Palm Sunday - Living into the Mystery of God

Here we are.  We have participated in the telling of our Lord's final meal, his betrayal and arrest, and his trial, his torture, his death on the cross. We are beginning the most holy week of the year for those who have chosen to follow Jesus Christ as our Savior. We know that a week from today we will celebrate Jesus' bursting from the tomb.  We know the resurrected Jesus will transform his dispirited disciples. We know through the power of God he will triumph over evil and death.

Yes, the joy of the resurrected Christ will come, but not today.  Today we are asked to live into the mystery that surrounds an important question:  What does Jesus' suffering and death, his passion, mean?  Or another way of asking this question is: Why did Jesus need to suffer and die?

 At first today we heard and sang “Hosanna!”  Then we heard ourselves calling out, “Let him be crucified!”  We heard Jesus' anguished cry, feeling abandoned by God, and the centurion's recognizing Jesus as God's Son.  And finally we heard  about the new tomb holding Jesus' broken, dead body being sealed shut.

What purpose lay in all these distressful events?  What is the mystery into which we have to live to understand them?

That mystery is the mystery of God. On this day and through this week, we have the possibility to go deep.  To come to know the Holy One who sustains us, who loves us, who came to live as a human being, who obeyed and offered himself in love to defeat the power of death-dealing evil.

The mystery of God cannot be found in theology or in Bible study or even in preaching.  All these inform our journey into the mystery, but they are not the mystery.  Experiencing the mystery of God—our Creator who redeems us and sustains us—comes from encountering the living God in a moment out of chronos, out of human time.  It comes in kairos, a moment in the time of God.

Jesus sent his disciples to secure a place where they could share the Passover meal by telling them to say, “Go into the city to a certain man, and say to him, 'The Teacher says, my time [kairos] is near.'”

Was participating in the dramatic reading of Matthew's passion gospel a kairos moment for us, an experience of the mystery of God?  It may have been. Will receiving the body and blood of Christ at the Eucharist be such a time?  Will it come some day this week in prayer or in worship?  It may.

May God grant us such moments this week.  For in these moments our lives become caught up in the mystery of God.  Words may fail us, but we will know . . . we will know.

The 5th Sunday of Lent - Given New Life

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.  Lord, hear my voice!  Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.  So begins Psalm 130, identified as De profundis in Latin, meaning “out of the depths.”  Our English word “profound” comes from the Latin word.  How profound is our desire for God to listen to us, when we express our needs?  Some folks label this sort of prayer as a “foxhole” prayer.  When things are desperate enough, we pray out of our profound need at the moment.  Then afterwards . . . depending on how things worked out . . . we are temporarily elated or angry or doubting, but then we revert to our usual patterns of life.

Behavioral psychologists have determined that intermittent reward works best for establishing behavior patterns that resist decay.  So if we believe that God answers prayers more readily the harder we pray, our praying behavior will be strengthened when we receive a positive result only occasionally and randomly.  If we think God behaves this way, then God seems capricious and manipulative—not a God I'd particularly want to believe in.

But, instead, if we view God as wanting to know what is on our hearts and in our thoughts—if we view God as loving us and accepting whatever we bring in prayer—then as the psalmist did, we can “wait” for the Lord and “hope” in God's Word.

The prophet Ezekiel's vision of the valley with dry bones came when his people, God's chosen people, languished in slavery in Babylon.  For most of the people, this was not forced labor in the sense of the Israelites' slavery in Egypt at the time of Moses.  The top members of society had been carried off from Jerusalem to pacify the captured province.  If the best and the brightest went to Babylon, they would not cause trouble for the Babylonian authorities and their puppet rulers.  In Babylon they could help create prosperity for their captors—and many of the exiles did prosper there as well.  But their captivity meant they could no longer worship God in the land they believed God had provided for them.  Despair and hopelessness characterized their plight.  Psalm 137 expresses this so clearly:  By the rivers of Babylon— there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

Through his vision of the dry bones and the breath of God that gives them life, Ezekiel understood God's way of acting in a seemingly hopeless situation.  Through Ezekiel's prophecy, God told those with little hope, “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”

Many of us who have faced the reality of a loved one's death wished that this reviving of the dry bones could be a physical reality, as well a spiritual reality.  But God was not reversing time as if the Babylonian captivity had never happened; instead God was offering the power of the Spirit to give new life in the face of hopelessness.

