Homily: The Second Sunday of Easter [April 7, 2013] Washington National Cathedral

 

Here in the Canterbury pulpit in this beautiful, Anglican, cathedral, I’m about to say something heretical: You see before you perhaps the one white man, the one English major, certainly the one Episcopalian, who does not love Downton Abbey.  My wife Kathy loves Downton Abbey.  My friends love Downton Abbey. My colleagues love Downton Abbey. I’ll bet even my dogs love Downton Abbey.  To me, watching Downton Abbey is kind of like watching Knot's Landing except that the cast is dressed in period clothes--well, different period clothes.  And the plot turns are incredible.  How can we believe that Matthew Crawley was really killed in that third-season-ending car crash? If he could get up out of that wheelchair in the second season, he certainly will be able to walk away from a head-on collision in the fourth.  And to tell the truth, I don’t even like Maggie Smith’s scene-stealing zingers all that much.

I don’t like Downton Abbey even though people I love and respect tell me I ought to. When it comes to Downton Abbey, you might call me a doubting Thomas.  And Thomas is on my mind because today, the Second Sunday of Easter, is the day we always read John’s Gospel account of Thomas, the apostle who refuses to believe until “I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side.”

As one who has been going to church regularly for the past 40 plus years, I have never much liked the sermons I’ve heard on this day. There are two entirely contradictory and unsatisfactory Thomas sermons. I know this because, at various times over the years, I have delivered both.

The first Thomas sermon is the one that essentially beats him up for not having been there. He is the guy who missed the meeting and now wants you to give him a private executive summary of the key takeaways and deliverables. The argument goes: sorry, Thomas: you snooze, you lose. Thomas sermon one attacks him as someone whose refusal to believe seems stubbornly willful, especially since he’s the guy who wasn’t there. The call is to suck it up and deal with what the other apostles tell you. This sermon is favored among the people who call themselves traditionalists.

The second Thomas sermon does not attack Thomas at all. On the contrary, it exalts him as the patron saint of existential doubt. If the first sermon treats Thomas as an absentee loser, the second turns him into a philosophical hero who demands proof—kind of a first century Christopher Hitchens. He’s lauded as an empiricist before his time, an enlightened, humanistic guy who stands in for all those who cannot believe some of the harder things Christianity asks us to swallow: the virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus, the resurrection itself. The call here is to admit that most of the stuff we’re asked to accept on faith goes against rationality, science, and modern best practices. This sermon is favored among the people who think of themselves as progressives.

My problem with both types of Thomas sermons is that they usually ask us to make a false choice. I don’t think it’s quite fair to castigate Thomas merely because he doesn’t trust the testimony of his friends. And, try as I might, I don’t admire him all that much for making such a big deal of it, either. So let me tell you what I do think of Thomas. This week, The New Yorker published an evocative memoir (called “The Return”) by the exiled Libyan novelist Hisham Matar. The writer and his family had been in exile since the 1970s when his father had become a leader of the resistance against Gaddafi’s government. In an interview on National Public Radio, Matar was asked why Libyan writers had been rounded up, tortured, executed, and disappeared by Gaddafi, here is what Hisham Matar said:

Dictatorship by its essence is interested in one narrative, [an] intolerant narrative, and writers are interested in a multiplicity of narratives and conflicting empathies and what it would be like to be the other, to imagine what the other is thinking and feeling. And that sort of completely unsettles the dictatorial project. [Hisham Matar, on Morning Edition, NPR 4/28/11]

A mature, open community can live with multiple narratives. This is true for nations and it is true for faiths. Notice that there are, in our Bible, four versions of the Jesus story—one each by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These four versions differ greatly in the factual details they present of Jesus’s life and ministry. Over the centuries, some Christians have made a case for settling on one Gospel or making a harmony of them to smooth out the differences, but the church has consistently maintained a preference for keeping all four, despite the discrepancies. We feel we get a truer picture of Jesus by seeing him from four disparate viewpoints than by narrowing our vision down to one.

Seen in this light, Thomas’s Easter night recalcitrance ceases to look like either heroism or stubbornness. It seems to me that Thomas is arguing less for scientific rationalism or for orthodoxy and more for the simple freedom of his own mind. He is asked to believe something only on authority, because the majority tells him to. He refuses. And in refusing he makes a case for something else.

