21 July 2015 - The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost Proper 10

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

I’ve been so glad to see the cooler weather come back.  When I’m at home, I’ve been holed up in my basement for the last several weeks confined to my study which we fondly call “the Man Cave.”  It’s about 10 degrees cooler down there and then with a fan it gets quite comfortable.  But after a while it can be a bit oppressive so I’ve gone to the other side of the basement at times which is storage, the furnace and the washroom, and done some organizing.  I was rummaging through a box when I stumbled upon a very old binder inside of which I found, of all things, all the handouts from my Confirmation class – written on parchment.  And when I read this morning’s cheery Gospel reading, my mind went back to my Confirmation class those many years ago. 

We had studied all the important facts of the Christian faith: the Ever-blessed Trinity, the Humanity and Divinity of Christ, the Seven Sacraments especially the Eucharist and Baptism.  We’d memorized the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds and giggled through the Creed of St. Athanasius. We learned how to use the Prayer Book and it’s place in the faith of the Anglican Church.  It was all somewhat interesting though on occasion rather dry.  But the Rector did his best to make it interesting and at times even fun. 

One Saturday morning he said, “You’ve been learning all the academic stuff about the Christian Faith – the nuts and bolts of belief.  But this morning we’re going to learn about what it means to put those beliefs into practice; what it really means to be a follower of Jesus.”

He then proceeded to open his big, black Prayer Book/Bible combination and read to us the story of the beheading of St. John the Baptist.  Of course, we boys were thrilled with all the intrigue and gore and the girls just shrieked at it – probably more appropriately.

After the reading, the Rector said, “Being a Christian is not about belief.  It’s about action.  It’s about following Jesus and being willing to face even death for what is right and true and moral.”  We then proceeded to enter into a conversation about what was really going on in this gruesome episode of the Gospel of Mark.

First off, we found out that John the Baptist was in jail because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.  By the time of his arrest, John was very popular and very influential within Jewish religious society.  People eagerly listened to him.  He was a prophet.  And he’d been loudly criticizing Herod’s marriage to his dead brother’s wife.  This was not Herod the Great of the Christmas stories, but Herod Agrippa his son.  His wife, Herodias, had probably been a main instigator of the marriage having been previously married to a nobleman and not willing to give up the lifestyle, power, prestige and wealth that went along with it.  But John saw this as nothing less than incest and had been screaming about it for a while and turning public opinion against Herod and especially Herodias.  So, she had a grudge and was out for blood.

The second thing we learned is that if one does the math, this being a second marriage, their daughter, Herodias named after her mother, couldn’t’ve been more than nine or ten years old.  This little creepy fact tells us that the poor girl was manipulated into her mother’s web of revenge.  I mean, what ten year old girl knows what to ask for in such a setting?  So, naturally she runs to her mother and asks what to ask for.  And Herodias had a plan: to silence John for good!

The Rector continued, “Morality is not something confined to what happens behind closed doors. In fact,” he said, “much of what happens behind closed doors is nobody’s business unless someone is being injured or abused.”  He went on to say that morality is a much broader issue and has to do with the degradation of human dignity.  That which claims that certain people are less than human or disposable or relegates them to poverty, hunger or war

is what is truly immoral.  John seems to have either known Herodias or her reputationand her scheming and manipulation of people for her own benefit.At least for John, this was beyond the limits of morality.     He’d probably even used her as a teaching tool while preaching to the crowds.  And it had cost him his head.

The Rector continued, “Being a Christian is not just about reciting Creeds and elaborate rituals.  Those things are fine and good, but their function is to give usthe courage to be willing to stand for what is right and just and moral in the face of institutional and individual greed and selfishness which doesn’t care who gets rolled over in the process. 

Being a Christian is about standing up for those who have no one to stand up for them; about being the voice for the voiceless; about standing with the poor and the outcast and the marginalized and the unloved in the face of criticism and even the threat of death because that’s what John the Baptist did.  In fact, it’s what Jesus did on steroids.  Jesus confronted the establishment of his time with their greed and arrogance and disregard for human dignity and demanded an end to it all.  He threatened their wealth and their power and their prestige so much so that their only option was to shut him up too.”

Now, of course, we listening to all this were about twelve years oldso we were starting to get a bit nervous and uncomfortable.  I mean, at that age, being told that we were called to go to the gallows for a cause was a bit overwhelming as well as a big heavy.  But then, the Rector asked,“What happened after Jesus was crucified?”  We all looked at each other until one of the boys said, “They buried him.”  The Rector said, “Yeah. OK. What happened after that?”  One of the girls chimed in gleefully, “He rose from the dead.”  “Bingo!” said the Rector.  “Jesus is raised from the dead showing that the powers of evil and even death itself are no match for the Source of truth and love and morality and peace and justice which is the very Being of God.  In other words, when we follow John the Baptist and Jesus himself and willingly give our lives for the sake of what’s right, the result is new life and transformation and Resurrection.  It may not happen overnight, but it has a cumulative effect and in the end the powers of evil never had any hope at all.” 

