laugh at these swooping titanium roofs today, but one day they’ll be celebrated as the greatest monuments of the early 21st century.
At the same time in my life—the early 1990s—when I was listening to these Objectivist teenage book reports, I was also working with a real architect named Brenda Levin, a woman who designed the Math and Science building at Oakwood School where I was serving as the principal. As part of the team helping to make that building a reality, I had the opportunity to watch a real architect in operation. And what surprised me the most about working with Brenda and her colleagues was the way in which she demonstrated how a successful architect actually works. Though the start of the process may be a visionary ideal conception, getting a building built requires enormous collaborative and community relations skill. Only a novelist would think of an architect as a loner. A better image might be a filmmaker: the architect needs to begin with a vision and then work with flesh and blood people with their disparate interests, values, and ideas to achieve a shared consensus on what the building will actually become. Not only that: the architect has to take building codes, utility lines, neighborhood interests, and the pedagogical uses of the structure into account. Designing and bringing a building into being is more like conducting an orchestra than like being a soloist.
Today we give thanks for the lives of two architects—Ralph Adams Cram, Richard Upjohn, and one artist, John LaFarge. All three were instrumental in the late 19th and early 20th century Gothic revival in church art and architecture that produced, among other things, these buildings here at Seabury. Cram designed two of my favorite spaces, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City, and Holy Cross Monastery, the main house of the monastic order of which I am an associate, in West. Park, New York. Upjohn designed a prodigious number of church buildings, including Trinity Church, Wall Street and one church I know well from my early days as a priest, St. Thomas Church in Taunton, Massachusetts. LaFarge was both a painter and a stained glass artist, and crafted among other things four prominent stained glass windows at Trinity Church, Boston. And Cram’s partner, Bertram Goodhue, designed Christ Church Cranbrook, the parish where I will become rector in January. Two other parishes where I’ve worked—All Saints, Pasadena, and Church of the Redeemer, were designed by Gothic revival architects in the same movement: Reginald Johnson and Charles Burns respectively. Though I run as far and as fast as I can, I can’t seem to get away from these flying buttresses!
Those of you who have been in the Anglican Ethos class this fall know that the rediscovery of Gothic architecture was more than an aesthetic fad. The neo-Gothic architects were themselves influenced by the Oxford Movement, and the ritual and liturgical affirmations of 19th century Anglo Catholicism involved a lot more than a taste for stone and stained glass. The Tractarians became a movement because they opposed the Erastian, Whiggish ideas of the church as the religious arm of the state. To Newman, Keble, Pusey, and Froude, the church was in fact the literal body of Christ. Or as Charles Gore later put it, “The Visible Church is the Son of God Himself.” The Gothic revivalists were attracted to Medieval vesture and architecture because these things represented the last period in Western history when the church had lived out of a unitive vision of its ministry and mission. So the Gothic buildings and liturgical arts designed by Cram, Upjohn, LaFarge, and others came to stand for an aspiration that the church might live up to the high ecclesiology of the Oxford Movement.
It always surprises people who don’t know me very well that I share this vision of the church, that my ecclesiology is a sort of ironic postmodern Tractarian Anglo-Catholicism. It is this understanding of the Gospel which has resulted in the strongest and most vibrant strain of social action in the church’s recent history. And it is only this kind of theological vision of the church—one that sees it as something more than a well-intentioned non-profit institution—that has the power to transform both lives and society.
Today’s Gospel—rather predictably, I’m afraid—is Matthew’s version of Jesus’s words about the wise person who built a house upon the rock. “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock.” [Matthew 7.24-25] As we think about those words in the context of our celebration of Cram, Upjohn, and LaFarge, two things come to mind.
First: it is precisely this serious vision of the church, and only this vision of the church, which is worth giving your life to. “The Visible Church is the Son of God Himself.” God is doing something in the world of which the church is the sacramental sign. And though we do all kinds of stupid, painful, oppressive, even sinful things in the church, nevertheless it is only in the life and witness of a community of finite people, brought together in Baptism and sustained in the Eucharist, that any kind of sense can be made of the world at all. The ultimate, final creative source of the universe is alive and work in the flesh and blood likes of you and me. That is the vision to which these artists and their buildings testify, and that is the vision that sustains a body of people seeking to discern God’s will for them and the world in the midst of all kinds of suffering and despair. We are part of the thing we proclaim. And the hope we announce is not only ours but belongs to the One who in Advent comes toward us. As Cormac McCarthy puts it in The Road, we are “carriers of the flame.”
