Homily: The Last Sunday after the Epiphany [February 19, 2012] Christ Church Cranbrook

I begin this sermon with a confession. Like many American men, I am in the grip of something bigger than I am. That’s right: I, too, am suffering from “Linsanity”, a condition defined as an obsessive interest in the play of New York Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin.

As those of you following this story know, Jeremy Lin was a virtually unknown bench player until two weeks ago when he was asked to substitute while the Knicks’ star player, Carmelo Anthony was sidelined. In the past two weeks Lin has racked up an enormous number of points and assists, and he has become a hero to every sentient basketball fan and to the Asian American community as well.

Of all the many interesting things about the Jeremy Lin phenomenon, perhaps the most intriguing aspect is the way he managed to elude notice for so long. He has gone from virtual unknown to media superstar in two short weeks.

If there’s a key element to the “Linsanity” phenomenon, it concerns the sudden transformation in the way we see somebody. Two weeks ago, Jeremy Lin was an earnest young third-string bench warmer. Today he is a super-star. Has he changed, or has our perception of him changed? Though he may be the same guy he was two weeks ago, we all respond to him entirely differently now than we would have then. What’s that all about?

Our Gospel for this morning tells us a similar story. Jesus goes up the mountain with his companions Peter, James, and John. There “he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white.” Two great heroes of Israelite prophetic faith, Moses and Elijah, appear with him. A voice comes from a cloud, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!" [Mark 9: 2-9] This story is known as “The Transfiguration”, and it is always read on the Last Sunday after the Epiphany. It says something to us about the way the manifestation of God’s glory—and Epiphany is a season about God’s glorgy--culminates in this mountaintop transfiguration of Jesus to his friends. It’s a story about seeing someone in a new way.

Prior to the Transfiguration, Jesus’s companions saw him as a particularly effective teacher and healer. After the Transfiguration, they will be asked to see him as the Messiah. Before the event he was just a specially qualified human being; after it he was understood to be the Son of God. Before the event he could look forward to a long and happy life. Afterward he was seen to be destined to go to Jerusalem and the cross. Something changed in this moment. Was it Jesus himself or his companions’ understanding of him?

I have to admit that when I was younger, I had a hard time preaching about this story. The Transfiguration seemed to me little more than a miraculous magic trick, and I had difficulty connecting it with life experience. But, as the Jeremy Lin story demonstrates, the longer one lives the more one is able to see people revealed in new and surprising ways. Jesus’s transfiguration on the mountaintop is emblematic not only of the way people and our understandings of them change. It is also an epitome of the transformational nature of Christian faith.

For almost exactly ten years now I have been an Associate of the Order of the Holy Cross, an Anglican monastic community with houses in New York, California, Canada, and South Africa. I’ve been connected to that order since my early days as a priest in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Over the years that connection deepened and, in 2002, I became an Associate. To be an Associate of a religious order, you have to adopt a rule of life and prayer consistent with the values of the monastery. As a Benedictine order, OHC values obedience, stability, and conversion of life above all Christian values. It is to this last that the Transfiguration story speaks. Christian life is an ongoing process, and its goal is that we become completely who we are as people made in God’s image. In the order’s “Rule for Associates”, this is how “conversion of life” is described:

As the monks seek conversion of life, so we will reflect on our own lives in regular self-examination, believing that what God wants of us, as of every human being, is growth toward the fullness of the Image in which we are made. We will strive to be open to the changes required by and for that growth. [“Rule for Associates”, p. 8]

Jesus knew that his life was more than about being a preacher, teacher, and healer. At some point it began to dawn on Jesus that something bigger and deeper was going on in his life than his success as a faith healer in Galilee. At some point he realized that for him to live out the deep logic of his life meant that he would need to make his way to Jerusalem and his confrontation with the forces that would bring him to the cross. It is only after this Transfiguration moment that Jesus can say, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” [Mark 9.31] As Mark’s Gospel presents him, Jesus has been on a transformational journey; and after the Transfiguration he can see himself as someone with a divine mission and destiny. He couldn’t have seen or said that before. Neither could those who gathered around him.

I said earlier that this story used to give me difficulty, that it seemed disconnected from the stuff of life. I don’t have that difficulty anymore. In fact, this story now strikes me as one of the truest ones in all of the New Testament. It’s a story about human transformation. It’s a story about ongoing conversion of life. It’s a story about what the Christian life really and finally means.