He then took out a file folder in which there were several photos.  The first was of Jesus but the rest were of people from our own time:  Martin Luther King; Mohandas Gandhi; Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement; Dietrich Bonheoffer, the German Pastor who had stood up against Hitler;  Nelson Mandela who at that time was still in prison.  We passed the pictures around the room, reading the blurbs on their reverse side about these remarkable and at times even non-Christian people.  And as we did, the Rector said to us, “This, my friends, is what it means to be a Christian.  These are the things that are not negotiable.”

When the Bishop came soon afterwards to administer the Sacrament of Confirmation to us, he had an hour before the Liturgy with us all to make sure that we were prepared to reaffirm our faith in Jesus Christ.  Afterwards, he asked the Rector, “Where did these kids get all this stuff about being willing to give one’s life for the Gospel?”  The Rector smiled, “From the Scriptures and the Saints.  Where else?”  The Bishop then too smiled and said, “Good work!  These kids may change the world yet!”

I have to admit that I’ve not, as of yet, changed the world and I haven’t heard the names of the others in that Confirmation class in the news.  But I have listened recently to the decisions of the Supreme Court upholding the dignity of the human being especially in ensuring that everyone has access to health care no matter their economic standing.  I followed online the proceedings of General Convention in Salt Lake City as the Episcopal Church reaffirmed its commitment to Christ and for justice and peace among all people and respect for the dignity of every human being among a myriad of issues – rather than seeking the security and safety of the institution.  And in these things had taken place because many, many people had followed the examples of Christ and John the Baptist and put their lives on the line for the truth.And as we continue to hear of the horror stories of terror on far away shores and murders in Churches in our own land, I still have hope because I know that in the end, if we are willing to do more than just “believe,” but truly have faith, that we and people of good will of every stripe will continue to bring transformation and new life and Resurrection to our world. 

As the years, OK, decades, have rolled by since that Confirmation class, I’ve struggled with the idea of being like John the Baptist or even Jesus himself.  I’m not very good at it.  Part of me is a confirmed and devout coward.  But then, I remember that I’m not called to give my life as an individual but as part of a community of faith called to give its life for the truth.  And so we come here, week after week, to support each other in our mutual calling and to celebrate the fact that the Living Christ dwells deeply in our midst and to be fed by him so that at least my cowardice and our courage can be fortified and we can continue the mission of transforming the world for the sake of him who gave his life for the world and calls us to do the same: Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

TRINITY SUNDAY 2014 AT CHRIST CHURCH PUYALLUP

THE SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS 2013

In the Name of the Incarnate One. Amen.

For my Advent devotions this year, I decided to reread the Early Church Fathers on the Incarnation. Now, before you roll your eyes and utter word that aren’t supposed to be uttered in Church, let me confirm that, yes, the old boys are as dry as the Sahara. And they’re not the best writers in the world when it comes to syntax and the like. But within that Sahara are little oases of profound beauty that can bring tears to the eye.

They all seem to have different perspectives on many things, but about one thing they are in accord: that Divine Being, whom we call God, is ultimately transcendent; that Divine Being cannot be known; God is immutable – unchanging, without passions nor emotions because God is beyond such things and the Creator of such things. God is not compassionate nor loving nor merciful nor just. God IS all compassion, the fullness of all love, mercy itself and ultimate justice. God is so totally other that no created entity can have access to Divine Being who is beyond time and space and all human knowledge. Divine Being is all knowledge, all sight and all power and in need of nothing, including us.But the Fathers are quite certain about another facet of Ultimate Divine Being: that within the Being of God is also Hagia Sophia, or Divine Wisdom, a feminine aspect of God, through whom all things came into being, all creation was created, who was the Prime Mover when the Big Bang went off billions of years ago. And it is this Divine Wisdom that has permeated the Universe and brought all things to life.

Have I lost you yet? Thought not.

It is this Hagia Sophia that sprung up in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.This Holy Wisdom filled with power and love and compassion and mercy and justice became vulnerable to the living things on this planet by being born, by taking flesh,  by, as St. John says in the Greek of this morning’s Gospel, “pitching a tent” among us, as one of us in the normal human way. It is this Holy Wisdom that pitched a tent  through the obedience of an unwed peasant girl and her finance in a backwater region of a third rate territory of the Roman Empire.