For me, what Thomas makes the case for is God’s invitation to trust our own experience of life and to ground our faith in it. The other ten apostles are asking him to believe what they do simply because they say so. In refusing to believe until he has a ground for his own faith, Thomas is telling us something radically new: he’s telling us that we people have, within ourselves, the grace, the discernment, the agency to reflect theologically on life and to tell our own truth about what God is doing. When Thomas announces that he will build his faith on what he himself knows, he is claiming his own authority, his own agency. Thomas refuses to be a mere consumer of religion. Thomas insists on being an agent, a partner, a voice in his own spiritual life.

Jesus’s resurrection is not a litmus test of faith.  It is an invitation into mystery. In today’s Gospel, Jesus’s words to his companions are simple words: "Peace be with you." "Receive the Holy Spirit.” “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” He offers them not only a fact but an adventure, the opportunity to go more deeply into mystery, openness, generosity, and hope. One of his companions, Thomas, was not there for the first appearance, but at the second he takes Jesus up on his offer and doing so transforms his life.

God did not raise Jesus so that some people who think one way about it could use their certainty to browbeat others who think about it differently. God raised Jesus so that you and I and God’s world could give ourselves over to a new way of being with each other in the world. The way to a fulfilled and creative spiritual life is not to memorize by rote every doctrinal point in the catechism. The way to a fulfilled and creative spiritual life is to claim your true identity, as Thomas did, as someone to whom Jesus offers a relationship and a journey.

If the world is big enough to accommodate those who both love and despise Downton Abbey, the church is big enough to hold both traditionalists and progressives, the believers and the doubters.  In his new risen life with the Father and with his companions, Jesus calls us to join him in a new, abundant way of living that will transform both us and the world.  Only dictatorships insist on a unified narrative. One of the great strengths of our comprehensive, Anglican way of being Christian lies in our openness to multiple points of view. 

On this Second Sunday of Easter, Peace be with you. Receive the Holy Spirit. As God sent Jesus, so Jesus sends you. Learn not just to tolerate but to exult in the multiplicity of narratives that are working themselves out in the pews and in the world all around you. Don’t take any of this on even my say so. And don’t reject it because some blowhard skeptic tells you not to believe in the kind of vengeful God that I don’t believe in, either. Learn, know, and live it for yourself. The story you tell, the song you sing, should be your story and your song and not somebody else’s. Thomas knew that. He acted on his knowledge and became a witness to Jesus and his resurrection. You can know and do that, too. Amen.

Homily: Easter Day [March 31, 2013] Washington National Cathedral

            Last Sunday was Palm Sunday, a day of mixed  festivity and sorrow.  It began with the festival procession recreating Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  It ended with the reading of the Passion Gospel telling of Jesus’s trial, execution, and death.

            During the happy part of the liturgy we entered, as we always do, singing the familiar hymn, “All Glory, Laud, and Honor”:

               All glory, laud, and honor,

               to thee, Redeemer, King,

               to whom the lips of children

               made sweet hosannas ring.

As I looked out at the congregation, though, I noticed that my wife Kathy was in tears.  After church I asked her about it: “You were crying during the happy part of the service. Why was that?”

               She replied, “Palm Sunday always makes me sad.  But when we were singing that hymn with the line about the lips of little children, all I could think about was Newtown.  This will be the first Easter for those families without their children.”

               In the hundred or so days since December 14, we here at Washington National Cathedral and most of the whole American faith community have walked in solidarity with the families of the children and teachers killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. We have made our way through the church year—Christmas, of course, then Lent and Holy Week—thinking and praying about those children, the teachers, and their families.  Now here we are at Easter, Christianity’s most joyful and holiest day. What in the world does Easter have to say to the families of Newtown?  What in the world does Easter have to say to us?

