Proper 20C - Catholic Biblical Interpretation

Proper 20C - Luke 16:1-13
Many people can tell you without a moment’s hesitation what their favorite parable is. Most often it is the Good Shepherd or the Good Samaritan. For all the times I have heard people tell me what their favorite parable is, not one person has ever mention this one: the Parable of Steward.
Mother Ede and I have a schedule of preaching that allows us to usually preach every other week. This gives me the luxury of sitting with my text for two weeks before I preach on it. A little over two weeks ago, while setting up for a wedding, I peeked ahead in the Gospel book, and saw that this parable was in the lectionary for today. I saw Mother Ede later in the day and remarked to her that my least favorite section of all the Gospels was on deck for today. That is the honest truth: of any portion of the Gospels to proclaim to you all , this would be my last choice. And I have been working through this parable for the past two weeks.
I remember hearing a sermon at seminary on this lesson where one of my professors got in the pulpit and essentially said “I hate this parable!” And he went on stated his problem with it – from a surface reading, this parable seems to say that out of nowhere Jesus is praising immoral business practices. I confess that I don’t remember much more of his sermon. I was too busy being shocked by the fact that he was honest enough to admit to the congregation that he was really struggling with the Gospel that day. I decided that I too, would do my best to always be honest when I found a text difficult in my sermons.
There are times when preachers look at a text and say “I just don’t know that I have anything to say about this today.” Other times, they look at the text and say plainly “I don’t want to preach on this text.” I am in the second group today. I find this parable challenging to the point that I feel that if I am going to tackle it, I need to first teach for about a year on topics including Biblical interpretation, first century Judaism, Imperial Roman economics and the particulars of St. Luke’s community.
However, I don’t have that option. I also don’t have the option of choosing something else. I am obedient to a long standing Church tradition in which the Church chooses the texts. Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, and some Presbyterians, Lutherans, Unitarians and northern Baptist churches have this same text this morning. All of us preacher must some present this text to our congregations today. How each preacher deals with the text will depend in part on whether they come from a Liberal Humanist tradition, a Protestant tradition or a Catholic tradition of Scriptural interpretation.
For those coming from the Liberal Humanist tradition, Scripture is often seen as a human attempt to deal with the divine. It sees Scripture as an entirely dependent on premodern ethics and world views, and must always be understood to be of human origin. Preachers from this perspective do their best to relate the scripture to a modern context if they can, and leave behind what doesn’t fit in our modern perspective.
Many coming from Protestant backgrounds that began during the 17th through 19th centuries have almost the exact opposite approach as their Liberal Humanist brethren. They see Scripture as the explicit and clear word of God, divinely given to a human writer without error. Because of this, scripture is plain and clear to all who read it, and mankind was meant to read scripture, and see the clear meaning in it, with no need for any other person to tell him what it means.
We Episcopalians come from the Catholic tradition. Like most things Anglican and Catholic, we are somewhere in between the two extremes I mentioned. We too believe that Scripture was written by men in previous times who were beholden to their culture. They wrote with the words of their communities, and conformed their writing to the literary genres of the time. We also believe that God is the true author of Scripture because He divinely inspired it’s writers in order to communicate His saving Truth through it. When you put this all together this means that every word in the Holy Scriptures is in there for a reason, and it contains the Truth. However, it also means that to be properly understood, it must be read in community, in light of the human author’s particular way of conveying the Truth. After all, Scripture was written with the intention that it would be read before groups of people. This community that we read it in is vast. We read it in the community that is Holy Tradition. We see how our brothers and sisters in the past have explained and interpreted the Scriptures to their smaller communities. We look at how it has informed our theology, how it has been enacted in liturgy. We stand back and look for the ways the Holy Spirit has guided the Church in its understanding of Scripture. When we come to views on Scripture that have been accepted by the Church both East and West, we see a sign that the Spirit is at work.
So with this all in mind we come back to today’s challenging Gospel passage. On the surface, we hear the story of a financial manger for a rich person who is about to be dismissed by his master. Knowing he is about to lose his job, the manager goes to everyone who owes him money and tells them they own him less now. When the rich man finds out what his financial manager has done, he commends him for his shrewd financial actions. Jesus then tells his disciples that the unfaithful people of His day are more shrewd than the people of faith. Jesus then seems to commend this example to us but then ends with a saying we know well: “You cannot serve God and wealth.”
Read directly on its own, and in isolation, it is easy to see how you could read this story in think that in certain cases, Jesus actually appears to condone sneaky and dishonest business practices in certain circumstances. Yet, when we read Jesus’ direct statement that one cannot serve God and wealth, this interpretation seems ruled out.
So, going back to our Catholic tradition of interpretation, we know we must look for issues that were important to Jesus’ followers in the early first century. Jesus lived in a Judea that was occupied by the Romans. The Romans had a vast empire that supported a systematized economy on a scale that was unseen before. In Jesus’ time a middle class had arisen, the merchant class. This class raised itself up by making a profit, not just scraping by. Just as today, Jesus and St. Luke’s community saw a difference in how people were treated according to the amount of their wealth. In His parables and stories Jesus also spoke a lot about those who were in charge of the Temple worship, because they abused their power, often to gain money. The pursuit of ill-begotten gains and the abuses of the religious authorities became metaphors for each-other in Jesus’ preaching.
Knowing that Jesus used speech about money as a metaphor, combined with His stinging statement on the incompatibility of serving God and wealth, eliminates the possibility that Jesus is actually praising bad business practices. So we now know that we are hearing a metaphor.
Many scholars, preachers and teachers have written articles and chapters trying to figure exactly what the best interpretation of this metaphorical parable is. When we have so many options in interpretation our Catholic tradition bids us to look back at what the Church and the Church Fathers have said about this parable. Many of the Church Fathers have agreed that what Jesus is actually speaking of is the undeserved gift we all have – the Love of God and the salvation He purchased us – even though we are the ones who betrayed God.
God is the Steward who rewrites our bills, out debt owed to God for our transgressions. We are the debtors, and we incurred that debt in Adam’s fall. Jesus is the steward who comes to us unexpectedly and says to us “You owe the Father everything, but I will I grant you a favor! I will reduce your debt to this: all you must do is believe in Me and live a life bearing the fruits of that belief. I cancel the debt that you owe the Father when you disobeyed Him and chose yourself over Him.” Our responsibility then is to live up to this great act. The Church Father Origen tells us “If God rewrites our documents of sin, do no rewrite what God has blotted out.” (Ancient Commentary, III:254)
There are many other thoughts from the Church Fathers on this parable. Some have seen this parable as admonition to distribute alms to all. Some have seen it as an explanation that the gifts you have from God are temporary and must be used for good while you have the chance.
I have shown my preference for interpreting this parable, but I won’t tell you that one of these interpretations of the Church Fathers is more correct than the other. The fact that there are several good ways to explain this parable in our Tradition is the beauty of Catholic Tradition. We have a way of looking at scripture that shows that it is a living, breathing thing. We read it and we are compelled to think about it, to speak about it, to ask about it. We are forced to ask our brethren who lived centuries ago what they made of it.
That is why, in the end, I am glad the Church in her wisdom gave me this Parable this morning. Now, it is still not my favorite Parable, and it is not the text I am going to point an atheist to first. Yet this parable was handed down to me today and made me think hard about what it means to proclaim Scripture as the true word of God. It reminded me of the depth our tradition and just how privileged I am that the Church has asked me to delve into Scripture daily, and share my love of it with you.