Our friend Jeremy Lin, the basketball player, is also a thoughtful and reflective Christian person. Last Friday, David Brooks wrote a column about Lin, his Christian faith, and the difficulty reconciling the competitive values of sport with the self-denying values of religious faith. In that column, Brooks quoted what Lin himself says about this tension:

“The right way to play is not for others and not for myself, but for God. I still don’t fully understand what that means; I struggle with these things every game, every day. I’m still learning to be selfless and submit myself to God and give up my game to Him.” [David Brooks, “The Jeremy Lin Problem”, NY Times 2/17/12]

Those are the words of someone who understands his life as a process, a journey of ongoing conversion of life. Those Christians who rely so heavily on the born-again experience tend to describe conversion as a static, once for all moment. “On such and such a date, I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal saviour. And that’s that.” Those of us committed to ongoing transformation of life see conversion rather differently. God reveals us to ourselves over time. The life of faith is a life of progressive ongoing discovery, one of being continually called into new and deeper understandings of ourselves, each other, and the world.

Jesus went up the mountain and was transfigured before his friends. In our language, we might say that he was transformed. His understanding of himself changed. His understanding of God’s vision for his life changed. He emerged with a new and deeper grasp of his life’s essence and purpose. In the same way, we could say that the life of faith is, for each and all of us, a Transfiguration journey. We are each and all on the way to becoming the people God made us to be, to becoming the completed selves made in the image of God. The life of faith is transfigural and transformative. The work that we do, the relationships we have, the things that happen to us—all of these events go into helping us grow nearer to the divine image, to become who we really are. Through all of life’s changes and chances, God is continually making and breaking and remaking us, all so that, in the words of today’s collect, “we may be changed into his likeness, from glory to glory.”

The Jeremy Lin story is not only about a great athlete; it’s about how we all can be caught up into something bigger than we are and changed by it. The gospel story about Jesus going up a mountain with his friends is not just a divine first-century magic trick. Nor is it a validation of Jesus against other religious teachers. It is instead our call to our own journey of ongoing conversion of life. God is continually making and breaking and transforming us out there and in here.

That is strong stuff, and it means going to church is not visiting a museum of our past, static religious experience. Peter wanted to build three booths, to preserve the moment as a Transfiguration museum, in effect to perma-plaque it. Going to church is not to visit the souvenirs of our past experience. It can and should be a transformational event. We may come here seeking comfort, but what we’re offered is Transfiguration.

Conversion of life seems scarier than nostalgia, but we have Jesus as the example of the joys of transfigured life. On this Last Sunday after the Epiphany—when we see what God’s glory really and finally looks like-- Jesus has been revealed to us as one who opened himself up to God transforming light, whose willingness to become who God made him has opened up joy and hope and blessing for all of us. May Lent be a time that we can open ourselves as he did, and be transformed and converted, too. Amen.

The Rector's Monday Message: February 12, 2012

Holding Things Lightly

In the February issue of Poetry magazine, there is a collection of essays by contemporary poets on the connections between poetry and faith. One of the most interesting is a piece by Jane Hirschfield, a poet who is a longtime student of Zen Buddhism. Many things appealed to me about this essay, but I confess to a difficulty with its title: “Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.”

“Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.” As I stared at that sentence, I tried to make sense of it. What could she possibly mean? What is an “assailable” thought? What is the connection between “unassailable” thoughts and loneliness? And what does any of this have to do with poetry, let alone God?

When I was in high school, I regularly took part in speech and debate tournaments. One of the ways we train people to think is to ask them to develop an argument and then to support it with examples or evidence that will be convincing. The aim of rhetoric is to persuade people to your point of view. We do that by marshalling evidence that supports our argument, refuting examples that would go against it.

One of the interesting things about debating, though, is that when you are on a debate team you have to prepare both sides of an argument. If you do it right, you learn the strengths and weaknesses of each position. Usually you will side personally with one of the points of view. But you will also, in your secret heart, know that your position is “assailable”. It has weaknesses. It is open to correction.

In our culture we tend to admire people who know what they think and who hold tenaciously to a position. But Jane Hirschfield’s Zen insight suggests another way for us to be. We might hold on to our positions more lightly. We might admit to ourselves that the truth we hold to is our truth, that all truth is provisional.

