There is much I revere and respect about the Roman Church, at least on a theological level.  There are also things that I don't buy into such as the Marian Dogmas, the Roman version of Purgatory, the all male priesthood and the obsessive legalism which seems to pervade her, not to mention that my take on the Gospel and the teachings of Our Lord are considered much too liberal for her tastes.


We Episcopalians and Anglicans are not immune from our own versions of hypocrisy but at least we seem to be attempting to confront them when they rear its ugly head.  However, the hypocrisy of Rome has gone to the point where it betrays the Gospel.  The fact that the hierarchy continues to diminish (a deeper word needs to be found) the abuse of children by priests while opening an all out assault on the backbone of the Church, her Nuns, is about as anti-Christian as one can get.  The hierarchy of the Roman Church has lost all credibility.  The Roman laity continue to uphold the Gospel and live the teachings of Jesus while their "leaders" drag the Church further and further back into the Medieval and Dark Ages.  


I can never deny the validity of the Eucharist of the Roman Church.  It's the same as the Anglican Eucharist.  But the celebration of this most Blessed Event by the hierarchy has become an abomination in and of itself.  To celebrate the Mass while at the same time subjugating women, condemning gay people as "unnatural," accumulating wealth, power and status which could alleviate most of the suffering on the planet may just be an abomination.  Celebrating the very presence of Christ himself while denying and willingly rejecting what he taught is the very definition of sin.  Claiming to hold absolute truth while while living a lie is totally contrary to the message for which Christ went to the Cross. 


I don't want to judge the leaders of Roman Church - as Our Lord has forbidden such things, and rightfully so.  And it certainly is not the place of a simple parish priest of little status to cast aspersions on Successors to the Apostles.  But, as a baptized Christian who vows to "work for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being," to sit back and say nothing concerning these things is to give tacit approval.  As a priest, called to pastor and teach, to say nothing is to be a false witness to those to whom I am responsible.  And as a human being, to sit back and say nothing - and do nothing - while my fellow humans are degraded and belittled, even denied their full humanity, especially in the name of Christ, is to betray my own humanity.  


There is little a simple, rather insignificant (and gladly so!) Episcopal parish priest can do to set right the wrongs of another and more powerful institution, let alone his own.  But I can and do pray, and invite you to do the same.  Pray for a new heart for the Bishop of Rome and his henchmen.  Pray for strength, fortitude and courage for the Roman Catholic laity and the thousand of faithful priests and nuns that serve them.  And pray for ourselves.

O Gracious One, we pray for thy holy Catholic Church. Fill it with all truth, in all truth with all peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in any thing it is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of Jesus Christ thy Son our Savior.  

Amen. 

                 From The Book of Common Prayer (1979), adapted.

EASTER - THE GREAT FEAST OF THE RESURRECTION!

As we all know, the Gospels were written beginning a generation or so after the events of Holy Week and Easter.  These twenty-five years or so gave the fledgling Christian Community time to digest the events and try to figure out exactly what happened.  Of course, we're still trying to figure all of that out to this day.

One of the things the Evangelists did was to make the assumption that all of this was God's plan giving Jesus the words to predict his Resurrection.  But the truth of the matter is that probably not even Jesus himself knew what was going on.  If the Apostles HAD known, they'd'a taken him off to the Cross three years earlier saying, "Let's get this puppy moving!"  

And if Jesus had known, he'd've made it clear to them. They'd've been outside the tomb on that first Easter morning in a festive mood waiting to hand him a Mocha instead of the Magdalene asking Jesus if he were the gardener.

And why the outpouring of grief?  If he'd told them he'd be back, they'd'a just bided their time and "Voila! I'm back!" But grief and fear is where they were.  

I always think of three people during Holy Week: The Blessed Mother, St. John and the Magdalene.  There is no deeper or more profound grief than the death of a child no matter the age, and the firstborn makes it even worse.  Our Lady's grief has been portrayed through the centuries, but its true depth will never be fathomed.  

   St. John was Jesus' best friend.  And we know how deep friendship between straight guys can be.  But they NEVER talk about it.  And when death happens, all that pent up, never spoken emotion comes to the surface and the pain is incredible. 

