Homily: Independence Day [July 3, 2016] All Saints Pasadena

“A Better Country”

            I begin with a word of warning: this sermon is a bit thin in the joke department. My assignment is to preach about Independence Day, and you can’t talk about the Fourth of July at All Saints without at least mentioning our public life. Now obviously, there is a lot of hilariously stupid stuff going on in American politics right now, but it’s hard to think up a joke about the election that won’t get All Saints Church back in trouble with the Internal Revenue Service. It is nearly impossible to say anything sane and rational this year without making it appear that you’re be taking sides. So: homiletical hands off the presumptive nominees. Then again, I probably could make some fun of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union, but since this is Independence Day we Americans should probably not be too contemptuous of people who have followed our lead in deciding, in the words of our own Declaration, to “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another”. So hands off Brexit as well.

Two weeks ago today I had the opportunity to spend the day in Washington, D.C., the city from which Kathy and I moved back to L.A. five months ago. It was a lovely, if muggy, late spring day, and instead of going back up to the cathedral and finding out how well they were getting along without me, I decided to walk from Union Station over to the Capitol and then down the length of the mall—past the museums, the Washington Monument, and the World War II Memorial--to the Lincoln Memorial at the mall’s west end. I wasn’t really sure what was drawing me there, but I knew that given everything that is going on in America these days, I needed a good dose of Abraham Lincoln if I was going to make it to November.

When you climb the steps and enter the Lincoln Memorial, you see before you a giant statue of a seated President Lincoln. On the north wall to your right is inscribed the full text of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. On the south wall to your left you can read the Gettysburg Address. You turn around facing east and remember that on the steps of this building Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.

Having lived and worked in Washington D.C. and hung around our government for a while, I am pretty jaded about America’s displays of civic piety. But on this Sunday morning in June I was surprised and moved to feel myself caught up in what the Lincoln Memorial embodies about America and its aspirations.

            And maybe because we have spent the last several months subjected to so much xenophobia and race-baiting by political figures both here and abroad, it was the composition of the people gathered in the Lincoln Memorial itself that most impressed me. On that Sunday morning I found myself one of the very few white people in the building. The group gathered that day was a tapestry of the makeup of the American nation: African Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, Whites, and even some Native Americans all mingling together and paying tribute not only to our greatest president but also to the vision of America he lived and died to advance.

I spent many years before coming to All Saints in the 1990s teaching American literature to high school and college students. In those years of living with American texts, it always struck me as pretty obvious that from its colonial beginnings our nation has lived with two visions of itself: one exclusive, the other expansive. For some, like Benjamin Franklin or Jay Gatsby, the “American Dream” is the possibility to make it big in terms of money, fame, and what we otherwise label “success”. For others, like Walt Whitman or Frederick Douglass, the “American Dream” is the opposite: a communal vision of shared hope and mutual accountability.  Is America about Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or the Social Safety Net?  Yes generally to both, but only to one for those of us who follow Jesus.

I have never been one of those who want to to talk about America as a “Christian nation” or of the Founders as Christian people. Please. The Declaration doesn’t mention Jesus at all. It talks about a vaguely defined “Creator” as “Nature’s God”, and in the excerpt we read together, “Divine Providence”. Half of those guys gathered in Philadelphia were Deists, and Deism isn’t even really a religion. It’s a philosophy. So don’t go looking to the Declaration of Independence for religious advice on personal or social issues. Nevertheless, from the beginning in America there has always been an interfaith religious community surrounding the world of politics, and up until the 1980s these faith voices consistently pressed for communitarian values and social change. Think of the 18^th century preaching that advocated revolution, the 19^th century Abolitionism stoked by Christian preachers, the 20^th century vision of a Social Gospel that did so much for workers and children and women’s rights. And then of course there was the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King.

Bill O’Reilly once interviewed Michael Moore and asked him, given all the social positions his films advocate, if he was a socialist. Moore replied, “I’m a Christian.” For those of us who follow Jesus, there can only be one version of the American Dream—a dream of racial, social, economic, political justice. That dream has been articulated not by fast-buck entrepreneurs or evangelists with French cuffs and razor cut hair, but by women and men who have felt the call of allegiance to something bigger than themselves. These Christian change agents have steadfastly looked to the example of Jesus and the way he lived—saying “No” to imperial pomp and oppression, saying “Yes” to compassion and liberation—and they have brought those values right squarely into our political discourse. Doing this is hard work. They held to a vision of America that was not universally held or admired. Remember that we killed runaway slaves, beat striking miners, murdered Civil Rights workers, and burned crosses on integrationists’ lawns. What kept these visionaries going?

I think what kept them going was the Christian hope we heard articulated in our reading from Hebrews this morning. The eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews tells the story of Abraham and Sarah who left their home for a new country, and they did so without any guarantees, only with the divine promise of a place “whose designer and maker is God”. It’s a hard thing to leave your homeland. You only do so in hopes of finding a better one.  The author of Hebrews spiritualizes the journey and makes it a pilgrimage. To Sarah and Abraham, this new country was not an imperial dream of colonialism in Palestine. It was a pilgrimage toward  a place in the imagination, in the mind of God and in the hearts of humanity. It was a better country, a heavenly one. As the Letter to the Hebrews says:

All of them died in faith.  They did not obtain what had been promised, but saw and welcomed it from afar.  By acknowledging themselves to be strangers and exiles on the earth, they showed that they were looking for a country of their own.  If they had been thinking of the country from which they had come, they would have been able to return to it.  But they were searching for a better country, a heavenly one.  So God is not ashamed of them, or ashamed to be called their God.  That is why God has prepared a city for them. [Hebrews 11: 8-16]