The poet Robert Frost said that we tell ourselves stories as “momentary stays against confusion”. What he meant was that as people we try to make sense of reality by making up a working hypothesis of how things are. But the key to spiritual health seems to be an ability to revise the story as things change. In his essay, “Circles”, Ralph Waldo Emerson said that one must prefer truth to our “past apprehension of truth”. People, like institutions, become ossified in what they hold on to. They build fortresses and monuments around a living reality. In other words, their thoughts become unassailable. And life inside a fortress may feel safe, but it is very lonely.

By saying this I do not mean to imply that we should not have any firm convictions. (I still remember the topic of the first impromptu speech I gave in high school: “If you become too open minded, your brains will fall out.”) Every faith community and every person has certain core affirmations around which they organize their lives. But if I prefer truth, in Emerson’s words, to my past apprehension of truth, I will be willing to adjust my understanding of how those core affirmations manifest themselves over time. As James Russell Lowell said in the great Abolitionist hymn, “New occasions teach new duties.”

“Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.” The skills that we have all learned to articulate and support our arguments are the skills we use to help our point of view prevail. Even framing the practice that way suggests that life is some kind of contest, that what I want from our engagement with each other is victory rather than companionship. Living in community requires a different set of skills. As the philosopher Richard Rorty said, “Truth is made, not discovered.” Truth is something that emerges from our dialogue with and connection to each other. It is not a dead monument. It is a living stream.

As Lent approaches, I’m beginning to think about how I will organize my approach to it, and this year I’m thinking about how I learn to hold things more lightly. What I want is truth and community, not unassailable loneliness. To have the former, I’ll have to admit to much of what I affirm is a momentary stay against confusion, a provisional formation of how things look to me now. Seeing things this way I may win fewer arguments, but I hope I’ll have more companions along the way.

Gary Hall

Homily: The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany [february 12, 2012] Christ Church Cranbrook

No matter how many times I read Mark’s Gospel, I always find it full of surprises. Last week’s passage told how Jesus healed Simon’s mother-in-law. Today’s shows Jesus healing a leper. Last Sunday, when I was leading a retreat at Camp Stevens in Julian, California, we discussed the first healing story as part of the closing Eucharist, and once again Mark’s Gospel told me something about Jesus I hadn’t known before. After hearing this passage read, one of our members noted that in these early Mark stories Jesus is suddenly coming to terms with his ability to heal people. It’s as if he hadn’t known he could heal people before. He goes to Simon’s house, touches his mother-in-law, and she recovers. In today’s Gospel, Mark underlines the newness of Jesus’s healing power when the leper has to remind Jesus that he has the power to make people well. He says to Jesus, "If you choose, you can make me clean,” meaning, if my friend is right, that news has spread of Jesus’s healing power but Jesus hasn’t entirely taken it in yet himself.

But Jesus is a fast learner. "I do choose. Be made clean!" He touches the man and heals him. And then he asks him to do something: "See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." What interests me in today’s Gospel is how the recovered man disobeys Jesus on both counts. Jesus has done him an enormous service. He has healed him physically, and he has healed him socially. To say that he is “clean” means that he is both bodily clean and ritually clean. He is now free from physical and social suffering. You think he’d be grateful, and that he’d show his gratitude by doing what Jesus asked. Instead, he runs out and tells everybody how the new rabbi healed him. And there’s no record that he ever went to the priest to offer thanks.

So our Gospel reading for today pictures Jesus with a newfound healing power using it to cleanse a leper who, once he is healed, disregards everything that Jesus asked him to do. So much for gratitude. This reading is paired with an Old Testament story that tells us of another cleansing from leprosy, this one of the Assyrian General Naaman by the prophet Elisha. Part of the point of this first story revolves around Naaman’s and Assyria’s military power in relation to Elisha’s and Israel’s political weakness. When the Israelite king hears that Naaman is coming to town for healing, he panics. Will they hold it against him if the great man is not healed? And Naaman’s attitude doesn’t help things. When he is told he can be cleansed simply by bathing in the Jordan River, he complains to Elisha that this advice wasn’t worth the trip--they have much bigger, more impressive rivers back home where he comes from. It is only when a servant says to him, "Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, `Wash, and be clean'?" that Naaman relents and does what the prophet had asked. And as the passage tells us, “his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.”

These two stories are overtly linked by their subject: healings from leprosy. But they are covertly connected, too. Not only does each passage relate a miraculous healing. Each story also tells us how someone with authority tells a person to do something simple. In each story, that person refuses. There is something in us that balks at good advice, that wants to assert itself in a contrary way, that thinks it always knows best. Naaman and the unnamed man in the Gospel story share that characteristic. So do you and I.