John Henry Newman's Tract 90

The Patriarch of Rome, Benedict XVI, is visiting England this week and will be officially declaring John Henry Newman to be "Blessed." Before he was Cardinal Newman, he was The Rev. Newman, leading Anglican theologian of the Oxford (Catholic) Movement, in the The Church of England in the mid 1800's. He was essentially booted from the Church for his infamous Tract 90, a tract defending the 39 Articles as compatible with the Council of Trent. Newman's opinions on the Eucharist got him in some of the biggest trouble. Here is my humble defense of Newman's thoughts on Article XXVIII:

John Henry Newmans’ Tract XC

In 1841, John Henry Newman issued Tract XC, a commentary on certain parts of the XXXIX Articles of Religion that caused such a great controversy it effectively ended his career in the Church of England. In this tract, Newman discussed 12 of the articles and explained how they could be interpreted in a way that does not contradict catholic theology. Newman’s Tract XC was deemed radical and over the top, and dangerously close in theology to a Roman Catholic document.

The following focuses on Newman’s commentary on Article XXVIII (Of The Lord’s Supper), which also included references to Article XXIX (Of the Wicked, which eat not the Body of Christ in the use of the Lord's Supper). I beleive that Newman’s interpretation of Article XXVIII was not nearly as radical or as incompatible with traditional Anglican doctrine as it was said to be by Neman’s contemporaries. By comparing Newman’s Tract XC with Bishop Edward Browne’s An Exposition of The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion , published in two volumes between 1850 and 1853[1] and Charles Hardwick’s A History of the Articles of Religion, which was published in 1851. I will endeavor to show that Newman’s assertions do not conflict with non-Tractarian commentaries of the same time period on the same article.

John Henry Newman was a member of a group of scholars at Oxford University in England who began issuing tracts, entitled Tracts For The Times. The tracts, and the general theology of the group of scholars, sought to emphasize the pre-reformation catholic roots of the Church of England, and the powers and duties of the church that were due to the church owing to its maintained Apostolic Succession and Episcopal structure. They pursued this theology to defend the church from what they saw as an overly secular and liberal leaning church and society in general in England. Due to the tracts they published, they earned the name of “Tractarians”[2]

The last of the tracts to be issued was Tract XC. Newman and his fellow Oxford scholars had come under the increasing scrutiny by the leaders of The Church of England since the first tract had been published in 1833.[3] By the time Tract XC was released, the criticism against Newman and the other authors of the Tracts had reached a fever pitch. Although Tract XC was published anonymously, it was no secret that Newman was the author. C. Brad Faught, in his book “The Oxford Movement,” states that “The theological opinion that Newman took in the tract was hardly radical, however…But the timing of Newman’s tract was all wrong.”[4] In the aftermath of the storm that arose around Tract XC, Newman eventually withdrew from public and eventually left the Church of England for the Roman Catholic Church.

If we look past the hysterics that surrounded the tract, we can see that indeed it was not all that radical, and the opinions and not all that dissimilar from other commentaries on the articles published in the same time period.

In the beginning of Tract XC’s chapter 8, Newman begins his commentary by defining what he believes is being rejected by the term “transubstantiation.” Newman writes “What is here opposed as “Transubstantiation” is the shocking doctrine that “the body of CHRIST,” as the Article goes on to express it is not “given, taken, and eaten after an heavenly and spiritual manner, but is carnally pressed with the teeth;” that it is a body or substance of a certain figure and disposition of parts, whereas we hold the only substance such, is the bread which we see.”[5]

Newman goes on to say that Article XXIX proves that this is the doctrine being refuted. Newman states that as both St. Augustine and the article speak of “the wicked a “carnally and visibly pressing with their teeth the sacrament of the body and blood of CHRIST,” not the real substance.”[6]

In Bishop Browne’s An Exposition of The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and Charles Hardwick’s A History of the Articles of Religion, he also begins his commentary on the article by defining Eucharistic theology. Browne defines transubstantiation as “the doctrine of the Church of Rome…that in the Eucharist, after the words of consecration, the whole substance of the bread is converted into the substance of the Body of Christ, and that the substance of the wine into the substance of His Blood….the change is a real and miraculous conversion of the bread and the wine into the very Body of Christ, which was born of the blessed Virgin and crucified on Calvary.”[7]

Charles Hardwick’s A History of the Articles of Religion states that the purpose of the article is to refute the Zwinglians and the “opposite dogma of some physical transubstantiation in the Eucharistic elements….”[8]

Newman and Browne are in agreement that “Transubstantiation” that is rejected by the article is the idea that consecrated elements are Christ’s actual substantive Body and Blood.

Newman goes on to suggest that while this substantive change of the actual bread and wine was the official rejected notion, the framers of the article were actually seeking to counter medieval superstitions that had developed around the Eucharist. Newman gives several examples of the superstition by quoting the works of Bishop Taylor. One of these quotes listed several disturbing images: “Sometimes CHRIST hath appeared in His own shape, and blood and flesh hath been pulled out of the mouths of communicants: and Plegilus, the priest, saw an angel, showing CHRIST to him in the form of a child upon the altar, whom he first took in his arms and kissed, but did eat him up presently in his other shape, in the shape of a wafer.”[9] Newman goes on to quote others to show just how many superstitions arose in the church around what was actually happening at the Eucharist.

Neither Browne nor Hardwick spend much time explaining how out of control superstitious beliefs had become at the time of the writing of the Articles of Religion. If one were looking to find a text to prove what misguided beliefs a doctrine of Transubstantiation could lead do, the Tractarian commentary has more to say on the subject than the “Protestant” commentaries of Browne and Hardwick.

What Newman has provided us with in the first parts of chapter 8 are an unequivocal rejection of the notion of Transubstantiation that was in wide held belief at the time of the Article first appearance in 1553.[10] The fact that Newman’s condemnatation was so strong yet garnered so much outrage shows that Newman’s writing were probably being read with a suspicion that wasn’t attached to work of on non-Tractarians. A key difference in the handling of Transubstantiation between Newman and Browne, is that Browne assign this belief specifically to the Roman Catholic Church as an official position, while Newman simply shows it to be a wide spread idea that had been held by Christians of the time. Newman never assigns the doctrine as an official position to the Roman Catholic Church, because in his mind the Roman Catholic Church had yet to adopt the classic doctrine of Transubstantiation.

