All Saints: "Hospitality and Discipleship: Can we Do Both?"
Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18;
Psalm 149;
Ephesians 1:11-23;
Luke 6:20-31
Preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons
I am someone who genuinely wants everyone to like me, and there is a part of me that wants to please everyone. (That might come as a surprise to some of you!) Part of me
that wants everyone to speak well of me. Sometimes I think that being liked by everyone would be a blessing, that it would be a blessing to be popular. A lot of Christians think this way, I think. Like it would be a blessing for everyone to just like us.
We are often motivated by hospitality, and welcome, and inclusion, as though the more welcoming we are, the more people will like us; and the more people like us, the more we might become an inclusive community. So the church is motivated by righteous desires, when we want people to like us.
And we should be hospitable. There is something very Christian about it, to welcome people, to be friendly.
It made me wonder, as I prepared this sermon – maybe we should begin to shed all of our unfriendly burdens. There’s so many ways that we could be even more blessed because people would like us so much more, if only we gave up things like (oh I don't know) anything distinct about being a Christian, like our belief in the divinity of Christ, or the bodily resurrection, or that pesky doctrine of the Trinity, say – all those difficult doctrines that can make Christianity so unpalatable to others. Then, people would like us, right?
I even wondered if we should give up on being good disciples, give up on living godly lives, give up on repenting for our sins, or even trying to follow Jesus. Isn’t it all just a barrier to others? Wouldn’t we rather be more like the world around us, wouldn’t we rather have everyone like us? And for people to like us, isn’t that to be blessed?
Perhaps – is it better to be sub-Christian and liked by all, than to be robustly Christian?
***
There is some logic to that, right? Minimizing our differences could make us more hospitable and friendly. It’s sure easier to get along if it’s difficult to tell the difference between Christians and the non-religious, between Christians and those of other religions. Wouldn’t minimizing our differences please others and make them feel welcome?
I wish it could be that easy. But I’ve got bad news for you. As a person who has tried and struggled with keeping everyone happy, I’ve discovered a few things. And if you've ever tried to please everyone around you, this will probably sound familiar: It's never possible to please everyone. Some people will never be pleased anyway. And in the end,
the attempt to please everyone often turns you into a person without principle.
When a person, or a community, has principles, it means saying no when some would have you say yes, and saying yes when people would have you say no. Believing in something that others don’t believe means being a person, or a community, of distinct character. It means being, believing, and acting in a way that people may not always like because there is something larger at stake than being liked by all.
***
Today we read Jesus's sermon on the plain, a summary of discipleship that does not seem to be all that concerned with pleasing anybody at all – even Jesus’s disciples, I imagine. You're not blessed when everyone likes you – not according to Jesus, in this particular sermon if his – instead, you're blessed "when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you" for his sake. "Woe to you,” says Jesus, “when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”
Jesus is not so concerned with everyone liking you; in fact, Jesus calls anyone who is universally loved a false prophet –because to be universally liked is to be without much principle, to be like by all is to always tell people what they want to hear. This will inevitably make you a liar to some people, some of the time.
Jesus doesn’t stop there: Jesus then lists some very hard, difficult, perhaps entirely impossible demands of discipleship:
Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you. Turn the other cheek. If someone steals your coat, give them your shirt too. Give to the beggars, and never, ever, ask for any of it back.
Tried that lately?
**
It looks like this kind of discipleship means not being hospitable or accommodating at all. that kind of demand is not going to be all that compelling to all strangers.
So it makes me wonder: which is it? Should we, in the interest of good Christian hospitality, conform ourselves to the ways of the world? Or should we become radical disciples, unconcerned with hospitality, or inclusion, or welcome at all? Should we find something in between, where we are kind of welcoming because we are kind of Christian disciples? Or kind of Christian disciples in order to be a little more welcoming?
I don’t have an easy answer to this, except to say that it seems to me that these two things, hospitality and discipleship, are in considerable tension, all the time. It seems hard to be both, despite the fact that God calls us to be both hospitable and disciplined.
***
When Paul calls us “to set our hope on Christ,” “the hope to which God has called” us, what he is asking us to be is a community of welcome, and a place of reconciliation: just as the world was reconciled to God in Christ in the resurrection, just as Jesus goes from death to life, so we are united as the body of Christ, and called to a new way of discipleship. We are called, in the body of Christ, to reconcile those who are near with those who are far.
The tension is there, between discipleship and welcome, but as it turns out we don’t understand one without the other. For Paul, reconciliation is a spiritual discipline, and the spiritual discipline of reconciliation is only understood within the context of the doctrine of the resurrection, that utterly unique Christian teaching about what the world is really to be like. Just as the world is reconciled to God in the resurrection, where the life of the world is welcomed into the life of God, so we too work for reconciliation amongst each other, and between the body of Christ and the world.
We could throw the Christian teaching about the Trinity in there too: by way of a solid understanding of the life of God as fundamentally a life of mutuality among three persons, Father Son and Holy Spirit, by that we grasp what Christian discipleship is, the work of deepening our own relationships and modeling them on the divine life by way of our welcoming of others, being reconciled with each other. By this we become something more than we were before: reconciled to God and one another.
Do you see it?
Being disciples, being a people sanctified by the work of God in Christ, moves us to do the work of reconciliation. True hospitality comes out of being more of a Christian disciple, true hospitality comes out of being more of a Christian believer, not less of one.
Christian discipleship and Christian believing is strangely both in tension with hospitality, let’s not deny that – but more fundamentally, Christian discipleship and believing is the reason for our hospitality, and the way we learn how to do it!
And by this call to be disciples , we will probably not always be popular; but we will be blessed, having the true freedom from saying anything or doing anything to please others. We will be blessed by the freedom to walk with God, the freedom to become Christian disciples, and the freedom to become who God is calling us to be: open, welcoming, and reconciled to the world around us, and by this, reconciled to God.
Showing posts with label RCL Year C. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RCL Year C. Show all posts
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Proper 23 (28) (2007): "The Church in Exile"
Proper 23 (28) (2007): "The Church in Exile"
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Psalm 66:1-12; 2 Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19
preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons
As I finish up this series on Jeremiah today, I thought it is a good a time as any to let you know why think that Jeremiah is so important to us, and why I’ve chosen to preach these last few of Sundays on Jeremiah.
Why Jeremiah is so important for us, in this parish and in the church more broadly, can be summed up in one word: exile. Jeremiah is important for us to read and listen to because Jeremiah speaks to a people making the transition between establishment and exile, a people making the shift away from security and into uncertainty. My hope is that by way of Jeremiah we will be able to make those same transitions, that we too will move from establishment and security, into uncertainty and exile.
Strange hope, isn’t it. Strange to hope that we might become less established, and less secure. But remember that Jeremiah hoped for the same thing – but not because he had any great desire to actually be in exile. Rather, Jeremiah’s desire was for the people to see the truth of their situation, and the truth was that the people were about to go into exile. Similarly, if we took a moment to look around us, we would also see that we act like the church is still a well established cultural force, that we are far more secure than we are, when whether we like it, want it, desire it or not, the church is well on her way into exile from the culture and the world around us. This is true here, locally at St. Mary Magdalene.
So, what do you think? Are you used to thinking this way about the church? Are you used to thinking that we are a people in exile? Is it safe to say that not that long ago, Christianity and the practices associated with Christianity, were much more common? That more people used to go to church? That most of our public institutions, like schools and places of government, wouldn't see much conflict between being a good citizen and being a Christian?
It’s fair to say that not that long ago it was respectable to be a Christian. The church could assume that people would come to worship, because that's what good citizens did. We came to church, and we prayed in school. And no civil servant, MP or MLA, would get publicly derided for getting together with other Christians to pray. You could baptize children with the assumption that they would absorb Christian values outside the church as well as in Sunday School. You could marry people assuming that the surrounding culture would support marriage as a fundamentally Christian institution.
But those days are gone. We may not be physically uprooted like the people of Judah; we may not be suffering violence at the hands of a foreign army; but if we were honest about the world around us, we would see that Christianity is far from established, and we are far from secure. We are in an exile from a world where being a Christian can no longer be taken for granted, where nominal Christian values can no longer be assumed, and where it no longer makes sense to most people to darken the door of a church come Sunday morning.
There is no longer much social advantage to being a Christian: going to church isn’t going to get you that promotion; going to church won’t get you elected shop steward; and to pray in public might mean getting sneered at.
***
A few of us are going into the neighborhood to meet with local leaders of places like schools and community clubs. It's hard to describe what its like when I call people up and say "Hello, I'm calling from St. Mary Magdalene, a local Anglican parish. We'd love to come by and get to know you."
(And that is really what we're doing, too – simply hoping to get to know leaders in the neighbourhood, in order to build a sense of what the needs in St. Vital might be. They are meetings without agendas. We don't ask people to do anything, but to let us get to know them and to get a sense of their work.)
But whenever I call, and I say "I'm calling from St. Mary Magdalene . . ." there is a very awkward silence. An anxious silence. It's like people are thinking "what in the world do the Christians want with me . . ." The first response is not trust. The first response is not warmth. The first response is anxiety.
Now, so far so good. We haven’t been turfed out and no one has said no to meeting, nor do I expect they will. Once people realize that we genuinely just want to get to know them, people warm up. But I am coming away confirmed in my suspicion that we are now somewhere in-between establishment and exile, and that we can no longer assume that Christianity and the church is a meaningful and positive part of most people’s lives.
***
Am I depressing you yet? Probably, at least a little. Exile does suck. As we lose standing in the culture around us, we can no longer assume that people will just come to church (because that's just what folks do, they go to church), and when Christians are no longer automatically trusted, it really does suck for us!
But can you see why I've been preaching about truthfulness? So long as we operate like we are well-established, so long as we aren't truthful about our exile, we won't survive the cultural shift around us. We are going into exile, and the sooner we realize that, the better. So long as we assume that there is significant continuity between the culture around us and the practice of the Christian life, when there isn’t, we will shift with the culture right out of Christian practice!
This is why Jeremiah asks us over and over to remember the God who saves. When Jeremiah encourages us to remember what makes us the people of God – that we are a people who owe our lives to the saving God – Jeremiah helps us see that to love God does not always mean taking the world on its own terms.
***
In our reading for today Jeremiah is writing a letter to people in exile. When you’re in exile there are a number of temptations, as Jeremiah knew: one of the big ones is to cower in the corner in hopelessness. The world might not be totally against us when we are in exile; but it certainly isn’t for us, either. The first intuition of the world around us is not to support us in being Christian. And when this happens, we become tempted to take care of our own, to disengage from the communities around us, and to care for our immediate church family, longing for how things once were and romanticizing the past.
Shall we withdraw? Shall we think small, caring only for ourselves? There’s something in your heart that chafes at that, isn’t there. But to act like we are secure and established, like the world is on our side waiting to do us favours, will mean this: we will think small and ending up caring for ourselves by default.
But God would not have it be so. What God gives to that other community in exile – the one that Jeremiah wrote to – was a charge to think big. To take care of one another in the community of faith, to be sure – but not only to care for the community of faith. God called that people out of a closed sectarianism and into great responsibility, a missional responsibility.
“Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile,” says God to the Israelites in Babylon, “and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in [the] welfare [of Babylon] you will find your welfare." God asked that community of exiles not to despair, nor to think small, but to think big and to care for the strangers around them: because for Jeremiah and the prophets of the Old Testament, exile is where God promises a work of profound newness – exile is where we find a newness grounded in the retrieval of the past, in our memory of the God who saves. Even if we find ourselves in a strange place and in an unfamiliar time.
To put it simply: exile is where God is most powerfully at work.
***
This too is my hope for us, and why I find Jeremiah such an important voice. Let us be truthful: the world is changing around us; much of the world is pretty lukewarm towards us; much of the world doesn’t care too much about what we’re doing.
But it is also my hope that this doesn’t lead us into despair, or lead us to think small.
My hope is that we think big, that we engage the welfare of the people around us, and that we take on this great responsibility that God gives us precisely when we are in exile: the responsibility for mission, the responsibility to care in a big way.
My hope is that we embrace our exile, because it is exactly here, through his call to faithfulness in Him where God's great hope for us is most strong; it is exactly here where God's great hope for the world around us is most strong; it is in exile, where we are now, that God is most powerfully at work.
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Psalm 66:1-12; 2 Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19
preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons
As I finish up this series on Jeremiah today, I thought it is a good a time as any to let you know why think that Jeremiah is so important to us, and why I’ve chosen to preach these last few of Sundays on Jeremiah.
Why Jeremiah is so important for us, in this parish and in the church more broadly, can be summed up in one word: exile. Jeremiah is important for us to read and listen to because Jeremiah speaks to a people making the transition between establishment and exile, a people making the shift away from security and into uncertainty. My hope is that by way of Jeremiah we will be able to make those same transitions, that we too will move from establishment and security, into uncertainty and exile.
Strange hope, isn’t it. Strange to hope that we might become less established, and less secure. But remember that Jeremiah hoped for the same thing – but not because he had any great desire to actually be in exile. Rather, Jeremiah’s desire was for the people to see the truth of their situation, and the truth was that the people were about to go into exile. Similarly, if we took a moment to look around us, we would also see that we act like the church is still a well established cultural force, that we are far more secure than we are, when whether we like it, want it, desire it or not, the church is well on her way into exile from the culture and the world around us. This is true here, locally at St. Mary Magdalene.
So, what do you think? Are you used to thinking this way about the church? Are you used to thinking that we are a people in exile? Is it safe to say that not that long ago, Christianity and the practices associated with Christianity, were much more common? That more people used to go to church? That most of our public institutions, like schools and places of government, wouldn't see much conflict between being a good citizen and being a Christian?
It’s fair to say that not that long ago it was respectable to be a Christian. The church could assume that people would come to worship, because that's what good citizens did. We came to church, and we prayed in school. And no civil servant, MP or MLA, would get publicly derided for getting together with other Christians to pray. You could baptize children with the assumption that they would absorb Christian values outside the church as well as in Sunday School. You could marry people assuming that the surrounding culture would support marriage as a fundamentally Christian institution.
But those days are gone. We may not be physically uprooted like the people of Judah; we may not be suffering violence at the hands of a foreign army; but if we were honest about the world around us, we would see that Christianity is far from established, and we are far from secure. We are in an exile from a world where being a Christian can no longer be taken for granted, where nominal Christian values can no longer be assumed, and where it no longer makes sense to most people to darken the door of a church come Sunday morning.
There is no longer much social advantage to being a Christian: going to church isn’t going to get you that promotion; going to church won’t get you elected shop steward; and to pray in public might mean getting sneered at.
***
A few of us are going into the neighborhood to meet with local leaders of places like schools and community clubs. It's hard to describe what its like when I call people up and say "Hello, I'm calling from St. Mary Magdalene, a local Anglican parish. We'd love to come by and get to know you."
(And that is really what we're doing, too – simply hoping to get to know leaders in the neighbourhood, in order to build a sense of what the needs in St. Vital might be. They are meetings without agendas. We don't ask people to do anything, but to let us get to know them and to get a sense of their work.)
But whenever I call, and I say "I'm calling from St. Mary Magdalene . . ." there is a very awkward silence. An anxious silence. It's like people are thinking "what in the world do the Christians want with me . . ." The first response is not trust. The first response is not warmth. The first response is anxiety.
Now, so far so good. We haven’t been turfed out and no one has said no to meeting, nor do I expect they will. Once people realize that we genuinely just want to get to know them, people warm up. But I am coming away confirmed in my suspicion that we are now somewhere in-between establishment and exile, and that we can no longer assume that Christianity and the church is a meaningful and positive part of most people’s lives.
***
Am I depressing you yet? Probably, at least a little. Exile does suck. As we lose standing in the culture around us, we can no longer assume that people will just come to church (because that's just what folks do, they go to church), and when Christians are no longer automatically trusted, it really does suck for us!
But can you see why I've been preaching about truthfulness? So long as we operate like we are well-established, so long as we aren't truthful about our exile, we won't survive the cultural shift around us. We are going into exile, and the sooner we realize that, the better. So long as we assume that there is significant continuity between the culture around us and the practice of the Christian life, when there isn’t, we will shift with the culture right out of Christian practice!
This is why Jeremiah asks us over and over to remember the God who saves. When Jeremiah encourages us to remember what makes us the people of God – that we are a people who owe our lives to the saving God – Jeremiah helps us see that to love God does not always mean taking the world on its own terms.
***
In our reading for today Jeremiah is writing a letter to people in exile. When you’re in exile there are a number of temptations, as Jeremiah knew: one of the big ones is to cower in the corner in hopelessness. The world might not be totally against us when we are in exile; but it certainly isn’t for us, either. The first intuition of the world around us is not to support us in being Christian. And when this happens, we become tempted to take care of our own, to disengage from the communities around us, and to care for our immediate church family, longing for how things once were and romanticizing the past.
Shall we withdraw? Shall we think small, caring only for ourselves? There’s something in your heart that chafes at that, isn’t there. But to act like we are secure and established, like the world is on our side waiting to do us favours, will mean this: we will think small and ending up caring for ourselves by default.
But God would not have it be so. What God gives to that other community in exile – the one that Jeremiah wrote to – was a charge to think big. To take care of one another in the community of faith, to be sure – but not only to care for the community of faith. God called that people out of a closed sectarianism and into great responsibility, a missional responsibility.
“Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile,” says God to the Israelites in Babylon, “and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in [the] welfare [of Babylon] you will find your welfare." God asked that community of exiles not to despair, nor to think small, but to think big and to care for the strangers around them: because for Jeremiah and the prophets of the Old Testament, exile is where God promises a work of profound newness – exile is where we find a newness grounded in the retrieval of the past, in our memory of the God who saves. Even if we find ourselves in a strange place and in an unfamiliar time.
To put it simply: exile is where God is most powerfully at work.
***
This too is my hope for us, and why I find Jeremiah such an important voice. Let us be truthful: the world is changing around us; much of the world is pretty lukewarm towards us; much of the world doesn’t care too much about what we’re doing.
But it is also my hope that this doesn’t lead us into despair, or lead us to think small.
My hope is that we think big, that we engage the welfare of the people around us, and that we take on this great responsibility that God gives us precisely when we are in exile: the responsibility for mission, the responsibility to care in a big way.
My hope is that we embrace our exile, because it is exactly here, through his call to faithfulness in Him where God's great hope for us is most strong; it is exactly here where God's great hope for the world around us is most strong; it is in exile, where we are now, that God is most powerfully at work.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Proper 9 (14) (2007): "Being the Body"
Proper 9 (14) (2007): "Being the Body"
2 Kings 5:1-14; Psalm 30; Galatians 6:(1-6), 7-16; Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons, July 8th, 2007
I'm going to start this morning by talking about a finger. It is an especially long finger. This finger belongs to John the Baptist, and it is in a painting by a painter by the name of Grunewald. In this painting, just above John the Baptist's hand, read the words "He must increase, I must decrease."
Where is John the Baptist's finger pointing? It points to Jesus, but not only Jesus: but to Jesus on the cross. John the Baptist, with his long index finger, points to Christ crucified.
It was the favourite painting of one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century, Karl Barth, because for Barth this was the task of any theologian, any preacher: to point. To point away from him or herself, and to Christ crucified.
By this action of pointing, the priest, the preacher, and the church, all live up to our vocation, becoming what we are pointing to – we become the body of Christ by pointing to Christ and the cross.
***
I think it's about time to talk about preaching. And after that, to talk about the eucharist, and get some preliminaries clear about the role of the priest and the preacher.
I'd like for us to begin by turning to Galatians, specifically to verse 14 and 15 in chapter 6, where Paul writes: "May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!"
Paul's opponents were claiming converts to the Mosaic law. They were counting circumcisions because circumcision was the first observation of the law for any convert to the law.
But for Paul, there is no boasting, no story to tell, no story about his success, no personal illustration apart from the cross of Christ and new creation in the resurrection. Paul does not wish to tell any story, to boast and tell personal anecdotes about himself or what he has accomplished in the Galatians:
"May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!"
And in the end, this is his only story, and if he has a personal story to tell, it is about how the world has been crucified to him, and him to the world, but only through the cross of Christ. All other stories, his own, and the story of the Galatians,and the story of the whole world, is known only through the cross of Christ and his resurrection.
***
I spoke about this last week, about the central story Christians tell. The story central to our faith is that of the crucifixion of Christ, and that of the resurrection. This narrative, this story is the story that makes sense of our whole lives as Christians. This is the story that precedes and makes sense of our experience. This is how we make sense of scripture
and the life of the church. The story of the crucifixion is how we make sense of the world, of history. It is all made sense through the cross of Christ, the central event around which all things turn.
As Paul writes, the story of the crucifixion and the resurrection is the only story we really have to tell, the only story the church has to tell, the only one the preacher has to tell: Christ crucified, Christ resurrected.
Crucifixion and resurrection is the central story by which we identify ourselves, because to know and tell this story is to know Christ, it is to know how to be the body of Christ, it is to be who we are.
What we point to is what we become.
***
Think of baptism. In our baptism we die, and rise, in Christ. All identity outside our being in Christ, being dead and raised through baptism, anything besides this is peripheral. Our true self is now the one hidden in Christ, the one who died and rose again.
Further, this central narrative of the Christian life, that of Christ's crucifixion and his resurrection, your experience of this, our experience of this, our becoming what we point to is not a personal experience.
First of all, any experience that we have of the death and resurrection of Christ is already shared – because it is Christ who is crucified and resurrected first, and we share in that experience.
Secondly, even before it is personally shared, it is ecclesial – it is the experience of the church, it is the experience of the body of Christ.
We become what we are pointing to through our elder and experienced Christians, the ones who have learned the way of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection lived daily, and lived in hope.
But we also become, not just through the example of our elders in the faith, but it is also made true by the way we read the Psalms together, especially Psalms like the one we just read, Psalm 30. When we read the Psalms together, we read them as the body of Christ, the same Psalms that Jesus quotes n his life and on the cross. And we become this living and suffering body of Christ when we say together such things as:
“I will exalt you, O Lord,
because you have lifted me up *
and have not let my enemies triumph over me.
O Lord my God, I cried out to you, *
and you restored me to health.
You brought me up, O Lord, from the dead.”
This is the story, the one Paul insisted on boasting in rather than his own good deeds, the story of the one who is lifted up from the grave, the one whose enemies do not triumph, the one who cried out in pain, the one whose life was restored, the one who is the Christ, Jesus the crucified one, Jesus the risen one: through the Psalms, we point to Christ; and by this pointing, and speaking the words, we become the community of the crucified.
***
So what about the preacher?
Let's talk about the kind of preaching that is truthful to the task that is set before the preacher.
The truthful preacher will not tell personal stories, so much as he will always be pointing,
like John the Baptist in that painting by Grunewald, pointing to the crucified one. Because if the preacher points to him or herself, the cause is lost.
"He must increase." This is the story of Christ.
"I must decrease." This is not about me.
The proclamation of the church embodied in her preachers does not reveal the preacher nor the Scriptures. The proclamation reveals Christ, and him crucified.
"May I never boast of anything
except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ".
"a new creation is everything!"
Likewise, when you see the presider at the table, you better not be caught looking at him. Preaching is not about the preacher, neither is presiding about the presider. I'll be at that altar in a few minutes. And when I'm praying that great prayer of thanksgiving for you, don't look at me. Don't care about my voice. Don't care about my haircut.
No – Look at the cross. Look at the altar. Look at the bread and wine. Look there because that is how we do what we do, this is how we live out the Christian vocation, as a church, as a baptized people, a people baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ, this is how we do crucifixion and resurrection: we signify our lives of crucifixion and resurrection by passing through the waters of baptism to our place at this table, participating in the crucifixion and the resurrection, at this table becoming what we point to.
We remember God's acts in history, we remember his crucifixion, we remember is resurrection, and we do what he asked us to do: "This is my body which is broken for you." "This is my blood which is shed for you.” Take and eat. Take and drink. "When you do this, you do this in remembrance of me."
Look at what is being pointed to: Christ and his crucifixion, the resurrection of Christ, each remembered and made true at this altar.
Take and eat, take and drink, become the body of Christ.
Because this is what makes us who we are: not the preacher, not the presider. We are made Christ, as we reveal and witness to Christ, the crucifixion and the resurrection become our own by pointing to the one greater than us, and by this pointing to the one greater than we are, by speaking his words, by participating in him at this table, then we become the one who has been lifted up from the dead, we become the body of Christ, and him crucified.
2 Kings 5:1-14; Psalm 30; Galatians 6:(1-6), 7-16; Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons, July 8th, 2007
I'm going to start this morning by talking about a finger. It is an especially long finger. This finger belongs to John the Baptist, and it is in a painting by a painter by the name of Grunewald. In this painting, just above John the Baptist's hand, read the words "He must increase, I must decrease."
Where is John the Baptist's finger pointing? It points to Jesus, but not only Jesus: but to Jesus on the cross. John the Baptist, with his long index finger, points to Christ crucified.
It was the favourite painting of one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century, Karl Barth, because for Barth this was the task of any theologian, any preacher: to point. To point away from him or herself, and to Christ crucified.
By this action of pointing, the priest, the preacher, and the church, all live up to our vocation, becoming what we are pointing to – we become the body of Christ by pointing to Christ and the cross.
***
I think it's about time to talk about preaching. And after that, to talk about the eucharist, and get some preliminaries clear about the role of the priest and the preacher.
I'd like for us to begin by turning to Galatians, specifically to verse 14 and 15 in chapter 6, where Paul writes: "May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!"
Paul's opponents were claiming converts to the Mosaic law. They were counting circumcisions because circumcision was the first observation of the law for any convert to the law.
But for Paul, there is no boasting, no story to tell, no story about his success, no personal illustration apart from the cross of Christ and new creation in the resurrection. Paul does not wish to tell any story, to boast and tell personal anecdotes about himself or what he has accomplished in the Galatians:
"May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!"
And in the end, this is his only story, and if he has a personal story to tell, it is about how the world has been crucified to him, and him to the world, but only through the cross of Christ. All other stories, his own, and the story of the Galatians,and the story of the whole world, is known only through the cross of Christ and his resurrection.
***
I spoke about this last week, about the central story Christians tell. The story central to our faith is that of the crucifixion of Christ, and that of the resurrection. This narrative, this story is the story that makes sense of our whole lives as Christians. This is the story that precedes and makes sense of our experience. This is how we make sense of scripture
and the life of the church. The story of the crucifixion is how we make sense of the world, of history. It is all made sense through the cross of Christ, the central event around which all things turn.
As Paul writes, the story of the crucifixion and the resurrection is the only story we really have to tell, the only story the church has to tell, the only one the preacher has to tell: Christ crucified, Christ resurrected.
Crucifixion and resurrection is the central story by which we identify ourselves, because to know and tell this story is to know Christ, it is to know how to be the body of Christ, it is to be who we are.
What we point to is what we become.
***
Think of baptism. In our baptism we die, and rise, in Christ. All identity outside our being in Christ, being dead and raised through baptism, anything besides this is peripheral. Our true self is now the one hidden in Christ, the one who died and rose again.
Further, this central narrative of the Christian life, that of Christ's crucifixion and his resurrection, your experience of this, our experience of this, our becoming what we point to is not a personal experience.
First of all, any experience that we have of the death and resurrection of Christ is already shared – because it is Christ who is crucified and resurrected first, and we share in that experience.
Secondly, even before it is personally shared, it is ecclesial – it is the experience of the church, it is the experience of the body of Christ.
We become what we are pointing to through our elder and experienced Christians, the ones who have learned the way of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection lived daily, and lived in hope.
But we also become, not just through the example of our elders in the faith, but it is also made true by the way we read the Psalms together, especially Psalms like the one we just read, Psalm 30. When we read the Psalms together, we read them as the body of Christ, the same Psalms that Jesus quotes n his life and on the cross. And we become this living and suffering body of Christ when we say together such things as:
“I will exalt you, O Lord,
because you have lifted me up *
and have not let my enemies triumph over me.
O Lord my God, I cried out to you, *
and you restored me to health.
You brought me up, O Lord, from the dead.”
This is the story, the one Paul insisted on boasting in rather than his own good deeds, the story of the one who is lifted up from the grave, the one whose enemies do not triumph, the one who cried out in pain, the one whose life was restored, the one who is the Christ, Jesus the crucified one, Jesus the risen one: through the Psalms, we point to Christ; and by this pointing, and speaking the words, we become the community of the crucified.
***
So what about the preacher?
Let's talk about the kind of preaching that is truthful to the task that is set before the preacher.
The truthful preacher will not tell personal stories, so much as he will always be pointing,
like John the Baptist in that painting by Grunewald, pointing to the crucified one. Because if the preacher points to him or herself, the cause is lost.
"He must increase." This is the story of Christ.
"I must decrease." This is not about me.
The proclamation of the church embodied in her preachers does not reveal the preacher nor the Scriptures. The proclamation reveals Christ, and him crucified.
"May I never boast of anything
except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ".
"a new creation is everything!"
Likewise, when you see the presider at the table, you better not be caught looking at him. Preaching is not about the preacher, neither is presiding about the presider. I'll be at that altar in a few minutes. And when I'm praying that great prayer of thanksgiving for you, don't look at me. Don't care about my voice. Don't care about my haircut.
No – Look at the cross. Look at the altar. Look at the bread and wine. Look there because that is how we do what we do, this is how we live out the Christian vocation, as a church, as a baptized people, a people baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ, this is how we do crucifixion and resurrection: we signify our lives of crucifixion and resurrection by passing through the waters of baptism to our place at this table, participating in the crucifixion and the resurrection, at this table becoming what we point to.
We remember God's acts in history, we remember his crucifixion, we remember is resurrection, and we do what he asked us to do: "This is my body which is broken for you." "This is my blood which is shed for you.” Take and eat. Take and drink. "When you do this, you do this in remembrance of me."
Look at what is being pointed to: Christ and his crucifixion, the resurrection of Christ, each remembered and made true at this altar.
Take and eat, take and drink, become the body of Christ.
Because this is what makes us who we are: not the preacher, not the presider. We are made Christ, as we reveal and witness to Christ, the crucifixion and the resurrection become our own by pointing to the one greater than us, and by this pointing to the one greater than we are, by speaking his words, by participating in him at this table, then we become the one who has been lifted up from the dead, we become the body of Christ, and him crucified.
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Trinity Sunday (2007): :The Church’s “Funny Math”: The Story of the Trinity"
Trinity Sunday (2007): "The Church’s “Funny Math”: The Story of the Trinity"
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Psalm 8; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15
preached by Jane Barter Moulaison, June 3rd
This past week I attended the Canadian Theological Society meeting in Saskatoon. I heard an Anglican theologian reflect on about how, when she was training for the priesthood, her rector asked her to prepare a sermon on the trinity. She did so, preached the sermon, and her rector declared that he was very grateful to her because he had managed to preach each Sunday for twenty years and avoid the topic of the trinity altogether!
For many, talk of the trinity has become difficult, obscure, even incoherent. I had a Jewish friend who used to call the doctrine Christians’ “funny math.” Christians just don’t make any sense when they claim that God is three in one. Three persons in one being. All of it smacks of a speculation of irrelevancy. What could the doctrine of the trinity possibly teach us that would matter?
When a child or a student comes to us with questions, these are generally of two types. One is the kind of question that arises from curiosity: a question which seeks to resolve a problem. How do you grow tomatoes from seed? How did you and Dad meet? Who attends General Synod? By and large, for questions such as these, there is a limited response that will generally satisfy the curiosity of the questioner.
But there are other kinds of questions that can be asked, and those are the questions, not of curiosity, but ones which demand wisdom; the wisdom of the respondent to dig into her memory and intellect, to try to bring to the surface those things that are implicit, that form the deepest part of us. These are the questions that will try to bring to language the unspoken background of our lives. What is our responsibility for this earth? Why do you and Dad love one another? Why the Church?
The Psalm that we have heard this morning asks such a question of God: What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?
Responses to these questions require depth and nuance. And they require that which cannot be contained in words—they evoke emotion, conviction and a way of life. They are the questions that once asked require a lifetime of response.
And thankfully, these difficult types of questions are not determined on our own. We are not the sole tellers of the story; indeed, as the Proverbs reading for this morning claims, God, personified as Wisdom, seeks us out and makes certain that we will not be satisfied with the simplistic answer. Wisdom calls us instead to know her.
8: 1 Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?
8:2 On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand;
8:3 beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out: To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live.
God seeks us out in our questioning and our doubt, and God the Holy Spirit, leads to the truth: in the front of the town, at the thresholds of our lives, to us all, God does not leave us abandoned to figure out this life on our own. Instead, as the readings today attest, God reveals the truth of our lives by coming among us.
The problem with the trinity, historically and to this day, is that folks often confused the two types of questions, asking the Trinity to solve a problem once and for all rather than being the beginning of our conversation. In short, we asked the trinity to satisfy the demands of curiosity rather than being faithful to Holy Wisdom.
This happened in the very beginning of the church’s history when those who attacked and scorned the Christian church asked the Early Church how they, Jewish followers of Jesus, those who insist that there is only one God, could possibly worship this “man who appeared recently?”
It is the same question as that posed by my Jewish – the funny math question. How can three—Father, Son and Spirit—be one?
This very question preoccupied Jesus’ followers for the next four centuries. While those who mocked the church in these early times demanded that they be given a neat, logical answer, the Church responded instead with wisdom, with a story, not their own, but one given to them by the Holy Spirit. As Christ predicted in the gospel reading for today, that Spirit would take all that was Christ’s and declare it to them. And so, the story that Christians tell is the story of the love of God for the world called trinity.
Without that story of God’s love for the world, we are not only unable to respond to our opponents, but we also cannot make sense of God or of ourselves.
So what is this story that I claim is the story of God’s love for the world?
This story has three characters, whose unity in intention is perfect and complete. And so this story tells us that the very essence of God is relationship. That like us, God exists for and in the nexus of relationship.
God is understood then as a God for others, one who is involved in the deeply personal love of a parent and his progeny, and in the specific and special love of a father and a son. Yet the Trinity is not an idea about relationships, it is the relationship between God whom Jesus called Abba and his beloved son.
If we want to know what God looks like, we look to Christ who exists for others. We look to Christ, whose whole being was directed to the love of God and to the love of God’s people. We don’t attempt to freeze Christ in time, but his holiness, his incarnate nature, is revealed in relationship in being for God and in being for the world.