There is a great scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall that illustrates this shared tendency. Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, has just been stopped by a Los Angeles police officer and is told to get out of the car and hand over his driver’s license. Alvy is so nervous that he drops the license and it falls to the ground. He starts explaining himself to the cop, who says,

OFFICER

Don't give me your life story

(Looking at the piece of paper

on the ground)

-just pick up the license.

ALVY

Pick up the license. You have to ask

nicely 'cause I've had an extremely

rough day. You know, my girl friend-

OFFICER

(Interrupting)

Just give me the license, please.

ALVY

Since you put it that way.

(He laughs)

It's hard for me to refuse.

(He leans over, picks up the

license, then proceeds to rip

it up. He lets the pieces go;

they float to the ground)

... have a, I have a terrific problem

with authority, you know. I'm... it's

not your fault. Don't take it personal.

[Woody Allen, Annie Hall]

I don’t know about you, but I recognize something of myself in Alvy Singer’s tearing up his driver’s license, just as I do in Naaman the Assyrian’s grumpy complaint about Israel’s two-bit river and the leper’s disregard of Jesus’s small demands. In all three examples the request is simple: go bathe in a river, keep quiet and go offer thanks, hand over your driver’s license. And in all three examples the response is an almost inexplicable refusal to cooperate. Three people told not to do something stupid, and then there they go doing something stupid. I think I know those people. I think I am those people. I think they’re a lot like me.

There is a willful, selfish, stubborn part of me at my core that wants what it wants despite all good advice to the contrary. No matter what your credentials to advise me, I think I know best. One of the revelations in today’s healing stories concerns that solidarity you and I share with the two cleansed lepers. At some level, each of us needs healing. At some deeper level, each of us resists it. Part of us would rather stay isolated in our sickness than be restored to wholeness in God’s health. The good news of the Epiphany season is that God will not let us stop there. God wills that we be made whole. And one of the ways God makes us whole is by allowing us to see fully into ourselves.

One of the great spiritual landmarks in our tradition is The Confessions of St. Augustine, probably the first real autobiography in Western literature. In The Confessions Augustine talks directly to God, telling his life story, looking for signs of God’s activity in his life. As he goes over the facts of his life—his early years in North Africa as a pagan, then his religious seeking in other traditions, his years as a successful teacher of rhetoric and of his time living with a concubine in Rome, finally his conversion to Christianity and his return to North Africa—as he recounts these he becomes aware, late in the book, of just how little he knew himself at the time of these events he recounted. The real story of Augustine’s Confessions becomes the way God progressively reveals Augustine to himself. He realizes that his ability to take in the fullness and depth of his selfishness and sin increases as he grows in an appreciation of the fullness and depth of God’s grace. Augustine couldn’t have taken the knowledge of his own iniquity earlier in his life. It is only as he ages and matures and becomes more secure in God’s love that God allows him to see himself exactly as he is.

Sometimes God loves us by showing us things. Sometimes God loves us by hiding them from us until we are ready to accept them. If you’ve ever been in therapy, you’ll know that you’re not ready to understand your problem until you’re ready. The therapist could probably tell you your diagnosis at the end of the first session. But even if she did, you wouldn’t be able to hear it. Something in us not only resists. Something in us hides from the knowledge that we resist. Part of God’s mercy and grace to us is that God shows us ourselves only as we are able to accept ourselves. In this sense, God is like a therapist, and the life of prayer is like a relationship with a trusted guide whom you come to know enough to open you up to God’s healing, revealing light.

We’re nearing the end of the season of Epiphany, a word that literally means “manifestation”. In this season we talk of the ways in which God’s glory has been made manifest in Jesus, in the people who gather around him, in God’s world, and in us. Today our scriptures point us to another side of Epiphany, to one of the more subtle ways God is at work in the world. God wants to heal you. And God wants to heal you by showing you to yourself in all your fullness. God loves and blesses all of you—not just the public face you show to yourself and the world. God loves and blesses you in your shadow places, in the parts of yourself you certainly don’t love, probably don’t accept, and may not even acknowledge or know about. The journey of faith is a journey of progressive self-discovery. God shows you to yourself only as you are ready to take that knowledge in. But once you can acknowledge the fullness of who you are, the blessings extended are deep.