But the question remains: Why? Why would Divine Being and Holy Wisdom pitch a tent among such beings as us? The Fathers, in their dryness also address this question. It was not so that the Word made Flesh could be offered up as a sacrifice for sin. That idea didn’t surface until Saint Anselm in the 11^th Century an Archbishop Canterbury no less. Then the Protestant Reformers got hold of it and took it to its absurd conclusions.

No, Divine Being and Holy Wisdom became one of us God became human – so that humanity could understand its own divinity, say the Fathers. Not that humans become the Godhead, but humanity understands and claims the fact that inside each one of us, inside every human being dwells the Holy and Divine One whom we cannot understand. And such understanding changes everything.

Such understanding awakens in us the emotions and passions of love and mercy and compassion and justice. Such understanding creates within us the desire to take action. Such understanding urges us on to love those who are unlovable, to embrace those who are oppressed and outcast, to sit in solidarity with the poor, the lonely and the unloved, to seek peace not only as the absence of conflict but peace deep within the human soul. The Fathers are clear about one thing: that the Word became Flesh so that God could touch us and that we could touch the Transcendent God. The Word, that Holy Wisdom that John calls the Logos, pitched a tent among us so that the divinity with us could be Holy Divinity through us to those who cannot touch or see or experience it. God became human in Jesus of Nazareth so that humanity could touch and see and feel the very face of God. God became human so that we can recognize the divinity alive in each other and even within ourselves. And when that recognition comes, we come to realize just how beloved we truly are; that despite the transcendence of the Holy One, God comes to live among us to reveal to us just how much, deep within the Mystery of God, that that Divine Love is for us.

And so, since around the year 325, the Faithful have gathered each year around the time of the old pagan feast of the Unconquered Sun to remember who and what we are. And each year, we tell the stories of the miraculous birth of the Christ Child and sing carols of praise the words of which we all know by heart even though we only sing them once a year. And we exchange gifts in memory of the gifts brought to that most Holy Child by the Astrologers from the East and in thanksgiving to God for the gift of that Holy Child.

But, most importantly, we gather to remember that the Incarnation is not just a one time event. We gather to remember that God continues to become flesh in us and through us: in a smile to the homeless man selling Real Change in the hours spent in silence with a grieving friend in our care for those for whom no one else cares in our making the cranky check-out clerk laugh in our rejoicing with the joyful in our love for our families and friends and loved-ones in our feasting and in our laughter. And through all of it, the Transcendent and Unknowable One comes and pitches a tent among us through that most Holy Wisdom, through that Word made Flesh who was, and is, and ever shall be, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

10 November 2013

The 25th Sunday after Pentecost

As many of you know, I am not a great fan of Saint Augustine – the great 5th Century theologian of the Western Church who foisted his own personal guilt on us all with his concept of Original Sin. However, on occasion, Augustine had the right idea. One day, he was asked what God was doing before the creation of the universe. He replied, “creating Hell for those who ask stupid questions.” Now, most of us Anglicans left Hell in the dust centuries ago, but I get his point. And Augustine would have had no time whatsoever for the Sadducees in this morning’s Gospel lesson.

The Sadducees were a very small but powerful sect within Judaism. They were the Calvinists of their time. They didn’t believe in resurrection because they had no need to. Sadducees were very rich because, at least to them, God had blessed them in particular. They had all that heaven could provide here on earth and they saw the afterlife as rather a moot point. When you’re dead, you’re dead having had heaven on earth. Those who were not blessed as they were obviously had not received the blessings of God because they weren’t good enough. And of all things, that wasn’t the Sadducees’ problem. And, of course, for them the idea of resurrection was just plain silly.

On the other hand, there have been those throughout the centuries for whom the needs of the less fortunate were also not their problem. These folks – among them many 18th and 19th Century Anglican clergymen, had no problems with the huge divide between the rich and the poor and the conditions under which the latter worked and survived. These folks believed that such people would be rewarded in the afterlife so why worry about this one. If the poor had Jesus in their hearts, they’d be just fine.

We might observe that Our Lord in this morning’s Gospel is certainly kinder than St. Augustine - though I figure that even Our Lord himself was a bit exasperated by the Sadducees’ question certainly not asked in innocent inquiry. Of course, they were trying to pick a theological fight. Whether we like it or not, and no matter how much the Gospels rail against them, Our Lord was born and raised in the Pharisaic tradition of Judaism. He believed in resurrection. His beef with the Pharisees was their hypocritical insistence on ritual purity. But when it came to the resurrection, they were on the same page. The Pharisees were of the opinion that when the Messiah came, the righteous would be resurrected to live in new messianic age.