               As we pose these questions together, let me share a bit of how I’ve spent the last couple of weeks in Lent. Because the new pope, Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, took the name Francis I when he was elected earlier this month, and because up to then  I knew very little  about Saint Francis of Assisi (after whom he named himself), I decided to give myself a Lenten crash course on Saint Francis.  There are many wonderful and stirring stories about Francis--some of them probably even true!—but the one that has moved me the most took place as Saint Francis lay dying.  He was sick with a number of ailments: he was in constant pain, malnourished and bedridden. He was totally blind. And yet as he lay in his sickbed he composed one of the few great texts attributed to him that we know without doubt to be authentic:  “The Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon”. In the midst of his powerful physical suffering, Saint Francis of Assisi responded not with a lament for his suffering but with a hymn expressing the deepest joy and praise of the God he encountered in the created world. It says in part,

Praised be You my Lord through those who grant pardon for love of You and bear sickness and trial.

Blessed are those who endure in peace, By You Most High, they will be crowned.

What in the world does Easter have to say to those who suffer and grieve?  In answer to that question, it helps to keep St. Francis in mind as we reflect on the Gospel story we have just heard.  Outside the empty tomb, Jesus reveals himself to Mary Magdalene, and he tells her to “go to my brothers and say to them, `I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'" [John 20: 17b]

At first pass, this command may not sound like much.  But it marks a turning point in the divine-human encounter.  Up to this moment, Jesus has referred to God as his Father. Now, at the empty tomb, the language has changed:  the One Jesus previously called his Father is now “my Father and your Father, my God and your God”.

What happens here is as subtle and yet as startling as what takes place when any relationship moves to a new level of intimacy.  Before Easter, God was the One Jesus was trying to introduce (or reintroduce) to us.  After Easter, God is One who belongs not only to Jesus but now to us and the world.  How can that be?

That can be because in the events leading up to today God has taken on what it means to be us.  As Christians, we believe and proclaim that God was somehow uniquely present in the Palestinian Jewish peasant from Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospels tell the story of how Jesus came among us, taught us, healed us, called us into new life and community with each other.  The life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth show that we can live an abundant life even in the midst of social, political, and personal suffering.  We partake of that abundance not by holding on to what we have but by letting it go—by  coming together in community to love, support, and bless each other. In the days leading up to Easter, Jesus lived that message so faithfully that the power structures of church and state couldn’t stand it, so they took him to the cross.  And now here we are, at the empty tomb, and his first word to Mary and to us is one of solidarity: “Go to my brothers and say to them, `I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'"

At Easter, God belongs to us and the world.  Our fear, our aggression, our selfishness could not stop God’s relentless quest to be connected to us.  Easter is about many things, but perhaps its deepest meaning has to do with this divine persistence in search of you and me.  Do what we will to avoid, betray, even kill the One who comes toward us in Jesus, that One will not be stopped even by our rage, denial, and fear.  Jesus is alive at Easter not as some kind of cosmic magic trick.  Jesus is alive at Easter as a sign and symbol and witness of the relentless persistence of a divine love for us that refuses to let us go.

               What in the world does Easter have to say to the families of Newtown?  What in the world does Easter have to say to us?  Speaking as a preacher, I would be lying to you if I said that Easter erases the loss of the precious innocents who died there, or that it makes our shared human suffering go away. Speaking as a husband, a father, a teacher myself, I know that pulpit consolations come cheap, especially when you are on the other side of them. 

               But speaking as one who, with Mary Magdalene and with Peter and the beloved disciple comes to this empty tomb to encounter the risen Jesus, I am telling God’s truth when I say that Easter is about the luminous beauty God can make out of human failing, stupidity, and evil.  We human beings can’t seem to help ourselves:  we will always manage to get in our own way.  But in that relentless, divine persistence that searches for us even in spite of us, God will continue to seek us out and find us.  This search will not erase or undo our suffering and loss.  But it will take us to a new place:  a place of life and hope and wholeness and peace where we now live the risen life of Jesus with each other and with God.

            Easter is about the life that emerges from death.  It is about the joy that emerges from sorrow.  It is about the courage that comes forth from fear. Easter can be about all those things because it is finally about the One who greets Mary at the tomb and tells her, “Go to my brothers and say to them, `I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'"

With Jesus we have not only a new life; we have a new community. As Saint Francis said,

Praised be You my Lord through those who grant pardon for love of You and bear sickness and trial.

Blessed are those who endure in peace, By You Most High, they will be crowned.

God and God’s life belong now to Jesus, to you to me, to everyone, living, dead, and yet to be born. That is what Easter can and does say to each and all of us:  Go to my brothers and sisters and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God." Amen.