Certainly Martha and Mary felt hopeless when their brother, Lazarus, died.  They had such a strong faith in the healing power of Jesus that they blamed Jesus for not arriving soon enough.  Each one said to Jesus, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.  So profound was their sadness and their hopelessness that Jesus was moved to tears of empathy.  As the prophet Ezekiel experienced a sign of God's life giving Spirit in his vision, so Martha and Mary would learn what God's promise of new life meant.  Out of the depths of their grief they cried out to one in whom they believed—the one who listened to them, who wept with them, and who gave new life.

Jesus prayed to the God who listens, Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me . . . He said this prayer to demonstrate to the mourners who had gathered in Bethany that his power to give new life came from his relationship with God. But his words also revealed an aspect of God's nature:  God listens to those he loves—which just happens to be all of us—all humanity.

So then if we believe that God listens to not only the prayers we speak and think, but also the prayers we make without words, the prayers we make by our deeds, the prayers of our fears and anxieties, even the prayers of our hopelessness, we can expect that new life will come.  God's spirit will not only offer us the strength to “carry on,” but also the gift of joyful, new life.

How then can we describe our godly hope that rises from the depths of our lives?  Psalm 130 ends with these words (which I am changing a bit), People of St. Nicholas', hope in the Lord.  For with the Lord there is steadfast love and with him there is great power to redeem.

And Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life.  Those who believe in me, even though they die, they will live.

Yes, we can trust—we truly do know, as did Ezekiel and Martha and Mary, that our hope rests in God, who loves us, who listens to us and who gives us new life!

The 4th Sunday of Lent - Blindness and Sight

The sermon this Sunday was done in dialog with one of the St. Nicholas’ parishioners.  The following reflects some of the points we talked about.

As we listen to the story of Jesus healing the man born with blindness from the Gospel of John, there are several contexts we need to think about in order to understand the story.

First, John said Jesus had been teaching in the temple and so infuriated the religious authorities that they were planning to stone him.  He hid himself and left the temple in order to avoid these authorities.  Now he is just walking along with his disciples; he is not seeking conflict or looking to impress others.  However, when his disciples express concern about whose sinfulness caused the man’s blindness, Jesus decides to act.  He wants the disciples to see that God’s love does not look at sin, but about what is needed to make people whole and well.

Next, we can see the issues that concern the gospel writer and the community for whom he wrote.  At the time this gospel was written, there was much conflict between the religious authorities and those who were following Jesus’ teaching.  It was possible to be kicked out of the synagogue for claiming to follow Jesus’ way.  The issues of who was being faithful to God’s Law, who was going to be included, and who was going to be excluded clearly came to the surface in John’s telling of this story.  These questions still concern us today in our churches—often making us look to others as rigid and uncaring as the religious authorities appear here.  Institutional power looks ugly when it is practicing exclusion.

Then, we are hearing this story in the season of Lent.  During this season we are called to examine our shortcoming as a community, as well as individuals.  What are our shortcomings as Episcopalians?  What are our shortcomings in this community of St. Nicholas’?  We should be praying to discern how we have fallen short of God’s call to us as a community?

And then we should take action to remedy this. 

Finally, we are hearing this story one day before the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.   How have we been blind to the harm that injustice based on categories of race and ethnicity has done?   How can our eyes become open?   Perhaps through the power of the Holy Spirit we can become willing to see in new ways.  Our willingness and the power of the Spirit may lead us with John Newton, a former captain of a slave ship who became an Anglican priest, to proclaim:  “Amazing grace . . . ‘Twas blind, but now I see.”

