Friday, September 10, 2010
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.
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.
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.
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.
Proper 5C - Change or Die
June 6 – Luke 7:11-17
“The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized all of them.” I am willing to bet that the man who has just been raised from the dead was a but more disoriented and confused than the crowds that saw it happen. Death is a part of the human condition, a painful part of our life and world on this side of the last judgment. Yet, as painful as it is, we are usually good at dealing with it. Nations, civilization and popular movements and even parts of the physical Church are born and then die. We sit back and try and understand what happened. What we often forget is that Christ has trampled down death – it still exists in this world, yet it has no hold over us eternally. That triumph affects this fragile church we are a part of. Because it is a divine body that is made up of mere mortals, it sometimes dies on the surface, yet that divine substance of it all resurrects, bursts back into life, although sometimes in different forms. Like the man raised from the dead we find ourselves back in this world after we thought it was all over, yet here we are back on earth…and it looks different. Simply put, this church that we are a part of will die...but that death only affect the externals that lay on the surface. 100 years from now the church will still be here, but it probably won’t look like this.
Last week I spent a few days at a convent on a pre ordination retreat. When I stepped onto the grounds there, I could feel death, and see the ghosts of the convents glorious past behind every corner. The grounds were literally falling apart around me. This convent has been a part of the Anglo-Catholic movement of the early 20th century, and had all the accoutrements of a medieval convent. There were statues and altars everywhere. Yet at each of these, where children, nuns and clergy had gathered to glorify God 100 years ago, all that was left was some crumbling limestone and granite. Bits and pieces of statues littered the grass.
I didn’t know what to make of it. Was this a judgment on me? These were my people. Many of you have seen me bow, genuflect, cross myself and do all sorts of things that may make it look like I am having a fit during service. Believe it or not, there are actually other people who participate in worship the way I do. I am one of the exotic Episcopalians..an Anglo Catholic. The monastic movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were a hallmark of the Anglo Catholic movement. Yet here I was, in a place built by people who worship like me and it was falling apart.
So I did what came naturally, I felt sorry for myself. I moped around and mourned the loss of a great movement, Anglican monasticism. You see, most of the orders of monks and nuns of that came together a 100 years ago are no longer with us.
I refused to step back and think about what this meant. It took me going to the retreat leader and telling him about how I was feeling for me to get out of my place of self pity. He told me, “if you don’t like what you are seeing, FIX IT! Inspire people to serve God as monastics. Inspire people to build up the church, and learn something from this place, don’t just mourn it!”
Well after this verbal kick in the pants, I started to do some thinking. Why is this place no longer vibrant? The truth is that in many ways, these orders succeeded in what they were trying to teach the world, so the world no longer needs the teacher. These orders opened schools, showing the world that women deserved education too. They opened hospitals in the most impoverished parts of the world, showing the world that every one deserves the touch of a healer in the name of the Christ the physician. They opened communities to take care of the elderly and the handicapped, showing the world that all deserve love and care.
These don’t sound like radical ideas to us today, but they where a hundred years ago. You have these monks and nuns, Anglican, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian to thank for these things.
So if the orders are dwindling, what went wrong? Perhaps, we, the rest of the church failed them.
You see, we the people of the church are often great at taking something from the church, but we don’t often give back in return. For all the good these monks and nuns did, we the church did a bad job of encouraging vocations to monasticism. We didn’t raise up a culture in the church that thought of being a monk or a nun as a great vocation that our sons and daughters, or even we ourselves might be called too.
However, before we declare the death of monasticism in Anglicanism all together, we must remember that we forgot it once. King Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries 500 years ago and by 450 years ago there where no monastics left in our church. Yet when the people of our church began to finally be able to see past the prejudices that clung to us from the reformation, we realized once again that taking vows to live as a monk or a nun was a true Christian calling and was something that we the church needed in order to be healed.
This cycle has been repeated over and over again in the church. The church had its first death on the surface 1,000 years after Christ’s resurrection. The church, East and West, split off, with the heads of each church consigning each other to Hell. Then the church began to walk hand and hand with the secular governments of the world, and started confusing what God wanted with what men wanted. It took a new kind of monasticism to emerge to call the church to task for its failures and for things to turn around in the Western church. Again, during the reformation, the church had become far to comfortable with the secular world, and started basing church practices around what made things easy for some, what made others rich and what was easy to sell. In many ways, the church at that time was being called upon to do some deep thinking and make some honest decisions that would have gone against the way the church was working at the time…and it had to be dragged kicking and screaming into those decisions, weathering the death of some of the externals of the church.
You see, the cycle that I described about the Anglican monks and nuns is simply a microcosm of the larger church. God inspired the church to go one way, the church embraced that way, then we the people of the church took from the church without giving back, asked it to make us comfortable, not to challenge us, and then became shocked when it fell apart on the surface. Many a Christian over the past 2,000 years has stood at the ruins of a convent or a church, read the banishment of a leader, country or whole type or worship and scratched their heads. What went wrong?