Second: building your house on the rock does not mean being either recalcitrant a “traditionalist” or a self-centered jerk. Nor does it mean being a narcissistic visionary artist who will have no truck with compromise. It means being an architect in the sense that real architects do their work. As lay and clergy leaders, we are charged to be the visionary conveners of a conversation, trusting that God is and will be incarnate in the body over which we preside. “The Visible Church is the Son of God Himself.” We don’t need any more reactionaries or egomaniacs. What we do need is women and men who take the Gospel and the community which carries it seriously, people who feel both the pain of the world and the calling to address that pain in ministry, action, and prayer.
Cram, Upjohn, and LaFarge were that kind of people, and so, I hope, are all of us. And it is for the visible company of all us finite and fragile and faithful people that we proceed in the Eucharist to give thanks. Amen.
The hero of The Fountainhead is an architect named Howard Roark who chooses to destroy his own creation rather than see it compromised. In many ways Howard Roark has served as the popular image of the visionary architect in American culture, and even though Philip Johnson, Frank Gehry, and Richard Meier are no doubt much nicer people and more socially conscious than Rand’s hero, we nevertheless tend to expect the designers of our major public buildings to be the Romantic individualists emblematized by Howard Roark. You may laugh at these swooping titanium roofs today, but one day they’ll be celebrated as the greatest monuments of the early 21st century.
At the same time in my life—the early 1990s—when I was listening to these Objectivist teenage book reports, I was also working with a real architect named Brenda Levin, a woman who designed the Math and Science building at Oakwood School where I was serving as the principal. As part of the team helping to make that building a reality, I had the opportunity to watch a real architect in operation. And what surprised me the most about working with Brenda and her colleagues was the way in which she demonstrated how a successful architect actually works. Though the start of the process may be a visionary ideal conception, getting a building built requires enormous collaborative and community relations skill. Only a novelist would think of an architect as a loner. A better image might be a filmmaker: the architect needs to begin with a vision and then work with flesh and blood people with their disparate interests, values, and ideas to achieve a shared consensus on what the building will actually become. Not only that: the architect has to take building codes, utility lines, neighborhood interests, and the pedagogical uses of the structure into account. Designing and bringing a building into being is more like conducting an orchestra than like being a soloist.
Today we give thanks for the lives of two architects—Ralph Adams Cram, Richard Upjohn, and one artist, John LaFarge. All three were instrumental in the late 19th and early 20th century Gothic revival in church art and architecture that produced, among other things, these buildings here at Seabury. Cram designed two of my favorite spaces, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City, and Holy Cross Monastery, the main house of the monastic order of which I am an associate, in West. Park, New York. Upjohn designed a prodigious number of church buildings, including Trinity Church, Wall Street and one church I know well from my early days as a priest, St. Thomas Church in Taunton, Massachusetts. LaFarge was both a painter and a stained glass artist, and crafted among other things four prominent stained glass windows at Trinity Church, Boston. And Cram’s partner, Bertram Goodhue, designed Christ Church Cranbrook, the parish where I will become rector in January. Two other parishes where I’ve worked—All Saints, Pasadena, and Church of the Redeemer, were designed by Gothic revival architects in the same movement: Reginald Johnson and Charles Burns respectively. Though I run as far and as fast as I can, I can’t seem to get away from these flying buttresses!
Those of you who have been in the Anglican Ethos class this fall know that the rediscovery of Gothic architecture was more than an aesthetic fad. The neo-Gothic architects were themselves influenced by the Oxford Movement, and the ritual and liturgical affirmations of 19th century Anglo Catholicism involved a lot more than a taste for stone and stained glass. The Tractarians became a movement because they opposed the Erastian, Whiggish ideas of the church as the religious arm of the state. To Newman, Keble, Pusey, and Froude, the church was in fact the literal body of Christ. Or as Charles Gore later put it, “The Visible Church is the Son of God Himself.” The Gothic revivalists were attracted to Medieval vesture and architecture because these things represented the last period in Western history when the church had lived out of a unitive vision of its ministry and mission. So the Gothic buildings and liturgical arts designed by Cram, Upjohn, LaFarge, and others came to stand for an aspiration that the church might live up to the high ecclesiology of the Oxford Movement.
It always surprises people who don’t know me very well that I share this vision of the church, that my ecclesiology is a sort of ironic postmodern Tractarian Anglo-Catholicism. It is this understanding of the Gospel which has resulted in the strongest and most vibrant strain of social action in the church’s recent history. And it is only this kind of theological vision of the church—one that sees it as something more than a well-intentioned non-profit institution—that has the power to transform both lives and society.
Today’s Gospel—rather predictably, I’m afraid—is Matthew’s version of Jesus’s words about the wise person who built a house upon the rock. “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock.” [Matthew 7.24-25] As we think about those words in the context of our celebration of Cram, Upjohn, and LaFarge, two things come to mind.