      Those of us who follow Jesus will always be, like Sarah and Abraham, “strangers and exiles on earth”. Like them, we will always be divinely discontented in a social order that fosters or even allows social, racial, gender, sexual, or economic injustice and inequality. Like our biblical forbears, we 21^st century followers of Jesus will ever be restless to establish what the author of Hebrews calls “a better country”, that is “a heavenly one”. This divine restlessness doesn’t mean that we’re going to try to put the Ten Commandments on courthouse lawns or have kids say the Lord’s Prayer in our classrooms. It does mean that, together, we who follow Jesus will work to have America resemble the inclusive and egalitarian community that Jesus established in the face of the Roman Empire.  That is the same vision that our communitarian precursors in America have always envisioned:  a nation not of power but compassion; a politics not of  advantage but of justice; a social order not of privilege but equality; and a society where there are no insiders and everyone knows what it means to be valued and at home.

To my mind, Abraham Lincoln was America’s greatest president. He was also the least conventionally religious of our leaders. But he did know something about God, about politics, and about history. As I stood in his Memorial two weeks ago, I took the time to read again these words from his Second Inaugural inscribed on the north wall:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

What is this but the articulated vision of that better country toward which Sarah and Abraham yearned? You and I will always be strangers and exiles in any society that falls short of the vision of justice and peace the gospel holds out for us. On Independence Day—especially one in the middle of an election year--we who yearn for a better country do not have the luxury of wallowing in our shared alienation. “Let us strive,” as Lincoln said, “to finish the work we are in.” Let us not just look toward that better country. Let us walk toward it and build it here and now.

We will not see or achieve that better country by looking back to some imagined time of privileged greatness. We will achieve it in walking toward the better country, by making common cause with all those who are inspired by the dream of a place where God’s priorities and ours just might resemble each other.

So let us look, and let us walk, and let us build. Let us welcome that country from afar and bring it nearer with our prayer and faithful action. Together we can achieve Lincoln’s dream of “a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations”. Walking there won’t be easy, but it can be fun. And as we go there together we will come to know in our hearts and in our lives that the country we build and inhabit is being achieved for us, for our sisters and brothers, and for God. Amen.

Homily: May 15, 2016 [Pentecost] All Saints Pasadena

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            In the unforgettable words of Michael Corleone, “Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in.”

            For the majority of you who have no idea who I am, I’m Gary Hall. I worked on the staff here for 11 years—George’s last five, Ed’s first six. In 2001 I left All Saints for a 15-year whirlwind ecclesiastical tour of the U.S., stopping in Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Washington. Given the craziness of this year’s presidential process, it seems I left the District of Columbia just in time. Now I’m back here, ready, in retirement, to perp walk yet another rector through an All Saints transition. If I believed in reincarnation, I might wonder, “Was it something I did in a former life?” Socializing a new rector to All Saints is not pretty, but somebody has to do it.  “Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in.”

            But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Today is Pentecost, the day on which we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit to Jesus’s companions 10 days after his Ascension. If you are like me, the word “Pentecost” conjures up images of people speaking in tongues, rolling around on the floor in ecstasy, screaming how Jesus wants everyone to use gender appropriate bathrooms. “Pentecost” elides easily into “Pentecostal”, but there’s a world of difference between the two.

            The word “Pentecost” does not mean “slain in the Spirit” or anything like it. In Greek, “Pentecost” means “fiftieth”: today is the fiftieth day after Easter. In the New Testament chronology, Jesus rises three days after Good Friday, and then he spends forty days after his Resurrection restored to his companions. But he cannot seemingly stay forever.  So ten days ago on Ascension Day-- the fortieth day after Easter—Jesus departed for good and told his friends to wait for what will come next.  This ten-day period—the gap between the fortieth or Ascension Day and the fiftieth day or Pentecost—is the time theologian Karl Barth called “the significant pause”. It is a time of waiting, watching, and (yes) feeling anxious.  We have been left alone here. We have been promised a renewed presence. But who will it be and what will it look like?  These ten days are an epitome of the faithful person’s existential dilemma: we’re left alone in silence and waiting for God to act. The disciples stay in Jerusalem together, and all they can do is pray and wait.

            This ten day significant pause between Ascension and Pentecost gives us a compelling picture of an anxious community gathered in expectation. After working with a group of dedicated companions for personal peace and social justice in a dynamic and compassionate community, and after a long lead-up to his final departure—a charismatic faith leader has left his followers seemingly on their own waiting for what’s next, with only a promise of something new to follow. The community anxiously awaits the arrival of the one who will take them on the next steps of their missional journey.

Sound familiar? Who says the Bible isn’t relevant? This could be Jerusalem in 33 AD or Pasadena in 2016. Or it could be both.

Today’s celebration of Pentecost is both a remembrance of what happened then and an enactment of what happens now. Here is how the book of Acts describes the original fiftieth day:

When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. [Acts 2: 1-4]

On the fiftieth day of Easter then, the Jerusalem Christians got their answer. The Spirit of God came upon them in tongues of fire, empowering them each and all not only to speak and hear each other, but also transforming their hearts and minds. On the fiftieth day of Easter now, what might be on offer for us here, today? In neither situation does the answer to God’s on-going presence with us rest in the arrival of one flesh-and-blood person. Pentecost is not about a replacement Jesus or a brand new Ed Bacon. Pentecost is about something radically different. In both Jerusalem and Pasadena, the companions of Jesus are called dramatically into the center of things in a whole new way.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus makes this promise to his companions:

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. [John 14: 15-17]

The word rendered as “Advocate” is the Greek word παράκλητος—or in English “Paraclete”—and παράκλητος means a few distinct things. In New Testament times, a Paraclete was an “advocate” in our traditional sense, one who pleads another’s case before a judge. Jesus is promising us a counsel for the defense. But a Paraclete was also one who intercedes, prays for, acts on behalf of, someone else.  So in promising us a Paraclete Jesus is promising us someone who will pray for and with us. Moreover, a Paraclete is also a helper, an assistant, one who stands by and with us when the going gets rough. So in promising us a Paraclete, Jesus is promising us someone who will help us do and become the people God wants us to be.