   And Dan Brown wasn't the first to make the conjecture that Our Lord and the Magdalene may have been more than friends.  Such conversations were happening in the First Century among devout Christians.  However, no matter the relationship, the Magdalene loved Jesus more than any other human being.  And her grief would've been devastating. 

Given the outpouring of grief and the men in hiding, huddled in fear, no one was expecting the Resurrection.  It wasn't a minute blip on anyone's radar screen.  And I suspect it was the same for Jesus.  Otherwise, the pain of the Cross would've been assuaged by the thoughts of, "Well, I'll be back on Sunday.  No big deal."  I suspect he woke up in the tomb that first Easter morning and said to himself, "WOW! This is what Dad was talking about.  COOL!!"  If Jesus' suffering was truly redemptive, then it would have to have been true suffering, not just some temporary state that would be over soon.

And on a human level, the Resurrection doesn't make sense.  As humans, if someone had murdered our child, we'd be, "OK, EVERYBODY OUTA DA POOL!" and destruction of epic proportion would begin! 

But instead of celestial devastation, God raises Jesus from the dead.  Instead of wrath, God proves, once again, that the powers of love and compassion and mercy and justice and peace are infinitely and ultimately stronger than the human beings at their absolute worst and even death itself.  And the Risen Christ emerges from the tomb alive and whole. 

The Resurrection is the pivotal moment in human history.  It's the moment when God acts as God has never acted before....or since...at least with such intensity.  It is that moment when earth and heaven meet and humanity is reborn.  And as magnificent as that moment it, it's not JUST about Jesus.  Its also about us. 

I know for a fact that every one of us in this Church this morning have found ourselves nailed to a cross at one time or another.  We've all found ourselves betrayed or publicly humiliated, or the powers of death have overcome the people we love or us.  We've all been at that moment when we were at the bottom of the barrel and there was no way out.  There was no hope.  The only thing was to wait...wait for death to overtake us either physically or metaphorically.  Hope was dead and no one could bring us back.  No one.  

And then....

God steps in and removes the nails and gently takes us down from the cross and walks us through the tomb into the cool morning of the garden.  And we are new.  Like Jesus, we're not exactly who we were when we were nailed up, but we're still here, alive and becoming whole with the hope of becoming something new.

   When we are at the end of our ropes, God steps in unexpectedly and the same power that raised Jesus from the dead raises us to new and abundant life.  

That same power that raised Jesus from the dead is continually transforming our world and has been since the moment of Creation.  Through out human history, when things are at their bleakest, God has stepped in unexpectedly and brought the world out into the brightness of day.  And when the human race finds itself at the bottom of the barrel again, the process begins again. And one day in hopefully the not too distant future, in the twinkling of an eye, the world will be new and whole and alive. 

This is the feast of the Lord's Resurrection, our annual celebration of God raising Christ from the powers of death and destruction.  But it's also the feast of OUR resurrection.  It's not a feast to look into the future to see ourselves resurrected after this life is over.  That resurrection is a given.  Rather, it's the feast to celebrate the very fact that during this life, when all hope is lost, God unexpectedly embraces us and brings us - in this life - to new joy and peace and transformation; that the same power which raised Jesus from the dead comes and raises us too.  It's what St. Paul means when he talks about our sharing in Christ's Resurrection.

So, the next time you find yourself at the bottom of that barrel and you truly are convinced that there is no hope, know that you are not alone, that Christ himself, the Risen One, is there with you, embracing you and leading you out into the sunlight.  The Risen Christ may communicate through other people or through a book you read or through a new and unbelievable thought that races through your mind.  Or, as with the Apostles, the Risen Christ may just show up.  But however he does it, rest assured that you will be raised....you WILL be raised....into the new and abundant life of Jesus Christ our Risen Lord. 

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

Christ is Risen indeed! ALLELUIA!

PALM SUNDAY

In the Name of the Crucified.  Amen.

And so, it’s over.  Jesus is dead.  The rain comes down and Joseph of Aramathea and his friends take the body down and prepare it for burial.  The Blessed Mother cradles the head of her first born in her arms and wails as lightening splits the skies.  And she will not be comforted.