In our culture, we seem to think that being Christian is somehow about being “nice” or “warm” or “good”. Those are cultural values, but they’re not the deepest Gospel values. Jesus did not gather a group of nice, warm, good people around him. Instead, he gathered a group of broken, complicated, conflicted people around him whom he then loved into being authentic, compassionate, and whole. In a sense, those of us who gather around Jesus then and now are like the two lepers in today’s readings: broken people who need healing. The offer is not perfection (or goodness or niceness or warmth) but wholeness (and authenticity and health). And they’re offered to us even when we push back stubbornly against them.

Like Naaman and his Gospel counterpart, you and I have been given the opportunity to wash, be cleansed, and give thanks. The hope is that we, unlike them, will be able to live into our healing and its implications. God really does love you as you are. God really does call you into being who you are in all its complicated fullness. And God’s greatest mercy to you is God’s persistence in loving you into seeing and loving yourself as God sees and loves you. And if you can see and love yourself as God does, then you’re well on your way to seeing, loving, and healing others too. Amen.

The Rector's Monday Message: February 6, 2012

On Waiting

Sign seen in a repair shop:

Speed, Quality, Price. Choose Any Two.

Last week I went to a bike shop and asked to have a flat tire repaired. I also wanted some other things tuned up on the bicycle. The proprietor told me that I could have the flat repaired in 5 minutes, but if I wanted the other work done I'd have to come back tomorrow. I didn't really need the bike today. Heck, I could have waited until April. But for some reason I told the man that I'd wait for the quick repair and come back for the rest of the work some other time.

As I drove away I began to reflect on my decision. Why had I gone for the quick fix that didn't quite meet my needs instead of waiting for a more complete repair that would have required more of my time?

The sign quoted above has always struck me as one of the most concise statements of a philosophical reality. We can have it fast and good, but it won't be cheap. We can have it good and cheap, but it won't be fast. We can have it cheap and fast, but it won't be good. Being human, of course, we want all three. But increasingly we seem, when given the choice, to opt for only for decisions where speed will be the result. That means we give up either quality or price as values. I got my bike back quickly, and the cost was minimal. But the machine itself is still not quite in top condition.

It is perhaps a commonplace to observe that we seem to be living in a culture that values speed over almost all other considerations. Even as our labor-saving devices multiply and the basic tasks of life take decreasing percentages of our days, we are becoming increasingly impatient and unwilling to let processes take the time they need to work themselves out. Part of our increasing prurience for speed must result from our growing dependence on the stimulation we get from the instant responses of computer screens and hand-held devices. Speed (hurry, not amphetamines!), like alcohol, tobacco, or opium, is habit-forming. We are all on the way to being speed addicts, if we aren't already.

This is not just a social problem. It is also a spiritual one. Time and its unfolding are central to the Christian understanding of how we discern what God is up to. As a historical people, Christians look back to the whole salvation history, beginning with the Exodus, continuing with the prophets, culminating in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. As a faithful people, we look forward to the fulfillment of God's promises and the completion of God's purposes. Life makes sense in our tradition only over time. We can't quite see what a given event means in the actual moment. We only see the significance as the larger pattern emerges as time passes.

More than I want things good or cheap, I want them fast. I had an English teacher colleague who used to say that reading is a moral act. What she meant was that to read a book, the reader has to learn to accept the pleasure of delayed gratification. Waiting for a story to work itself out over 400 pages is often a hard task for a child used to half-hour episodes of a sitcom. But one of the things teachers do is lead children into the kind of maturity that can live with things unresolved until they're fully finished.

If you're like me, then being the kind of person who has to relearn patience is similar to being a student learning the pleasures of reading after a lifetime of television, video games, text messages. All of us have become so dependent upon instant results that we have lost the ability to wait for the outcome most fitting to all of the considerations inherent in the situation. By moving peremptorily to get done and move on to the next irresistible stimulus we fail to honor each other, ourselves, and the God who we believe is at work in the world over time.

As we get ready to observe Lent, let's remember that one etymology for the season's name derives from the Latin lentus, or slow. Working out God's purposes from Ash Wednesday to Easter Day takes 40 days. There's no way to short-circuit the process. Lent will take the time it takes. In that respect, it's an epitome of the way God works in all things. This Lent, let's learn to take things slowly, to let go of our need for instant responses. Of course in order to do that we'll have to give up the illusion that we're in control. But that, dear readers, is a topic for another message.

Gary Hall