            When we talk in the church about the Holy Spirit, we often make her sound somewhat gaseous, like an aerosol spray floating around in the ether someplace—a kind of cosmic air freshener.  When Jesus himself talks about the Holy Spirit, he does so in these words:  defense counsel, intercessor, helper.  The Holy Spirit is not some vague divine ghost in the atmosphere. The Holy Spirit is God standing in, with, and among us.

            I have recently become a fan of the work of Monica Youn, a poet and lawyer who teaches at Princeton and regularly appears in the New Yorker magazine.  In a recent poem (“Goldacre”, June 1, 2015) she writes these intriguing words:

the young morning

grommeted

with minutes

threaded

with wisps of wool

Now that line is part of a larger argument, but its reading depends on understanding the word “grommeted”. A “grommet” is a metal eyelet placed in a hole to allow a string to run through it. Think of a shoelace hole. In Monica Youn’s sense, a grommet is a hole made useful.  When she talks about the young morning being grommeted with minutes, she is suggesting that we have made the gracious gift of time “useful” by cutting it up into measurable bits. Grommeting takes things wild and unruly like holes and time and makes them useful. But in domesticating these things, grommeting deprives them of their wildness.

Grommeting:  Isn’t this what we in the church have done with the Holy Spirit?  In ancient Greek religion, the sibyls received the wild gift of prophetic speech. The religious establishment made this ecstatic prophecy useful by turning it into an oracle at Delphi where the wild spirit could be commercially available on demand.  In the same way, the church took the Holy Spirit and we forced her into a grommet. We made her useful, tame, institutionally reliable. Here was this wild gift where each person received what Jesus calls elsewhere “power from on high” (Luke 24:49) and we caught her, organized her, and tried to build a structure around her so that we could tell you, “The Holy Spirit will be reliably available at 132 North Euclid Avenue on Sundays at 7:30, 9, and 11:15.” Child care provided. We told you that we had the Spirit and you didn’t, and if you wanted to get a piece of her you had to come to us, the Spirit’s official licensed distributors.  We tried to make the Spirit useful.  We grommeted her, turning her into something like the official deodorant of the National League.

The trouble, of course, is that the Spirit we heard about this morning, the Spirit Jesus promises us, the One we come to know in places like this but also out in the natural world and in the prophetic justice work of the Gospel—that Spirit is neither domestic, tame, nor useful. That Spirit refuses to be grommeted. She is wild and free, an expression of the One at the center of the cosmos, the One we know in Jesus, the One who speaks in and through each of us when we are becoming the people God made and calls us to be.

Friends, I have spent forty years of my life serving and representing the institutional church, and nothing I say here should be taken as a disavowal of all the wonderful ways our structures forward the mission of the Gospel.  But let us not delude ourselves. Let us not confuse the institutional church with the Spirit of God. The witness of scripture, the witness of countless people who have gone before us, is that the Sprit of God is wild, free, and available to all. When the Spirit descended on the gathered community in Acts, she did so in flames of fire. She came not to one but to all. And if you read the next chapters of Acts, you’ll see how the Spirit sent them out into the streets of Jerusalem, not only proclaiming the name of Jesus but also finding and serving the lame, the blind, the lepers, the sinners, the lost, and calling them into a new transformed community of love, justice, healing, and peace.

“Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in.” Kathy and I are so happy to be back here. I am thrilled once again to be part of a community that seeks to claim and know that Spirit in its prayer, its community life, and in its witness. And speaking as one who loves this place and its people, I would remind us that Pentecost came not in a single human being but in a spirit of love, power, and joy that transformed a community so that we could transform the world.

The Spirit of God will not be grommeted. Try as we might, we cannot make her useful, domesticated, or safe. She calls us onward into new and sometimes dangerous places. I know we’re all eager to meet the new rector, but as qualified and charismatic as he or she will certainly be, the next rector of All Saints Church will not be the exclusive official representative of the Holy Spirit on earth or even in Pasadena.  Pentecost suggests that the Spirit is alive and at work right now, in you, in me, in us, in ways we cannot ask for or imagine or even understand. She calls us to new work, new hope, new service. Our Paraclete is not someone awaited from the outside. Our Paraclete is here among and in us now, calling us to invite a new leader as our sister or brother into the good thing we’ve already got going on to help shape and build its next iteration for the years ahead.

Michael Corleone was right: “Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in.” We’re all in this together. Let us not grommet the Spirit. Let us not grommet the next rector. Let us not grommet ourselves.  We have been clothed with power from on high. It’s all going to be all right.  Amen.

Homily: Robert O. Blake Memorial Service [January 9, 2016] Washington National Cathedral

 

            Although I’ve never liked the term “father” when applied to clergy, in one respect we are a bit like parents.  We are not supposed to have (or acknowledge we have) favorites among our parishioners. But since I’ve been retired now for all of nine days, I can finally admit that yes, we often do, and for me here at the cathedral Bob Blake will always remain my favorite.