If I were to ask you to describe someone who is good, who has passed on, what would you say? Selfless, kind, thoughtful, considerate. But after a while you would run out of adjectives, and I would still want to know more. And in order to tell me more you would have to tell me a story. A story which inevitably involves other characters, and a story of course happens in time. I remember when she organized a charity for a family that had lost their home to fire. I remember how he cared for his wife when she was dying. We cannot know someone apart from their stories of relations with others through time.
The trinity is like this. It is not a dry concept or a philosophical argument, but it is a story in time. It begins with the character, God, who is maker of heaven and earth, of everything in the world seen and unseen. That there is, the trees the earth the seas, the life that pulses and surges unseen within and beyond us, all of those are from God’s overflowing gift.
The Trinity is the name we give to our Christian story of salvation. It is the adventure story of God taking on flesh uniquely and for all time, in time. Because he loves us. It is the story of a man so uniquely identified with God that there is nothing within him that rebels or fails to display God’s own beauty. He is pure light from light. There is no darkness within him. There is no darkness or vice that he can possibly wield upon the world. There has never been anyone like him—he is, of one being with the Father. As the reading from Proverbs that we have heard this morning puts it: “then he was beside him, like a master worker; and he was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”
But this is not all, for the very nature of the love Christ shares with God is not to be hoarded or concealed, but breaks forth in the acts of our salvation. In a life that identifies fully with our own lives, even to the point of the misery of death. The story that we Christians call the trinity is the story of love that is stronger than death, of a love that cuts through time first in a tomb, in a world that could not contain such a love. And so, even as the story centres upon Christ’s return to his beloved father, but also reaches into our own time, and beyond our time, to a time in which this kingdom of perfect love, mutuality, self-donation, will have no end.
Finally, the Trinity is that name we Christians give to our story of salvation through the Holy Spirit. A Spirit abiding, a spirit that hovered over the creation of the world, a spirit that lit the prophets on fire, and a spirit that brooded and groaned in Christ’s death. It is that same spirit that girded up the frightened apostles and sent them out into the city, and it is this spirit who abides because Christ has promised not to leave us alone. It is this Spirit that awakens us to the love of God for the world in the wordless joy that is the eucharist. It is this spirit that transforms us from one alone, from strangers, to a communion of those who love God and one another.
Life in the trinity, then, can never be a life lived for ourselves, and the mystery of it is that such a life is far more abundant than the life we hoard and keep and preserve, the life in which we build defences and seek to protect that limited parcel that seems to be ours. All of the things I have learned in this life can be reduced to this: once I was alone and terrified and small, and the Spirit sought me out, and changed all that. The greatest gifts, the greatest joys, the greatest meaning that I have participated in always have to do with what Saint Paul in today’s epistle describes as “God's love … poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”
And so, if there is funny math here in the doctrine that one plus one plus one makes one, we are not to be embarrassed. Indeed, we can even be so foolish as to say that one plus, one plus, one plus the Christians gathered here today, add the Christians gathered across the world, plus the Christians throughout time make one. We might even go so far to say that were we to take this one and subtract and deprive it of all the worlds’ gains and measures – take away wealth, take away power, take away health, take away security--we would still be one. Within the doctrine of the trinity, within God’s story of love for the world, all this makes perfect and wonderful sense.
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Psalm 8; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15
preached by Jane Barter Moulaison, June 3rd
This past week I attended the Canadian Theological Society meeting in Saskatoon. I heard an Anglican theologian reflect on about how, when she was training for the priesthood, her rector asked her to prepare a sermon on the trinity. She did so, preached the sermon, and her rector declared that he was very grateful to her because he had managed to preach each Sunday for twenty years and avoid the topic of the trinity altogether!
For many, talk of the trinity has become difficult, obscure, even incoherent. I had a Jewish friend who used to call the doctrine Christians’ “funny math.” Christians just don’t make any sense when they claim that God is three in one. Three persons in one being. All of it smacks of a speculation of irrelevancy. What could the doctrine of the trinity possibly teach us that would matter?
When a child or a student comes to us with questions, these are generally of two types. One is the kind of question that arises from curiosity: a question which seeks to resolve a problem. How do you grow tomatoes from seed? How did you and Dad meet? Who attends General Synod? By and large, for questions such as these, there is a limited response that will generally satisfy the curiosity of the questioner.
But there are other kinds of questions that can be asked, and those are the questions, not of curiosity, but ones which demand wisdom; the wisdom of the respondent to dig into her memory and intellect, to try to bring to the surface those things that are implicit, that form the deepest part of us. These are the questions that will try to bring to language the unspoken background of our lives. What is our responsibility for this earth? Why do you and Dad love one another? Why the Church?
The Psalm that we have heard this morning asks such a question of God: What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?
Responses to these questions require depth and nuance. And they require that which cannot be contained in words—they evoke emotion, conviction and a way of life. They are the questions that once asked require a lifetime of response.
And thankfully, these difficult types of questions are not determined on our own. We are not the sole tellers of the story; indeed, as the Proverbs reading for this morning claims, God, personified as Wisdom, seeks us out and makes certain that we will not be satisfied with the simplistic answer. Wisdom calls us instead to know her.
8: 1 Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?
8:2 On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand;
8:3 beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out: To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live.
God seeks us out in our questioning and our doubt, and God the Holy Spirit, leads to the truth: in the front of the town, at the thresholds of our lives, to us all, God does not leave us abandoned to figure out this life on our own. Instead, as the readings today attest, God reveals the truth of our lives by coming among us.
The problem with the trinity, historically and to this day, is that folks often confused the two types of questions, asking the Trinity to solve a problem once and for all rather than being the beginning of our conversation. In short, we asked the trinity to satisfy the demands of curiosity rather than being faithful to Holy Wisdom.
This happened in the very beginning of the church’s history when those who attacked and scorned the Christian church asked the Early Church how they, Jewish followers of Jesus, those who insist that there is only one God, could possibly worship this “man who appeared recently?”
It is the same question as that posed by my Jewish – the funny math question. How can three—Father, Son and Spirit—be one?
This very question preoccupied Jesus’ followers for the next four centuries. While those who mocked the church in these early times demanded that they be given a neat, logical answer, the Church responded instead with wisdom, with a story, not their own, but one given to them by the Holy Spirit. As Christ predicted in the gospel reading for today, that Spirit would take all that was Christ’s and declare it to them. And so, the story that Christians tell is the story of the love of God for the world called trinity.
Without that story of God’s love for the world, we are not only unable to respond to our opponents, but we also cannot make sense of God or of ourselves.
So what is this story that I claim is the story of God’s love for the world?
This story has three characters, whose unity in intention is perfect and complete. And so this story tells us that the very essence of God is relationship. That like us, God exists for and in the nexus of relationship.
God is understood then as a God for others, one who is involved in the deeply personal love of a parent and his progeny, and in the specific and special love of a father and a son. Yet the Trinity is not an idea about relationships, it is the relationship between God whom Jesus called Abba and his beloved son.
If we want to know what God looks like, we look to Christ who exists for others. We look to Christ, whose whole being was directed to the love of God and to the love of God’s people. We don’t attempt to freeze Christ in time, but his holiness, his incarnate nature, is revealed in relationship in being for God and in being for the world.
If I were to ask you to describe someone who is good, who has passed on, what would you say? Selfless, kind, thoughtful, considerate. But after a while you would run out of adjectives, and I would still want to know more. And in order to tell me more you would have to tell me a story. A story which inevitably involves other characters, and a story of course happens in time. I remember when she organized a charity for a family that had lost their home to fire. I remember how he cared for his wife when she was dying. We cannot know someone apart from their stories of relations with others through time.
The trinity is like this. It is not a dry concept or a philosophical argument, but it is a story in time. It begins with the character, God, who is maker of heaven and earth, of everything in the world seen and unseen. That there is, the trees the earth the seas, the life that pulses and surges unseen within and beyond us, all of those are from God’s overflowing gift.
The Trinity is the name we give to our Christian story of salvation. It is the adventure story of God taking on flesh uniquely and for all time, in time. Because he loves us. It is the story of a man so uniquely identified with God that there is nothing within him that rebels or fails to display God’s own beauty. He is pure light from light. There is no darkness within him. There is no darkness or vice that he can possibly wield upon the world. There has never been anyone like him—he is, of one being with the Father. As the reading from Proverbs that we have heard this morning puts it: “then he was beside him, like a master worker; and he was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”
But this is not all, for the very nature of the love Christ shares with God is not to be hoarded or concealed, but breaks forth in the acts of our salvation. In a life that identifies fully with our own lives, even to the point of the misery of death. The story that we Christians call the trinity is the story of love that is stronger than death, of a love that cuts through time first in a tomb, in a world that could not contain such a love. And so, even as the story centres upon Christ’s return to his beloved father, but also reaches into our own time, and beyond our time, to a time in which this kingdom of perfect love, mutuality, self-donation, will have no end.
Finally, the Trinity is that name we Christians give to our story of salvation through the Holy Spirit. A Spirit abiding, a spirit that hovered over the creation of the world, a spirit that lit the prophets on fire, and a spirit that brooded and groaned in Christ’s death. It is that same spirit that girded up the frightened apostles and sent them out into the city, and it is this spirit who abides because Christ has promised not to leave us alone. It is this Spirit that awakens us to the love of God for the world in the wordless joy that is the eucharist. It is this spirit that transforms us from one alone, from strangers, to a communion of those who love God and one another.
Life in the trinity, then, can never be a life lived for ourselves, and the mystery of it is that such a life is far more abundant than the life we hoard and keep and preserve, the life in which we build defences and seek to protect that limited parcel that seems to be ours. All of the things I have learned in this life can be reduced to this: once I was alone and terrified and small, and the Spirit sought me out, and changed all that. The greatest gifts, the greatest joys, the greatest meaning that I have participated in always have to do with what Saint Paul in today’s epistle describes as “God's love … poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”
And so, if there is funny math here in the doctrine that one plus one plus one makes one, we are not to be embarrassed. Indeed, we can even be so foolish as to say that one plus, one plus, one plus the Christians gathered here today, add the Christians gathered across the world, plus the Christians throughout time make one. We might even go so far to say that were we to take this one and subtract and deprive it of all the worlds’ gains and measures – take away wealth, take away power, take away health, take away security--we would still be one. Within the doctrine of the trinity, within God’s story of love for the world, all this makes perfect and wonderful sense.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Fourth Sunday of Easter (2007): “Why the Creed is Like Playing the Blues”
Fourth Sunday of Easter (2007): “Why the Creed is Like Playing the Blues”
Acts 9:36-43 ; Psalm 23 ; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30
preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons on April 19th, 2007
In 1971, Chester Burnett, better known as Chicago bluesman Howlin' Wolf, got on a plane with his guitarist Hubert Sumlin, and went to London England.
They went to London so they could do a recording with some blues-inspired English musicians, like Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts from the Rolling Stones, and Steve Winwood. Ringo Starr even sat in on one session. Guitar hero Eric Clapton sat in on all the sessions, and he’s the one that makes for the best story coming out of that London recording studio.
***
But first a word about the blues.
The blues is a relatively simple form; It's built around a chord progression only consists of three chords, a 1, a 4, and a 5 chord. These three chords are played in a repeating, 12 bar pattern, that has only a handful of variations. The blues is a relatively fixed form, without a great deal of variation within it. The form has rules, and if you want to play the blues, you stick close to the form. The form serves a regulative function: 12 bars, and three chords played in a particular order: you've got something close to the blues.
The strict rule of the blues, rather than being a hindrance to creativity, actually serves as a way of grounding creative work. It allows for a great deal of variation, even vastly different kinds of expressions, while remaining recognizable as the blues: you can have the Texas style of Stevie Ray Vaughn; the folk-rock style of Creedence Clearwater Revival; the psychedelic blues of Jimi Hendrix; you can have Eric Clapton on an acoustic guitar, playing in the style of Big Bill Broonzy.
All different styles; all recognizable as the blues, if you look at the simple underlying pattern: 3 particular chords, 12 bars.
**
This brings me back to Eric Clapton, and that London recording studio. Eric Clapton was a hot guitarist in 1971. But there he was, in a studio with a living legend, Howlin' Wolf. Eric Clapton thought he was hot stuff, but this old, grizzled, bluesman with failing kidneys kept grabbing Clapton's fingers while he played his guitar, saying "don't do it that way, you're doin' it wrong, c'mon, can't you play it right?"
The blues might be simple: 3 particular chords, 12 bars; with that you know it's the blues; but the simple rule doesn't mean it's easy to play.
Eric Clapton almost gave up. He almost left the studio. But Howlin' Wolf eventually picked up his own guitar, and played it himself. And we get to reap the benefit of an excellent recording of a Chicago bluesman playing "the Red Rooster" with a bunch of hot-shot young Englishmen.
***
I hope you have a question in your minds. What on earth or heaven does this have to do with the gospel? It has to do with one line, six words from our gospel: Jesus says: "The Father and I are one."
This was part of a significant debate in the early centuries of the church. How does Jesus relate to the Father? Here Jesus says that he and the Father are one, Jesus recognizing a kind of equality with the Father. But earlier on in the gospel of John Jesus said that the Father is greater than he is.
So which is it? Is Jesus equal to the Father? Or is the father greater than Jesus? How do you make a decision as to which is a faithful description of Jesus' relationship to the Father?
What Christians have done, since the earliest of times, is to understand scripture according to the Rule of Faith. There are fragments of Rules of Faith in the New Testament, there are fragments of rules of faith in the earliest Christian writings apart from the New Testament. Rules of faith serve a regulative function within Christian reflection on God and Jesus; they even help us understand scripture, because in rules of faith we already have the kernel of the gospel. Both the rules and the Scriptures proclaim salvation in Jesus Christ.
Just as we look back at the blues, and recognize it by the simple pattern of 3 particular chords and 12 bars, we recognize faithful Christian reflection according to the rule of faith. Just as anyone who wants to play the blues first learns the simple rule of the blues, in the same way the rule of faith, the creed we are about to say together, forms the foundation upon which we build what we say about God and Christ, allowing for a tremendous amount of creative reflection while remaining recognizably Christian.
***
The greatest of our Rules of Faith, the Nicene Creed that we will say in a moment, will help us with our current problem presented to us in John. Is Jesus equal and one with the Father? Or is Jesus inferior to the Father?
The creed, in its preservation of that driving force that arises out of Scripture, salvation in Christ, leads us to affirm that Jesus is one with the Father. If it is God that saves, and we proclaim that Jesus is saviour, then Jesus is equal, and one with the Father. At the same time, however, by affirming that Jesus became fully human, we can say that according to his humanity Jesus is less than the Father. By way of the creed we preserve the fullness of the proclamation of Scripture, because both Scripture and the creed arise from the same driving force: salvation in Christ.
Now I hope I didn't just lose too many of you. But I didn't say that this was going to be easy, did I! The blues was irritatingly hard for Eric Clapton to play in that recording studio with Howlin' Wolf that day in 1971, even if the form is simple. The creeds are simple, too, right? They're not that hard to say, and what they say is extremely important: salvation in Christ.
Even if the creeds are easy to say, I will grant that many find the creeds difficult to understand. But that doesn't mean we get to ignore them. Our creeds are the form upon which we build Christian reflection, and we need to be reminded of the form, despite the fact that the reflection, the life, the play, might all be difficult.
Just as you recognize the blues by the simple form, three particular chords, 12 bars; you recognize Christian reflection by fidelity to the form set out in the creeds. There's nothing to stop a musician from departing from the form of the blues; it's just that the farther you depart from the form, the harder it becomes to recognize the music as the blues. Similarly, the farther theological reflection departs from the creeds, the more difficult it becomes to recognize that reflection as Christian reflection.
This is no light subject, either, by the way; there is a lot at stake. What's at stake is the core of the Christian proclamation as it is found in Scripture: God saves us; he saves us in the person Jesus Christ; this salvation is total, and comprises the entirety of the human person, by his very taking on of our humanity in the incarnation; by the resurrection of his body we come to new life in the Spirit.
This is our proclamation; these are the words we live by; these are the words through which we play the Christian life. And for this: thanks be to God.
Acts 9:36-43 ; Psalm 23 ; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30
preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons on April 19th, 2007
In 1971, Chester Burnett, better known as Chicago bluesman Howlin' Wolf, got on a plane with his guitarist Hubert Sumlin, and went to London England.
They went to London so they could do a recording with some blues-inspired English musicians, like Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts from the Rolling Stones, and Steve Winwood. Ringo Starr even sat in on one session. Guitar hero Eric Clapton sat in on all the sessions, and he’s the one that makes for the best story coming out of that London recording studio.
***
But first a word about the blues.
The blues is a relatively simple form; It's built around a chord progression only consists of three chords, a 1, a 4, and a 5 chord. These three chords are played in a repeating, 12 bar pattern, that has only a handful of variations. The blues is a relatively fixed form, without a great deal of variation within it. The form has rules, and if you want to play the blues, you stick close to the form. The form serves a regulative function: 12 bars, and three chords played in a particular order: you've got something close to the blues.
