Heavenly Architecture

We are still on the Way, not quite ready for the Truth and the Life, until polished and dressed as living stones for the heavenly dwelling.

SJF • Easter 5a 2014 • Tobias S Haller BSG
Let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

It is difficult for us, living in a nominally Christian country, to imagine what it was like for the earliest believers in Christ. They were a tiny minority wherever they went in the Jewish or the Roman world. Among the Jews, themselves a minority in the Empire, the Christians were an even smaller sub-group, put upon and persecuted from the very first. In today’s passage from Acts we witness the end that befell one of them, Stephen, a young Christian whose death was partly the doing of another young man, Saul. This Saul, this persecutor of the church, would later undergo a powerful conversion, and change more than his name, becoming one of its greatest champions, but also a victim of the persecutions against it.

Christians in those early days got it from both sides: opposition from many of the Jewish leaders, but from the Gentile pagans as well. Compared with the Empire’s pagan religions — from worship of the Emperor to worship of the ancient deities of Rome and Greece and Egypt, to the emerging mystery religions — the Christians were a pitiful few and far between. To get a sense today of what it was like to be Christian in those days, you would have to go to someplace like Saudi Arabia or Iran or Northeast Nigeria, where Christians are not only a minority, but are restricted and in some cases persecuted or killed.

The other thing it is hard for us to understand is based on the fact that in our culture being a Christian is respectable. Politicians today can wear their religion on their sleeve — or on their lapel — without fear. I am old enough to remember when John F Kennedy had to make up excuses for his being a Roman Catholic; but the issue barely came up with John Kerry — remember him? And the Mormon religion only came up as a footnote with Mitt Romney — remember him?

People today can be public about their faith, but in the early days of the church it was clearly not so, as our readings from Acts and First Peter show. As far as the majority — pagan or Jewish — was concerned, the Christians were a dangerous minority, a cult with strange ideas that went against everything that society held in high esteem. Many of the Jews of the Greek and Roman cities were upstanding citizens, many of them were leaders of commerce, and the Greek and Roman leaders of the territories wanted above all to keep the peace, and the wheels of commerce turning. These Christians, their opponents would say, were turning the world upside down. “They say that the poor should be treated as well as the rich — even that it is blessèd to be poor. What an idea! They claim that God came among us in the person of a convicted felon, a trouble-maker — a man who was executed for treason against the Emperor; and what’s more, they claim that this disreputable traitor, this rebel against all that is decent and civil was raised from the dead! I mean, really! What will they be telling us next? that we should join them?!” And so these pious upright citizens hounded the apostles from town to town, stirring up opposition against them, those people, those weird, strange cult-like people who were turning their world upside down.

+ + +

It is to address exactly this situation that Peter writes his first letter, offering good advice for those who are being persecuted for their beliefs. He tells the Christian believers to turn to Jesus — and to do so with the innocence and purity and naturalness of a newborn child reaching for its mother’s breast, to be held, protected, rocked and nourished. Don’t worry about being rejected — those who reject you now rejected Jesus before: and look! He, the stone rejected by the builders, has become the cornerstone of a new spiritual house, into which you are being incorporated like living stones. Yes, it’s true you were once no people — you were nobodies — but now you are God’s own people, and that makes you somebody!

The simple truth of all of this is that God has indeed turned the world upside down — and inside out! As Jesus’ own mother had sung at the beginning, when she heard the word of his Incarnation, “God has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly and meek. ”

And what could be more upside down and inside out than the resurrection itself? God has brought his own beloved Son out of the darkness of death and into the marvelous light of new life, rolling away the stone and turning the tomb that held him inside out. So too each Christian, is blessed and baptized and forgiven and freed from the death of sin. And no matter how lowly your estate before, you have become a member of a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. No wonder the civic leaders of the status quo were worried about this new religion; no wonder the authorities wanted to clamp down on this new faith; the Gospel is nothing less than revolutionary!

+ + +

And the revolution continues for each Christian believer, if not at the scale of the worldly society, then at least for each and every one of us as we engage in our own struggles with the pressures each of us faces. For Christ turns each and every one of us, and our own personal worlds, upside down and inside out.

God, it seems, puts his people through a good bit of a tumble in this life. And we might well ask, Why? If Jesus loves us so much; if, as he says in today’s Gospel that he is going to prepare a place for us, and he will come and get us, why doesn’t he just do so and take us now? In a rapture — all of us, right now! Why the wait? Why do we go through this earthly life at all if what we are really meant for is heaven?