Third Sunday of Lent - Baptismal Water

A baby was baptized today, so I reflected on the living water that Jesus offered the Samaritan woman whom he met at the well.  


Although my homily was not given from a full text, these were my main thoughts:

Through this living water we die with Christ and are raised with Christ.

Through this living water we are cleansed from sin.

Through this living water we experience God’s gift of salvation through Christ, washing over us without concern for our worthiness.

The water is also a visible sign of the deeper reality of God.  St. Patrick expressed this deeper reality poetically and completely in these words: “Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me; Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.” 

The deeper reality of God’s action in [name of child]’s life today makes us joyful, gives us cause to celebrate—for God’s saving grace expressed through the water of baptism will make [name of child] one of God’s saints—just as the water of baptism has made everyone of us one of God’s saints, a member of Christ’s body.  For this act of love let us give God glory, thanks and praise!

2nd Sunday of Lent - Nicodemus seeks understanding

About a thousand years ago St. Anselm of Canterbury (in England) chose as a motto, “faith seeking understanding.”  He was concerned that people’s belief in God might come through un-thoughtful acceptance of what they had been told.  Although his work is mostly read today by seminarians and academic types, his motto offers us a lens through which to read scripture and to engage in discussions about it.  It also offers us a lens through which we can charitably view religious or theological disagreements.

  Many of us today view the word “heresy” as a rather archaic term.  In the early church and for several centuries discussions of God's nature generated much heat and sometimes resulted in banishment for heresy.  Were God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit co-equal and co-eternal?  The pro and con positions on this issue became much like political parties, except they were in the church.  However, today most of us hardly give a thought about nature of the Trinity—except on the first Sunday after Pentecost.

Yet the church's legacy of disputes, resulting in the exclusion of some folks for their positions on certain hot-button issues, continues to this day.  Different centuries bring different issues to divide us as Christians and cause us to forget Jesus' prayer for his followers love one another.  Anselm's concept of “faith seeking understanding . . .” rather than “faith knowing without a doubt  . . .” provides us with a way around choosing up sides and excluding those that disagree with us.  This does not mean that we would be willing to believe anything and everything, but undertaking discussion in the spirit of seeking understanding can provide light, rather than heat, and allow space for the leading of the Holy Spirit in our common life as Christians.

“Faith seeking understanding” can be lived out as well as discussed.  From the account in Genesis we learn that God told Abram to go from his own country and kindred to go to a new land, Abram did so because he trusted God.  What did it mean to be promised that his family would become a great nation and all families of the earth would be blessed through him?  Abram (later Abraham) had faith that God would show him how all this would work out.  So he followed God's bidding and left all he knew behind.  Abram's going could be called, I think, “faith seeking understanding.”

Nicodemus, a Jewish religious leader whom we heard about from the Gospel of John this morning, had faith.  Nothing in the gospel indicates otherwise.  He sought out Jesus and engaged in a dialog with him.  He seemed to be seeking to understand who Jesus truly was.  Was he the Messiah, foretold by the prophets, for whom the Jews were waiting?  Was this the man who would establish God's rule of justice and peace?

Can we compare ourselves to Nicodemus?  Do we have faith, but still have questions about Jesus—in particular, about his teachings?  We don't have Jesus with us to ask him directly.  So how can we gain the understanding we wish we had?

As Episcopalians we believe that Holy Scripture provides all things necessary for salvation, but we also believe that we must use our reason to interpret scripture.  We must pose questions when we study scripture, just as Nicodemus did to when he went to see Jesus.  Nicodemus showed respect for Jesus by seeking Jesus out.  Through challenging Nicodemus to think more deeply about the issues he raised, Jesus shows respect for the importance of Nicodemus' concerns.  The questions we pose when we study scripture show our respect for God's holy Word.  God will honor our questions by leading us to a deeper understanding if we allow our minds to be open to the Spirit's leading in the context of our Christian community.