Meditation: Good Friday [March 29, 2013] Washington National Cathedral

           During the season of Lent this year I have been thinking about the life of St. Francis of Assisi.  When Cardinal Bergoglio became pope and took the name of Francis I earlier this year, I realized that I didn’t know very much about St. Francis at all.  I have been grateful for the opportunity to learn more about this extraordinary saint.

         St. Francis is by now a cultural fixture—famous for his love for animals, his solidarity with the poor, his identification with the sufferings of Jesus.  But it wasn’t always this way.  Early in his ministry, Francis was viewed with suspicion and ridicule.  He and his brothers in the order owned no property or money, and they begged for their meals.  Even more shockingly, Francis did not shun lepers but would embrace them and kiss their sores.  The first responses to St. Francis were fearful and hostile.  He was considered a dangerous madman before he was revered as a saint.

         The great Italian director Roberto Rossellini’s 1950 film, The Flowers of Saint Francis, dramatizes this early negative response to Francis and his community.  In one vignette, a character called Brother Ginepero sets off on a preaching mission and wanders into the camp of a group of barbarian warriors.  They seize him and violently play with him, at one point using him as a human jump rope.  Ginepero is finally taken to the tent of the tyrant Nicolaio, who plans to execute the little monk.

         During the private audience between the warrior and Franciscan brother, it becomes clear that Nicolaio has never seen anyone like Ginepero. He is peaceful, trusting, and kind.  The barbarian is ultimately shamed and conquered by Ginepero’s humility and lets him go.

         Although this episode is probably not historical, there is a deep truth in this vignette from The Flowers of St. Francis.  Nicolaio and his warriors want first to mock, then to kill Brother Ginepero. And so with us: when we meet absolute purity, innocence, and humility in one person, something in us wants to destroy them. You don’t need to read very far in the Gospels before you see this same reaction to Jesus.  Though many—especially the sick, the poor, the outcast-- are drawn to Jesus’s holiness, others—particularly those with power—see his innocence as a threat.  In the words of today’s reading from the Wisdom of Solomon

Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange.  [The Wisdom of Solomon, 2]

         Philosophers and theologians have studied endlessly to define the concept of evil.  Nobody ever agrees entirely about what evil is, but all seem to start from the idea that it has to do somehow with the suffering of the innocent.  The evil on display at the cross is like the evil that confronts St. Francis and his brothers. The pain of Good Friday lies in the way it shows us our (usually unconscious) complicity with those who cause the innocent to suffer. You and I respond to people like Jesus, like Francis, like the holy women and men among us, with aggression before we do so with admiration.  We respond to them that way because something in them reminds us of the parts of our selves we would rather not acknowledge.  It is a sign of God’s forbearance, mercy, and grace toward us that these holy fools keep showing up in our lives.  Like the tyrant Nicolaio, we would like to kill or at best humiliate them.  Like brother Ginepero, like Francis, like Jesus himself they ultimately prevail despite our worst intentions.

         As we gather at the cross of Jesus this afternoon, let us ask ourselves: what is it about him that we cannot stand?  What is it about Jesus that shows up the part of ourselves that we cannot accept?  In the words of scripture, “the righteous man is a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us.” We will continue to take Jesus and people like him to the cross so long as we ignore and disown the dark places in our own hearts.

         Today as we gather at the cross, let us remember that Holy Week and Easter are a redemptive process.  God is in search of us.  The first step on the road to Easter involves naming and loving even those aspects of our life and behavior that we ourselves want to deny.   God loves you as you are—even those places you neither know nor love yourself. God is in search of us.  As we open ourselves to God’s healing light, we will no longer need to bring Jesus and his brothers and sisters to the cross.  Amen.

Homily: Maundy Thursday [March 28, 2011] Washington National Cathedral

Like many of you, I am quite taken with the new Pope, Francis I.  As a lifelong skeptic about Vaticanal things, I find my fascination to be a bit of a surprise.  All of his recent gestures—moving into a smaller apartment where he can be part of a community, refusing to wear ermine capes and Prada shoes, paying his own hotel bill and canceling his newspaper subscription—seem to strike just the right note of personal humility. 