Newman argues that because the articles were first published in 1553, had had taken years to formulate, they could not be written against the official doctrine of Transubstantiation because that doctrine was officially formulated by The Council of Trent, which did not end until 1563, ten years after the first publication of this Article XVIII.[11]

This logic must have seemed suspicious to the Tractarianism opposition, especially when they already considered Newman’s theology Roman Catholic. However, when Newman’s denunciation of Transubstantiation is read against Browne’s, it seems that Newman has not actually said anything that conflicts with the Protestant interpretation of Article XVIII of the time period. One is left wondering if Newman’s opposition simply saw the word “Transubstantiation” and went after Newman without thoroughly reading and considering it.

In Tract XC, after Newman has described what the article is arguing against, he begins to describe what it is not arguing against, namely, a “Real Presence” in the Eucharist. In a church were communion services had gone from a daily activity to a service that was relegated to a few times a year, any lengthy discussion of what was going on during the services was bound to raise ire. Yet once again, when we put Newman’s arguments for a “Real Presence” up against the commentary of Browne and this historical description of the article’s composition contained in Hardwick’s, we are hard pressed to find an assertion in Newman’s work that isn’t balanced by similar ideas in the other two works.

Newman makes that transition between his arguments with: “We see then, that, by transubstantiation, our Article does not confine itself to any abstract theory, nor aim at any definition of the word substance, nor in rejecting it, rejects a word, nor in denying a “mutation panis et vini,” is denying every kind of change….”[12]

Newman then goes on to explain in Tract XC what the sacrament that is referred to in Articles XXVIII and XXIX is, if is not the actual Body and Blood of Christ. By the end of the Tract, Newman argues for “a real super-local presence in the Holy Sacrament,”[13] but refutes imagined arguments against a theory of a real presence before he concludes that it is the natural conclusion of the Articles and 1662 The Book of Common Prayer, to which the Articles must not contradict.

Newman was not alone in suggesting that Article XXVIII suggests a real presence in the Sacrament. In A History of the Articles of Religion, Hardwick explains that the original version of what we now know as Article XXVIII originally contained an additional section condemning the notion of any presence in the Sacrament. The fact that the paragraph was proves that there is a history in the Church of England of not asserting there is no presence in the Sacrament.

Newman begins by analyzing the explanation appended to the Communion service in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. The explanation instructs the communicants to kneeling while receiving, rejects the notion of a corporal presence in the elements and concludes that “For the sacramental bread and wine remain still in their very natural substances….and the natural body and blood of our SAVIOUR CHRIST are in heaven, and not here, it being against the truth of CHRIST’S natural body to be at one time in more places than one.”[14] Newman argues that Homilies, which are enjoined to the Church by the Articles, speak of a presence in the Sacrament. In order for the Articles, Homilies, and The Book of Common Prayer to not contradict themselves, Newman is left to now answer the question: “How can there be a presence, yet not a local one?”[15]

Hardwick also came up with the same question. While disusing the dropped clause of Article XXVIII that had rejected any presence, Hardwick states: “The ejected clause had also opened an ulterior question…whether the humanity of our Lord, as now glorified, is so absolutely and inseparably associated with His Divinity, that we are justified in speaking of His Body as present in many places at one and the same time.”[16]

Newman goes on to explain what meaning of presence is. He believes that this they key to understanding how “He is really here, yet not locally”[17] in the Sacrament. Newman explains that the Article isn’t speaking of material presence, but Spiritual presence. Newman argues that spiritual presence is different from a local or physical presence, and is not bound by the same rules of distance. Newman explains that Divine Grace and spiritual presence are akin, and we never speak of distance when speaking of the reach of Divine Grace.

If we are not speaking of a corporal presence in the Sacrament, but a spiritual sprence, it make no matter that Christ’s natural body is at the right hand of the Father, for His spiritual presence isn’t hedged by the same restriction so distance. Newman argues that once the problems of our ability to phrase what we mean is overcome, we can now see that “CHRIST’S Body and Blood are locally present at God’s right hand, yet really present here,- present here, but not here in place,- because they are spirit.”[18] With this understanding, there is no longer any conflict between the explanation appended to the Communion service and a doctrine of a real presence.

Newman concludes by insisting that while he has come to the conclusion that a real presence is suggested, it is not the only one possible. Newman states: “Let it be carefully observed, that I am not proving or determining any thing; I am only showing how it is that certain propositions which at first sight seem contradictions in terms, are not so – I am but pointing out one way of reconciling them…It seems at first sight a mere idle use of words to say that CHRIST is really and literally, yet not locally, present in the Sacrament; that He is there given to us, not in figure but in truth, yet is still only on the right hand of God. I have wished to remove this seeming impossibility.”[19]

Newman seemed so cautious to assert the possibility that there could a notion of the real presence could be sustained by Article XXVIII the named and argued the objections to his conclusion before he had even really stated it. Yet as radical as the claim may seem by the way Newman presents it, other scholars where ready to unequivocally state that the Church of England supports the doctrine of a real presence.

In Browne’s commentary on Article XXVIII he states that “The doctrine of a real, spiritual presence is the doctrine of the English Church, and was the doctrine of Calvin and of many reformers.”[20] With this sentence, Browne links the conclusion that Newman has stated in Tract XC with the doctrine of Calvin. This is starling connection when one considers that that accusation against Newman and the other Tractarians was that they were theologically as far from Calvin’s Geneva as they could get, yet here Newman and Calvin are shown to hold a common doctrine on the Eucharist!

Browne goes on to describe this real, spiritual presence in a similar fashion to Newman’s explanation. Browne explains that the doctrine “teaches that Christ is really received by faithful communicants in the Lord’s Supper; but that there is no gross or carnal, but only spiritual and heavenly presence there, not the less real, however, for being spiritual….The result of which doctrine is this: its is bread, and it is Christ’s Body.”[21]

Browne later goes on to make a statement that that seems much more controversial than Newman’s, and opposes his Newman’s assertion that received notion of Transubstantiation in the 16^th century was a superstitious degradation of a real presence doctrine. Browne states: “Here is the question; and it must be carefully noted. If there were no alternative, but that the fathers must have been either Papists or Zuinglians, - must have held either a carnal presence, or none at all, than we must acknowledge that they believed in a carnal presence, and were transubstantialists.”[22] Browne goes on to explain that a version of the doctrine of the real presence might also have been possible of the early father, but he does not seem as convinced of that. Much of the English Reformation’s zeal was to return to the faith of the fathers, and here is Browne has attributed a belief to them that Newman did not dare to in his Tract.

Once compared against his contemporaries, Newman’s assertions in Tract XC do not to appear to be nearly as radical as they were thought to be at the time. It seems that some of Newman’s more Protestant contemporaries were actually making similar if not more emphatic statements that in the end, both Article XXVIII and XXIX logically lead to a doctrine of a real presence.