First: it is precisely this serious vision of the church, and only this vision of the church, which is worth giving your life to. “The Visible Church is the Son of God Himself.” God is doing something in the world of which the church is the sacramental sign. And though we do all kinds of stupid, painful, oppressive, even sinful things in the church, nevertheless it is only in the life and witness of a community of finite people, brought together in Baptism and sustained in the Eucharist, that any kind of sense can be made of the world at all. The ultimate, final creative source of the universe is alive and work in the flesh and blood likes of you and me. That is the vision to which these artists and their buildings testify, and that is the vision that sustains a body of people seeking to discern God’s will for them and the world in the midst of all kinds of suffering and despair. We are part of the thing we proclaim. And the hope we announce is not only ours but belongs to the One who in Advent comes toward us. As Cormac McCarthy puts it in The Road, we are “carriers of the flame.”
Second: building your house on the rock does not mean being either recalcitrant a “traditionalist” or a self-centered jerk. Nor does it mean being a narcissistic visionary artist who will have no truck with compromise. It means being an architect in the sense that real architects do their work. As lay and clergy leaders, we are charged to be the visionary conveners of a conversation, trusting that God is and will be incarnate in the body over which we preside. “The Visible Church is the Son of God Himself.” We don’t need any more reactionaries or egomaniacs. What we do need is women and men who take the Gospel and the community which carries it seriously, people who feel both the pain of the world and the calling to address that pain in ministry, action, and prayer.
Cram, Upjohn, and LaFarge were that kind of people, and so, I hope, are all of us. And it is for the visible company of all us finite and fragile and faithful people that we proceed in the Eucharist to give thanks. Amen.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Homily: Advent 2 [December 6, 2009] Church of the Holy Spirit, Lake Forest, IL
I.
It’s hard to remember now, but back before the Tiger Woods “single car accident with possible wifely golf club rescue” story took over all print, broadcast, and electronic media, there were actually other things we cared about—and I don’t mean the couple who crashed the Obamas’ first state dinner. I mean things like healthcare legislation, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the state of the economy, and, yes, even Christmas! I am neither a golfer nor a follower of the sport—I tried hard to learn how to do it, but the golf gods decided to smile elsewhere—so Tiger Woods looms no larger in my consciousness than do, say, NASCAR drivers or WWF wrestlers. So I’m a bit surprised at the “All Tiger all the time” coverage right now. I just hope when the time comes my wife Kathy has the presence of mind to rescue me from a smashed up car with a blunt instrument.
Part of the job of a preacher, though, is to help us all focus on the important stuff that is going on, and for us Christians, of course, the most vital looming event in our lives is the coming of Christmas. And what better way to focus on Christmas than the shopping frenzy of Black Friday? Last weekend, when we were in California for Thanksgiving, the Los Angeles Times carried a story called “Black Friday: Wal-Mart in Upland Temporarily Closes after ‘Fighting Inside’” [Los Angeles Times, 11/27/09]. The story told of how police were called to the store at around 3 a.m. to help the staff deal with about three hundred people who were fighting each other and store workers, tearing into shrink wrapped packages, refusing to line up. After the police arrived, expelled the shoppers, and restored order, they caught several trying to sneak back into the store through the lawn and garden section. “It was scary,” one worker said.
What better way can you think of to prepare for the coming of the Prince of Peace than to go down to Wal-Mart and knock some heads together? Although there is a humorous side to this story, I don’t bring it up to be flip. Remember that a year ago, at a Long Island Wal-Mart, a 34-year-old worker named Jdimytai Damour was killed when a frenzied mob broke through that store’s doors and trampled him to death. I’m sure that at least part of this frenzy stems from the high rate of unemployment and the desperate desire for bargains that people feel will enable them to give gifts to their families and friends at Christmas. People are hurting financially, emotionally, and spiritually. They worry that there is not enough to go around.
But the very fact that Christmas itself has become an occasion for fear, outrage, anxiety, and depression tells us that we are all very much off course. Even those of us who are not in desperate financial straits still shrink at the approach of some of the excesses of the season we’re in. We feel, somehow, that it’s up to us to make this season “perfect” (as Martha Stewart might say) for ourselves and for the people we love. For some of us, that perfection is tied up with getting the season’s hot toy. For others of us, that perfection involves a flawlessly decorated and served gathering or event. For still others, perfection consists in merely surviving a day inside with people you can only stand to be with a couple of times a year. What saddens me about Christmas as we celebrate it is that we have turned it into a problem to be solved rather than a festival to be enjoyed.
One of the great blessings of the Christian life is the season of Advent—the four weeks that lead up to Christmas Day. Advent asks that we prepare for the coming of Christ at Christmas—and that coming moves backward and forward in time. Christ came at the first Christmas, Christ will come at the end of time, and Christ comes to us NOW. While the rest of the world frenzies to the beat of the “Christmas Season” (which actually began around Labor Day), you and I have been given the gift of Advent, a time to watch and wait for something extraordinary which is coming toward us NOW.