Well, Peter has already given us the answer. We are like newborns in the faith — our eyes closed and happily nursing on the spiritual milk of Mother Church, provided to us, and helping us to grow; but we are still in the process of growth into salvation, as Peter calls it. Only God knows when we will be ready for him to come to take us to our everlasting home. Sometimes indeed God seems to take people too soon, while there are others for whom, it seems, God holds back. But preparation is needed, and God is the preparer.

This is why Peter uses the image of a building: the stones for the building — which is to say, us — have to be cut and polished and fit into the places that God the heavenly Architect intends for them. And such preparation and such building takes time.

On the twenty-eighth will be the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone for this church. This church didn’t just plop down fully made, unpacked out of a cardboard box and set up; it had to be built; a foundation had to be dug; stones had to be laid to hold up the rest of the building.

There’s a TV show on the Science Channel called “Strip the City” — I don’t know if any of you have seen it. But they make use of computer animation to peel away the outsides of buildings, and even of the streets — rolling them back like carpet to show the subways, and the plumbing, and the sewers and everything the lies underneath. It’s amazing: cities aren’t just from the ground up; they go down, down, down. And in fact it’s the stuff below that nourishes the city: that’s where the water comes from, that’s where the electricity comes from; that’s where people travel to and from their work. There’s a whole lot there, underneath — the foundation.

And for us something else is in that foundation. For us, that foundation is Jesus Christ; who was buried — remember — he was buried, he was put below, he descended into Hell, so that he could hold up a whole new world. Imagine the great building that this new world is: those who have gone before rest on that firm foundation of Jesus Christ, and other stones laid down rank by rank, like the Apostles. They rest on Christ, and then the next generation and the next, building and building this spiritual temple — into which we too will be added when our time comes, God’s time — not ours. He is the architect, we are the stones. God will take us when he knows that we have been tumbled enough through life to have our edges smoothed, our rough spots worn down, when we have been cut to shape and formed for the purpose God has for us.

But we are not quite ready yet. You may recall that famous line from a movie a few years back, when Jack Nicholson confronts Tom Cruise, who says he wants to know the truth. Nicholson snarls, “Truth! You can’t handle the truth!” Well, we face an even greater Truth; the one who is the Truth, and the Way, and the Life. And we know that that is true. But we are not yet quite ready to face the Living God in all his majesty and awe; we are still in our spiritual infancy, still incompletely formed and polished.

It is not that Jesus is not ready for us, but that we are not ready for him. We are still in the process of being shaped and formed for the proper fit in his temple on high. All our life is part of that preparation — a school of hard knocks sometimes, but also the school of God’s mercy. All our life is preparation. And when the time comes — God’s time, not ours — as that wonderful old hymn puts it, after “many a blow and biting sculpture” has “polished well those stones elect” we will find ourselves — one day — “in our places now compacted by the heavenly Architect.”

The time will come, beloved, when we close our eyes one last time on this earth, and Christ takes us by the hand to lead us to be with him where he is. The time will come when the pains and sorrows and challenges of being chiseled and battered and polished will be well worth it. When the heavenly Architect slips us into place in his temple in the heavenly city, we will see just why he has shaped us in the way he did, so that we could be all that he intends us to be: living stones for his spiritual temple — for ever. And in Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest, we will bask forever in the radiancy of glory, and the bliss beyond compare.+

---

Over My Dead Body!

The shepherd and the gate...

SJF • Easter 4a 2014 • Tobias S Haller BSG

Peter wrote, He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.

We continue our Easter exploration of the teaching of the apostle Peter this week as he takes up an image with which he had heard Jesus describe himself: the Good Shepherd. This is one of the most popular images of Jesus — literally: there are hundreds of stained glass windows and statues and paintings of Jesus portrayed as the Good Shepherd. I can’t even remember the last time I was in a church that didn’t have at least one image of the Good Shepherd. And we have one here at St. James — you may not see it very often because it is around the corner in the transept; but take a moment, perhaps later after worship, to come around the side and see our picture of Jesus the Good Shepherd in stained glass. The oldest known image of Jesus, in fact, is an image of Jesus painted on the walls of one of the ancient catacombs, showing him as a young man with a lamb over his shoulders, gently bearing it home — one of the oldest images.