Wild assumptions where made about Newman and Tract XC when it was first published. Future Archbishop of Canterbury A. C, Tait feared that young men would read the tract and be persuaded to leave the Church of England for the Roman Catholic Church. Tait even accused Newman of raising “curious questions” that were not relevant.[23] If young men of the church were being persuaded to leave the Church of England, it certainly was not over Newman’s Eucharistic theology, as Neman’s theology has been shown to be consistent with Calvin’s according to Browne’s work.

In the end Newman’s work was banned by the board of Oxford University. Newman was also brought up on Episcopal Charges over the purported erroneous theology contained in Tract XC. After being harassed by Bishops and the leaders of the Church of England, Newman slipped out of the public eye into seclusion. A few years later, after ruminating on the evolution of his beliefs, and still dealing with the public mockery he had incurred, Newman left the Church of England to join the church he felt truly called to; the Roman Catholic Church.

It would seem that Newman was never judged fairly for his work. While other parts of Tract XC were more radical than the section on Article XXIX was, in its entirety, it wasn’t nearly the subversive nor the Roman Catholic document it was decried as being.

A comparison of Newman’s work with his contemporaries, at least on Article XXIX just do not support the accusations leveled against Newman. Tract XC was a victim of it it’s timing. Had it been published earlier in Newman’s career, it might not have gone down in history as the controversial document as it was. Chadwick writes that the fate of Tract XC was for it to spark a “declaration of war on the part of the Oxford authorities against the Tractarian party. The suspicion, alarms, antipathies, jealousies, which had long been smoldering among those in power had at last take shape in a definite act.”[24] When all this is removed, and nothing is left but the document itself, the declaration of war seems much less warranted.

[1] Dr. Robert Prichard

[2] Michael Chandler, An Introduction to the Oxford Movement (New York: Church Publishing Inc., 2003), 1-16.

[3] C. Brad Faught, The Oxford Movement (University Park, IL: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 15.

[4] Faught, The Oxford Movement, 93.

[5] John Henry Newman, Tract Number Ninety (1841; repr., New York: H.B. Durand, 1865), 77.

[6]Newman, 77.

[7]Edward Harold Browne, An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles (1865; repr., N.p.: Classical Anglican Press, 1998), 683-684.

[8] Charles Hardwick, A History of the Articles of Religion (1851; repr.; London: George Bell & Sons, 1876), 103.

[9] Newman, Tract Ninety, 78.

[10] Hardwick, A History of the Articles of Religion, XV.

[11] Chandler, An Introduction to the Oxford, 56.

[12] Newman, Tract Ninety, 83.

[13] Newman, Tract Ninety, 95.

[14] Newman, Tract Ninety, 86.

[15] Newman, Tract Ninety, 86.

[16] Hardwick, 136-137.

[17] Newman, Tract Ninety, 88

[18] Newman, Tract Ninety, 91.

[19] Newman, Tract Ninety, 94.

[20] Browne, 684.

[21] Browne, 684.

[22] Browne, 685.

[23] Chandler, 57.

[24] Chadwick, 56.

I have moved all my sermons from Facebook over to here. FB has a limited audience and does not format all that well. From now on I will post sermons here and post links to FB. In addition, you can read my pontification on obscure and arcane Anglican topics...lucky you!

Proper 18C - The Eucharistic Sacrifice

Jesus tells us “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” This statement has been interpreted in many ways. Most often people talk about how Jesus is calling us to a life of self denial in order to follow God. To me, what this clearly alludes to is that Jesus will carry a cross down a road in Jerusalem to a place of execution and in the words of St. John, through his death he will be the “sacrifice that takes our sins away.” (1 John 2:2 TJB) By telling us to pickup our own cross, Jesus is telling us that we must also live a life of sacrifice. In our life as Christians, we are called to a life of both self denial and a life of sacrifice. Yet there is another piece to this invitation to a life of sacrifice, and that is lived out here every Sunday, when we participate in the Eucharist, and we encounter, behold and benefit from the Eucharistic Sacrifice.

The notion that the Eucharist is a sacrifice has been a sticky issue since the time of the Reformation. During that period, some Christians held a view that grossly perverted the nature of the Sacrament. They thought that the priests were actually re-sacrificing Christ at each Eucharist, as if they could repeat that act over and over again for the benefit of those in attendance. The reformers rightly protested this view, but unfortunately, they often went too far. In order to counter this erroneous view of the Eucharist, they began to avoid all talk of a sacrifice and began to think of it simply a memorial of the Last Supper, under the assumption that the notion of a Eucharistic sacrifice was a medieval corruption.

Yet what they failed to realize was that Christians have understood the Eucharist to be a sacrifice from the beginning, and the early Fathers of the Church attest to it. So what then, is this sacrifice? In the early and mid 20th century some of the brightest minds in Western Christianity began to rethink this subject. Liturgist Dr. Frank Gavin told us what it is not. It is not the bloody sacrifice of the Pagans. Dr. Gavin suggests that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus changed the whole meaning of Sacrifice. He tells us “Sacrifice has therefore a new meaning and an intensely practical aim. God stands in no need of what we can give, but man has grievous need of what God gives…so the oblations of the faithful were no mere alms, benevolences or charity: they where the very stuff of religious worship.”(Liturgy and Worship, 110) By oblations, Dr. Gavin means our offerings, both of the physical nature and of a spiritual nature.

There is no getting around it, some of things we do bear a resemblance to what the Pagan Romans did. They offered food to the gods because it fed them, and they offered money to the gods because they desired it. We too, offer food and money at out service.

We offer food in the form of bread and wine each Sunday and that is why it carried forward from the congregation to the altar. However, unlike the Pagans, we know that God does not need our bread and wine to somehow be satisfied. We offer bread and wine because by giving it to God through His priests we in turn feed ourselves and our brothers and sisters. It doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice to us to give these little wafers and bottled wine, but we must remember how this was done for so long. In times past, someone in the congregation actually baked bread before the service in order to offer it up for the Eucharist. Likewise, someone in the congregation picked grapes, crushed them and fermented them, all to give it to God in the Eucharist. This is sacrifice. Surrendering time, effort, grain and grapes in order that, through the Eucharist, the congregation might be fed. The fact that our bread and wine are pre-made makes them no less a sacrifice, these wafers and wine on the credence table back there were not free, they cost you all. When that bread and wine comes up to this altar soon, each one of you in here will have sacrificed.

After these gifts have been presented, you will offer yet more sacrifice. As our Eucharistic prayer in the Rite I service says, “here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and living sacrifice unto thee.” (BCP, 336) Each time you participate in the Eucharist, you do something dangerous to your own human will, you lay it aside.

The Prayer Book recognizes the gravity of this. In the beginning of the section of the Prayer Book that contains the liturgies of the Holy Eucharist, there is a section called the Exhortation. This is an old part of the service that used to be read before communion in the old Prayer Books. In reference to receiving Communion, it states “For, as the benefit is great, if with penitent hearts and living faith we receive the holy Sacrament, so is the danger great, if we receive it improperly, not recognizing the Lord’s Body. Judge yourselves, therefore, lest you be judged by the Lord.”