But let's return to Nicodemus.  Nicodemus appeared to want confirmation that Jesus was a teacher “come from God.”  Instead of replying, “Well, of course, I'm from God—you said you'd seen my signs, right?” Jesus kicked the dialog up a notch by telling Nicodemus a person must be transformed in order to see God's rule of justice and peace.  Jesus' words have become a well-known sound bite, “. . . no one can see the kingdom of God with out being born again.”   The Greek word, anothen, sometimes translated “again,” can be understood in several senses—“again,” “anew,” or “from above.”  Some Christians have made a litmus test of this statement:  if you are not born again (as they define it—usually as a dramatic emotional experience) you have not been “saved.”  Jesus did not appear to be creating a litmus test, but used the words “born again” as a way to draw Nicodemus into a deeper understanding of how the rule of God will happen.

The power of God through God's Spirit, God's wind, God's breath—pneuma in Greek—can transform us, make us new, give us a rebirth and make us fit for the kingdom.  Then Nicodemus asked, “How?”  After a brief expression of exasperation—you should understand this, Nicodemus, since you are well-educated—Jesus launched into an explanation of how he will be the Messiah of God:  “For God so loved the world . . .”

This verse, John 3:16, must be the most famous quote from the New Testament—maybe from the entire Bible.  And yet when we read or listen to this passage from the Gospel of John, we must remember Jesus' purpose—not to condemn Nicodemus or exclude Nicodemus—but to draw him in.  Is God trying to draw us in as well?  Seeking to open our minds and our hearts to the power of God's spirit, to the power of God's love—so we may be transformed into kingdom people—just, merciful, and humble.

So we must ask ourselves—how do we understand the phrase “everyone who believes in [Jesus] may not perish but may have eternal life?”  What do we think about the phrase in the next verse after those we heard this morning that appears to indicate salvation depends on “believing in the name of the only Son of God?”  Are these litmus tests to exclude some folks from heaven, or are they invitations to go deeper into God's heart, to strengthen our faith by seeking to understand how God loves each of us and how God loves all of us.  To use a rather modern turn of phrase:  is this passage calling us to embrace our inner Nicodemus—a somewhat clueless, although educated, fellow whose faith was most clearly seeking understanding?

1st Sunday in Lent - Resisting Temptations

“Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil.”  “Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil.”

The prayer that Jesus taught his disciples—what we call the Lord's Prayer—drew from Jesus' experience in the wilderness.  He also said his disciples should pray:  “May thy kingdom thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  “Give us this day our daily bread.”  The strong connection between Jesus' testing in the wilderness and his understanding of God's way seems clear.  Each of Jesus' wilderness temptations and the need to resist them, trusting in God no matter what, finds expression in this prayer.  Indeed, Jesus' temptation in the wilderness provided a foundation for his entire ministry.   For Jesus' responses to the personification of evil—Satan, the tempter—demonstrated his commitment to the mission God began with the incarnation of God's self.   Jesus of Nazareth—fully God, yes; but fully human as well.  In his humanity Jesus revealed a deep trust in God's protection. His trust in God was firm as he resisted these three temptations.  He answered each of Satan challenges with a quote from the Torah, specifically quotes from the 6^th and 8^th chapters of Deuteronomy.

Both St. Matthew and St. Paul wrote to show the first century followers of Jesus, and by proxy us, exactly who Jesus was.  They want those who hear or read their texts “to learn Jesus.”  This phrase “to learn Jesus” is used by contemporary scholars to indication a path of faith in Jesus, rather than a path of trying to know the Jesus of history.  By “learning Jesus,” these scholars say, we will strengthen our faith and our trust in God.  By “learning Jesus” we prepare to become his disciples who follow him and put his teachings into practice.  How appropriate this process is for Lent!