            Why that is so may not be immediately apparent.  While an obviously accomplished, faithful, and gracious person, Bob drew me toward him for additional reasons. We were both native Californians—and not only native Californians, but native Southern Californians.  It’s true that I went to UC Berkeley and he attended that other place on the peninsula, but we learned not to hold our colleges against each other, especially as Stanford has outperformed Cal routinely on the gridiron for many years now. But there was more to it than that. The first time Bob took me to lunch, he asked rather casually if I had ever heard of his uncle, David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford. Now that’s an obscure reference, but I replied, “Bob, you’re looking at one of the few Washington alumni of David Starr Jordan Junior High School in Burbank.” After discovering that rather bizarre connection, we were friends for life.

            There were, of course, a million other reasons to love Bob Blake. He would write regular generous and supportive emails to me (with the entire message contained somehow in the subject line) expressing his willingness to assist personally and financially in whatever justice ministry the cathedral might engage in.  After a distinguished career as a diplomat and then a stint in international development, Bob devoted the last years of his life to working for social justice on a range of issues—the environment, pre-eminently, but also poverty, race relations, and hunger. Bob was the real deal, both as a person and as a Christian. His faith informed his social and personal commitments, and he was generous with his time, energy, and resources in working to make the world and America a better place.  Who couldn’t love a guy like that?

            Talking with Bob Blake was like being part of a living history lesson. You’d learn about the inner workings of the State Department and the U.N.; the ins and outs of the Kennedy Administration; climbing Mount Everest; and (my own personal favorite) what it’s like to be cooped up in an embassy for a week with Richard Nixon. That Bob had been both so close to power and so relaxed about it was part of his charm. That he climbed mountains and didn’t boast about doing so enhanced, at least for me, his personal appeal.

            The Gospel reading Sylvia chose for today’s service is a familiar one. In the fourteenth chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “In my Father's house are many mansions.” We often read this passage at funerals because of the beautiful way in which Jesus assures us that even in the face of death, we have been provided for.  “I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.” This passage has always stood for Christians as a promise that we and those we love are ultimately held in God’s eternal, loving, embrace.

            All that is true. Yet, in reading this passage, I hear something else about Bob Blake that all of us can hold on to in the wake of his passing.  In the King James version of the Bible, Jesus talks of his father’s house having many “mansions”. That’s a confusing word to us 21^st century people. When I hear the word mansion, I think of a big house like Mount Vernon or The Biltmore. But in Early Modern English—the language of Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and the Prayer Book-- a mansion was either a place where someone literally dwelt—a house or lodging—or it was a figurative abode—Paul called the body the “earthly mansion wherein we now dwell”. So in the English of the King James Bible, a mansion is, literally and figuratively, a home. In my father’s house are many mansions. In our ongoing life with God, we are and will be at home.

            Now Bob Blake was a well-travelled guy. From Whittier, California to Washington D.C. and Maine with stops in Palo Alto, Baltimore, Managua, Tokyo, Moscow, New York, Tunis, Kinshasha, Paris, and Mali. Bob Blake got around. And I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to observe that Bob was pretty much at home everywhere he went. To speak both literally and figuratively, the world was Bob’s mansion.  The world was Bob’s home.

            “In my father’s house are many mansions.” We are gathered this afternoon not only to give thanks for the life and work of Bob Blake. We are gathered also to entrust him, to hand him over, to God’s care. We know that Bob was at home in the mansions of the world. It is Jesus’s assurance that he will be at home in the mansions of God.

            And our other Bible reading—from Isaiah 61—gets at what allowed God to be at home in the world:

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
   because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
   to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
   and release to the prisoners.

This is the scripture passage Jesus read in the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth. It’s the one that defined Jesus’s life and ministry and has become the mission statement of those who feel the world’s pain and believe that following Jesus has implications for how we live our lives.  For people like Bob Blake, Christianity was not just about his own personal salvation. For Bob and people like him, Christianity is about feeling for and standing with the ones Jesus names: the oppressed, the broken-hearted, the prisoners, the poor.  For Bob Blake, being a Christian meant not only being at home in the world; it meant making the world the kind of place where everybody could be at home.

            I have been a priest for almost 40 years now, and over the course of my working life I’ve probably known a handful of men and women with Bob Blake’s qualities: deep faith, personal grace, professional accomplishment, and real empathy for those who are up against it.  You don’t meet a lot of people like Bob in my business, but the ones you do meet are the ones who make the whole lifelong enterprise worthwhile. They are so grounded in what it means to follow Jesus that they make it just a little bit easier for you to follow Jesus, too.

            “In my father’s house are many mansions.”  “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me . . . to bring good news to the oppressed.”  We all knew Bob in different roles and capacities, so there are as many reasons to be grateful for the gift of Bob Blake’s life as there are people gathered in this cathedral today. Bob was a husband, a father, an outdoorsman, a diplomat, a tireless worker for justice and peace. To spend any time in his presence was to come away feeling that you had been engaged and encountered by a great spirit and a deep mind.  He was, in every respect, a lovely and fascinating person.

            But he was more than that.  He was a follower of Jesus who shaped his life in response to Isaiah’s vision of what it means to stand for God’s values of love, justice, peace, and compassion in a beautiful yet broken world. He made it a better place, and he helped to make it enjoyable for an ever-widening circle of people. He was at home everywhere in God’s world, and by his life and witness he made it easier for all of us to be at home in the world with him. In the short time I knew him, he brightened and deepened my life. I am not alone in holding him as a favorite. As Bob Blake moves on now with Jesus to the mansions in his father’s house, I know as surely as I know anything that he will be at home there, too. Amen.