This exhortation recognizes what St. Paul addressed in his first letter to the Corinthians – receiving the Body and Blood of Christ while refusing to give up and repent of our favorite sins that we hold on to, anger, greed, lust, this is dangerous to us.

When you truly sacrifice your will in order to receive communion, you lay yourself open and invite the Holy Spirit to fill you, to feed you, to change you. You sacrifice your own fallen human desires and intentions and let yourself become made new in Christ.

Finally, we get to what may the most important aspect of the Eucharist, the Sacrifice of Christ himself. While today we often think of the Eucharist as memorial of the Last Supper, that interpretation is not what the majority of our Christian forebears thought. In analyzing the primitive Western Liturgy that serves as the basis for our Eucharistic Prayers, the Liturgist Dom Gregory Dix made a succinct statement. He said the whole liturgy “”recalls” or “re-presents” before God not the Last Supper, but the Sacrifice of Christ in His death and resurrection, and makes this “present” and operative by its effects in the communicants.” (Shape of the Liturgy, 162).

Now some may point to the objections that some of the reformers raised 500 years ago. They said, “wait a minute – how can Christ’s Sacrifice be present here and now? We know Jesus died in 33 A.D. and as we sat in the Creed, he now sits at the right hand of the Father!” None of what they said was incorrect. Jesus did indeed offer himself once as a perfect, full and sufficient Sacrifice for all, the rose on the third day and ascended to the right hand of the Father.

The problem that the reformers had is that they couldn’t escape linear time. What happened in the past stayed in the past! The thing is, God is not bound by time and space. He is the one who created time. He is the one who created space. He had always existed and therefore God is not bound by these constructs, because it seems from the account in Genesis, that God was doing just fine before he created time in the fashion of day and night and made space by creating matter.

St. Paul tells us that Christ’s sacrifice reordered the entire universe, for it had all been disturbed by our fall. An action by God, that affected everything in existence, surely then cannot then be bound by time and space. That is why it is possible at the Eucharist for Christ’s Sacrifice at Calvary to really and truly be before us.

That act of redemption and love by God is so big, that it breaks through the world we know and comes before us again at the altar. That is why the Sacrifice at Calvary must be present at the Eucharist. God, the One who is Love, brings us to the moment when all humanity is reconciled to Him through the laying down of Christ’s life voluntarily, out of Love, and yearning for us each time we follow his command to take and eat. That Love demands each and every one of us be present at that act of Love and redemption. So when you pray and participate in the Eucharist you stand next to St John and the Blessed Virgin Mary at the foot of the cross weeping. You stand next to St. Mary Magdalene and the other women gazing at the empty tomb. You marvel with the Apostles as they first encounter the Risen Christ.

That is what we do each time at the Eucharist, and that remains the invitation. Come to Church and offer to God the Sacrifice of your labor, your possessions and your money. Confess your sins with a true and penitent heart and receive God’s forgiveness through the Church. Lay yourself open before God and sacrifice your own will, and accept His. Draw near and witness Christ’s death and marvel at his Resurrection. Come forward and be fed, healed, renewed, forgiven and reconciled. Then go back into the world on fire with the Love of God.

Proper 15 C - The Heresy of Americanism

I would like all of you to close your eyes for a few seconds and picture most of the images of Jesus you have seen all your life. How many of them show a calm, peaceful Jesus? Perhaps smiling, or looking peacefully out at you. Maybe it's the popular image of Jesus the Good Shepherd, calmly carrying that lost sheep over his shoulders.

Now here Jesus speak: "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!...Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!"

Shocking isn't it? The fact is that American Christianity has tended to do it's best to tame and calm our image of Jesus for the past 100 years. With Christianity in ascendance so much that we could add the word "Under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance without a fight, there was no need to look at the less friendly words of Jesus. We thought we had no one left to convince so we simply showed Jesus as our buddy, our friend. He is our co-pilot, the footsteps beside you, the Man holding you while you were at bat for the first time in Little League.

The problem is, when you put forth this image of Jesus, you end up forgetting a basic fact of His life – He came into the world and it rejected him consistently until it put Him to death.

Yes, Jesus was a loving Man who showed endless mercy and love to those around Him, but he never minced words. He knew he was preaching to a world that would reject Him during his life on Earth because he was preaching what God wanted, not what man wanted. As a reading through our history in Holy Scripture will show, we consistently chose ourselves over God. When God sends His prophets to preach repentance and a return to the Ways of the Lord... well, we usually kill them.

Into this world Jesus was born, to call the world back to the Lord and redeem fallen mankind. This was certainly not a peaceful mission. Jesus came on a mission that resulted in an entire reordering of the cosmos, forever altering the connection between mankind and God.

This was a big change, and we Episcopalians know, people tend be slightly resistant of change.

In today's shocking Gospel passage Jesus is addressing his followers. It seems that some of those following Jesus thought this might actually be an easy mission, where things would just fall into place. People would encounter Jesus and simply follow him. But Jesus could see into the heart of mankind and knew that his offer of a new, redeemed world that followed God and not the will of man, would not be accepted by many.

Jesus' predictions of households being split in two came to bear during his earthly ministry and even more intensely in the immediate years after his Resurrection and Ascension. The religion of Israel was torn in two by those who accepted Jesus as the Messiah and those who did not.

Now through the next two millennia Christianity grew to become the predominant faith of the world, yet it never forgot its radical nature. Jesus word's of division made sense to His followers, because to follow Jesus was always seen as radical act, a choice to accept God's grace and follow Him over and against our own sinful wills and desire. As St. Augustine put it, there have always been two cities: the City of God and the City of Man. Even with Christianity growing each and every century of these millennia, that choice was always there. Christians were always confronted with brothers and sisters and who chose the City of Man, and their own will and desires over that of God.

Yet something strange happened here a 100 years ago. We got a bit conceited and thought the battle was over. We thought there was simply no one left in the Western World who hadn't chosen the City of God over the City of Man. So we got lazy. Having declared victory, we forgot that our own sinful will would always be a temptation. But because we didn't think we needed to hear it, we stopped remembering the challenging words of Christ, we only remembered Him smiling and encouraging us, because we couldn't possibly be doing anything that would make Him challenge us!

So here we are today, and it's abundantly clear that we have residency in the City of God, but we live in the City of Man.

The teachings Jesus, His Holy Apostles and his Holy Church have given to us still challenge us in the Church and in the World today. I could go through and list each and every issue that Bible and the Church have laid out where the difference between our desire and God's desire is, but I don't think that would be all that helpful, because it really boils down to that one question: Do you choose yourself or do you choose God?

During my years as an atheist I was firmly in the camp of those who chose themselves. As someone who refused to believe in anything bigger than mankind, I used my own thoughts, my own intellect as the final guide and arbiter on all things. I refused to believe in any universal standard of good or bad, right or wrong. This lead me to a very narcissistic life when I made myself a god capable of judgment. It led to unfair judgments on others and a morality based around what was easy for me and my friends.