And we all know who did it.  There’s always the finger to point. “Whose fault was it?”  Mark is the first to put pen to parchment and write a Gospel -  written some forty years after the event.  By this time, the hostility between the Jewish and Christian communities was in high gear so it was easy for the author to blame the death of Jesus on the Jews. 

But in reality, there were only about fifty or so Jewish men involved in the trial and execution of Our Lord.  Between the office of the High Priest and the Sanhedrin and the Elders, it wasn’t a big group.  It may have been about the same number of Romans involved between Pilate and the court system - as well as the soldiers that played a part.  Certainly it wasn’t the whole Jewish nation responsible for the death of Christ, though that community has suffered mercilessly up to the present for a crime it didn’t commit.  And since the Roman Empire eventually converted to Christianity, of course their part in the story would be all but forgotten. 

But there remains the question of “why.”  Why did Jesus go to the cross?  Was it even necessary?

There has never been a dogma pronounced by the Church on the Atonement as has been on the dogmas of the Trinity or the Incarnation.  The meaning of Jesus’ death and what it accomplished is still open to question and debate. 

The Early Church wasn’t concerned with such questions.  To the Early Church, the death of Jesus and his subsequent Resurrection defeated the powers of sin and death.  One participated in that defeat by being a member of the Christian community.  It was very simple.

No one seriously asked any deeper questions until the coming of St. Augustine of Hippo in the 4^th Century.  Augustine had lived a life of debauchery until his conversion and then felt horribly guilty about it afterwards.  Not being able to cope, he came up with the doctrine of Original Sin – that all people, including himself – had inherited Adam and Eve’s guilt for their disobedience in the Garden of Eden, and all deserved eternal damnation because they had ticked God off to the nth degree.  Oddly enough, neither Judaism nor the Christianity before Augustine had any concept of Original Sin.  The Eastern Church never even thought about it.  In reality, it should be called “Augustine's Sin.”

It is no wonder that an Englishman named Pelagius saw through Augustine and challenged him.  But he lost and entered the realm of obscurity and was labeled a heretic.  But another Englishman, over a thousand years late, St. Anselm – then Archbishop of Canterbury – took Augustine one step further.  Anselm came up with the idea of Substitutionary Atonement, the idea that God was so angry about sin and disobedience that he wanted and deserved vengeance and retribution.  But instead God sent Jesus to pay the the price for human sin and those who believed were spared their sentence.  Somewhere, I think Anselm missed the logic.  Also smacks of child abuse.

Of course, the Continental Reformers took this to ludicrous extremes.  Calvin taught that such an Atonement was only for the elect.  The Calvinist Puritans in this country founded the legacy which led to the rise of Fundamentalism in the early 20^th Century. And Luther believed that God loathed the human race because of its sin but when He looked down from heaven, all he saw was the blood of Christ on the Baptized and had mercy on them for the blood alone, not for any worth of their own. 

 

But there is, and always has been, another school of thought surrounding the events of Jesus trial and execution – one that never got the press of the other schools because one can’t control the crowds as well - one that looks at these events from a different vantage point – a vantage point of a compassionate God, who being outside of time and space knew how the human race would turn out in the act of creation; a God who took the risk of giving humans free will knowing what we might do with it but took the risk anyway.  Vengeance and retribution from such a deity would be nothing but tyranny – a truly human trait.  Such a vantage point presents God as never being angry about sin, but profoundly saddened by it.  Such a God doesn’t require a sacrifice for sin.  But eventually that God decided to become one of us in Jesus of Nazareth to teach the world to live in compassion and mercy and peace; a God whose love for the human race was never in doubt – a love which embraced everyone, both saint and sinner.  And with that love, the world would be transformed into new and abundant life.

But such a message scares the living daylights out of us, especially those among us who are wealthy and powerful.  Teaching that all are equal in God’s eyes threatens such power and wealth because those at the bottom of the food chain come to realize that those at the top are no better than they are.  And such raising of human dignity creates the danger of insurrection and revolution.

And these hundred Jewish and Roman men and their friends felt so threatened by Jesus and what he was preaching that the only thing they could think of in response was to execute him in order to shut him up.  Kill him and be done with him.  Problem solved. 