Lucky for us, the church is bigger than us, is more than us. It is a divine being, the Body of Christ on earth, and therefore can’t die in whole. The surface parts are born and then die, yet through the power of God those surface parts are resurrected, in a new form, in order to show forth physically and tangibly the Body of Christ.
We stand at another one of these moments. We find ourselves in the situation where we the church has spent too much time thinking about what the secular world thinks of us only to find out that the secular doesn’t even think of us at all. We have been written off as an outdated idea.
The good news is that it doesn’t make a difference what the outside world thinks of us. We are here to serve and to be transformed by God.
Now I know this isn’t what you want to hear this morning, but things are going to change. The church the way we know it is not working. People are sleeping in on Sunday mornings, wondering why we don’t stop suing each other and just go send a check off to Amnesty International and sleep sound, knowing that we have done some good.
We, the church, need to think long and hard, but most importantly pray about what God asks of us. How we can bring the light of Christ to those who walk in darkness. How can we invite people to be transformed, made new beings in Christ? How can we get ourselves to a point where we can admit that what Christ has to say about us and what the world has to say about us have never been and never will be the same thing?
The comforting conclusion I have for all this is a two edged sword. The comforting news is this: God will not let the church die. He will let us stare in bewilderment at the externals of the church, that we foolishly call the entire church, as they die out or change beyond recognition, but the Body of Christ, the thing that we who profess Christ are part of, will not die because it already beat death. Here then is the uncomfortable part of the comfortable news, you won’t be let off the hook. Failure is not an option. You cannot write the church of as dead. If you do, you are simply labeling the externals and missing the forest for the trees. The Church will always be there, yet we the people of the church have the task of making the externals work better so that the Truth of God can be clearly shown to the world, and most importantly, it can have a better shot at reaching people who think they don’t want to be reached. The very fact that this church has raised up countless lay leaders and three people for ordination is proof that this church knows that it can’t and won’t just lay down and die like so many others have, even though that may be the comfortable thing to do.
When we emerge from all this in resurrected externals we will probably be bewildered just like the man in today’s Gospel. But as soon as we do, we can get on with glorifying God and stop pitying ourselves. I pray that in my lifetime I will see a church that looks completely different because it has listened to God and is doing a better job of bringing Christ’s saving Gospel to the Ends of the Earth and in between. May we all be blessed to see that new, transformed, and indeed resurrected church.
“The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized all of them.” I am willing to bet that the man who has just been raised from the dead was a but more disoriented and confused than the crowds that saw it happen. Death is a part of the human condition, a painful part of our life and world on this side of the last judgment. Yet, as painful as it is, we are usually good at dealing with it. Nations, civilization and popular movements and even parts of the physical Church are born and then die. We sit back and try and understand what happened. What we often forget is that Christ has trampled down death – it still exists in this world, yet it has no hold over us eternally. That triumph affects this fragile church we are a part of. Because it is a divine body that is made up of mere mortals, it sometimes dies on the surface, yet that divine substance of it all resurrects, bursts back into life, although sometimes in different forms. Like the man raised from the dead we find ourselves back in this world after we thought it was all over, yet here we are back on earth…and it looks different. Simply put, this church that we are a part of will die...but that death only affect the externals that lay on the surface. 100 years from now the church will still be here, but it probably won’t look like this.
Last week I spent a few days at a convent on a pre ordination retreat. When I stepped onto the grounds there, I could feel death, and see the ghosts of the convents glorious past behind every corner. The grounds were literally falling apart around me. This convent has been a part of the Anglo-Catholic movement of the early 20th century, and had all the accoutrements of a medieval convent. There were statues and altars everywhere. Yet at each of these, where children, nuns and clergy had gathered to glorify God 100 years ago, all that was left was some crumbling limestone and granite. Bits and pieces of statues littered the grass.
I didn’t know what to make of it. Was this a judgment on me? These were my people. Many of you have seen me bow, genuflect, cross myself and do all sorts of things that may make it look like I am having a fit during service. Believe it or not, there are actually other people who participate in worship the way I do. I am one of the exotic Episcopalians..an Anglo Catholic. The monastic movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were a hallmark of the Anglo Catholic movement. Yet here I was, in a place built by people who worship like me and it was falling apart.
So I did what came naturally, I felt sorry for myself. I moped around and mourned the loss of a great movement, Anglican monasticism. You see, most of the orders of monks and nuns of that came together a 100 years ago are no longer with us.
I refused to step back and think about what this meant. It took me going to the retreat leader and telling him about how I was feeling for me to get out of my place of self pity. He told me, “if you don’t like what you are seeing, FIX IT! Inspire people to serve God as monastics. Inspire people to build up the church, and learn something from this place, don’t just mourn it!”