C.S. Lewis tells us in his book Mere Christianity that he was the saddest man in all of England the first night he got down on his knees and prayed, and that sounds strange to many. For me, however, it makes perfect sense. That day I had my light bulb moment, when I knew that that letter I was reading by St. Paul contained the capital T Truth, I knew everything had changed, and I was not happy. For in that moment, what wasn't running through my mind was God Loves Me!, but instead: this means I was wrong! Being the fallen man that I am, my pride was bruised. This revelation meant there was a right and wrong, there was good and bad, and it was not me who made the determination, it was He who made me and all of creation who was judge of all this.

It took me a year to get over myself and realize that this was a gift from God not a curse. Quite frankly it made my life quite easier. I can tell you from my brief attempt at trying to be an omnipotent god who knew right and wrong, it's not an easy job! But once I got past this, it made my life so much happier, it made all the pieces of my life fall into place.

After this revelation I spent another year simply buzzing with the knowledge that even though I had been wrong all these years, God forgave me, and He loved me. I spent a year simply basking in that glow of His love. After that year I was ready to open eyes and see what it meant to not just look internally at my relationship with Him, but to look outward and to see what it meant to be a Christian in the world.

When I began to look at the world around me as a Christian, I was not all that surprised to see the gigantic differences between those who chose genuinely followed God in His City and those who chose themselves and the City of Man in the secular world. I wasn't surprised about this because Jesus told us there would be a clear difference. What I was shocked by was the great inroads the City of Man had made into those who claimed residency in the City of God.

While no one would ever be silly enough to claim that they chose their own will over God because God told them to, it actually happens enough. It's a symptom , and perhaps the cause, of that laziness in American Christianity for the past 100 years. Because we were convinced that we, the people of God, had won, we got comfortable and stopped asking a fundamental question that Christians should always ask themselves: are we doing this for ourselves or for God? A new way of asking about what is right and what is wrong emerged. It follows this pattern: I have a need to do something, and because I am a Christian, and I have a need, it must be of God, because God made me and made my needs. And because everything within me is of God, all Scripture, all Tradition and all other people's reason must be interpreted though my needs. While one can appeal to the Book of Genesis and the children of God language in the New Testament to try and ground it in theology, to me, it sounds an awful lot like my thought process as an atheist ...it's all about me!

The reality is, to be a Christian has always meant that we must examine our internal needs, desires and urges and look at them knowing we are fallen. God gave us Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition, as the means, which through Godly reason, we can evaluate our desires. We ask ourselves, what does Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition say about my feelings, and how do I use these feelings and desires in light of Scripture and Tradition for the greater glory of God?

This is the challenge that Jesus puts before us in the Gospel today, and He tells us it is not easy. Will we choose God? Will we choose ourselves?

Will we chose ourselves and call it God? When you choose God, it is not always going to be the popular choice. It will offend those of the secular world and sometimes even those in our greater Christian family.

The good news is that you will never be alone in this. God know this question, of discerning Thy Will Be Done, is our biggest challenge as Christians and has given us tools to work though this. He has given us Scripture, Tradition and Godly Reason to work through that, and perhaps his sweetest gift of all, a loving church family right here, that lives to choose God, and helps us do the same.

Proper 13C - Hosea and the ER

Earlier this week I found myself in the wrong part of a hospital room. Usually I am the one who goes and visits hospitals, but last Monday, I was the one needing help, because I had landed myself in the ER.
It started like any other Monday. I woke up, poured some coffee and began to think about the things I needed to get done. Mother Ede’s sermon from last week kept echoing in my head as I remembered her telling us how she begins each morning praising God, as opposed to asking Him for help with everything she needs to get done. Yes despite my best efforts to follow Mother Ede’s example, I was focused on what I had to get done. I had a Christian Ed meeting to plan, hymns to work out for the service, phone calls to return, paperwork for the diocese and so on. I sat there in my home office, a half cup of coffee away from full alertness with all these tasks running through my head.
Then it happened, I started to get itchy under my eyes.
I have an allergic condition called idiopathic hives. It’s a big word that means that every once in awhile I have an allergic reaction to something that swells my face, and the doctors have no clue what causes it or how to prevent it.
It can go one of two ways, either I will just be a bit itchy that day, or like twice before in my life, my throat will swell up and I will be in danger of my throat closing up. So I went off and took some Benadryl and hoped it would do the trick. Unfortunately, I began to feel my tongue tingle, and that means my throat closing could be next. So I did something stupid…I tried to ignore the feeling. You see, to my stubborn mind I had too much to do last week to have my tongue tingle. For if my tongue really is really tingling, I have to get to the ER. Going to the ER means hours in the hospital followed by a few days of anti allergy drugs that make me sleep for a few days straight.
All that was not in the plan. I had things to do, places to go, people to see. Yet after 5 minutes I could no longer deny what was happening. I told my wife what was going on, and we called 911.
When they ambulance wheeled me into the hospital I could see my reflection in the sliding doors. There I was on the stretcher, arms crossed, mouth frowning, eyes glaring. I was not a happy camper and I was showing it to everyone .
Once they put me in my room I quickly realized how lucky I was. You see I had the luxury of being a frowning, glaring and all around bad hospital patient because I knew what was going to happen. Having gone through this before, I knew the questions they would ask, what drugs they would give and the fact that this would be about a 2 hour stay in the ER.
The people in the rooms around me didn’t have that luxury. It turns out that my visit to the ER wasn’t all that different from my pastoral visits, because in both cases I know before I go through the hospital door what will happen, so I can make a plan of action. When I go to visit someone in the hospital I have been given a basic run through of what happened to whomever I am seeing. Then when I get there I can speak to the nurse, I can then begin to plan my visit. I mark my prayer book for the right pages, I select the appropriate reading and then I go in. In the same way, as a patient, I went in with a plan. Once they put me in the room at the ER I began to give notes to my wife. This is my healthcare info. This is who you call for this. Once the nurse speaks to me I can than call someone and tell them an estimate of when I’ll need a ride. It’s all very ordered and according to the plan of how things work for Matt Venuti.
After I had given my wife my instructions to carry out my master plan, she went to go call people, leaving me with nothing to do but to listen to those in the rooms around me. It took me about thirty seconds to realize how lucky I was. Those of you have made a visit to an Emergency Room know it’s not a great place to visit. By very virtue of what an Emergency Room is, if you are there, you didn’t plan to be there. Something went wrong, you need help, and you can’t wait for it.
The people around me did not have a plan, because they did not know what was going to happen next. They were uncertain of what the next few hours, let alone what the next few days would hold for them. I heard someone next to me groaning in pain. In the way I saw people bleeding with doctors crowded around them. When I heard and saw this all this around me, I couldn’t help but realize what the priorities in Christian life and ministry actually really are.
In today’s Gospel Jesus tells us about the folly of focusing on things in our life that only pertain to us, and not God. In some ways, that message is a repeat of what I dealt with in my sermon two weeks ago about the Gospel story of Mary and Martha.
The fact that Holy Scripture reminds us again and again to pay attention to God instead of ourselves is a testament to the fallen human condition – we need to be told this over and over again in order to get it.
My story comes to an easy conclusion with this message. I woke up on Monday morning, and instead of saying Thank You God for another chance to be in the world You made, I instead said help me Lord, help ME get MY lists of things done. So God knocked me upside the head and gave me a lesson in who’s really in charge here and whose plans I should be focusing on, the end, amen!
Yet, if I am honest, that’s not what I heard from God on Monday. Sure, it would make a perfectly sensible sermon, yet that is not what really stuck with me on that day.
You see, when I was waiting for the nurse to come with the drugs I needed after the doctor evaluated me, in one last act of trying to control the situation I asked my wife to read me the readings for this Sunday so I could start my working on my sermon in my head. So she got out my phone, looked up the readings and began to read them aloud. As soon as she said the first reading was from Hosea, I thought, boy, I don’t want to hear this. The term “children of whoredom” was used in last week’s reading, so I braced myself for another blast of God’s displeasure with the people of the Northern Kingdom of Israel after the glory of David and Solomon’s reigns had begun to fade, and the apostasy and heresy began.
Yet, instead of words of rebuke, I heard the loving words of a parent to a child. “Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms…I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks.”
That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. The heartbroken voices of those who were hurting were still be whispered all around me, and this was an answer to my prayer. While I was waiting there for the doctor I had prayed that God would be with all those who were in pain, to let them know He loved them…and then came those wonderful words from the Prophet Hosea.
That’s really what my job is in the end. To love people. Like God told Hosea. My job is not to order the universe despite that fact that that appears on my to do list. Yes, sometimes in order to bring this love to people I have to start by making to-do lists and making phone calls, but these are just the means of doing my job, not the sum total of what I do. My job is to show people that God loves them and to love them in turn.
That is the good news of Christ. Despite all the wretched things we can to do God and to our fellow man, God still wants to remind us that He made us, and He loves us. Don’t hear me wrong, the book of Hosea is not easy to read, and Hosea is not done registering the Lord’s complaints with the leaders of Israel. In the same way, we are not done doing stupid things here in the Church and in our lives to God and to those around us, yet God will always remind us: I love you. And sure, part of my job, just like Hosea, is to tell people things they don’t want to hear, to remind them of the way God wants us to live our lives, but these are secondary to the main mission of the Church, to bring God’s Holy love to all around us.
In the midst of my dashed plans and slightly arrogant beginning to my prayers on Monday, when I asked Him to be with me and those around me, my Father and yours reminded me that he delights in us. Regardless of how much we are doing to ignore Him in our daily life, or how hard we find it to believe in Him in bad circumstances, His compassion for us never changes.
In the end, I think that’s what the take home message from my experience was on Monday. My primary reason for getting up each morning should not be to get things done and to make my to-do list smaller or to impose my control on those around me. My reason for getting up each morning is that it gives me another chance to delight in God’s Love, and to share it with His children.