We tend to think of the shepherd’s life in just this way: spending the lonely days and nights chasing after fluffy lambs, sitting on the hillside in a sunny afternoon as the sheep graze contentedly, playing on a pipe and drowsing as the bees buzz and hum around the flowers: just the kind of job where snoozing the day away seems just about right: a low-stress job!

What gets lost in this imagery, however, is the reality of just how hard and dangerous it is to be a shepherd. Not only are there thieves and bandits to contend with (as our Gospel text this morning reminds us) but also wolves and lions and bears and other wild beasts who would snatch up a young sheep for a tasty meal.

We sang David’s shepherd song today, in a musical version of that belovèd Twenty-third Psalm. You may recall that when King Saul told David that he was just a boy and no match for the Philistine giant Goliath, young David answered, “Your servant used to keep sheep for his father; and whenever a lion or a bear came, and took a lamb from the flock, I went after it and struck it down, rescuing the lamb from its mouth; and if it turned against me, I would catch it by the jaw, strike it down, and kill it. Your servant has killed both lions and bears; and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, for he has defied the armies of the living God.” Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

So David knew just what was involved in being a shepherd. Above all he knew that it was no easy-peasy, lazy-hazy, laid-back way of life. It was hard; it was dangerous. If we look closely at David’s beloved Psalm 23, we find it filled with danger and strife. In fact, it is because of all the danger and strife that the comforting parts of the Psalm are there — for who needs to be comforted when he’s already comfortable? Look at the perils described in this Psalm: the valley of the shadow of death, the enemies before whom the table is set, the rod and staff which aren’t just for show, but for striking down the foe and giving strength to the weak, and even that wounded head anointed with oil.

So being a shepherd is no easy task; it rates high on the scale of hazardous work — something which Peter the fisherman would also have appreciated. For fishing is also not just sitting dozing by a stream with a can of worms at one’s side and the line tied around your toe to wake you up when there’s a nibble. Commercial fishing — for that is what Peter and James and John and Andrew were involved in — commercial fishing is one of the most dangerous professions in the world. There was a TV show about it, that they had to amend the filming of because two of the fishermen were killed in the course of doing the series. Fishing has always been one of the most dangerous jobs you could undertake — on the stormy sea of Galilee in Peter’s day or the stormy North Atlantic today. Peter knew perfectly well that a fisherman might lose his life when a storm swamped his boat and swept him overboard. He also knew that he might risk his life to catch fish, but no fisherman would lay down his life for the sake of the fish themselves! He wasn’t there to save them; he was there to catch them! But on the other hand, a shepherd might well be called upon to lay down his life for the sheep — to lose life and limb to protect them by fighting the thieves, the bandits, the lions or wolves or bears, or whoever might seek the life of that flock.

+ + +

Being a shepherd, then, is a risky business, a rough line of work. And our Gospel reading this morning shows us just how rough and risky with another surprising image. Note that in the second half of the gospel passage, Jesus doesn’t describe himself as a shepherd but as “I am the gate,” he says. “Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.” This is odd, isn’t it? If you think so, you aren’t the only one. We’re used to seeing Jesus portrayed as a shepherd, but not as the gate of the sheepfold. Years ago pastor George Adam Smith was on a tour of the holy land. This was quite an extensive tour, and it hit all the backwater spots not usually visited today. One afternoon he stopped at a shady oasis, rarely visited by outsiders. Off to one side was a perfect Near Eastern sheepfold, such as has existed for thousands of years: it’s a low enclosure about so high, square, with an opening on one side — but no gate. The sheep were all in the fold, resting in the heat of the afternoon, and there was an ancient Arab shepherd sitting outside by the opening. Smith called for the tour interpreter and said, “Ask him where the gate for the sheepfold is.” The interpreter asked the question, and the old shepherd looked up at the curious visitors, and then smiled a knowing smile — revealing that he had more wrinkles than teeth. He spoke a few words in the local dialect, and smiled again, as the interpreter translated. He said, “I am the gate for the sheep. When I have brought them in, I sit here, and watch that none goes out. At night I sleep in the doorway, so if a sheep tries to go out it must pass over me, and if a wolf tries to get in it must pass over my body. I am the gate.” And Pastor Smith learned a lesson he would long remember.

For Jesus is the gate of our sheepfold. He watches over us day and night, protecting us from harm and preventing us from wandering. He will not allow a thief or a bandit to get past him, nor a wolf or lion or bear. He will block their way, and say, “You’ll get to my sheep over my dead body!” And that’s not a threat, it’s a promise!