II.
In today’s Gospel, we hear the first reference to the ministry of John the Baptist, who, as Luke tells us, appeared in the area around the Jordan River and proclaimed a baptism of repentance and the forgiveness of sins. The most famous thing that John says is actually a quotation from the prophet Isaiah:
"The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
'Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth;
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'"
[Luke 3.4-6, Isaiah 40.3-5]
John is talking, of course, about the coming of Jesus and his ministry. He is a voice crying in the wilderness, making the paths straight and the rough ways smooth in preparation for the One who approaches. He preaches a Baptism of repentance and the forgiveness of sins so that we may greet with joy the One who will be born in Bethlehem. The Church has traditionally thought of Advent as a penitential season, not quite Lent, but a time of cleansing and preparation. It is a time for us to attend to the voice of one crying in the wilderness. It is a time for us to make our own paths straight and our own rough ways smooth. We are making ready a place in our minds and hearts for the One who is coming toward us.
And that understanding of Advent as a time of gift and quiet and preparation brings me back to the frenzies of Black Friday and our own drive to over-achieve in our celebrations of Christmas. When we listen to that voice crying in the wilderness, I hear two words being spoken to us in the here and now about how we can—individually and together--prepare the way of the Lord.
III.
First, to each of us as individuals: Christ is coming toward you NOW. This means many things, but perhaps the deepest thing it means is that you are worth enough to God and Jesus for this whole immense drama of salvation to take place. Each of us, to some extent, dwells in an internal and external wilderness, and each of us needs to hear that the One coming toward us does so in love and blessing and peace. There are many reasons people overdo it at this time of year, but at least one big one is a nagging fear of worthlessness. Maybe if I give the perfect gift, serve the perfect dinner, put on the perfect party—maybe then I will matter and be accepted. The first great truth of Advent and Christmas is that God is doing this whole thing for YOU. Christmas is about what theologians call the Incarnation—the coming of God into human flesh in Jesus Christ—and what the Incarnation finally means is that you and I matter. We are created in God’s image and endowed with God’s purpose and blessing. By taking on human life in Jesus, God says that everything we do and experience counts for something. If you are entertaining and giving gifts out of a deep sense of the abundance of God’s love for you, wonderful! If you are doing all that out of a sense that you have to earn something, then think again. You matter. You count. You are accepted. You are loved. That is what God’s voice says to you in the wilderness.
And God’s voice says a second word to us that we, all of us, need to hear together. It’s not only that God comes to us in our wilderness to tell us that we matter. It’s that there are others lost in this wilderness who need to hear that message. There are hungry, poor, sick people who need to hear that message. There are lonely, cynical, alienated people who need to hear it, too. If Christmas becomes only a celebration of our own preciousness—if we try to hoard and keep this blessing to ourselves inside our own small circles—then it’s only a pale parody of the real festival which God calls us to. The real, deep point about Christmas is that it’s a celebration of the crazy, wild, profligate abundance of God’s love for you, for me, for the world. One way we make the way straight for the coming of Christ is to knock down our own internal barriers which keep us from truly joyful living. Another way we make the way straight for Christ is to stand with and for those whose lives are characterized by scarcity. To the poor and the oppressed we reach out in generosity and advocacy and hope. To the lonely and alienated we open our hearts and houses and our churches of welcome and meaning and life. In community with all God’s beloved children we try, as Jesus did, to create a table fellowship where we can together enjoy the abundant life God means us to live.
The Black Friday Wal-Mart slugfest serves as a grotesque image of what Christmas in our culture can become—a crazed mob driven by fear, anxiety, and a gnawing sense that there just isn’t enough to go around. As a counterpoint to that image, today’s gospel gives us another one—that of a community crying in the wilderness, gathering us in a community of repentance and forgiveness, waiting expectantly for the next wonderful thing God might be about to do.
Christianity has always been a counter-force in every culture it has inhabited, from the Roman Empire to the present day. We have always been, as John the Baptist was, a voice crying in the wilderness. In a world obsessed with the material excesses of the season, you and I are called to be, as John was, voices crying in the wilderness, people preparing the way of the Lord in our own minds and hearts and houses and in the wider world we all inhabit. Prepare the way of the Lord. Make the pathways straight, the rough places smooth. You are so important to God that God comes toward you even now to grant you fullness and abundance of life. And all God’s people—especially the ones at the margins of illness, poverty, and alienation—are precious to God as well. Some One and something great is coming towards us. Let us pause and open ourselves up to it, so that finally we may, all of us together, give thanks. Amen.
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