The strict rule of the blues, rather than being a hindrance to creativity, actually serves as a way of grounding creative work. It allows for a great deal of variation, even vastly different kinds of expressions, while remaining recognizable as the blues: you can have the Texas style of Stevie Ray Vaughn; the folk-rock style of Creedence Clearwater Revival; the psychedelic blues of Jimi Hendrix; you can have Eric Clapton on an acoustic guitar, playing in the style of Big Bill Broonzy.
All different styles; all recognizable as the blues, if you look at the simple underlying pattern: 3 particular chords, 12 bars.
**
This brings me back to Eric Clapton, and that London recording studio. Eric Clapton was a hot guitarist in 1971. But there he was, in a studio with a living legend, Howlin' Wolf. Eric Clapton thought he was hot stuff, but this old, grizzled, bluesman with failing kidneys kept grabbing Clapton's fingers while he played his guitar, saying "don't do it that way, you're doin' it wrong, c'mon, can't you play it right?"
The blues might be simple: 3 particular chords, 12 bars; with that you know it's the blues; but the simple rule doesn't mean it's easy to play.
Eric Clapton almost gave up. He almost left the studio. But Howlin' Wolf eventually picked up his own guitar, and played it himself. And we get to reap the benefit of an excellent recording of a Chicago bluesman playing "the Red Rooster" with a bunch of hot-shot young Englishmen.
***
I hope you have a question in your minds. What on earth or heaven does this have to do with the gospel? It has to do with one line, six words from our gospel: Jesus says: "The Father and I are one."
This was part of a significant debate in the early centuries of the church. How does Jesus relate to the Father? Here Jesus says that he and the Father are one, Jesus recognizing a kind of equality with the Father. But earlier on in the gospel of John Jesus said that the Father is greater than he is.
So which is it? Is Jesus equal to the Father? Or is the father greater than Jesus? How do you make a decision as to which is a faithful description of Jesus' relationship to the Father?
What Christians have done, since the earliest of times, is to understand scripture according to the Rule of Faith. There are fragments of Rules of Faith in the New Testament, there are fragments of rules of faith in the earliest Christian writings apart from the New Testament. Rules of faith serve a regulative function within Christian reflection on God and Jesus; they even help us understand scripture, because in rules of faith we already have the kernel of the gospel. Both the rules and the Scriptures proclaim salvation in Jesus Christ.
Just as we look back at the blues, and recognize it by the simple pattern of 3 particular chords and 12 bars, we recognize faithful Christian reflection according to the rule of faith. Just as anyone who wants to play the blues first learns the simple rule of the blues, in the same way the rule of faith, the creed we are about to say together, forms the foundation upon which we build what we say about God and Christ, allowing for a tremendous amount of creative reflection while remaining recognizably Christian.
***
The greatest of our Rules of Faith, the Nicene Creed that we will say in a moment, will help us with our current problem presented to us in John. Is Jesus equal and one with the Father? Or is Jesus inferior to the Father?
The creed, in its preservation of that driving force that arises out of Scripture, salvation in Christ, leads us to affirm that Jesus is one with the Father. If it is God that saves, and we proclaim that Jesus is saviour, then Jesus is equal, and one with the Father. At the same time, however, by affirming that Jesus became fully human, we can say that according to his humanity Jesus is less than the Father. By way of the creed we preserve the fullness of the proclamation of Scripture, because both Scripture and the creed arise from the same driving force: salvation in Christ.
Now I hope I didn't just lose too many of you. But I didn't say that this was going to be easy, did I! The blues was irritatingly hard for Eric Clapton to play in that recording studio with Howlin' Wolf that day in 1971, even if the form is simple. The creeds are simple, too, right? They're not that hard to say, and what they say is extremely important: salvation in Christ.
Even if the creeds are easy to say, I will grant that many find the creeds difficult to understand. But that doesn't mean we get to ignore them. Our creeds are the form upon which we build Christian reflection, and we need to be reminded of the form, despite the fact that the reflection, the life, the play, might all be difficult.
Just as you recognize the blues by the simple form, three particular chords, 12 bars; you recognize Christian reflection by fidelity to the form set out in the creeds. There's nothing to stop a musician from departing from the form of the blues; it's just that the farther you depart from the form, the harder it becomes to recognize the music as the blues. Similarly, the farther theological reflection departs from the creeds, the more difficult it becomes to recognize that reflection as Christian reflection.
This is no light subject, either, by the way; there is a lot at stake. What's at stake is the core of the Christian proclamation as it is found in Scripture: God saves us; he saves us in the person Jesus Christ; this salvation is total, and comprises the entirety of the human person, by his very taking on of our humanity in the incarnation; by the resurrection of his body we come to new life in the Spirit.
This is our proclamation; these are the words we live by; these are the words through which we play the Christian life. And for this: thanks be to God.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Third Sunday in Easter (2007): "Gone Fishin' "
Third Sunday in Easter (2007): "Gone Fishin' "
Acts 9:1-6, (7-20); Psalm 30; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19
preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons
So – Jesus is crucified, and he rises again. He appears to his disciples, miraculously entering locked rooms, not as some ghost, but as a body that can be touched, a body that breathes. This Jesus is worshipped, called Lord. The world has changed, the renewal of the world has begun in the body of a crucified God.
So – you're the disciples of this God, and after all this, all these miracles, what do you do? Well, you go fishing!
We know that eventually the disciples do go all over the world, bringing the good news of God in Christ, the good news of the resurrection, to all sorts of people. They even they perform miracles. But for now? What do they do? They go fishing.
I love that, actually. I even think it's important. Not important because there is something special about fishing, but because what the disciples do is go back to the routines of life, the routines of life that includes work. And for these guys work is fishing.
Jesus doesn't appear, for this last time in the Gospel of John, in any special way. The resurrected Jesus comes while the disciples are simply going about the mundane routines of life. Kind of like Jesus showing up at the loading dock and giving some advice to the truck driver about backing up, or like showing up in the warehouse to help stack boxes, or showing up at the water cooler to tell you how to reboot your computer. Jesus said, "fishing not too good today, huh?" They said, "No." He said to them, "throw your net to the other side of the boat, and you'll catch some." So they did this, and they caught a whole lot of fish. Jesus appears to fishermen, by the sea of Galilee, and offers fishermen fishing advice, providing a working miracle.
You'd think there were far more important things for a risen Jesus to do, but I guess once you've risen from the dead you just want to hang out. "Whatcha doin?" "Going fishing." "Can I come with?" And in this miracle, through the catching of fish, the man on the beach is revealed to be Jesus, Lord and King.
***
But we know this, don't we? We know that Jesus is revealed to us especially in the mundane routines of life? Or do we look for the intervention of the divine only in the big stuff? Only in the miracles of healing, only in ecstatic moments of prayer? Surely Jesus is revealed in the big stuff, but do we believe that Jesus is revealed in the small stuff?
I'll make a confession. I've caught myself, when I'm really late, praying for a parking spot. I don't know that I should do that! But if Jesus is with us, at all times, in all the mundane aspects of our life, maybe it makes sense.
***
Whether Jesus ever helps me find a parking spot, I don't know, but as we read this passage we find that Jesus is certainly present in another of the mundane parts of the lives of the disciples. Jesus is concerned that they get something to eat.
"Jesus said to them, Come and have breakfast." "Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish."
Whether Jesus is my co-pilot and helps me find my parking spot I don't know. But Christians have been certain, throughout the centuries, that Jesus is present in at least one of the most mundane routines of life, that of eating. We are about to share a meal together, right? And celebrate the sign of Jesus' presence in the simple act of breaking of bread? We do this because of the stories that we have of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples at the last supper, on the road to Emmaus, and on the beach by the Sea of Galilee.
Jesus is present with us here, today, at the Eucharistic table, in order that he might inhabit all the mundane parts of our lives, our work, the most boring and (what seem to be) the most unproductive parts of our lives.
Jesus is present with us in the most ordinary of acts, the breaking of bread and the sharing of a meal, because by this he is revealed to be for us the risen Lord and Saviour.
Acts 9:1-6, (7-20); Psalm 30; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19
preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons
So – Jesus is crucified, and he rises again. He appears to his disciples, miraculously entering locked rooms, not as some ghost, but as a body that can be touched, a body that breathes. This Jesus is worshipped, called Lord. The world has changed, the renewal of the world has begun in the body of a crucified God.
So – you're the disciples of this God, and after all this, all these miracles, what do you do? Well, you go fishing!
We know that eventually the disciples do go all over the world, bringing the good news of God in Christ, the good news of the resurrection, to all sorts of people. They even they perform miracles. But for now? What do they do? They go fishing.
I love that, actually. I even think it's important. Not important because there is something special about fishing, but because what the disciples do is go back to the routines of life, the routines of life that includes work. And for these guys work is fishing.
Jesus doesn't appear, for this last time in the Gospel of John, in any special way. The resurrected Jesus comes while the disciples are simply going about the mundane routines of life. Kind of like Jesus showing up at the loading dock and giving some advice to the truck driver about backing up, or like showing up in the warehouse to help stack boxes, or showing up at the water cooler to tell you how to reboot your computer. Jesus said, "fishing not too good today, huh?" They said, "No." He said to them, "throw your net to the other side of the boat, and you'll catch some." So they did this, and they caught a whole lot of fish. Jesus appears to fishermen, by the sea of Galilee, and offers fishermen fishing advice, providing a working miracle.
You'd think there were far more important things for a risen Jesus to do, but I guess once you've risen from the dead you just want to hang out. "Whatcha doin?" "Going fishing." "Can I come with?" And in this miracle, through the catching of fish, the man on the beach is revealed to be Jesus, Lord and King.
***
But we know this, don't we? We know that Jesus is revealed to us especially in the mundane routines of life? Or do we look for the intervention of the divine only in the big stuff? Only in the miracles of healing, only in ecstatic moments of prayer? Surely Jesus is revealed in the big stuff, but do we believe that Jesus is revealed in the small stuff?
I'll make a confession. I've caught myself, when I'm really late, praying for a parking spot. I don't know that I should do that! But if Jesus is with us, at all times, in all the mundane aspects of our life, maybe it makes sense.
***
Whether Jesus ever helps me find a parking spot, I don't know, but as we read this passage we find that Jesus is certainly present in another of the mundane parts of the lives of the disciples. Jesus is concerned that they get something to eat.
"Jesus said to them, Come and have breakfast." "Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish."
Whether Jesus is my co-pilot and helps me find my parking spot I don't know. But Christians have been certain, throughout the centuries, that Jesus is present in at least one of the most mundane routines of life, that of eating. We are about to share a meal together, right? And celebrate the sign of Jesus' presence in the simple act of breaking of bread? We do this because of the stories that we have of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples at the last supper, on the road to Emmaus, and on the beach by the Sea of Galilee.
Jesus is present with us here, today, at the Eucharistic table, in order that he might inhabit all the mundane parts of our lives, our work, the most boring and (what seem to be) the most unproductive parts of our lives.
Jesus is present with us in the most ordinary of acts, the breaking of bread and the sharing of a meal, because by this he is revealed to be for us the risen Lord and Saviour.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Second Sunday of Easter (2007): "Revisiting Doubting Thomas"
Second Sunday of Easter (2007): "Revisiting Doubting Thomas"
Acts 5:27-32; Psalm 118:14-29 or Psalm 150; Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31
preached by Jane Barter Moulaison on April 15th, 2007
The Easter appearance to the disciple Thomas is a much loved and a well-known story. Many times we have probably heard sermons preached on “Doubting Thomas.” In many ways, Thomas becomes the great patron saint of modernity. He is interpreted as doubting the authority of the disciples; of having a great scientific mind, wanting empirical proof of the resurrection which his friends proclaimed.
So, like the good rationalist he is, he declares: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his ands, and pit my finer in the mark of the nails and my hands in his side I will not believe.”
And, of course, it is indeed possible that it was this kind of skepticism that made him a “Doubting Thomas”; but I am intrigued by his request.
• Why the nail marks in his hands?
• Why his pierced side?
• Why did he wish to touch those places of his Lord’s woundedness?
• Why did he not just wish to see him and to cling to him, as Mary Magdalene had?
• Why did he not long to see evidence of his glory rather than the marks of his crucifixion?
Let’s keep this question in the back of our mind for a bit while I tell another Easter story.
It is early morning on Easter Sunday just west of Kandahar. A caravan of Canadian troops are traveling; it has been quiet for some time now. Some no doubt are thinking about the holiday; remembering family traditions; thinking of their kids and hiding Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies. Wondering if it is Spring-time yet in New Brunswick. Then a thud and a sudden explosion. Then light, now panic, now terror. Then the silence. Six men killed instantly.
Their names flashed across televisions, were heard on radios, interrupting Easter holiday celebrations.
• Sgt. Donald Lucas, 31, of Burton, N.B.
• Cpl. Aaron E. Williams, 23, of Lincoln, N.B.
• Pte. Kevin Vincent Kennedy, 20, of St. Lawrence, N.L.
• Pte. David Robert Greenslade, 20, of Saint John, N.B.
• Cpl. Christopher Paul Stannix, 24, of Dartmouth, N.S.
• Cpl. Brent Poland, 37, of Camlachie, Ont.
Half a world away, in Gagetown, military officials spent most of Easter day tracking down the families of the soldiers killed in the attack. Three days later, more terrible, most un-Easter-like news. This time it comes to Petawawa Ontario. Master Cpl. Allan Stewart, 30, and Trooper Patrick James Pentland, 23. Also dead.
We can hardly fathom the loss of young life; we cannot make sense of the Easter message in the midst of continued violence.
Perhaps it was like this for the disciple Thomas two thousands years ago in that locked meeting place.
Perhaps it was like this for Thomas who had seen enough devastation, had witnessed enough terror that he could not imagine anything being otherwise.
As we hear the story of the empty tomb, we often forget the terror and the violence that gave birth to it.
We shut out the violence of our own world we become desperate for hope for a happier ending, but Thomas does not forget: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hands in his side I will not believe.”
• Unless I know that the one whom you claim has appeared to you is no ghostly spirit, but still bears the marks of his vulnerability--
• Unless this man who has appeared to you still carries his woundedness and our own upon him--
• Unless this one whom you say has come can show me a way out of this endless cycle of violence and suffering, I will not believe.
Thomas’ doubt is not his intellectual curiosity, but his grief; his lament. Why else would he want to see his Lord’s wounds still?
And in the midst of Thomas’ grief, and our own, Jesus enters into the locked up places of our world, into our hearts broken in grief, into our battle zones, and proclaims, “Peace!”
What kind of a peace is it that he proclaims?
Certainly, it is not a peace that would suggest that after his appearance the disciples will live lives free of discord, freed from the threat of violence. Our Acts reading for this morning dispels such illusions. It is not the peace that is the achievement of political machinations; it is not the peace of a final military conquest; it is not the peace that the UN hopes for once the Taliban finally loses its power or resolve to plant one more road-side bomb.
Christ offers, instead, the peace that is himself. The prince of peace. The first fruit of a new creation. He offers Thomas his resurrected body, which Thomas, and we too will one day share. A body that has borne all the iniquities and violence that the world gives; and yet a body that lives. And so he invites Thomas to touch him, to probe his hand into his very wounds, and to know that he is no ghost—that his peace is no illusion. “Thomas, do not doubt but believe.”
• Believe that the kingdom is here in your midst, Thomas.
• Believe that the Spirit that I have sent is the pouring out of a new creation; a creation of peace that is waiting to be born.
• And receive, Thomas, this gift so that you and your friends might be emissaries of this peace. A peace that comes through the very wounds that you have touched. “Do not doubt, but believe.”
I cannot imagine how this very simple message, “Do not doubt, but believe,” is conveyed by the priests and pastors in Gagetown and Petawawa. I do not know how the good news of Easter is proclaimed meaningfully to those who have suffered such a loss, but I suspect that Jesus’ words to Thomas have much to teach us about suffering. There was a news story recently on the so-called collateral damage inflicted upon civilian families back home as children suffer the fear and anxiety of having parents in combat. And, as many of you have probably seen, the government has committed some money to bolster the scant resources for military families, particularly in Petawawa, so that they might learn to cope with their fear and loss. I was raised in a military family, and so I have a great deal of sympathy for the efforts of these counselors and family centres.
But what I would suggest is that what the church has to offer is something quite different from the capacity to manage or cope in a world of violence and in a world of grieving. What the church has to offer is the patient kind of ministry that Jesus has displayed in his care for Thomas.
Jesus does not deny Thomas or rebuke him in his doubt, but like his appearance to Mary, Jesus reveals himself uniquely to him; calling Mary by name, and allowing Thomas the time to touch and probe. In our doubt, in our suffering, in our anguish and loss of faith, Jesus calls us by name, and he says, “Do not doubt, but believe.” This is no rebuke but an invitation. And it is an invitation that is accompanied by various gifts so that the pain and doubt may not be unbearable.
First, the risen Christ offers his presence to the end of time through the power of the Holy Spirit. In a moment reminiscent of the book of Genesis, Christ breathes upon the disciples, just as God breathes life into Adam. In this new creation, the disciples are filled with the Spirit, and with the Spirit’s power to act in God’s name. This is the gift that we have been given as the church--to be agents of reconciliation in a broken world. Not so that we can merely manage our loss, but so that we might become whole, so that all might enjoy Christ’s peace.