For Jesus did lay down his life for us — for you, for me. He bore our sins, as Peter said, bore them in his body on the cross, so that, we, free from sins, might live for righteousness. We were gone astray like silly sheep, wandering off in search of greener pastures but finding ourselves lost in the middle of the desert — and he found us laid us on his shoulder and gently brought us home. He put us in our sheepfold, and laid himself down in the opening, to keep us safe within, and to keep out the thieves and the bandits. And when the wild beasts of sin and fear and despair came stalking by that gate, he set himself between them and us. His rod and his staff took the form of a cross on that hill outside the city gates, a rod and a staff set crosswise, upon which he suffered and died in the presence of his enemies, upon which he entered into the valley of the shadow of death — for us, for us, my beloved brothers and sisters. He set that table before us on the night before he died, in the presence of his enemies, and ours — which for us was our own sin and waywardness.

And not for us alone. For there where he was lifted high upon the cross he could call the whole world to himself — he, the gate of the sheepfold. He, the way out of the valley of the shadow and into the pasture of the beautiful sunlight of God; He, the way out of the desert of sin and into the fields beside which the waters gently flow, the still waters whose still surface is as clear as glass. He is the gate of the sheep, of all the sheep who hear his voice and come to him, raised high upon the cross in all of his woundedness so that all might see him from afar, and come, and be healed by his wounds, and then enter the sheepfold. Jesus came that we might have life, and have it abundantly — and he gave his life for us, for our sake, placing himself between us and our sins.

We enter into life because of his death and resurrection; they stand between us and the thieving banditry of sin, the wild beasts of fear and wrong, and the foolishness of our own wandering. He is the gate, he is the shepherd.

So let us, beloved, this Eastertide and always, give thanks for our Good Shepherd, who calls us to him, each by name, and leads us in and out of pasture; who laid down his life for us; who rose again from the dead and who now lives in us, and we in him, the shepherd and guardian of our souls, forever and ever.

---

Sit Down and Eat Your Supper

Jesus give us the real instruments of unity...

SJF • Easter 3a 2014 • Tobias S Haller BSG
Those who welcomed the message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.

Last week we heard part of Saint Peter’s first sermon, delivered on the day of Pentecost, and today we hear the conclusion, and more importantly, the results. What you have here might be described as the first “altar call” — the crowd is cut to the quick by Peter’s ardent testimony, and about three thousand of them are added to the flock in baptism.

But there is more: as the Book of Acts makes clear, this is not the end, but the beginning of the story. The text continues: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” This is literally a “cast of thousands” for the performance that is about to begin, which is the ongoing life of the church as a new body of the faithful. And what is important to note here is that they are not just faithful to God, but to each other. They are no longer simply a crowd of individuals, but a congregation, an assembly, a church. What holds them together, what unifies them, is their one faith in the one Lord through the one baptism. And their unity is strengthened and reinforced by the disciplines they practice as the body of Christ.

These instruments of unity are familiar to us: we use the words that summarize them at every baptism, and when we recite the Baptismal Covenant as we did two weeks ago on Easter. The members of the church not only devote themselves to God, but to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers.

You all know the Christmas carol, that goes, “I saw three ships come sailing in on Christmas day in the morning,” right? Well I’d like to point out that the earliest believers, and believers since, are united by means of three ships: leadership, fellowship, and worship.

+ + +

First of all, the believers acknowledge the apostles’ leadership. As Acts records, they turn “to Peter and to the other apostles” with an earnest question; after being told what a mess they are in, they naturally ask, “Brothers, what should we do?” And they heed their advice, their witness, their teaching, the testimony from these eyewitnesses, testimony that has been passed down through the ages. And as I said last week, that testimony is this: Christ is alive! In him we have forgiveness of sins — all our sins, whatever they may be — and we have a new life in the Spirit. That’s it, the short form of the Christian faith, as handed down from the beginning until now, and as it will be handed down until the coming of the Lord in glory, to judge both the living and the dead. Christ is alive.