           

Homily: The First Sunday after Christmas [December 27, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

The longer I go on living in the Christian tradition, the more I realize the profound truth of a simple idea. For every positive statement we make, we can state its opposite and still be speaking the truth. Paul said, "Justification comes by faith apart from works of law." James said, "Faith without works is dead." Both statements were made by apostles, both appear in the New Testament, and both seemingly contradict each other. And yet: the truth of each does not imply the falsity of its opposite. The longer I go on in the life of faith, the more I realize that two apparently contradictory things can be true at once. Reality is bigger and more complex than I am. The broad, comprehensive nature of Christianity makes all narrow partisan ideology seem shallow and false.

So two things can be true at once. We're saved by grace, yet works matter. God is compassionate, and God is just. We're all sinners, and God loves us. To hold on to one half of any of these statements (without also grasping the other) is to see only part of the picture, and thus to misunderstand the radical nature of grace.

Something along these lines occurs to me whenever I think about Christmas these days, because Christmas is at its core a set of what seem like massive contradictions. It is a celebration of light at the darkest time of the year.  It is an affirmation of peace and blessing in a world of aggression and alienation. It is an occasion when we have to hold two, seemingly opposing, ideas of God in our head. No wonder Mary spent her time after the shepherds' departure treasuring their words and pondering these things in her heart. The King of the Universe has been born in a stable. How paradoxical can you get?

One way of thinking about Christmas is to hold the Hebrew word "Emmanuel", as Mary did, in your heart. "God with us." From the beginning of time, it seems, human beings have lived with two distinct images of God. God is at the same time the Being behind the Universe and my personal Savior. God is far away, powerful, and transcendent. God is also nearby, vulnerable, and immanent. Some religions emphasize God's immensely other holiness. Other religions emphasize God's compassion and concern for me in all my idiosyncratic particularity. The unique thing about Christianity is that it does not choose sides in this game of dueling theological banjos. Christianity says two true things together at the same time: yes, God is other and righteous and holy; and yes, God is familiar and compassionate and nearby. And the way we say that is Christmas.

On Christmas Eve we heard the familiar story of the birth. On the First Sunday after Christmas we hear the less familiar opening verses of John's Gospel. Listen to what they say:

In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the

Word was God. Christ was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Christ, and without Christ not one thing came into being. What has come into being in Christ was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. [John 1]

 

What John announces here is a more poetic way of saying what Matthew's and Luke's birth stories tell us. The God who we thought of as far away is the same God who is right here, passionately and compassionately involved with us. Christmas is about God's willingness to take on what it means to be human, to be with us in our frailty and freedom, to experience what we experience from the inside out. When you really love someone you are concerned with sharing and knowing their interior experience. God loves the way we love—though perhaps with fewer blinders on--and Christmas is God's way of risking the safety and the isolation of perfect transcendence for the vulnerability and community of love and life in and with us.

But the journey does not stop there. Yes, God comes to meet us.  But now we go to meet God. Christmas is a two-way transaction. Because if God shares our experience, now we also can share God's. Listen again to the 61st chapter of Isaiah:

For as the earth brings forth its shoots,
   and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up,
so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise
   to spring up before all the nations. [Isaiah 61:11]

These joyous words come to us from a hard season of personal and social pain. In their historical setting, the last chapters of the book of the prophet Isaiah sit perched on the brink of a great thing God is doing for Israel, but they arise from a time of great suffering. Israel has been nearly demolished and taken into captivity in Babylon. The whole sweep of its life and meaning appears to be over. And then, out of nowhere, in a way no one could have predicted, God acts. Israel is freed from Babylonian captivity. They return home. The story is back on. Isaiah 61 announces a revolution in divine and human experience: in bringing Israel home from Exile, God has done something so unbelievably enormous that it almost defies description. Isaiah cannot be silent because this divine deliverance requires that it be noticed and praised.  God’s truth and justice and love and salvation are going forward. They spring up as naturally from God’s actions as shoots come forth from the earth and as the plants of a garden spring up from the seeds that have been sown within it. God moves towards us in mercy and justice. We move toward God in thanksgiving and praise. We are saved by grace alone. Faith without works is dead.

In other words: yes, God is moving toward us.  And yes, we are moving toward God. In the life of Jesus, God takes on what it means to be a human being. We call God’s movement toward us “the incarnation.” And the incarnation, the enfleshment, is not only about what God does for us. It is just as importantly about what we do for God. After the Jesus event, God understands human life differently than God had before. God now knows what it is like to be us. God experiences our joys and sorrows and hopes and fears not just from the outside but now from within.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. [John 1:14]

 

When we say that the Word has become flesh and dwelt among us, we are saying that God and we have met each other in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And when we say that, we mean these two things. First, we mean that human life—in all its glory, in all its smallness—has been ennobled by God's choosing to take it on and experience it from the inside. That’s why we do justice work: because in becoming one of us, God has given every human being unique worth and dignity. Second, we mean that the divine life of God—in all its transcendence, in all its immanence--has been irrevocably changed by its encounter with what it means to live and die as a particular human being. That is why we pray, because the one we pray to knows what it is to be us.  God has taken on our experience, and we have taken on God's destiny.

Christmas is about contradictions, about opposites, about two things being true at once. In Jesus Christ, God and humanity meet once and for all. In becoming one of us, God has taken on human mortality. For our part, you and I have been taken up into God's immortality. Two things can be true at once. God knows and loves you more fully than you can imagine and understand. Your life has meaning and depth and purpose beyond the human markers we use to identify it. You are part of something timeless and universal. You now share God's divine life in ways that connect you to the entire human community. Because what is true for you and me is also true for our brothers and sisters of every racial, ethnic, sexual, or class identity.