***
The second gift is related to this. The Church is given the gift of Christ’s wounded body, just as Thomas was, to see, to touch to partake in. It is this body that we take into our hands as we participate in our eucharistic meal. And it is through this body that we are transformed, as our world awaits transformation. To partake in the eucharist in a world of violence and terror, is to partake in a free gift of life, in which brokenness is made whole, in which the many become one. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from his prison cell in the last days of his life, indeed the last days of the war, wrote these words to his friend:
It is difficult to celebrate Easter when sometimes our world looks much the same. Yet we have before us a table, a sanctuary, in which Christ offers his peace, offers himself. Touch and see and taste how the world has changed, and become that peace that Christ grants. Do not doubt, but believe.
From Easter, 1916, by W.B. Yeats
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Acts 5:27-32; Psalm 118:14-29 or Psalm 150; Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31
preached by Jane Barter Moulaison on April 15th, 2007
The Easter appearance to the disciple Thomas is a much loved and a well-known story. Many times we have probably heard sermons preached on “Doubting Thomas.” In many ways, Thomas becomes the great patron saint of modernity. He is interpreted as doubting the authority of the disciples; of having a great scientific mind, wanting empirical proof of the resurrection which his friends proclaimed.
So, like the good rationalist he is, he declares: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his ands, and pit my finer in the mark of the nails and my hands in his side I will not believe.”
And, of course, it is indeed possible that it was this kind of skepticism that made him a “Doubting Thomas”; but I am intrigued by his request.
• Why the nail marks in his hands?
• Why his pierced side?
• Why did he wish to touch those places of his Lord’s woundedness?
• Why did he not just wish to see him and to cling to him, as Mary Magdalene had?
• Why did he not long to see evidence of his glory rather than the marks of his crucifixion?
Let’s keep this question in the back of our mind for a bit while I tell another Easter story.
It is early morning on Easter Sunday just west of Kandahar. A caravan of Canadian troops are traveling; it has been quiet for some time now. Some no doubt are thinking about the holiday; remembering family traditions; thinking of their kids and hiding Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies. Wondering if it is Spring-time yet in New Brunswick. Then a thud and a sudden explosion. Then light, now panic, now terror. Then the silence. Six men killed instantly.
Their names flashed across televisions, were heard on radios, interrupting Easter holiday celebrations.
• Sgt. Donald Lucas, 31, of Burton, N.B.
• Cpl. Aaron E. Williams, 23, of Lincoln, N.B.
• Pte. Kevin Vincent Kennedy, 20, of St. Lawrence, N.L.
• Pte. David Robert Greenslade, 20, of Saint John, N.B.
• Cpl. Christopher Paul Stannix, 24, of Dartmouth, N.S.
• Cpl. Brent Poland, 37, of Camlachie, Ont.
Half a world away, in Gagetown, military officials spent most of Easter day tracking down the families of the soldiers killed in the attack. Three days later, more terrible, most un-Easter-like news. This time it comes to Petawawa Ontario. Master Cpl. Allan Stewart, 30, and Trooper Patrick James Pentland, 23. Also dead.
We can hardly fathom the loss of young life; we cannot make sense of the Easter message in the midst of continued violence.
Perhaps it was like this for the disciple Thomas two thousands years ago in that locked meeting place.
Perhaps it was like this for Thomas who had seen enough devastation, had witnessed enough terror that he could not imagine anything being otherwise.
As we hear the story of the empty tomb, we often forget the terror and the violence that gave birth to it.
We shut out the violence of our own world we become desperate for hope for a happier ending, but Thomas does not forget: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hands in his side I will not believe.”
• Unless I know that the one whom you claim has appeared to you is no ghostly spirit, but still bears the marks of his vulnerability--
• Unless this man who has appeared to you still carries his woundedness and our own upon him--
• Unless this one whom you say has come can show me a way out of this endless cycle of violence and suffering, I will not believe.
Thomas’ doubt is not his intellectual curiosity, but his grief; his lament. Why else would he want to see his Lord’s wounds still?
And in the midst of Thomas’ grief, and our own, Jesus enters into the locked up places of our world, into our hearts broken in grief, into our battle zones, and proclaims, “Peace!”
What kind of a peace is it that he proclaims?
Certainly, it is not a peace that would suggest that after his appearance the disciples will live lives free of discord, freed from the threat of violence. Our Acts reading for this morning dispels such illusions. It is not the peace that is the achievement of political machinations; it is not the peace of a final military conquest; it is not the peace that the UN hopes for once the Taliban finally loses its power or resolve to plant one more road-side bomb.
Christ offers, instead, the peace that is himself. The prince of peace. The first fruit of a new creation. He offers Thomas his resurrected body, which Thomas, and we too will one day share. A body that has borne all the iniquities and violence that the world gives; and yet a body that lives. And so he invites Thomas to touch him, to probe his hand into his very wounds, and to know that he is no ghost—that his peace is no illusion. “Thomas, do not doubt but believe.”
• Believe that the kingdom is here in your midst, Thomas.
• Believe that the Spirit that I have sent is the pouring out of a new creation; a creation of peace that is waiting to be born.
• And receive, Thomas, this gift so that you and your friends might be emissaries of this peace. A peace that comes through the very wounds that you have touched. “Do not doubt, but believe.”
I cannot imagine how this very simple message, “Do not doubt, but believe,” is conveyed by the priests and pastors in Gagetown and Petawawa. I do not know how the good news of Easter is proclaimed meaningfully to those who have suffered such a loss, but I suspect that Jesus’ words to Thomas have much to teach us about suffering. There was a news story recently on the so-called collateral damage inflicted upon civilian families back home as children suffer the fear and anxiety of having parents in combat. And, as many of you have probably seen, the government has committed some money to bolster the scant resources for military families, particularly in Petawawa, so that they might learn to cope with their fear and loss. I was raised in a military family, and so I have a great deal of sympathy for the efforts of these counselors and family centres.
But what I would suggest is that what the church has to offer is something quite different from the capacity to manage or cope in a world of violence and in a world of grieving. What the church has to offer is the patient kind of ministry that Jesus has displayed in his care for Thomas.
Jesus does not deny Thomas or rebuke him in his doubt, but like his appearance to Mary, Jesus reveals himself uniquely to him; calling Mary by name, and allowing Thomas the time to touch and probe. In our doubt, in our suffering, in our anguish and loss of faith, Jesus calls us by name, and he says, “Do not doubt, but believe.” This is no rebuke but an invitation. And it is an invitation that is accompanied by various gifts so that the pain and doubt may not be unbearable.
First, the risen Christ offers his presence to the end of time through the power of the Holy Spirit. In a moment reminiscent of the book of Genesis, Christ breathes upon the disciples, just as God breathes life into Adam. In this new creation, the disciples are filled with the Spirit, and with the Spirit’s power to act in God’s name. This is the gift that we have been given as the church--to be agents of reconciliation in a broken world. Not so that we can merely manage our loss, but so that we might become whole, so that all might enjoy Christ’s peace.
***
The second gift is related to this. The Church is given the gift of Christ’s wounded body, just as Thomas was, to see, to touch to partake in. It is this body that we take into our hands as we participate in our eucharistic meal. And it is through this body that we are transformed, as our world awaits transformation. To partake in the eucharist in a world of violence and terror, is to partake in a free gift of life, in which brokenness is made whole, in which the many become one. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from his prison cell in the last days of his life, indeed the last days of the war, wrote these words to his friend:
Not only action, but also suffering is a way to freedom. In suffering, the deliverance consists in our being allowed to put the matter out of our own hands into God’s hands. In this sense death is the crowning of human freedom. Whether the human deed is a matter of faith or not depends on whether we understand our suffering as an extension of our action and a completion of freedom. (LPP)There is something quite right that the church does when it remembers its war dead, because it acknowledges the courage of those who recognize that suffering for others is a way to freedom. Yet, that freedom is now only partially available to us; there remains in our lives, countless ways in which Christ still bears the marks of humanity on his hands, in his side. What we do when we proclaim the resurrection in the midst of war and strife is that we remember the wounds, of those who have died far too young, and we remember that those wounds are borne for us by God, and that God has given the Church the power to likewise transform that suffering into promise. Just as there is nothing in the lives of the young men that will not be taken up by Christ, their deaths, like ours too will be, represent a release from the terror and fear that is still part of the life in the times in between.
It is difficult to celebrate Easter when sometimes our world looks much the same. Yet we have before us a table, a sanctuary, in which Christ offers his peace, offers himself. Touch and see and taste how the world has changed, and become that peace that Christ grants. Do not doubt, but believe.
From Easter, 1916, by W.B. Yeats
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Friday, April 13, 2007
The Resurrection of Our Lord (2007): "The Grafting of the Gardener of Souls"
The Resurrection of Our Lord (2007): "The Grafting of the Gardener of Souls"
Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26; John 20:1-18
preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons, on April 8th, 2007
I’ve tried gardening. And I’ll probably try gardening again. I wouldn’t call myself the best gardener, though – there’s something about gardening that assumes you’re going to keep your eyes open, and be diligent. You’ve got to keep watering, and make sure you plant the right thing in the right season.
That part I can do well enough, most of the time. That’s not the part that I have had the most difficulty with. The hardest part for me is keeping my eyes open to what’s around me.
***
When I was about 12, a sapling started growing up in our yard. It was an elm sapling. I loved that little sapling. I was the one who mowed the lawn, and every Saturday, I carefully mowed around this sapling.
The rest of the trees didn’t matter to me at all, just this little sapling, this little elm tree. It took years for that little tree to grow to any height, and it was still there when I went away to university. But when I went away to university, someone else started mowing the lawn. So you know what happened, right? My precious little sapling got mowed over by someone with a little less love for that little elm tree than I did.
***
I lived in California for a few years, and Karen and I had our first back-yard there. So we thought we might do some gardening. One of my favourite herbs is rosemary, so I was particularly excited to grow some rosemary in our new back-yard. I gave that little rosemary so much attention. But it never grew. All I had was a little shrimpy rosemary branch sticking out of the mud, so small that to take enough rosemary off that shrub for any cooking, was to risk the life of the poor little guy. So we cooked without rosemary.
That rosemary never grew, and Karen and I left it to die when we left that house.
***
And so we find Mary Magdalene in another garden, in another time, looking for her Lord, the one who was going to save her, but who died an anonymous, wretched, and torturous death on a cross, just three days before. She went to the tomb to visit a dead man, but what she was looking for wasn’t there; and she discovers that her Lord and saviour is not only dead, but his body has disappeared: “They have taken my Lord out of the tomb,” says Mary to Peter and the beloved disciple, “and I do not know where they have laid him.”
Her saviour is not only dead, he’s dead and gone.
***
You know that little elm sapling that I so lovingly mowed around, only to have it get mowed over by a reckless gardener? If I had taken a minute to look around I would have realized something. Let me say a bit about where I grew up: I grew up near the centre of the city, in a neighbourhood where old old trees grew on the boulevard all the way up and down the street. Think about it for a second – I was worried about a little elm sapling (as beautiful as it was), but if I had only looked up to what was there – I grew up on Elm street, it wasn’t called Elm street because poplar grew on it! Great, hulking, cathedral elms swung over my head every day I mowed that lawn. Seeds had already been planted,
and the fruits of someone else’s labour swung above me, and if only I took a minute to look up, my pet project would sure have been put into perspective.
And in California, while I agonized over that little shrimpy shrub of rosemary, if I had taken a minute to look around, I would have seen that rosemary grows like a weed in that little California town. If I had taken a good look, I would have seen that people grew rosemary for shrubs on their front lawns, and that I passed rosemary bush after rosemary bush every day on my way to the bus stop. If only I had looked, I would have seen that the fruits of the seeds that someone else had already planted were already there, the fruit was available in abundance – and my little pet project would have come into perspective.
And when Mary Magdalene, who is looking for a dead man, when she looks up,
it turns out she is as dense as I am. Mary is looking for her Lord, who she thinks is a dead man. But she finds a gardener. And Mary says to the gardener, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Mary couldn’t see what was right in front of her, as concerned as she was with her nearly meaningless errand.
But the gardener says to her, “Mary!” And in a moment Mary understands; what she has been looking at, but not seeing, was that this man, the gardener, is the man she thought was dead; her Lord, the gardener, the first fruits of her salvation, this gardener is her Lord. Mary doesn’t finally see her Lord in a fit of ecstasy; she is not in some kind of deep prayer; she only needs someone to tell her who she is: “Mary!”
Jesus the gardener calls out her name, and in this calling of Mary she finally sees the gardener for who he is; Mary was looking for a sapling, but found a cathedral elm;
Mary was looking for a sprig, but found a field full of rosemary; Mary was looking for the dead, but she finds a living God, a living man.
And this living God, this living man, is the gardener of souls, the one we see for who he is when he calls out our name. This gardener of souls is calling out Mary’s name;
he’s calling out my name; this gardener of souls is calling out your name; and when we hear our name from his lips we call out to him “Teacher!”
***
But this gardener of souls offers us far more than the friendship he spoke of at the last supper; he offers far more than being our Teacher, though this gardener is both of these things: he is our friend, and our teacher.
But this gardener of souls, the man who is God, the crucified one, the risen one, says to Mary: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” This gardener of souls offers to us participation in the divine life of the Father, participation in the divine life of God, through the work of our brother, our Lord and savior Jesus Christ. The world has been pruned and is ready to bear the fruit of everlasting life because this gardener is himself the first-fruits of the salvation that we will know if we believe in him. He has died, yet he is not dead; he is risen and has ascended, yet he is here with us in the power of the Holy Spirit. Through death and resurrection the gardener grafts us to himself, saving us and bringing into the fullness of life through participation in the very life of the Holy Trinity.
***
So what have you come here looking for? I don't know exactly why you're here, but if your looking for anything less than the living God, open you eyes! The living God has walked among us as a man; the living God suffered death on the cross in Jesus of Nazareth; the living God in a living human body has risen to the fullness of life in the Father; and the living God leaves us signs of his presence in the fruit of the field and the fruit of the vine made true by the Holy Spirit.
Feed on the fruit of salvation made known to us in the one who offers himself on this table, the salvation made known to us in the crucified one, the risen one.
Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26; John 20:1-18
preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons, on April 8th, 2007
I’ve tried gardening. And I’ll probably try gardening again. I wouldn’t call myself the best gardener, though – there’s something about gardening that assumes you’re going to keep your eyes open, and be diligent. You’ve got to keep watering, and make sure you plant the right thing in the right season.That part I can do well enough, most of the time. That’s not the part that I have had the most difficulty with. The hardest part for me is keeping my eyes open to what’s around me.
***
When I was about 12, a sapling started growing up in our yard. It was an elm sapling. I loved that little sapling. I was the one who mowed the lawn, and every Saturday, I carefully mowed around this sapling.
The rest of the trees didn’t matter to me at all, just this little sapling, this little elm tree. It took years for that little tree to grow to any height, and it was still there when I went away to university. But when I went away to university, someone else started mowing the lawn. So you know what happened, right? My precious little sapling got mowed over by someone with a little less love for that little elm tree than I did.
***
I lived in California for a few years, and Karen and I had our first back-yard there. So we thought we might do some gardening. One of my favourite herbs is rosemary, so I was particularly excited to grow some rosemary in our new back-yard. I gave that little rosemary so much attention. But it never grew. All I had was a little shrimpy rosemary branch sticking out of the mud, so small that to take enough rosemary off that shrub for any cooking, was to risk the life of the poor little guy. So we cooked without rosemary.
That rosemary never grew, and Karen and I left it to die when we left that house.
***
And so we find Mary Magdalene in another garden, in another time, looking for her Lord, the one who was going to save her, but who died an anonymous, wretched, and torturous death on a cross, just three days before. She went to the tomb to visit a dead man, but what she was looking for wasn’t there; and she discovers that her Lord and saviour is not only dead, but his body has disappeared: “They have taken my Lord out of the tomb,” says Mary to Peter and the beloved disciple, “and I do not know where they have laid him.”Her saviour is not only dead, he’s dead and gone.
***
You know that little elm sapling that I so lovingly mowed around, only to have it get mowed over by a reckless gardener? If I had taken a minute to look around I would have realized something. Let me say a bit about where I grew up: I grew up near the centre of the city, in a neighbourhood where old old trees grew on the boulevard all the way up and down the street. Think about it for a second – I was worried about a little elm sapling (as beautiful as it was), but if I had only looked up to what was there – I grew up on Elm street, it wasn’t called Elm street because poplar grew on it! Great, hulking, cathedral elms swung over my head every day I mowed that lawn. Seeds had already been planted,
and the fruits of someone else’s labour swung above me, and if only I took a minute to look up, my pet project would sure have been put into perspective.
And in California, while I agonized over that little shrimpy shrub of rosemary, if I had taken a minute to look around, I would have seen that rosemary grows like a weed in that little California town. If I had taken a good look, I would have seen that people grew rosemary for shrubs on their front lawns, and that I passed rosemary bush after rosemary bush every day on my way to the bus stop. If only I had looked, I would have seen that the fruits of the seeds that someone else had already planted were already there, the fruit was available in abundance – and my little pet project would have come into perspective.
And when Mary Magdalene, who is looking for a dead man, when she looks up,it turns out she is as dense as I am. Mary is looking for her Lord, who she thinks is a dead man. But she finds a gardener. And Mary says to the gardener, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Mary couldn’t see what was right in front of her, as concerned as she was with her nearly meaningless errand.