Perhaps the most striking thing he’s done, though, occurred today. As part of his first Holy Week observance, Pope Francis travelled to Casal del Marmo youth detention center in Rome to wash the feet of twelve young prisoners there.  This isn’t a new papal gesture—Pope Benedict did it in 2007—but it is nevertheless in keeping with the new Pope’s care of and advocacy for the poor and the marginalized.

Still, I wonder.  Will the Pope, or any of his attendants, ask the twelve young Italian prisoners to return the gesture and wash their feet? I raise the question because, when I’m honest about it, I realize that for me washing your feet is easy.  The harder part is letting you wash mine.

This difficulty arises not only from my reservations about revealing my feet in all their imperfection.  It arises also from my innate sense that I owe God and you a lot more than you or God owe me. This sense of one-way obligation is broadly shared in our church culture. About a decade or so ago I attended a clergy conference led by Martin Smith, a priest and monk and writer, who told a story about a question he often poses to clergy coming to the monastery on retreat. On the first night he tells them to go back to their rooms and ask themselves what they would like Jesus to do for them. Without fail, he said, the next day the clergy always show up with long lists of what they are supposed to do for Jesus. No, Smith said, you didn’t hear me right. I didn’t want you to list what Jesus wants you to do for him; I asked you to think about what you want Jesus to do for you. Not surprisingly, when the question is put that way, his retreatants have a very hard time coming up with any ideas at all. Jesus do something for me? Isn’t that backwards?

That’s the way it is in this Gospel for Maundy Thursday. When Jesus washes the disciples’ feet, Peter becomes distraught.

"Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus answered, "You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand." Peter said to him, "You will never wash my feet." [John 13]

Though we are tempted to think of Peter as they guy who never quite gets it, in tonight’s Gospel it looks to me as if he responds as any one of us might. Jesus is the teacher, the disciples are his students. The normal order of things in a hierarchical culture is for them to serve him. Jesus calmly but radically turns that hierarchy upside down. He establishes the primary obligation as being on his part, not theirs. He serves them.

Tonight let’s sit with Martin Smith’s question as we think about the events we witness tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday. What would you like Jesus to do for you? In our liturgy last Sunday we all shouted “Crucify him!” as part of the dramatized Palm Sunday reading of the Passion Gospel. If you’re anything like me, you’ve thought a lot this Lent about the many and myriad ways in which you regularly let God and Jesus down. Fair enough.

But it’s too simple to say that we are only the crowd in that Gospel. It’s more true to say that we are both the crowd and Jesu—betrayers and betrayed. And tonight Jesus’s act of washing his companions’ feet asks us to think about why God and Jesus are going through this whole experience of betrayal, crucifixion, and death in the first place. They are going through it for you and me. They are going through it because you and I are worth something to them. They are going through it because we’re precious enough in Jesus’s sight for it to be worth his while to wash our feet.

Maundy Thursday is both a penitential and joyous occasion: we gather both to lament Judas’s betrayal of Jesus and to give thanks for Jesus’s gift to us of the Eucharist as the way to be together in the world. As you enter into these three days of betrayal and death and resurrection, what is it that you want God to do for you? What is your need for God right now at this moment in your life? What would grace look like for you now? How do you want God to act toward and for you? How have you been betrayed or misunderstood or mocked, yourself? How would God heal and restore you in the light of that? What would new, risen life look like for you if you dared to ask for it?

"Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” If you’re like me, you’d probably rather remain in your seat than come forward and have your feet washed.  If you’re like me, you are powerfully more conscious of how much you owe than you are of what God wants you to have.  I will come forward both to wash and be washed because in so doing I am allowing both God and you to do something for me.  And letting that happen is the first step on the road to acknowledging that someone other than me is in charge of the universe.

"Unless I wash you, you have no share with me," Jesus replied to Peter. In one sense we should hear that as judgment. But, in the context of the infinite love which undergirds the mighty acts of these three great days, we should hear that as a promise, too. Jesus washed his companions’ feet; God hears our prayers not because we grovel but because we are loved. Use the time between Maundy Thursday and Easter to ask yourself and God what you need Jesus to do for you. And then do your best to live-- creatively and joyously and maybe even with a little bit of risk and a lot of love-- into the answer you hear. Amen.