Funeral Sermon

As a clergyman I have the privilege of being with people in some of their most intimate moments, and there is nothing more intimate than dying. Many people think that it must be hard for us clergy to be around death so much. Yes, it is hard to be around death, as all of you here know. There is no question about it. Yet in this hard time, we also have the ability to learn. I have found that I learn some of the deepest things about basic Christian truths from those who are dying and from the families who have asked me to be with them during their mourning.
I only had the chance to meet Herb once before his death, but in that one meeting, Herb reminded me of something that we often forget. Death is not the end for those of us who profess Jesus Christ.
When I walked into the door at Herb’s house to say prayers and to anoint him with holy oil he was asleep. Herb’s family told me that he had been asleep for awhile. When the family and I gathered around him, the rain started to come down in giant storm. A few words into the prayers Herb opened his eyes, lighting struck, the power started flickering and all the phones in the house started ringing.
The skeptic will say that this was all just coincidence, but I know it is not. Herb knew that his time here was drawing to a close. People, whom doctors declare are past alertness and deep thought often wake up and become alert for a few moments during these prayers. They can feel the fact that their family has gathered around them to say goodbye and to commend them to God. Herb did just that, he opened his eyes, knowing his loved ones where there to say goodbye, to say I love you, and to commend him to God.
When this happened, what I could feel was the direct connection between Herb and God. All of us Christians are connected to God throughout our entire lives, but we feel that connection in different ways at different points in our lives. I know we feel that connection to God the strongest when we are dying. Now I have never been close enough to death to feel this intense connection myself, but I know it happens. I know it happens because I can feel that connection radiating from the person who is dying. The feeling is tangible, as if I can reach out and touch it.
When Herb opened his eyes, I felt it. I could feel the connection between him and God.
This experience is proof of what Jesus tells us about death. In the Gospel passage we heard, Jesus tells about that connection between us and God. He tells us that “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes is me will never die.” We know this doesn’t mean that we will never physically die, we do, just as Mary and Martha’s brother Lazarus did in this Gospel passage. Mary and Martha had not put it together yet. Martha says to Jesus “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Martha is aware of Jesus’ miraculous powers, and can only think about life here on earth. In a grief that we can all understand she yells at Jesus. What Martha doesn’t understand yet is that the gift Jesus came to bestow on us is far bigger than what she is asking for. Martha simply wanted a few more years with Lazarus. Instead, Jesus offers us far more. The gift we receive from God is that we are not bound by that physical death. Jesus Christ died for us and rose on the third day and in doing so trampled down death. Like the physical death Jesus endured, we too must also face that. But like Him, death never can win, never can have the final say. We live in God after death through the miracle of the resurrection of all the dead. The gift Jesus gives us is so much bigger than those few years Martha is asking for. Jesus offers us eternal life in God.
This is what I felt when Herb opened his eyes. I could feel the knowledge that death would not win, the fact that he would be raised again, coming from Herb in that moment.
That is the gift that Herb gave me last week. He reminded me of one of the basic facts our life in God. Death has no power over us because we are raised again. I say it all the time. I read it all the time, but nothing compares to standing in a room with someone who is being reminded by God of this truth in a deep intimate connection. I thank Herb for the gift of allowing me to experience with Him this intimate communion with God where he was reminded of God’s never failing love for Him. Death truly has no power for us, for those who believe in Christ Jesus will live again.