It’s easy to point the finger at a hundred men who lived two thousand years ago.  What vile creatures they were: inhumane, vicious, cowardly men who could only respond from their own greed and fear and ignorance.  But the truth of the matter is that they were and are us.  It’s an unfortunate truism that when humans are backed into a corner we respond in the most vile of ways.  And the stronger the threat, the viler the response.  We become vicious and vindictive and, if backed far enough, murderous.  Humans responding to their own fear become irrational and violence and death frequently ensue.  Look at human history.  Well, why go that far back?  Just look at the last and present centuries: The Great War to end all wars; the Armenian Genocide; the Genocides in the Balkans, The Second World War, Vietnam, Rwanda, Iraq – twice!, the concentration camps of the National Socialists which exterminated fourteen million people, six million of them Jews still paying the price for the death of Christ.  I could go on, but you get the picture. 

The truth of the matter is that neither the hundred Jews nor Romans are solely responsible for the execution of Our Lord.  It is we humans who put Jesus on the Cross.  Those hundred men are unfortunate Sacraments: outward and visible signs of what we as humans can do and have done.  It is a humanity living out of its basest instincts of survival at any cost.  It’s easy to marginalize those hundred men, but the very truth is that they are us – us at our worst – humanity gone to the dogs.  Somehow, the message of Jesus scares us to death – literally.  For some reason, when humans are confronted with absolute compassion and mercy, we head for the hills.  We don’t believe it.  We don’t buy it – even if it’s true.  And we lash out.  And the results are beyond what the darkest places in our souls can begin to imagine.

It’s very tempting at this point for a preacher to go and sit down and get on with the Liturgy.  By now, we should all feel requisitely guilty and at the verge of despair.  But such a preacher wouldn’t be worth his or her weight in salt.  We’re Anglicans.  We’re the Catholics that don’t do guilt.  And we’re Christians that proclaim that power of God is stronger than even death itself. 

It may seem premature to talk about the Resurrection, but let’s face it, we all know how the story ends.  We’ve all bought new hats and baskets and that plastic grass stuff to go in them with the chocolate eggs and bunnies.  So, the Resurrection isn’t a new story.  But it’s the story of what life is all about.

As you all know, I have no children.  I’ve been owned by cats through the years however.  And I’ve loved those cats as if they were children.  And I know that if anyone had dared to come near one of them, I’d’ve ripped their eyes out.  And I’m sure that you who are parents have a much deeper and more profound love for your children than one can ever have for a cat.  And had I been God, which thank goodness I’m not, and the people I loved most betrayed me and executed my child, I’d’ve been, “OK!  EVERYBODY OUTA D’POOL!  THIS GAME’S OVER!”  And the suffering and devastation that would’ve followed would be epic! 

But I and you are human.  God is not.  And at the darkest moment in human history, when humanity had sunk into the pit of its worst depravity, God’s response is not vengeance nor retribution nor divine wrath, but love.  Instead of “everybody outa d’pool!” God raises Jesus from the dead – a living and breathing witness that the powers of love and compassion and mercy and forgiveness and peace are stronger than even death itself.  And that witness goes even deeper.  Not only does God raise Jesus from the dead, but God raises us too.  All of us find ourselves occasionally nailed to crosses – alone, despairing, frightened, betrayed.  And when we’re stuck in the tomb, it is the power of God that bids us into the garden, and into new life.  It is the power of God, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead, that gives us the courage and fortitude so that when we’re backed into a corner we respond with mercy and loving-kindness, with reconciliation and peace.  And it is the power of the Resurrection that holds the same promise to change and renew the world in which we live.  

Holy Week is a time for us to retell the story of the last days of our Lord.  It is an important week to remind ourselves of the loving compassion of our God.  But it is also a time for us to retell our own stories – a time for us to remember the joys of friendship and the depths of despair, a time to remember the God who enters our own tombs and brings us out into the bright sunshine of day. 

Let us walk this Week together, through the Passion and Death and Resurrection of our Lord.  Through Liturgy and sacred song, through ritual and metaphor we relive the truth that out of death comes life – and life more abundant.  For it is through his death and Resurrection that we to have new and abundant life and peace and hope; the peace of the Resurrection; the peace of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.