But the gardener says to her, “Mary!” And in a moment Mary understands; what she has been looking at, but not seeing, was that this man, the gardener, is the man she thought was dead; her Lord, the gardener, the first fruits of her salvation, this gardener is her Lord. Mary doesn’t finally see her Lord in a fit of ecstasy; she is not in some kind of deep prayer; she only needs someone to tell her who she is: “Mary!”
Jesus the gardener calls out her name, and in this calling of Mary she finally sees the gardener for who he is; Mary was looking for a sapling, but found a cathedral elm;
Mary was looking for a sprig, but found a field full of rosemary; Mary was looking for the dead, but she finds a living God, a living man.
And this living God, this living man, is the gardener of souls, the one we see for who he is when he calls out our name. This gardener of souls is calling out Mary’s name;
he’s calling out my name; this gardener of souls is calling out your name; and when we hear our name from his lips we call out to him “Teacher!”
***
But this gardener of souls offers us far more than the friendship he spoke of at the last supper; he offers far more than being our Teacher, though this gardener is both of these things: he is our friend, and our teacher.
But this gardener of souls, the man who is God, the crucified one, the risen one, says to Mary: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” This gardener of souls offers to us participation in the divine life of the Father, participation in the divine life of God, through the work of our brother, our Lord and savior Jesus Christ. The world has been pruned and is ready to bear the fruit of everlasting life because this gardener is himself the first-fruits of the salvation that we will know if we believe in him. He has died, yet he is not dead; he is risen and has ascended, yet he is here with us in the power of the Holy Spirit. Through death and resurrection the gardener grafts us to himself, saving us and bringing into the fullness of life through participation in the very life of the Holy Trinity.
***
So what have you come here looking for? I don't know exactly why you're here, but if your looking for anything less than the living God, open you eyes! The living God has walked among us as a man; the living God suffered death on the cross in Jesus of Nazareth; the living God in a living human body has risen to the fullness of life in the Father; and the living God leaves us signs of his presence in the fruit of the field and the fruit of the vine made true by the Holy Spirit.Feed on the fruit of salvation made known to us in the one who offers himself on this table, the salvation made known to us in the crucified one, the risen one.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Easter Vigil (2007): “Why do you look for the dead among the living?”
Easter Vigil (2007): “Why do you look for the dead among the living?”
Genesis 1:1-2:2; Exodus 14:10-15:1; Isaiah 55:1-11; Ezekiel 37:1-14
Romans 6:3-11; Psalm 114; Luke 24:1-12
Preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons, on April 7th, 2007
When Moses arrives at the edge of the Red Sea with the rest of the Israelites, the Egyptians are very close at hand. And the Israelites start complaining. So Moses offers some advice to the Israelites: “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still.” Which is kind of funny, because the Lord is hardly happy with this advice.
The first thing the Lord does is, well, complain a little too. “Why do you cry out to me?” Stop complaining, says the Lord.
But then the Lord, seemingly unhappy with Moses’ advice to the Israelites that they ought to keep still, the Lord says don’t keep still. “Tell the Israelites to go forward!” says the Lord.
The Israelites are asked to go forward right into the Red Sea, without knowing that Moses was about to be given the power to divide that very same sea. I don’t care about this keeping still business, says the Lord, go forward – and I don’t care if you think you’re going to get a little wet.
***
So we can give some credit to St. Mary Magdalene. While the eleven were elsewhere (we’re not sure where, but perhaps they were heeding Moses’ advice, hoping that the Lord would fight for them, if only they kept still), St. Mary Magdalene, and a few other women, went ahead and did something.
There’s a lot to be said for keeping still. Most of us are like St. Mary Magdalene, at least in some respects. We just want to do something, to keep busy with unimportant things, distractions. There is something important about knowing that the Lord will fight for us, if only we keep still.
But St. Mary Magdalene didn’t go to the tomb because unimportant things distracted her. Her friend, her teacher, and Lord had died, and she did him a great honour: she brought prepared spices in the hopes of paying her deepest respects to a dead body. That is what you expect to find, when someone dies and is put in a tomb, right? A dead body? St. Mary Magdalene was acting in good faith according to what she already knew and expected. This was no busy work, no distracting task- it was an errand of mercy, affection, and adoration of her dead Lord.
Many of us do the best we can in our tasks of mercy and affection, and adoration of our Lord, according to the knowledge we have on hand. And this is good – mercy, affection, and adoration, are good things! But what do we do when something new comes to pass?
Sometimes what we know changes deeply, as it did for St. Mary Magdalene that early dawn. St. Mary Magdalene went looking for a dead man, but what she found was something entirely different: she found an empty tomb with two angels standing there.
Now we can do two things when such an event happens: we can cling to what we once knew, and continue believing that our Lord is a dead man; we can keep up our acts of mercy, affection, and adoration as we had once done according to what we once knew.
But St. Mary Magdalene does the more difficult thing. She changes her mind. She acts differently. She finds no dead man, and discovers that this particular errand of mercy, affection, and adoration actually makes little sense anymore: because only dead men need burial spices.
Living and risen saviours ask something different; they ask for conversion, they ask for a turning of the mind, a changing of what we do and how we do it, because all things are new, all things are changed – “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”
Good question!
“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, he has risen.” But by the resurrection, abd by our distance from the grave, we can now ask the question a little differently: “Why do you look for the dead among the living?” Look for dead men somewhere else. They won’t be found here. Here is not the place to go on an errand of mercy, or affection, or even adoration of any dead man. Here – in this church, in this worship, in this liturgy, you will find no dead man. You will find the living God, our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ, at once man and God, the one who, through his empty tomb and the resurrection of his body (the one in whom we will partake at this table), this is the living God of wondrous possibility, the one who makes all things new.
Let us let the Lord do this work through us; let us leave old things behind; let us imagine (because it’s true!) that all things are made new through this, our risen and living Lord and saviour Jesus Christ.
Genesis 1:1-2:2; Exodus 14:10-15:1; Isaiah 55:1-11; Ezekiel 37:1-14
Romans 6:3-11; Psalm 114; Luke 24:1-12
Preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons, on April 7th, 2007
When Moses arrives at the edge of the Red Sea with the rest of the Israelites, the Egyptians are very close at hand. And the Israelites start complaining. So Moses offers some advice to the Israelites: “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still.” Which is kind of funny, because the Lord is hardly happy with this advice.
The first thing the Lord does is, well, complain a little too. “Why do you cry out to me?” Stop complaining, says the Lord.
But then the Lord, seemingly unhappy with Moses’ advice to the Israelites that they ought to keep still, the Lord says don’t keep still. “Tell the Israelites to go forward!” says the Lord.
The Israelites are asked to go forward right into the Red Sea, without knowing that Moses was about to be given the power to divide that very same sea. I don’t care about this keeping still business, says the Lord, go forward – and I don’t care if you think you’re going to get a little wet.
***
So we can give some credit to St. Mary Magdalene. While the eleven were elsewhere (we’re not sure where, but perhaps they were heeding Moses’ advice, hoping that the Lord would fight for them, if only they kept still), St. Mary Magdalene, and a few other women, went ahead and did something.
There’s a lot to be said for keeping still. Most of us are like St. Mary Magdalene, at least in some respects. We just want to do something, to keep busy with unimportant things, distractions. There is something important about knowing that the Lord will fight for us, if only we keep still.
But St. Mary Magdalene didn’t go to the tomb because unimportant things distracted her. Her friend, her teacher, and Lord had died, and she did him a great honour: she brought prepared spices in the hopes of paying her deepest respects to a dead body. That is what you expect to find, when someone dies and is put in a tomb, right? A dead body? St. Mary Magdalene was acting in good faith according to what she already knew and expected. This was no busy work, no distracting task- it was an errand of mercy, affection, and adoration of her dead Lord.
Many of us do the best we can in our tasks of mercy and affection, and adoration of our Lord, according to the knowledge we have on hand. And this is good – mercy, affection, and adoration, are good things! But what do we do when something new comes to pass?
Sometimes what we know changes deeply, as it did for St. Mary Magdalene that early dawn. St. Mary Magdalene went looking for a dead man, but what she found was something entirely different: she found an empty tomb with two angels standing there.
Now we can do two things when such an event happens: we can cling to what we once knew, and continue believing that our Lord is a dead man; we can keep up our acts of mercy, affection, and adoration as we had once done according to what we once knew.
But St. Mary Magdalene does the more difficult thing. She changes her mind. She acts differently. She finds no dead man, and discovers that this particular errand of mercy, affection, and adoration actually makes little sense anymore: because only dead men need burial spices.
Living and risen saviours ask something different; they ask for conversion, they ask for a turning of the mind, a changing of what we do and how we do it, because all things are new, all things are changed – “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”
Good question!
“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, he has risen.” But by the resurrection, abd by our distance from the grave, we can now ask the question a little differently: “Why do you look for the dead among the living?” Look for dead men somewhere else. They won’t be found here. Here is not the place to go on an errand of mercy, or affection, or even adoration of any dead man. Here – in this church, in this worship, in this liturgy, you will find no dead man. You will find the living God, our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ, at once man and God, the one who, through his empty tomb and the resurrection of his body (the one in whom we will partake at this table), this is the living God of wondrous possibility, the one who makes all things new.
Let us let the Lord do this work through us; let us leave old things behind; let us imagine (because it’s true!) that all things are made new through this, our risen and living Lord and saviour Jesus Christ.
Good Friday (2007): "When the Stones Cried Out"
Good Friday (2007): "When the Stones Cried Out"
Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42
Preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons, April 6th, 2007
When Jesus rode triumphantly into Jerusalem, Luke writes that “some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to [Jesus], ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’” Jesus answered them by saying that if his disciples were silent, “the stones would shout out.”
Now imagine, when Jesus said that the stones would should out, that Jesus was pointing to people. The rocks that would shout out if the disciples went silent, the stones that would shout out with praise, were the unbelievers, the politicians, and the scoffers.
***
Now turn a few days ahead, to what is at hand for us, the task of remembering the event that follows Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. Today we are called to remember the trial and crucifixion of our Lord and Saviour. And on this day, the disciples that the Pharisees wanted Jesus to stop, the disciples who praised their teacher and their master on another day with great cries of jubilation: on this day, these very disciples, as it turns out, go silent.
***
The disciples were there, in the garden, when they came to take Jesus away. They came for him, over 600 soldiers and policemen, according to John. They came with weapons and clubs, hoping to defend themselves; they came with lanterns, in an attempt to pierce the darkness.
They called out for Jesus of Nazareth, and Jesus replies, claiming the divine name revealed to Moses at the burning bush, Jesus says: "I am." Jesus claims the divine name, the very name of God, the name of the source of all being, the very one who is. In Jesus of Nazareth, our very God is there in the garden.
Jesus has claimed the divine name before, when he was questioned, he said that "when you have lifted me up, then you will realize that I am." Jesus says that the day he is lifted up, the day he is lifted up on the cross, this is the day that the fullness of the glory of God is strangely revealed.
So when Jesus replies to the question, “are you Jesus of Nazareth?”, and Jesus says "I am," over six hundred soldiers and policemen step back and fall to the ground. In the silence of the disciples, the men who come to bind up this man, the man who is God, the stones fall down and reveal the glory of God.
***
It is no small irony that the disciple that does speak is Peter, the rock. But this disciple does far less than praise his master. While Jesus is telling us that one of his natures is the very source of our being, saying "I am," Peter is saying "I am not." Jesus is the one who is; Peter, when he denies Jesus and says "I am not," Peter becomes the one without Jesus, Peter becomes the one without being, the one who is not. Without Jesus Peter fades into nothingness by his own admission of being apart from our Lord. This disciple is more than silent. He is nothing at all.
***
Pilate, the man great only in his indecisiveness, his vacillation and his uncertainty, even Pilate cries out announcing the glory of God. This stone, this Pilate, cries out the glory of God and announces his innocence, making it known that this is the silent lamb sent to the slaughter. Pilate oversees the soldiers, more stones that cry out to the glory of God. They weave for Jesus a crown and dress him in the robes of a King. They cry out the glory of God, a glory strangely revealed in the suffering of an innocent man.
And again Pilate, while the disciples are silent, cries out from the Stone Pavement that this man, Jesus of Nazareth, this man who is God, Pilate tells us, "Here is your King!" The stones cry out and reveal the glory of God.
And the sign on the cross says, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." He is being lifted up, and his glory is being revealed in a hidden way, in a strange and disorienting and unsettling way. God’s glory is being revealed in the death of a man on the cross.
Yet even the disciples at the foot of the cross look up in silence, while others, according to Luke, are looking from afar off. In silence.
And when it is finished, this man, our King and our God, is carried away in silence, and placed in the tomb; we watch in silence and see our cruelty to the innocent, we see our complicity in the suffering of those who don't deserve it.
As we see our cruelty and our complicity, we are unsettled, disoriented, and a strangeness overcomes us. In a world where no one is innocent, this man was; in a world where divinity escapes us, he is God; in a world where suffering is shameful, it was through this
suffering that the glory of God was revealed.
Look here; look upon the cross. It is here where we find ourselves, at the foot of the cross, looking in silence; and the stones shout out, “Here is your King,” here is our King. Here upon the cross salvation is won by our God and our King. Look upon the cross because it is here where the glory of God made man is strangely, and silently, and fully revealed.
Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42
Preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons, April 6th, 2007
When Jesus rode triumphantly into Jerusalem, Luke writes that “some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to [Jesus], ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’” Jesus answered them by saying that if his disciples were silent, “the stones would shout out.”
Now imagine, when Jesus said that the stones would should out, that Jesus was pointing to people. The rocks that would shout out if the disciples went silent, the stones that would shout out with praise, were the unbelievers, the politicians, and the scoffers.
***
Now turn a few days ahead, to what is at hand for us, the task of remembering the event that follows Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. Today we are called to remember the trial and crucifixion of our Lord and Saviour. And on this day, the disciples that the Pharisees wanted Jesus to stop, the disciples who praised their teacher and their master on another day with great cries of jubilation: on this day, these very disciples, as it turns out, go silent.
***
The disciples were there, in the garden, when they came to take Jesus away. They came for him, over 600 soldiers and policemen, according to John. They came with weapons and clubs, hoping to defend themselves; they came with lanterns, in an attempt to pierce the darkness.
They called out for Jesus of Nazareth, and Jesus replies, claiming the divine name revealed to Moses at the burning bush, Jesus says: "I am." Jesus claims the divine name, the very name of God, the name of the source of all being, the very one who is. In Jesus of Nazareth, our very God is there in the garden.
Jesus has claimed the divine name before, when he was questioned, he said that "when you have lifted me up, then you will realize that I am." Jesus says that the day he is lifted up, the day he is lifted up on the cross, this is the day that the fullness of the glory of God is strangely revealed.
So when Jesus replies to the question, “are you Jesus of Nazareth?”, and Jesus says "I am," over six hundred soldiers and policemen step back and fall to the ground. In the silence of the disciples, the men who come to bind up this man, the man who is God, the stones fall down and reveal the glory of God.
***
It is no small irony that the disciple that does speak is Peter, the rock. But this disciple does far less than praise his master. While Jesus is telling us that one of his natures is the very source of our being, saying "I am," Peter is saying "I am not." Jesus is the one who is; Peter, when he denies Jesus and says "I am not," Peter becomes the one without Jesus, Peter becomes the one without being, the one who is not. Without Jesus Peter fades into nothingness by his own admission of being apart from our Lord. This disciple is more than silent. He is nothing at all.
***
Pilate, the man great only in his indecisiveness, his vacillation and his uncertainty, even Pilate cries out announcing the glory of God. This stone, this Pilate, cries out the glory of God and announces his innocence, making it known that this is the silent lamb sent to the slaughter. Pilate oversees the soldiers, more stones that cry out to the glory of God. They weave for Jesus a crown and dress him in the robes of a King. They cry out the glory of God, a glory strangely revealed in the suffering of an innocent man.
And again Pilate, while the disciples are silent, cries out from the Stone Pavement that this man, Jesus of Nazareth, this man who is God, Pilate tells us, "Here is your King!" The stones cry out and reveal the glory of God.
And the sign on the cross says, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." He is being lifted up, and his glory is being revealed in a hidden way, in a strange and disorienting and unsettling way. God’s glory is being revealed in the death of a man on the cross.
Yet even the disciples at the foot of the cross look up in silence, while others, according to Luke, are looking from afar off. In silence.
And when it is finished, this man, our King and our God, is carried away in silence, and placed in the tomb; we watch in silence and see our cruelty to the innocent, we see our complicity in the suffering of those who don't deserve it.
As we see our cruelty and our complicity, we are unsettled, disoriented, and a strangeness overcomes us. In a world where no one is innocent, this man was; in a world where divinity escapes us, he is God; in a world where suffering is shameful, it was through this
suffering that the glory of God was revealed.