Well after this verbal kick in the pants, I started to do some thinking. Why is this place no longer vibrant? The truth is that in many ways, these orders succeeded in what they were trying to teach the world, so the world no longer needs the teacher. These orders opened schools, showing the world that women deserved education too. They opened hospitals in the most impoverished parts of the world, showing the world that every one deserves the touch of a healer in the name of the Christ the physician. They opened communities to take care of the elderly and the handicapped, showing the world that all deserve love and care.
These don’t sound like radical ideas to us today, but they where a hundred years ago. You have these monks and nuns, Anglican, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian to thank for these things.
So if the orders are dwindling, what went wrong? Perhaps, we, the rest of the church failed them.
You see, we the people of the church are often great at taking something from the church, but we don’t often give back in return. For all the good these monks and nuns did, we the church did a bad job of encouraging vocations to monasticism. We didn’t raise up a culture in the church that thought of being a monk or a nun as a great vocation that our sons and daughters, or even we ourselves might be called too.
However, before we declare the death of monasticism in Anglicanism all together, we must remember that we forgot it once. King Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries 500 years ago and by 450 years ago there where no monastics left in our church. Yet when the people of our church began to finally be able to see past the prejudices that clung to us from the reformation, we realized once again that taking vows to live as a monk or a nun was a true Christian calling and was something that we the church needed in order to be healed.
This cycle has been repeated over and over again in the church. The church had its first death on the surface 1,000 years after Christ’s resurrection. The church, East and West, split off, with the heads of each church consigning each other to Hell. Then the church began to walk hand and hand with the secular governments of the world, and started confusing what God wanted with what men wanted. It took a new kind of monasticism to emerge to call the church to task for its failures and for things to turn around in the Western church. Again, during the reformation, the church had become far to comfortable with the secular world, and started basing church practices around what made things easy for some, what made others rich and what was easy to sell. In many ways, the church at that time was being called upon to do some deep thinking and make some honest decisions that would have gone against the way the church was working at the time…and it had to be dragged kicking and screaming into those decisions, weathering the death of some of the externals of the church.
You see, the cycle that I described about the Anglican monks and nuns is simply a microcosm of the larger church. God inspired the church to go one way, the church embraced that way, then we the people of the church took from the church without giving back, asked it to make us comfortable, not to challenge us, and then became shocked when it fell apart on the surface. Many a Christian over the past 2,000 years has stood at the ruins of a convent or a church, read the banishment of a leader, country or whole type or worship and scratched their heads. What went wrong?
Lucky for us, the church is bigger than us, is more than us. It is a divine being, the Body of Christ on earth, and therefore can’t die in whole. The surface parts are born and then die, yet through the power of God those surface parts are resurrected, in a new form, in order to show forth physically and tangibly the Body of Christ.
We stand at another one of these moments. We find ourselves in the situation where we the church has spent too much time thinking about what the secular world thinks of us only to find out that the secular doesn’t even think of us at all. We have been written off as an outdated idea.
The good news is that it doesn’t make a difference what the outside world thinks of us. We are here to serve and to be transformed by God.
Now I know this isn’t what you want to hear this morning, but things are going to change. The church the way we know it is not working. People are sleeping in on Sunday mornings, wondering why we don’t stop suing each other and just go send a check off to Amnesty International and sleep sound, knowing that we have done some good.
We, the church, need to think long and hard, but most importantly pray about what God asks of us. How we can bring the light of Christ to those who walk in darkness. How can we invite people to be transformed, made new beings in Christ? How can we get ourselves to a point where we can admit that what Christ has to say about us and what the world has to say about us have never been and never will be the same thing?
The comforting conclusion I have for all this is a two edged sword. The comforting news is this: God will not let the church die. He will let us stare in bewilderment at the externals of the church, that we foolishly call the entire church, as they die out or change beyond recognition, but the Body of Christ, the thing that we who profess Christ are part of, will not die because it already beat death. Here then is the uncomfortable part of the comfortable news, you won’t be let off the hook. Failure is not an option. You cannot write the church of as dead. If you do, you are simply labeling the externals and missing the forest for the trees. The Church will always be there, yet we the people of the church have the task of making the externals work better so that the Truth of God can be clearly shown to the world, and most importantly, it can have a better shot at reaching people who think they don’t want to be reached. The very fact that this church has raised up countless lay leaders and three people for ordination is proof that this church knows that it can’t and won’t just lay down and die like so many others have, even though that may be the comfortable thing to do.
When we emerge from all this in resurrected externals we will probably be bewildered just like the man in today’s Gospel. But as soon as we do, we can get on with glorifying God and stop pitying ourselves. I pray that in my lifetime I will see a church that looks completely different because it has listened to God and is doing a better job of bringing Christ’s saving Gospel to the Ends of the Earth and in between. May we all be blessed to see that new, transformed, and indeed resurrected church.
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