Proper 11C

Proper 11C, Luke 10:38:42
Poor Martha! It’s hard to go down in history as the person who has been chastised by Jesus for complaining and not paying attention to the right thing. Or at least that’s how most people tell this story. The phrase “Martha, Martha” has been thrown at more than few people whom we think are busybodies.
When I read this Gospel passage last week, a story from my own life popped into my head right away, and I had a new found understanding of what Martha was going through.
During the ordination process, there are two life altering educational experiences the Church expects you to have. The first is seminary; the second is Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE. CPE is a summer long intensive course where students learn pastoral care in critical and crisis situations. Usually, a student is a chaplain in some sort of hospital facility. For my CPE assignment I was the chaplain at a retirement home that had a dedicated hospital floor. My job was to spend the morning going to classes about pastoral care, and spending the afternoon visiting with patients on the hospital floor and the rest of the time filling out paperwork on my visits. I was assigned a small section of the floor and asked to visit these people regularly.
There was a lot to do, and I was assured by my instructors that the classes, the paperwork and the visits were all equally important.
My first week there I met a man, Mr. Smith, in the common room of the hospital floor. He introduced himself as I was walking by, so I sat down next to him to have a brief chat. Well that brief chat turned into an hour long conversation, where we found out that we both loved to talk about theology and operas. When our conversation ended, I looked down at my watch, and realized what time it was. I had planned to fill out some paperwork that afternoon, but I had talked my way through that time.
I resolved that I would pay more attention to my watch and evenly distribute my time. Yet a few days later, I walked by Mr. Smith, and another hour long conversation ensued. Mr. Smith told me stories of serving his country, of being a school teacher, of being a father. I sat in a chair facing him, hanging on every word. Our conversation was easy, never awkward or forced.
I went home again that day annoyed at the disproportionate amount of time I had spent with talking to Mr. Smith. I knew I had to attend to my classwork and my paperwork, but I was realizing that I was spending more time visiting people than I was on the paperwork and classwork.
I still got my paperwork in on time, and I still read all the readings for class, but because of how much time I was spending visiting people like Mr. Smith I was not putting an equal effort into everything. The visiting was clearly becoming my priority. I felt like I was beginning to break the rules by not giving equal time to my classwork and paperwork, but I was sure I would be letting Mr. Smith down if I stopped visiting Him so much.
I believe Martha was in the same position that I was; someone with a set of duties and the challenge of balancing them all.
Mary and Martha are close friends of Jesus, some of the few mentioned in the Gospels outside of the disciples. On his way to towards Jerusalem, Jesus stops to visit his friends and followers. In first century Palestine, much like today, the rule is that when a guest comes to your house, you take care of that guest. You offer them a drink and food, you make them comfortable. Martha gets right too this. She heads right off into the kitchen and begins to get things ready. Now her sister Mary, she decides that she will attend to their guest by sitting down at the Lord’s feet to listen to him.
Many people hear this story and think “What was Martha doing? Why on earth, when God in the Flesh comes into your house, would you go off and start fussing in the kitchen? Why didn’t she go sit at the Lord’s feet like her sister?”
One the surface, It seems like Jesus agrees with this statement. He tells her “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things!” Yet, I am convinced this surface reading is not what Jesus meant. John Henry Newman, one of the foremost Anglicans of the 1800’s tells us “If Jesus’ words be taken literally, they might indeed, even mean that Martha’s heart was not right with Him,
which, it is plain from other parts of the history, they do not mean.” I think Newman was right in his reading of this. If Martha is wrong, wouldn’t have Jesus told her so? Jesus has no problem with telling people they are wrong…just ask any Pharisee or scribe that came within 50 feet of Him! Instead, He tells us that she is distracted. So what does Jesus mean?
Jesus is well aware that his time left is short. His earthly ministry will come to an end when he is put to death for our redemption. He speaks about this time and time again in the Gospels, but Jesus’ followers don’t seem to get this. They can’t seem to see the crucifixion looming on the horizon.
So on a practical level, Jesus wants his followers to listen to him. He wants to impart as much wisdom them to as His time on earth will allow Him. Yet we know in this desire, he wasn’t telling his disciples to break all the rules in order to listen to him. Jesus tell us “Let the dead bury their dead” (Matt 8:22) yet he also tells us “Think not that I have come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.” (Matt 5:17)
Hearing these two seemingly contrasting statements, it seems like you can’t win. “What am I to do? Do I follow the rules in the name of Jesus, or do I break them all in order to follow Jesus?”
This is the situation I felt myself in when I was talking to Mr. Smith. Does my love for Jesus, who tells me to love my neighbor, mean that I should blow off all my other work to show my love to Mr. Smith by listening to him all day?
After a few weeks of feeling guilty about this, I had a breakthrough. I was explaining this struggle I had over balancing my duties to a classmate of mine who was a chaplain on the same floor as me. She told me that she had seen Mr. Smith and I in one of those long conversations, and she said something special was happening there. In her opinion, I was doing the right thing by spending most of my time visiting people. I thought about this for a moment, and I realized that she was right. Something special was happening here…I was truly learning how to be a good pastor. I was being taught by a wise man how to listen well and to live into the moment…things that good pastors need to do.
That is the goal of Clinical Pastoral Education, to become a good pastor. I realized I had been learning more from Mr. Smith than I had been from any of the class work or reflection papers I was writing.
In this breakthrough I began to understand what Martha must have gone through and what Jesus really wants of us. Like Jesus’ limited time n Earth, Mr. Smith’s time was also drawing to a close. It was clear that his health was failing. What became clear to me was that the paperwork would always be there, the books would always be in a library for me to read. The time I had with Mr. Smith, that was limited. Every minute I spent with him was minute of education I could never get from anywhere else.
In the end, the tough decision I had made for myself never was a decision. If I truly wanted to learn to be a good pastor, yet fully pay attention to my paperwork, my classwork and my pastoral visits, I could never spend an equal amount of time on each of them. Class work and paperwork would never go away, but Mr. Smith would. In order to get the most out of all three of these learning assignments, I had to first give my time and energy to my pastoral work. It was only after spending all this time on the pastoral visits, and with Mr. Smith in particular, that the classwork and paperwork began to make sense.
This is what the Lord is telling Martha. Jesus is not saying to her, “Martha, why are you wasting your time on unimportant things like kitchenwork!” St. Luke tells us that Jesus told her “there is need of only one thing.” That doesn’t mean that in following Jesus that Martha is freed from all her earthly obligations. Jesus means that at this moment, what matters is that Martha is in the room with Jesus, listening to Him, learning from Him, loving Him. The kitchen will still be there when Jesus takes His leave and goes back on His journey. Martha wasn’t wrong to be attending to her obligations, she simply hadn’t realized that the obligation to be with Jesus came before her obligations in the kitchen.
Like Martha, we all live with various sets of duties, of things we need to get done. Quite often, these duties come up at the same time, and we are forced to ask the question: which one do I do first? This choice will always be up to you in the end, but I believe Jesus gives us a very good indication of what to focus on. Jesus instituted a church, a family, because He knows that we learn the most about God and serve Him the best when we work with others. When you have obligations that come up at the same time, and one of them has to with another person, spend your time with the other person. Kitchen work, paper work, class work will always be there, and always be important, but our time with friends, family and teachers is fleeting. Love your neighbor as yourself by spending your time with your fellow man. See Jesus in the other and then, when your friend has left to continue on their journey, attend to your other duties, knowing they matter just as much, yet they can never come first.