Look here; look upon the cross. It is here where we find ourselves, at the foot of the cross, looking in silence; and the stones shout out, “Here is your King,” here is our King. Here upon the cross salvation is won by our God and our King. Look upon the cross because it is here where the glory of God made man is strangely, and silently, and fully revealed.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Maundy Thursday (2007): "How Peter learned to become Jesus’ friend"
Maundy Thursday (2007): "How Peter learned to become Jesus’ friend"
Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14; Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 ; John 13:1-17, 31b-35
preached by Jane Barter Moulaison
I would like, for this evening, to draw our attention to the gospel story in John, about the washing of the disciples’ feet by Jesus, but I would like to narrow our focus just a little --to consider this evening from the vantage of the disciple, Peter, because I think it is from here, from the very particular place where Peter sat at the Lord’s table that we might understand what it means to follow the rejected and the reviled Messiah, and what it means to be washed by him.
I mentioned before that the washing of the feet is a sign of great humility as we considered Mary of Bethany’s anointing of Jesus. It was the practice of slaves to wash that which was considered, lowly, base, unclean.
It is for this reason that Peter does not wish to have his master wash his feet. "You will never wash my feet." Jesus, after all, was not Peter’s slave but his hero. It would have been undignified for Jesus to wash so lowly and so base a part of him.
And yet, this is precisely what Christ is pleased to do for Peter and for us. Showing us that there is no place so shameful, so base that he is not able to touch.
***
Feet are not just lowly; they are also vulnerable. They are the very place that the serpent threatens to strike; they are weak to dashing against stones; they are the places where Christ is pierced.
It is also for this reason that Peter does not wish to have his master wash his feet. Peter cannot abide the vulnerability of having his Lord at his feet, washing them. He would far prefer that Jesus’ attention be diffused to the Body’s other members. Yet Jesus insists upon offering his singular attention to Peter, and to Peter’s feet. What weakness will he find there, Peter must be asking.
What vulnerabilities do we wish to keep hidden, even from God?
And yet Christ descends even to our terrifying weakness. And in so doing, he pours out his redeeming grace.
***
While feet are signs of humility and vulnerability, they also travel; they are our chariots to the world beyond our immediate gaze. Peter could at that moment not have known what Jesus knows about how the feet that Jesus cleans are the very feet that will stand in the square in Jerusalem proclaiming Christ’s salvation to all flesh; nor could he have known that his very feet would be led to places where he did not want to go -- the way of suffering and death. Just as Jesus’ feet were led to death, so too would Peter’s be. Just as Jesus was anointed for burial; so too was Peter. To become Jesus’ friend, is to follow him to the cross. Or, as Jesus puts it: “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
It is finally for this reason that Peter really does not want to have his master wash his feet.
***
Jesus says to Peter: "You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand."
We cannot know the implications of this radical practice of footwashing together, not immediately anyway. We understand at some level that we must serve others’ needs, even though we live in a world where we are trained to become anything but servants. We sense something of the mystery of the church being caught up in our vulnerability together—of being the one place in our society where bigger, richer, younger and more powerful are not what is to be valued. And, finally, we sense somehow that our feet that we wash tonight will travel from this night to places of great sorrow and great joy and that our very own feet may find themselves, paradoxically, in both spheres at once. And yet, may we, like Peter, allow this anointing to shape us, knowing that the vulnerability that we share is precisely that which Christ cherishes and redeems, and that the washing that he undertakes prepares us for a life set apart for service and for sacrifice. And may we come to participate in this knowledge, even and especially, as we make our own ways, and our way together, to the foot of the cross.
Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14; Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 ; John 13:1-17, 31b-35
preached by Jane Barter Moulaison
I would like, for this evening, to draw our attention to the gospel story in John, about the washing of the disciples’ feet by Jesus, but I would like to narrow our focus just a little --to consider this evening from the vantage of the disciple, Peter, because I think it is from here, from the very particular place where Peter sat at the Lord’s table that we might understand what it means to follow the rejected and the reviled Messiah, and what it means to be washed by him.
I mentioned before that the washing of the feet is a sign of great humility as we considered Mary of Bethany’s anointing of Jesus. It was the practice of slaves to wash that which was considered, lowly, base, unclean.
It is for this reason that Peter does not wish to have his master wash his feet. "You will never wash my feet." Jesus, after all, was not Peter’s slave but his hero. It would have been undignified for Jesus to wash so lowly and so base a part of him.
And yet, this is precisely what Christ is pleased to do for Peter and for us. Showing us that there is no place so shameful, so base that he is not able to touch.
***
Feet are not just lowly; they are also vulnerable. They are the very place that the serpent threatens to strike; they are weak to dashing against stones; they are the places where Christ is pierced.
It is also for this reason that Peter does not wish to have his master wash his feet. Peter cannot abide the vulnerability of having his Lord at his feet, washing them. He would far prefer that Jesus’ attention be diffused to the Body’s other members. Yet Jesus insists upon offering his singular attention to Peter, and to Peter’s feet. What weakness will he find there, Peter must be asking.
What vulnerabilities do we wish to keep hidden, even from God?
And yet Christ descends even to our terrifying weakness. And in so doing, he pours out his redeeming grace.
***
While feet are signs of humility and vulnerability, they also travel; they are our chariots to the world beyond our immediate gaze. Peter could at that moment not have known what Jesus knows about how the feet that Jesus cleans are the very feet that will stand in the square in Jerusalem proclaiming Christ’s salvation to all flesh; nor could he have known that his very feet would be led to places where he did not want to go -- the way of suffering and death. Just as Jesus’ feet were led to death, so too would Peter’s be. Just as Jesus was anointed for burial; so too was Peter. To become Jesus’ friend, is to follow him to the cross. Or, as Jesus puts it: “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
It is finally for this reason that Peter really does not want to have his master wash his feet.
***
Jesus says to Peter: "You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand."
We cannot know the implications of this radical practice of footwashing together, not immediately anyway. We understand at some level that we must serve others’ needs, even though we live in a world where we are trained to become anything but servants. We sense something of the mystery of the church being caught up in our vulnerability together—of being the one place in our society where bigger, richer, younger and more powerful are not what is to be valued. And, finally, we sense somehow that our feet that we wash tonight will travel from this night to places of great sorrow and great joy and that our very own feet may find themselves, paradoxically, in both spheres at once. And yet, may we, like Peter, allow this anointing to shape us, knowing that the vulnerability that we share is precisely that which Christ cherishes and redeems, and that the washing that he undertakes prepares us for a life set apart for service and for sacrifice. And may we come to participate in this knowledge, even and especially, as we make our own ways, and our way together, to the foot of the cross.
Palm/Passion Sunday (2007): "Forging True Friendship"
Liturgy of the Palms & Passion Sunday (2007): "Forging True Friendship"
Palms: Luke 19:28-40; Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29
Passion: Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 31:9-16; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 23:1-49
Preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons, April 1st, 2007
This is an odd Sunday in the church year. It feels like we just gave away everything that we should have held onto until Good Friday. The tradition of reading the story of Jesus' crucifixion on the Sunday before Good Friday arose for some good reasons. It arose out of the desire for people to hear the passion when there is no Good Friday service, though it is probably kept in some places by anxious rectors who knew that a lot of people wouldn’t show up for Good Friday even if there was a service. Though I have no such anxiety. I know you will all be here, right?
Without hearing the passion, you go straight from celebrating Jesus' Triumphal entry into Jerusalem, straight to the celebration of the resurrection, without any of the nastier more difficult bits in between, like Jesus' betrayal and his death on the cross.
But I didn't choose to keep Passion Sunday because I don't expect to see you on Friday.
It's partly because the prayer book makes no allowance for anything else, but it's also that if we did substitute some other gospel lesson, the passion according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke would never be heard on Sunday mornings in church. The other passions simply don't come up again in the Sunday lectionary, so all we would ever hear is John's passion.
But in the other passions, Like Luke's, there are details , that preachers might like to take advantage of. And in Luke's passion, this preacher would like to do just this, and lift out something unique to Luke: and today that is Luke's thoughts on friendship. We'll save the crucifixion sermon for Friday. Today, I'll talk about friendship.
***
Imagine for yourself two young men going away from home to study. They're both devout Christians, but they find themselves in a whole new world, a world of drinking and carousing – perhaps a little like going to university now – except that these two young men aren't coming from a small Manitoba town in the 1950's to go to the University of Manitoba. Instead, these two young men are coming from small towns in Turkey, to go to study in Athens, and it's not the 50's, it's the middle of the 4th century. And these young men are in an ancient world where students didn't just drink a lot, by the way - they also fought in the streets with rocks and clubs for the prestige of their teachers.
These two young Christian men who went off to study together in ancient Athens would later become saint's of the church: St. Gregory the Theologian and St. Basil the Great. But for us, in our story, they are just young Christian men, living together and loving God, praying, studying the scriptures, living a common life, both trying to get a good education from a good Christian teacher. (And while they're at it, trying not to get clubbed in the head by rival students.)
They had a very close friendship, Basil and Gregory. And friendship then, in the old old world were not quite like ours. Your friendships were closer than your relationships with your wife or your husband. Gregory would even write that his friendship with Basil was made with eternal bonds, that their friendship was "a full harmony of heart and nature", and even that, though he and Basil had two different bodies, they nevertheless shared the same soul.
***
In Luke we read of two more friendships. The first one we read of is a new friendship between Herod and Pilate. Luke writes in Chapter 22, verse 12, that "that same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies." These two Roman governors came to a new friendship, according to Luke, through Pilate recognizing Herod's authority, and Pilate’s sending of Jesus the Galilean to Herod, because it was Herod who was governed Galilee. This new friendship between Herod and Pilate was born on the day of Herod's mockery, the day of Herod’s disappointment about not seeing Jesus perform a sign. In other words, this was a friendship born out of the recognition of temporal, earthly authority, and in the context of the inability to recognize the meaning of Jesus’ innocence and his heavenly kingship.
"That same day," the day of Jesus' trial and crucifixion, "Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies."
***
And the third friendship is the friendship between Jesus and the confessing criminal on the cross beside Jesus. This was also a friendship born out of a recognition of authority, like the friendship between Herod and Pilate; and this friendship was also born out of a sign, the sign that Herod didn’t care to see.
The confessing criminal on the cross recognizes two things: he recognizes the true sign of Jesus's power, the sign that Herod looked for but could not see, the sign of Jesus' innocence. "This man has done nothing wrong," says the confessing criminal, yet he "stands under the same sentence of condemnation." This confessing criminal Jesus' suffering lets slip the truth, that the friendship of Herod and Pilate is deeply corrupted, because it is built upon the denial of Jesus' true power, built upon their inability to care at all about the sign of Jesus' innocence.
The confessing criminal, crucified with Christ, recognizes Jesus' true authority, his heavenly authority, the authority that Herod could only mock. So the confessing criminal on the cross asks: "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." The heavenly Kingdom, the true Kingdom. And Jesus, the one who wouldn't even speak to Herod, says to the condemned and dying man on a nearby cross, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise." Jesus and the criminal make, through the confession that Jesus is innocent though suffering, and a king though in the form of a slave, through this confession the bond between the criminal and Jesus is made sure and eternal.
***
I began this reflection on friendship with those two young Christian students, Saints Gregory and Basil. I should be honest, though. The friendship between Basil and Gregory, the friendship born through their common confession, their studying the scriptures together, and their common life; the friendship with Basil that led Gregory to say that their hearts were in full harmony, their bond was eternal, and that though they were in two bodies, that they shared the same soul; the truth of the matter is that their friendship fell apart. Basil left Athens and the Christian affection, and deep deep friendship between Basil and Gregory, was in ruins. And Gregory had a very hard time forgiving Basil for this.
Years later, after both of them had become powerful bishops and theologians, Basil died. Even after years of this estrangement from his friend, Gregory gave a speech about Basil, still saying that their friendship was an eternal one, even while speaking truthfully about their friendship falling apart. Despite the very real bitterness, Gregory still said his friendship with Basil was made with an eternal bond.
Even Pilate and Herod, if they were the best of friends to their last days, hanging out at the circus and going to the theater together, the friendship between Pilate and Herod would never have been what Basil and Gregory had.
The friendship between Pilate and Herod was born out of the mockery of Christ's kingship; it was born out of a recognition of earthly power apart from this King Jesus. Their friendship, though revealed through Jesus, was born in lies and untruth.
But Gregory, despite his estrangement from Basil, could look in hope to the maker of eternal bonds, the one who will make all things well in good time. That Christian friendship was marked by an eschatological hope in the Christ that promises reunion in paradise: Gregory with Basil, Christ with the criminal, and all of us who are marked by hope in the King who rules eternally.
Even that confessing thief on the cross can turn with confidence. Even the friendships faltering now, if they be friendships forged in the eternal bond of Christ the King, the friendship will be restored in truth through the promise of paradise. Trust and believe, all things will be made well, thanks be to God.
Palms: Luke 19:28-40; Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29
Passion: Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 31:9-16; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 23:1-49
Preached by the Rev. Preston Parsons, April 1st, 2007
This is an odd Sunday in the church year. It feels like we just gave away everything that we should have held onto until Good Friday. The tradition of reading the story of Jesus' crucifixion on the Sunday before Good Friday arose for some good reasons. It arose out of the desire for people to hear the passion when there is no Good Friday service, though it is probably kept in some places by anxious rectors who knew that a lot of people wouldn’t show up for Good Friday even if there was a service. Though I have no such anxiety. I know you will all be here, right?
Without hearing the passion, you go straight from celebrating Jesus' Triumphal entry into Jerusalem, straight to the celebration of the resurrection, without any of the nastier more difficult bits in between, like Jesus' betrayal and his death on the cross.
But I didn't choose to keep Passion Sunday because I don't expect to see you on Friday.
It's partly because the prayer book makes no allowance for anything else, but it's also that if we did substitute some other gospel lesson, the passion according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke would never be heard on Sunday mornings in church. The other passions simply don't come up again in the Sunday lectionary, so all we would ever hear is John's passion.
But in the other passions, Like Luke's, there are details , that preachers might like to take advantage of. And in Luke's passion, this preacher would like to do just this, and lift out something unique to Luke: and today that is Luke's thoughts on friendship. We'll save the crucifixion sermon for Friday. Today, I'll talk about friendship.
***
Imagine for yourself two young men going away from home to study. They're both devout Christians, but they find themselves in a whole new world, a world of drinking and carousing – perhaps a little like going to university now – except that these two young men aren't coming from a small Manitoba town in the 1950's to go to the University of Manitoba. Instead, these two young men are coming from small towns in Turkey, to go to study in Athens, and it's not the 50's, it's the middle of the 4th century. And these young men are in an ancient world where students didn't just drink a lot, by the way - they also fought in the streets with rocks and clubs for the prestige of their teachers.
These two young Christian men who went off to study together in ancient Athens would later become saint's of the church: St. Gregory the Theologian and St. Basil the Great. But for us, in our story, they are just young Christian men, living together and loving God, praying, studying the scriptures, living a common life, both trying to get a good education from a good Christian teacher. (And while they're at it, trying not to get clubbed in the head by rival students.)
They had a very close friendship, Basil and Gregory. And friendship then, in the old old world were not quite like ours. Your friendships were closer than your relationships with your wife or your husband. Gregory would even write that his friendship with Basil was made with eternal bonds, that their friendship was "a full harmony of heart and nature", and even that, though he and Basil had two different bodies, they nevertheless shared the same soul.
***
In Luke we read of two more friendships. The first one we read of is a new friendship between Herod and Pilate. Luke writes in Chapter 22, verse 12, that "that same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies." These two Roman governors came to a new friendship, according to Luke, through Pilate recognizing Herod's authority, and Pilate’s sending of Jesus the Galilean to Herod, because it was Herod who was governed Galilee. This new friendship between Herod and Pilate was born on the day of Herod's mockery, the day of Herod’s disappointment about not seeing Jesus perform a sign. In other words, this was a friendship born out of the recognition of temporal, earthly authority, and in the context of the inability to recognize the meaning of Jesus’ innocence and his heavenly kingship.
"That same day," the day of Jesus' trial and crucifixion, "Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies."
***
And the third friendship is the friendship between Jesus and the confessing criminal on the cross beside Jesus. This was also a friendship born out of a recognition of authority, like the friendship between Herod and Pilate; and this friendship was also born out of a sign, the sign that Herod didn’t care to see.
The confessing criminal on the cross recognizes two things: he recognizes the true sign of Jesus's power, the sign that Herod looked for but could not see, the sign of Jesus' innocence. "This man has done nothing wrong," says the confessing criminal, yet he "stands under the same sentence of condemnation." This confessing criminal Jesus' suffering lets slip the truth, that the friendship of Herod and Pilate is deeply corrupted, because it is built upon the denial of Jesus' true power, built upon their inability to care at all about the sign of Jesus' innocence.
The confessing criminal, crucified with Christ, recognizes Jesus' true authority, his heavenly authority, the authority that Herod could only mock. So the confessing criminal on the cross asks: "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." The heavenly Kingdom, the true Kingdom. And Jesus, the one who wouldn't even speak to Herod, says to the condemned and dying man on a nearby cross, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise." Jesus and the criminal make, through the confession that Jesus is innocent though suffering, and a king though in the form of a slave, through this confession the bond between the criminal and Jesus is made sure and eternal.
***
I began this reflection on friendship with those two young Christian students, Saints Gregory and Basil. I should be honest, though. The friendship between Basil and Gregory, the friendship born through their common confession, their studying the scriptures together, and their common life; the friendship with Basil that led Gregory to say that their hearts were in full harmony, their bond was eternal, and that though they were in two bodies, that they shared the same soul; the truth of the matter is that their friendship fell apart. Basil left Athens and the Christian affection, and deep deep friendship between Basil and Gregory, was in ruins. And Gregory had a very hard time forgiving Basil for this.