So Christmas and its season are jam packed with good news. God has come to meet us. We are moving toward God. Both sides are transformed in this encounter. We and God meet, once for all, in Jesus Christ. This meeting is the real gift of Christmas. Two things can be true at once. And it is the work of a lifetime to see, and know, and thank God that they can. Amen.

Christmas Leaflet Message, 2015: Washington National Cathedral

O the magnitude of meekness!

Worth from worth immortal sprung;

O the strength of infant weakness,

If eternal is so young!

                --Christopher Smart, “The Nativity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ”

 

Christmas 2015 arrives at an unusually fraught time in our national and international life. We seem this season to be assaulted by distressing news on an almost daily basis.  Life seems ever more fragile and at risk. Civility seems all but absent from our public discourse. We spend our days alternating between postures of anger and fear.

It is natural in times like these to want to defend ourselves and to strike back at those who either threaten our sense of security or offend our values. Our safety, we believe, resides either in our corporate and personal power or in our superior principles.

As vexing as today’s world can be, it is no more disturbed than the one into which Jesus came two millennia ago. Then as now the arrogant overwhelmed the meek.  Then as now the preciousness of life seemed of no account to those bent on enmity and control. Then as now the answers on offer seemed to revolve around getting more—resources, power, control—with which to overwhelm those who posed a threat either in fact or imagination.

But it has always been the affirmation of the biblical tradition—from the Hebrew prophets to Jesus himself and to his earliest followers—that security resides neither in power nor money nor status. Real safety—the kind that Isaiah, Jesus, and Paul both live out and offer—consists in what might seem like a counterintuitive set of emotions.  Real security consists in trust—trust that reality is finally friendly, trust that the world is actually good, trust that God keeps promises.  The One behind the world—the One who comes into it then and now at Christmas—is ultimately trustworthy. And we are finally safe.

The eighteenth century English poet Christopher Smart understood what Isaiah and Jesus and Paul proclaimed and what Jesus’s mother Mary lived out in her faithful nurture of her infant son.  We normally think of and describe God as ultimate power, but such a construction gets it totally wrong. The truth is really the other way around.  God is not to be seen in ultimate power.  God is on view in ultimate weakness. God comes among us not as a warrior but as a baby. Our image of God is not of a mighty king but a helpless infant. Our fantasies of power are fakes. What Smart calls the “strength of infant weakness” is the real truth about God, the world, and us.

We gather in this cathedral church during the season of infant weakness to celebrate the strength and endurance of those values and virtues that Christopher Smart names “the magnitude of meekness”.  The One born at Christmas will come to stand with and for us humans in ways that will outlast the pretensions and postures of power in all its pompous self-display. The infant Jesus embraces us in his weakness, and beckons us to share that embrace around. The problems of 2015 lose their power to frighten us. We can live, with God and Jesus and our neighbors in gratitude and trust.

May the God we meet in infant weakness bless you in the magnitude of meekness to live in hope and thanksgiving, both now and throughout the year. Welcome to Christmas at Washington National Cathedral.

 

Gary Hall

Dean

 

Homily: Farewell Evensong, Monday in the Third Week of Advent [December 14, 2015] Washington National Cathedral

Anyone who loves American literature will no doubt remember the seventeenth chapter The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – that’s the one in which Tom, Huck, and Joe Harper find themselves somehow attending their own funeral. Here in part is how Mark Twain describes it:

 

As the service proceeded, the clergyman drew such pictures of the graces, the winning ways, and the rare promise of the lost lads that every soul there, thinking he recognized these pictures, felt a pang in remembering that he had persistently blinded himself to them always before, and had as persistently seen only faults and flaws in the poor boys. The minister related many a touching incident in the lives of the departed, too, which illustrated their sweet, generous natures, and the people could easily see, now, how noble and beautiful those episodes were, and remembered with grief that at the time they occurred they had seemed rank rascalities, well deserving of the cowhide. The congregation became more and more moved, as the pathetic tale went on, till at last the whole company broke down and joined the weeping mourners in a chorus of anguished sobs, the preacher himself giving way to his feelings, and crying in the pulpit. –Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Chapter 17

 

 

            I don’t know why, but as I contemplated tonight’s service this passage came to mind. It’s one thing to attend your own funeral.  It’s quite another to find yourself the preacher at it.  But I will leave it to you to discern between the touching incidents and rank rascalities of my tenure here. Of course, this isn’t exactly a funeral, but it does signal the end of both a working life and a pastoral relationship.  Do I address you as the tenth dean of Washington National Cathedral, the seventh rector of Christ Church Cranbrook, the ninth dean of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, the thirteenth rector of the Church of the Redeemer in Bryn Mawr, or as the fifth vicar of St. Aidan’s Church in Malibu? Kathy and I are entitled to be buried in four churches.  How do we choose? I’ve been doing this work for forty years now, so it’s probably important to say something memorable and summative. Or at least something interesting.  Let’s hope I can at least hit one of those three targets.

            In the past weeks many people have asked me to speculate on my legacy here at the cathedral. (When you come, they ask you about your vision.  When you leave, they ask you about your legacy. While you’re there, you’re just trying to keep the ship afloat.)  I have pondered this question without success on and off since Kathy and I made the decision to retire last August.

            And then a week ago today I found myself attending the community Eucharist at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts—the seminary from which I graduated in 1976 and where I serve now as chair of the Board of Trustees.  EDS is an important place to me. It’s where Kathy and I met, and for that alone it would have a high place in my affections.  There’s no place in the world like Cambridge, Massachusetts when you’re in love and in your 20s.