What no one seemed to know or understand, including Our Lord himself, was that the resurrection was much more than that for which they had bargained. The question of what the Resurrection of Jesus even was has stumped theologians since the day Our Lord peeked out from the tomb. Earliest scriptural references to the Resurrection are the Risen Christ as bright light knocking St. Paul off his horse on the way to Damascus, or a very gauzy figure. It’s not until the end of the First Century and the writing of the Gospel of John, that Our Lord takes on very human bodily forms. But for our purposes this morning, that question will need to continue to be a sacred mystery. At the same time, no one was expecting the Resurrection or else they’ve all been camped outside the tomb filing their nails, just waiting for the stone to move. What really happened, we don’t know. No one had a video camera to bear witness to the events that followed. But what we DO know is that a power stronger than even death itself brought new and abundant life to a small group of Jewish women and men that changed the entire course of human history. It was the power of the Resurrection that gave this little band of people the power and courage and outrageously intense desire to go into the world with the message of God’s unrelenting love for the human race. And it was their joy and compassion and mercy, their refusal to judge and condemn, being God for the world, that brought new and abundant life to millions. And it is this new and abundant life of which we have become inheritors.

We come and sit in this Church every Sunday morning to bare witness that the Resurrection has touched our lives in the most intimate of ways. It is the knowledge of God’s outrageous love for us and all people that brings us back each week. It’s knowing that there is a place where the Gospel of Jesus is lived out: a place where we know that we might be challenged, but never judged nor condemned because such things are not the Gospel. It is living with the security that when life happens we have a resurrected community to hold us in the dark times and lift a glass of Champagne with us in our joy - a community to be Christ for and with us. It is being part of a cause, the ultimate cause of Christ himself, that stands up to challenge the wolves in sheep’s clothing who still preach the purity laws and condemnation of which the Pharisees were so fond in our own day. It is indeed Christ’s own Resurrection which lavishly provides a place where we belong a place for us to call home.

I have always refused to talk about fund raising in Church. I always let someone else do that. That’s what Stewardship committees are for. But I’ve changed a bit. I’ve come to realize that stewardship isn’t about raising money though it might be a byproduct. Stewardship is knowing what we have and who has given it to us and not wanting to keep it just for ourselves. We are not stewards of just our checkbooks. We are stewards of the Gospel. We are stewards of the very power that raised Jesus from the dead which has brought the possibility of new and abundant life to every human being on this planet. And we are stewards of the power of that Gospel in our own little corner of the world on First Hill.

When Ron and I have our yearly conversation about what we’re going to give to the Church, it’s not about the money. Sure, we talk about dollars and cents. But ultimately, it’s about what those dollar and cents mean and what they accomplish. Our paltry little contribution to the whole increases the chances that some poor soul who’s been beaten up by the wolves in sheep’s clothing might find a place of refuge and new life and home and the knowledge that the love of God has no strings attached. What we give ensures that what passes as Christianity in this country is not the only voice that is heard and the peace and love which God has for us all is available to all – even the Pharisees of our own day. We give so that others might have what we have. And it insures that we continue to have a place from which to live out our faith in Jesus and be supported in living the life and Gospel to which he calls us with those who have become our community.

And we don’t give because we ought to or because we should. Guilt is never a good or positive motivator. We give because we want to. We give out of a sense of deep thanks for what God has given us - what God has given to everybody whether they know it or not.

With Ron’s Jewish roots, we make an investment in the thing that we value the most and to the One whose investment in us is our ultimate joy. And we make that investment because this is home. It’s the place we belong. It’s the place where we are fed and nurtured and have the privilege of feeding and nurturing others.

I invite you to invest with us, to invest in our mutual home: for all that it is and for all that it can be.

Some of us may only spend an hour or so a week here. And what’s one hour or so out of 168 minus the 56 we are asleep? Some of us may spend more than that. But even just that one hour is the nitty gitty of what life is made. This is the place – even for that one hour or so – where we live into what life is really all about, - the community to whom we turn in life’s most profound moments, - the place that reminds us that we are indeed loved and lovable, - the place we can be our true selves at least for that hour and nobody snickers.

Whether the cash value of your investment is large or small is somewhat beside the point. What matters is what that investment means. It means that you value this place and that for which it stands. It means you value the Gospel which is its bedrock. And it mans you value the One who is its very bedrock. But ultimately, I invite you to invest in the One through whom God has invested in us, the One whose love for us and the world knows no bounds; the One we know in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.