Years later, after both of them had become powerful bishops and theologians, Basil died. Even after years of this estrangement from his friend, Gregory gave a speech about Basil, still saying that their friendship was an eternal one, even while speaking truthfully about their friendship falling apart. Despite the very real bitterness, Gregory still said his friendship with Basil was made with an eternal bond.
Even Pilate and Herod, if they were the best of friends to their last days, hanging out at the circus and going to the theater together, the friendship between Pilate and Herod would never have been what Basil and Gregory had.
The friendship between Pilate and Herod was born out of the mockery of Christ's kingship; it was born out of a recognition of earthly power apart from this King Jesus. Their friendship, though revealed through Jesus, was born in lies and untruth.
But Gregory, despite his estrangement from Basil, could look in hope to the maker of eternal bonds, the one who will make all things well in good time. That Christian friendship was marked by an eschatological hope in the Christ that promises reunion in paradise: Gregory with Basil, Christ with the criminal, and all of us who are marked by hope in the King who rules eternally.
Even that confessing thief on the cross can turn with confidence. Even the friendships faltering now, if they be friendships forged in the eternal bond of Christ the King, the friendship will be restored in truth through the promise of paradise. Trust and believe, all things will be made well, thanks be to God.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Fifth Sunday in Lent (2007):" The Anointing at Bethany"
Fifth Sunday in Lent (2007): "The Anointing at Bethany"
Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12:1-8
Preached by Jane Barter Moulaison on March 25th, 2007
I am very blessed this morning because I get to preach on one of my favourite texts in the entirety of the Bible--the anointing of Bethany.
I was trying to think of why it one of my favourite texts, and I was struck by three things that I would like to explore in some detail this morning: these are beauty, love and politics. Now these do not always go together all that well. The closest we get in our current climate is the ill-fated love of Belinda Stronach and Peter McKay, but I am speaking of a different kind of beauty; different kind of love, and supremely, a different kind of politics.
One is the role of beauty in the Church.
This passage is about beauty—it is about earthy sensuality. Jesus has come to the home of his friends, and his friends have prepared a great meal. He has come to the house of his sister, Mary, and she washes and anoints his feet, using the most precious and extravagant oils, and dries her feet with her own hair.
It is an act of generosity. It is an act of sensuality. It is an act of deep devotion and love. And if the love seems to be of an erotic kind, then this is no accident. Even Saint Augustine in his Homily on John, a saint who is generally and wrongly remembered as being anti-sex, sees a parallel running through this story with the lovers in the Song of Songs. Augustine links the perfume that fills the entire house with that great image in the Song of the Beloved’s longing declaration: “Thy name is as ointment poured forth.” Christ, to Mary, is also the ointment, the one who offers her healing and completion.
And this is why beauty is so important to the church, although we often forget this to be true. Beauty reminds us that the things of the world are intrinsically good. That God created the world and created us for his pure delight. Not so that we could learn a lesson; not so we could make the world better. But God created us for delight, for Beauty.
Surely Mary’s act of grace and beauty is in keeping with God’s own creative action.
Yet, there is something unsettling for us when we hear Jesus’ and Judas’ exchange over Mary’s gift. The oil, we are told, costs three hundred denarii, which would have been nearly a year’s wages for a labourer in Jesus’ time.
I must admit that when I was younger I used to find Jesus’ quip, “You always have the poor with you,” a bit offensive. Is Jesus commending complacency in fighting poverty? Surely not. There are two things worth noting in this passage. One is that Jesus is speaking to Judas, who cares not a whit about the poor, who keeps the common purse and hoards away money for himself. The second is the most important part of this passage, and that is “you will not always have me.” Everything in this passage must be read in the light of Jesus saying this. As he predicts his imminent death, Jesus reminds his disciples of the special urgency of this time. There is no more time for worrying about the costs of our discipleship and devotion--Christ’s time has come. There is no need for a calculating of costs and a strategizing over effective action—Christ is about to be put to death. This now becomes the centre of our attention and focus.
And I think this passage has something to teach us today about beauty and goodness. If our efforts to do the right thing with our resources do not praise God, if they are not characterized by Beauty, then they fail to be truly Good. It is only when we place Christ, the Beloved, at the Centre that we know what goodness and beauty are. Yet, we in the modern Church, have been afraid of beauty. We have measured the value of a thing only by its utility. And so, we become nervous about art and about adornment, because they do not serve a purpose. We pride ourselves on being practical. But sometimes our practicality can be a sign that we think it our responsibility to save the world. Beauty helps to remind us that the world as God created it is good and worthy of enjoyment for its own sake. Like Mary, our task is not to shape the world to our own will, but it is to respond generously to God’s action and God’s being. Our job, as Christians, is simply to rejoice in God! And such praise, as the musicians in this congregation will surely tell us, is the greatest source of beauty that the world has known.
A second thing to note about this passage has to do with the nature of love in discipleship.
In Jesus’ time, washing of the feet took place upon entering a house. Feet were usually dusty and dirty from desert travel, and the ointment would be a balm to help soothe tired feet. It was the task of the slave to offer hospitality to guests by washing feet. The work itself was considered too intimate, too base, for free people to undertake. Read in this light, Mary’s act is one of great humility, even humiliation.
Contrast this act with the words of Judas. Whereas Judas’ words are full of suspicion and self-protection, Mary’s act is a pure gift of vulnerable love, counting not the cost, either of the bottle of perfume, or of the act that she performs. Not calculating the kind of repercussions it will have, the only thing worth noting is that Jesus was here, and that he would not be for long. We do not know to what extent Mary knows what is about to happen to Jesus as goes to Jerusalem, but she does, in this act of discipleship, display that she knows who he is in a way that the male disciples do not. And, in so this act, which is clearly an act of love is, in fact, a confession of faith, such a confession is made not just by our tongues, but also by our bodies. Like Mary, we are called to display through our bodies a discipleship that is turned entirely to Christ, a discipleship that is placed at the feet of Christ.
How different this example of love is from our contemporary notions about the love between a man and a woman. The love that Mary displays is a love that can only be understood through her confession, through the commitment of her entire being to tangible practices of caring for Christ. It is a pledge that she will not turn away even in his weakness, incapacity and death.
I want to suggest that it is precisely such pledges we make when we share table fellowship. We commit ourselves to a life bent toward Christ, but also to his Church, to his people. We pledge ourselves in the breaking of bread to a kind of care of one another that rejects the calculation of cost and benefit to ourselves. We commit ourselves in our partaking in the Body of Christ to refuse to turn away from those we love in their vulnerability or in their dying. And thus we commit ourselves to a way of being that offers the world a political life, a common life, of a radically different kind:
And so, the third is the nature of the political life that we share in the Body of Christ.
The passage refers throughout to those outside the walls of Mary’s home. Here they are, assembled in a household just outside of Jerusalem, and the crowds are moving in on Jesus. He has recently raised Mary’s brother, Lazarus, from the dead, which has incited the terror and the hostility of the religious authorities; the Chief Priests and Pharisees are conspiring against him. The religious council, the Sanhedrin, has set a warrant for Christ’s arrest, asking that his whereabouts be revealed and that he be handed over. The whole drama of the event is reaching a feverish intensity as preparations for Passover are underway. And even within the sanctuary of the home, there is Judas who has now become a representative of those on the outside—cynical, full of fear, and read to hand Jesus over.
In the midst of this political and religious terror, the disciples are hopeful for a happy ending—a victory and a vindication. It is time for Jesus to step up to the plate as Messiah and turn the religious and political authorities on their heads. Yet Mary knows different. She breaks the bottle of nard to anoint her king, as all kings were anointed, but she anoints his feet, not his head. And Jesus states, against all expectation, that she has anointed him not for battle, not for victory, but for death.
There will be no political victory here; no glorious crusade into Jerusalem. There is, in the politics of Jesus, only renunciation, defeat, poverty, and death. This politics is inaugurated by Mary as she washes Jesus’ feet, a practice that the disciples are later commissioned to do. It is a sign of their humility, their servanthood to one another, and to the peaceful practices that Jesus will train them into.
The Church today.
Understood in this light, the actions of Mary, of beauty of love, and indeed of a kind of politics, are all the more profound.
For we see in her action, for a time, in midst of the ugliness and sinfulness of violent political and religious life, a display of great beauty.
For we see in her action, in spite of the dominant economy of measuring up costs and benefits, an act of abundance.
For we see in her act, in a world that fears vulnerability and denies death, a meeting of these face-on with depth, and servanthood and joy.
For we see in her action, for a time, how the forces of the world which crowded all around Jesus were kept at bay.
And this, I would venture, is the mark of true discipleship. Not just for 2000 years ago; not just for a moment in the disciples’ life where we are at the brink of Christ’s violent death, but here and now, too, when the forces of this world are closing in on us.
Where governments convene in the endless cycle of cause and effect, cost and benefit, we are called to display an extravagant life.
And where utility is prized above all other things, we are to be a place that remembers God’s delight in creation, in joyous praise and thanksgiving.
And where death and violence are met with fear and denial. We are called to be a community of the dying, knowing the limits of our lives together, and finding within these limits the language and the action of a beautiful response of praise and thanksgiving.
As we move toward Jesusalem, may we too incline our bodies toward Christ, not turning away from his suffering, nor counting the cost of his calling us.
Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12:1-8
Preached by Jane Barter Moulaison on March 25th, 2007
I am very blessed this morning because I get to preach on one of my favourite texts in the entirety of the Bible--the anointing of Bethany.
I was trying to think of why it one of my favourite texts, and I was struck by three things that I would like to explore in some detail this morning: these are beauty, love and politics. Now these do not always go together all that well. The closest we get in our current climate is the ill-fated love of Belinda Stronach and Peter McKay, but I am speaking of a different kind of beauty; different kind of love, and supremely, a different kind of politics.
One is the role of beauty in the Church.
This passage is about beauty—it is about earthy sensuality. Jesus has come to the home of his friends, and his friends have prepared a great meal. He has come to the house of his sister, Mary, and she washes and anoints his feet, using the most precious and extravagant oils, and dries her feet with her own hair.
It is an act of generosity. It is an act of sensuality. It is an act of deep devotion and love. And if the love seems to be of an erotic kind, then this is no accident. Even Saint Augustine in his Homily on John, a saint who is generally and wrongly remembered as being anti-sex, sees a parallel running through this story with the lovers in the Song of Songs. Augustine links the perfume that fills the entire house with that great image in the Song of the Beloved’s longing declaration: “Thy name is as ointment poured forth.” Christ, to Mary, is also the ointment, the one who offers her healing and completion.
And this is why beauty is so important to the church, although we often forget this to be true. Beauty reminds us that the things of the world are intrinsically good. That God created the world and created us for his pure delight. Not so that we could learn a lesson; not so we could make the world better. But God created us for delight, for Beauty.
Surely Mary’s act of grace and beauty is in keeping with God’s own creative action.
Yet, there is something unsettling for us when we hear Jesus’ and Judas’ exchange over Mary’s gift. The oil, we are told, costs three hundred denarii, which would have been nearly a year’s wages for a labourer in Jesus’ time.
I must admit that when I was younger I used to find Jesus’ quip, “You always have the poor with you,” a bit offensive. Is Jesus commending complacency in fighting poverty? Surely not. There are two things worth noting in this passage. One is that Jesus is speaking to Judas, who cares not a whit about the poor, who keeps the common purse and hoards away money for himself. The second is the most important part of this passage, and that is “you will not always have me.” Everything in this passage must be read in the light of Jesus saying this. As he predicts his imminent death, Jesus reminds his disciples of the special urgency of this time. There is no more time for worrying about the costs of our discipleship and devotion--Christ’s time has come. There is no need for a calculating of costs and a strategizing over effective action—Christ is about to be put to death. This now becomes the centre of our attention and focus.
And I think this passage has something to teach us today about beauty and goodness. If our efforts to do the right thing with our resources do not praise God, if they are not characterized by Beauty, then they fail to be truly Good. It is only when we place Christ, the Beloved, at the Centre that we know what goodness and beauty are. Yet, we in the modern Church, have been afraid of beauty. We have measured the value of a thing only by its utility. And so, we become nervous about art and about adornment, because they do not serve a purpose. We pride ourselves on being practical. But sometimes our practicality can be a sign that we think it our responsibility to save the world. Beauty helps to remind us that the world as God created it is good and worthy of enjoyment for its own sake. Like Mary, our task is not to shape the world to our own will, but it is to respond generously to God’s action and God’s being. Our job, as Christians, is simply to rejoice in God! And such praise, as the musicians in this congregation will surely tell us, is the greatest source of beauty that the world has known.
A second thing to note about this passage has to do with the nature of love in discipleship.
In Jesus’ time, washing of the feet took place upon entering a house. Feet were usually dusty and dirty from desert travel, and the ointment would be a balm to help soothe tired feet. It was the task of the slave to offer hospitality to guests by washing feet. The work itself was considered too intimate, too base, for free people to undertake. Read in this light, Mary’s act is one of great humility, even humiliation.
Contrast this act with the words of Judas. Whereas Judas’ words are full of suspicion and self-protection, Mary’s act is a pure gift of vulnerable love, counting not the cost, either of the bottle of perfume, or of the act that she performs. Not calculating the kind of repercussions it will have, the only thing worth noting is that Jesus was here, and that he would not be for long. We do not know to what extent Mary knows what is about to happen to Jesus as goes to Jerusalem, but she does, in this act of discipleship, display that she knows who he is in a way that the male disciples do not. And, in so this act, which is clearly an act of love is, in fact, a confession of faith, such a confession is made not just by our tongues, but also by our bodies. Like Mary, we are called to display through our bodies a discipleship that is turned entirely to Christ, a discipleship that is placed at the feet of Christ.
How different this example of love is from our contemporary notions about the love between a man and a woman. The love that Mary displays is a love that can only be understood through her confession, through the commitment of her entire being to tangible practices of caring for Christ. It is a pledge that she will not turn away even in his weakness, incapacity and death.
I want to suggest that it is precisely such pledges we make when we share table fellowship. We commit ourselves to a life bent toward Christ, but also to his Church, to his people. We pledge ourselves in the breaking of bread to a kind of care of one another that rejects the calculation of cost and benefit to ourselves. We commit ourselves in our partaking in the Body of Christ to refuse to turn away from those we love in their vulnerability or in their dying. And thus we commit ourselves to a way of being that offers the world a political life, a common life, of a radically different kind:
And so, the third is the nature of the political life that we share in the Body of Christ.
The passage refers throughout to those outside the walls of Mary’s home. Here they are, assembled in a household just outside of Jerusalem, and the crowds are moving in on Jesus. He has recently raised Mary’s brother, Lazarus, from the dead, which has incited the terror and the hostility of the religious authorities; the Chief Priests and Pharisees are conspiring against him. The religious council, the Sanhedrin, has set a warrant for Christ’s arrest, asking that his whereabouts be revealed and that he be handed over. The whole drama of the event is reaching a feverish intensity as preparations for Passover are underway. And even within the sanctuary of the home, there is Judas who has now become a representative of those on the outside—cynical, full of fear, and read to hand Jesus over.
In the midst of this political and religious terror, the disciples are hopeful for a happy ending—a victory and a vindication. It is time for Jesus to step up to the plate as Messiah and turn the religious and political authorities on their heads. Yet Mary knows different. She breaks the bottle of nard to anoint her king, as all kings were anointed, but she anoints his feet, not his head. And Jesus states, against all expectation, that she has anointed him not for battle, not for victory, but for death.
There will be no political victory here; no glorious crusade into Jerusalem. There is, in the politics of Jesus, only renunciation, defeat, poverty, and death. This politics is inaugurated by Mary as she washes Jesus’ feet, a practice that the disciples are later commissioned to do. It is a sign of their humility, their servanthood to one another, and to the peaceful practices that Jesus will train them into.
The Church today.
Understood in this light, the actions of Mary, of beauty of love, and indeed of a kind of politics, are all the more profound.
For we see in her action, for a time, in midst of the ugliness and sinfulness of violent political and religious life, a display of great beauty.
For we see in her action, in spite of the dominant economy of measuring up costs and benefits, an act of abundance.
For we see in her act, in a world that fears vulnerability and denies death, a meeting of these face-on with depth, and servanthood and joy.
For we see in her action, for a time, how the forces of the world which crowded all around Jesus were kept at bay.
And this, I would venture, is the mark of true discipleship. Not just for 2000 years ago; not just for a moment in the disciples’ life where we are at the brink of Christ’s violent death, but here and now, too, when the forces of this world are closing in on us.
Where governments convene in the endless cycle of cause and effect, cost and benefit, we are called to display an extravagant life.
And where utility is prized above all other things, we are to be a place that remembers God’s delight in creation, in joyous praise and thanksgiving.
And where death and violence are met with fear and denial. We are called to be a community of the dying, knowing the limits of our lives together, and finding within these limits the language and the action of a beautiful response of praise and thanksgiving.
As we move toward Jesusalem, may we too incline our bodies toward Christ, not turning away from his suffering, nor counting the cost of his calling us.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