            Because I arrived late to last Monday’s service I sat in an out-of-the-way corner of St. John’s Chapel, and even though I had been in that building several hundred times over the course of the last 50 years, I saw for the first time a beautiful brass plaque I had never noticed before.  It read:

To the glory of God
And in Memory of
John Seely Stone DD
Born Oct 7 1795
Died Jan 13 1882
First dean of this school
1867-1876
Scholar Teacher
Preacher Pastor
Servant of God
This memorial bears witness
To the Love and reverence of
The graduates for their friend
And teacher.

           

            Looking at that plaque, I realized I’d forgotten what I ever knew about John Seely Stone.  I have long ago lost the book I had which told the seminary’s history, so I tried googling John Seely Stone.  To no one’s surprise, you can’t seem to find him on the internet.  I did find references to Seely Posturepedic Mattresses and to film star Sharon Stone, but nothing about John Seely Stone, D.D., the first dean of Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge. So much for legacies.
         Aside from a small plaque hidden away in a remote corner of the chapel, John Seely Stone doesn't have much of what we might call a "legacy" at EDS. There is no Stone Hall, Stone Library, Stone Auditorium. His name has no ostentatious memorial. Yet I will bet that when he founded the school, John Seely Stone had no idea that it would some day produce people like Jonathan Daniels—enshrined now in the cathedral’s human rights porch--or that it would be the first theological school to teach scientific biblical criticism, admit women as students, have ordained Anglican women on the faculty, and admit openly gay and lesbian students.  Dean Stone doesn't have much of what you or I might call a legacy at EDS, but his ministry built an institution whose life and work has changed the church and through it the world.

            So perhaps it won’t surprise you when I say that I do not believe in personal, institutional legacies. Working to lead an institution is something like writing in sand or water: it takes all one’s energy when you’re in it, but six months after you leave, the place seems to be doing just fine without you. I very much doubt that you will see a Hall Auditorium, Hall House, or—what I’ve always secretly dreamed of every place I’ve worked—a building named “Gary” Hall anytime soon either here or at Cranbrook, Redeemer, Seabury, or St. Aidan’s. And even if such an unlikely edifice were built, 50 years from now who would really know or care?

            So I don’t believe much in institutional legacies. What do I believe in?

            We are now in the third week of Advent, a season that looks in three directions at once.  In this season we look backward to the coming of Jesus in historical time. We look forward to the coming of Jesus at the end of history.  We look among us for the coming of Jesus into our life and experience now.  Advent reminds us that Christianity is only partially, and not primarily, a historical faith community. Yes, we care about and honor the past, but only insofar as the past can help us size up and operate effectively in the present and build for the future.  We Christians look for God not as someone remembered but as someone expected.  God is coming toward us. That is what this season is about: not only are we preparing for Jesus’s birth at Christmas, we are getting ready for the future to which God and Jesus call us. When he ran for president in his parody campaign of 1968, comedian Pat Paulsen adopted as his slogan, “The Future Lies Ahead”. That’s pretty much always been my eschatology.

So what is a priest’s legacy?  What is any Christian person’s legacy? The season of Advent orients us in the best way to think about answering these questions. Those of us who do this work do not do it in hopes of leaving something behind. We do it in the service of moving ahead.  We do it in preparation to meet the one who comes towards us in Advent.

I began with a book.  Let me end with one.  The last paragraph of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch expresses in ways I cannot this Advent sense of the importance of living in expectation and service and leaving the legacy question behind.  As George Eliot says,

For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.—George Eliot, Middlemarch

 

            Dean John Seely Stone is all but forgotten, but the school he founded continues to envision and enact transformative change in our church. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are best remembered for their rank rascalities.  George Eliot suggests that Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of Middlemarch will be remembered, if at all, in the quality of the lives she touched with her many “unhistoric acts” of charity and grace. In the end, to the extent that they exist at all, institutional legacies don’t count for much. To be concerned with building or maintaining a legacy is to look backward. And if there’s one thing I know after all these years about God, it’s that God is someone out there, ahead of us, calling us toward a future of hope, justice, reconciliation, and love.

In future years we will all be pleased to forget the rascalities and remember good things about each other. But for now, the future lies ahead. It is time for Kathy and me to move on in service of that Advent vision and for others to carry on the work of leading this cathedral church to whatever future God intends for it. And so I leave you with the apposite words of someone you’d never thought I would quote from a pulpit--none other than General Stonewall Jackson, a man whose name and image will no doubt endure in this cathedral at least as long as my own. “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” Amen.

Homily: Installation of Court Williams as Rector of Trinity Church, Highland Park, IL [December 8, 2015]

            It is a great pleasure to be with you tonight as you celebrate the renewal of your ministry here and welcome Court Williams as rector of Trinity Church. Court was a student leader at Seabury when I served there, and Julie was an active member of the spouses group which my wife Kathy convened. How they managed to be so present on campus when they lived all the way up in Mundelein (if I remember correctly) I never quite figured out. And having done some time in what they used to call the wilds of the Pacific slope in Oregon they have come back to God’s country to live and work. And it’s always a joy to be with Jeff Lee, your bishop, who made a similar move back from Washington state when he became Bishop of Chicago. As one who is preparing to move back to my native California early next year, I hope there is not some horrible thing about the west coast that they’re not telling me.