Let us turn first to St. Paul's letter to the Romans as a means of  “learning Jesus.”  St. Paul tells us in his Letter to the Romans that Jesus came to earth and live as one of us and be God's free gift of grace. Jesus came to repair the breach in humanity's apparent close relationship with God before we learned about good and evil.  I say “we,” not Adam and Eve, because I am certain the writer of the second and third chapters of Genesis would draw a direct line between humanity's failure in the Garden of Eden and humanity's failure now to love God with all our heart and mind and strength and our neighbors as ourselves.  

St. Paul certainly agreed with this connection.  He says: “Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned.”  Protestant reformers called this “the utter depravity of human nature.”   “Learning Jesus” will lead us to reach out to him and accept God's free gift of grace and, with it, our “justification” in God's eyes.  Jesus came to show us God's love—even when it meant facing the power on evil in the world on the cross.  Through the cross Jesus repaired the breach between humanity and God—as Jesus was “beloved” by God, so God's love for us has been made clear in Jesus.  So then our sinful nature will no longer separate us from God's love.  God's loving grace becomes ours to claim!

Now let us turn to the gospel written by Matthew.  What does he tell us to help us “learn Jesus?”  He shows us the deep roots Jesus had as a faithful Jew.  The amount of time Jesus spent in the desert wilderness parallels the amount of time Moses spent on Mt. Sinai  (Exodus 24, Deuteronomy 9) communing with God and receiving two tablets of stone with the revelation of the Law and the commandments.  It also parallels the time Elijah spent on Mt. Horeb when encountered God in the sound of sheer silence (I Kings 19).  Matthew want those who listened to or read his gospel to know that Jesus' experience in the desert was as important as the experiences of the great men of God before him. 

Matthew also puts the title for Jesus “Son of God” in the mouth of Satan.  That was one of the kingly titles the Roman emperor used.  Matthew shows Jesus rising above the temptation to claim earthly power and prestige.  With that sort of power, Jesus' offering his life out of love to cover our sinfulness would make no sense.  By rejecting the path of Satan offers, Jesus honors the path of obedience to God's way, confronting the evil of the world with only the weapon of God's Word.  So the Jesus we learn in Matthew's gospel has deep roots in the faith of his ancestors and a commitment to live out that faith despite extraordinary temptations to live more spectacularly and with great power.

Whom have you known or known about who had “learned Jesus” well enough to follow this path of fidelity to God's way—in the face of very attractive temptations?  Patrick Willson, a Presbyterian pastor, in a commentary on this passage writes that Matthew's account of Jesus' temptation resists practical application for keeping a holy Lent.  Perhaps so, but I believe it—and the theology St. Paul shared in his letter to the Romans—both these have real application for living a holy life.  As Christians, we should trust in God's love and grace, as seen in Jesus' life, death and resurrection.  Then because of that trust, we will find the strength to resist the temptations in our world.  We can recognize the temptation to make wrong choices, arising from our desire to never lack for anything, our desire to have fail-safe security, and our desire to always have the power to control any situation.  These are our temptations today that parallel the ones Jesus faced. Then with the strength we have gained in “learning Jesus,” we can resist these temptations in our lives—and in our society—as we seek to follow God's way as seen in Jesus.

Reference:  Patrick Willson, commentary on Matthew 4: 1-11, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol 2, p. 45.

The Last Sunday after the Epiphany - Transformation and Attentiveness

The seasons after Epiphany and after Pentecost are elastic.  The longer the season after Epiphany, the later the date of Easter, and the shorter the season after Pentecost.  This happens because the date of Christmas in our Christian calendar is fixed and the date of Easter moves around—controlled by the lunar calendar.  Easter is the first Sunday after the full moon on or after the vernal or spring equinox.  According to an ancient church computation the vernal equinox for the church always comes on March 21. So the earliest Easter Day  is March 22 and the latest is April 25.  So this year the season of Epiphany which stretches from the coming of the Magi until Ash Wednesday is as long as it could ever be—9 Sundays.