            I’ve been a priest for almost 40 years now, and one of the things I love about the church is collecting all the sayings people think are in the Bible but are not actually there.  You know, adages like “God helps those who help themselves.” “This, too, shall pass.” And, as an Episcopalian, my favorite, “We’ve always done it this way.” This third is perhaps the most widely used in our church, said usually in jest, always meant in earnest.  At Washington National Cathedral I’ve actually had it said to me straightfaced and without any hint of irony at all. “But dean,” they say to some proposed new thing, “we’ve always done it this way.” To which I usually reply, “Isn’t that one of the Beatitudes?”

            The liturgy we do tonight is a new—and to my mind much improved—way of celebrating a new ministry. The rite I have lived most of my working life with came in with the prayer book of 1979, and it was more like a kingly coronation than the installation of a servant of Jesus.  But over the course of my working life we in the church have begun to “get” the radical implications of Baptism, a sacrament also rediscovered in the 1979 prayer book.  In the church I grew up in, we used to think of ordination as the fundamental commissioning to ministry—indeed the people we called “ministers” were the ordained. But all the historical and liturgical scholarship that led to the 1979 prayer book revived our understanding of what Baptism is all about and how it creates and renews the church.  All of us here tonight—from the bishop to the priests and deacons to everyone lay person in the building—are baptized people. Some of us in ordained ministry are called to live out the baptized life in particular ways. But there are no fundamental differences between us.

            So when we celebrate the renewal of ministry and welcome a rector, what we’re really doing is asking Court to live out his Baptism in a way that will help and empower you to live out your Baptism. Court is not coming here as your ministry service provider. (I think we sometimes conceive ministry as akin to going to the butcher—“I’ll take a half a pound of weddings please, and throw in a couple of funerals.”)  Court is coming as one baptized person called to live among you in a priestly way, and his primary job is not to do your ministry for you but to help you live into the Gospel in such a way that you can discover and live out what it means to follow Jesus in the circumstances of your own life.

            As we prepare to welcome Court and renew our own shared sense of what it means to be baptized, we have three readings to consider. Briefly, here’s a thought about each.

            Our first scripture passage [Exodus 3: 1-6] tonight tells of Moses’s encounter with God in the form of a burning bush on Mount Sinai. Maybe it’s because I have been privileged to serve churches with wonderful buildings—Seabury in its days in Evanston, Christ Church Cranbrook in Michigan, and now Washington National Cathedral—that I am particularly attuned to the strangeness of this encounter. Moses meets God by the side of the road in an ordinary bush. True, the bush is on fire, but still. It’s not a Gothic cathedral. It’s just a bush. And yet, as Moses approaches, God says to him, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”

            Thought one: if God can speak out of a bush, God can be anywhere. Indeed, God is everywhere. The “we’ve always done it this way” part of us wants to locate God in the sacred space of a building. But a church is not a building. A church—what Paul in the Bible calls the ekklesia—is a community, the group of those called to follow Jesus. If Court and all of you are to emulate Moses, you must be attentive to God’s presence not only inside this sacred space. The ground on which you stand—at work, at home, in school, in the community—that ground is holy ground. And Trinity’s ministry is present there as you are present here.

            In our second Bible reading tonight we heard Paul tell the Romans [Romans 8: 12-17], “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” He then goes on, ^“For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption.” We who follow Jesus are not slaves to fear. The events of the last several weeks—shootings in Paris and Colorado and California, an overheated presidential campaign, an escalating war in the Middle East, violence on our city streets—are disturbing events, and our natural tendency is to view the church as a place to flee from them for refuge and safety. But as Paul reminds us, we who follow Jesus are no longer slaves to fear. God’s encounter with Moses assures us that all ground is holy ground. Paul’s letter to the Romans asserts that fear is not a Christian category. In his life, death, and resurrection Jesus showed us that the kind of love and compassion  he stood for always outlast the things we fear. In the midst of a culture cringing in terror, the church, the ekklesia, those called to follow Jesus, we are called to remind that culture of a bigger and enduring set of truths. The things that scare us will not last. But the values of the baptized life—the values of love, joy, compassion, forgiveness, justice—those things do last. As a parish community your job is to proclaim God’s abundant fearlessness to a world desperately in need of the things that matter.

            And then we have the third reading, the story of Nicodemus seeking out Jesus by night [John 3: 1-16]. We have come to see Nicodemus as a type of the seeker, someone driven perhaps by the fearful atmosphere of Jewish Palestine under Roman occupation to come to Jesus for answers. Jesus tells Nicodemus a couple of things he has a hard time taking in. ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.” Nicodemus comes to Jesus for answers and what Jesus gives him is neither refuge nor a set of ideas but rather a community. Jesus gives Nicodemus Baptism. The thing that will help you give shape and meaning to your life, says Jesus, is living into the baptized life. And the baptized life is something you can only achieve in community. Jesus is not a guru. He does not promote an individualistic path to holiness or salvation. Jesus is himself a baptized person, and what he offers finally is something like solidarity with others and with God. We will all get through this, but only as we do it together. Being born from above means being born anew with others. We don’t get through life by hunkering down in fearful isolation. We get through life by making common cause with others. We get through life through compassion and forgiveness, not through power and fear. We get through life by inviting the world onto the holy ground where we already and always stand.

 So to ^*Court and Julie: I’m sorry we won’t see each other out west, but I rejoice that you have come here and tonight join with the women and children and men of Trinity Church as we all renew our shared commitment to follow Jesus as those who have been given life and identity and ministry in Baptism. The ground on which we stand tonight is holy. A world overcome with enmity and fear longs for the authentic vision of life on offer in the Gospel. May we all be born anew tonight both within and from above, so that the ministry not only of Trinity Church but of each and all of us may offer that vision to others and call everyone to gather around God’s abundant table and give thanks.  Amen.