Vestments and altar furnishings for these two seasons are green.  After this Sunday you won't see green again until after Trinity Sunday, June 19^th this year.  Then our liturgical color will be green until Christ the King Sunday, just before Advent begins.

So the arrangement of the church calendar has a practical aspect of fitting things in between fixed Christmas and moveable Easter.  But there is also a theological aspect as well.  From Advent, through Christmastide and the date of Epiphany we focus on the coming of Jesus into our world—the Incarnation of God.  Then from Lent, through Eastertide until the day of Pentecost—we focus on Jesus life—his ministry, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension and his sending the Holy Spirit to empower his disciples.

But during the “Green Season” —Ordinary Time—we focus on what it means to live as followers of Jesus Christ.  Green is the color we associate with the growth of plants. Jesus, in a parable, compared our faith to seed.  Seed appears dead until green sprouts are sent up from where it is buried in the ground., nourished by water and sunshine.  We are asked to reflect during the green seasons on how we are growing in our relationship with God and how we are expressing our Christian faith in our lives.

The word “metamorphosis,” a word from Greek that has come directly into English, can be used to describe how a seed changes form and structure to become a plant.  Metamorphosis could also be used to describe what Peter, James and John witnessed on the mountain when Jesus' face shown “like the sun” and his garments become “dazzling white,”  Metamorphosis might also be used to describe what happened in the lives of the apostles and the other followers of Jesus when the Holy Spirit empowered them to leave their fear behind and go forth to witness to the good news of Jesus Christ.

The question for us becomes how do we understand our encounters with Christ whether through worship and prayer, in the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist, through service to others, or through encounters with others whose lives may attract or scare us.  Are we aware of the metamorphosis, or transformation, that God encourages in each of us in many different ways?   And through this transformation we will see Christ more clearly, love Christ more dearly, and follow Christ more nearly.

Missionaries are folks who have embraced God's encouragement to lived transformed lives. Today is World Mission Sunday on our Episcopal calendar, and we are blessed to have Maria and Canon Joseph Tucker worshipping with us today.  Mission can be defined as ministry across a dimension of difference.  Sometimes that dimension of difference is cultural.  Maria and Joseph became refugees from their home country of Sierra Leone because of war.  In becoming part of the life of our diocese and of our parish, they have offered us a chance to be grow in our faith and be transformed by widening our view beyond Delaware and beyond our shores.  They have participated as representatives from the Diocese of Delaware in the Global Episcopal Mission Network.  They have returned twice before to Sierra Leone as Volunteers-in-Mission, being a connection between Delaware and Sierra Leone that has led to many baptisms and commitments to follow Jesus Christ there.  On Tuesday they leave for one last mission trip.  May God bless them and their mission, and may God bring them safely back to us.

Perhaps in each of our lives we can point to moments of transformation when something happened and we changed.  Usually only recognized in hindsight, these can be either positive or negative moments, but after them we became someone we had not been before.  An emotional religious conversion experience, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one—we are different now because of these moments.  Usually, however, transformation happens more gradually.  Look back at a yearbook from your high school days or photographs from your childhood.  How much has changed?  How much has been transformed?

Are you more aware of God's glory, the light of Christ in your hearts than you were when that picture was taken?  In reflecting on his experience in seeing the Transfiguration of Jesus with Moses and Elijah, St. Peter wrote: “You do well to be attentive to this [God's voice in this experience] as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”  Are we responding to God's seeking us—seeking to transform us—by our attentiveness in worship, in prayer and in the sacraments?  Are we responding to God, as we look for Christ's image in those folks with whom we share our lives?

Perhaps this should be our Lenten discipline—not giving up chocolate or the internet per se—but ordering our lives, so we may be more attentive to God's seeking us—more attentive to how God may be calling us to live transformed lives, as we endeavor to follow the example of Jesus Christ, our Savior and our Lord.