+ + +

Out of this strong leadership and teaching of the apostles, there arises almost at once the second instrument of unity: fellowship. The first thing the people do — those three thousand — is to get baptized — all washed with the same baptismal water, united with Christ in a death like his, in order to live in the life which is his, the life of the church, which is his body. And this fellowship takes surprising forms: these people will go on to share their property with each other, the better-off helping those in need. They spend much more time together than they ever had before. As Peter says in the Epistle, looking back on this newly baptized community: “Now that you have purified your souls by obedience to the truth” — that is, now that you are reborn in Christ — “you have genuine mutual love.” They are a community bound in fellowship.

And then, of course, comes worship. The new community of faith is unified by the instruments of prayer and the breaking of the bread in which Christ is made known and makes himself known from Emmaus onward even to this day. These new believers discover that in giving thanks and praising God and sitting at the table together, they share in this great mystery of Christ’s presence with them, the Holy Communion of his Body and Blood, of his and their — and our — Savior.

This is how the church began, and this is how the church is called to continue, united through these three instruments, sailing the seas of this world in these three ships — the leadership and teaching of the apostles’ and their successors — which is the body of the faithful, lay and ordained; in the fellowship of that gathered community that transcends time and space; and in the worship that offers and shares the broken bread and the cup of wine, with the prayer of thanksgiving.

+ + +

These three aspects of leadership, fellowship and worship are summed up in our gospel this morning. When Jesus meets the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, he takes the leadership that is his by right; he teaches them about himself, leading them into an understanding of the Scripture as they walk along, as he relates it to all that has happened. He then stays with them in fellowship, accepting their invitation as the day draws to a close and night comes on, to be with them, to stay with them a little longer; and in doing so he draws them even closer together in fellowship. And finally, as he breaks the bread — in what would ordinarily have been just an act of fellowship but which has been raised by Jesus into an act of worship — he makes himself known to them, even as he vanishes from their sight, perhaps leaving behind his knowing smile, the warmth of his presence, and the knowledge of his love.

+ + +

Would it were always so! For there are some who reject this way to unity in Christ; some who don’t book passage on these three ships but try to take another way — and insist on others taking it too! Instead of accepting the imperishable presence of God whom we meet in communion and fellowship with each other, some still want to have their own way, refusing to share in the leadership of the church because of disagreements over one thing or another, refusing the offered hand of fellowship because they don’t approve of the one who offers it, and worst of all refusing to worship together because of these divisions and dissensions.

No doubt you have heard or read of the disagreements that have gone on in the Anglican Communion over the last twenty years. Some go so far as to say that the Communion has fallen apart. Well, I say, Don’t believe everything you hear! While there are some — even a handful of folks here in our own country — angry enough to try to vote others off the island (as if they could!), there are many others, the vast majority of others, who are on record as saying they do not approve of such a movement. More importantly, in the long run, they trust — I hope we all trust — that Christ will prevail. The majority of the leaders of the Anglican Communion will heed Christ’s commandment to be one in him, not seeking unity in manmade political structures or elaborate compromises, but in the comprehensive instruments of unity that Christ himself gave us: shared leadership, committed fellowship, and communal worship.

+ + +

Some people, even at the level of a parish, refuse to share in prayer and fellowship with those with whom they disagree. What would Jesus do in a case like this? A number of things spring to mind. I can well imagine him saying, as he said long ago, “Who are you to judge your brother? Who are you to place heavy loads on others that you are not willing to bear? Who are you to bar the way to the kingdom of heaven even though you do not enter yourself?” But I can also imagine Jesus saying something that many an irrate parent has said to his or her unruly children: “Sit down and eat your supper!”

For in this case the supper is not mere earthly food. Nor is it our supper — it is his, the Lord’s Supper. This is the supper of Christ’s death, the meal which it took his death to feed us, his Body given for us, his Blood shed for us, by which we are not merely nourished, but saved. Through him we have come, as Peter wrote, to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that our faith and hope might be set on God, not on our poor efforts, but on his gift. His sacrificial leadership has led us to this table. His willing to be with us ensures his presence with us in fellowship. And his gift of himself has blessed us with the opportunity to worship. The three ships have come to this safe harbor, to this destination: here where we gather. Here at this table he makes himself known to us in the breaking of the bread. He has told us to cease our strife — to take and eat, to take and drink, together; to sit down and have our supper.

To reject each other here, my friends, is to reject him. To reject each other, to judge each other, is to dismantle the church for which he died, for which he was raised from the dead. To reject each other is to undo Easter, to rob the Last Supper of its power, to put Jesus back in the tomb, to seal it with the stone of judgment, and earn thereby our own justified condemnation.

How much better, to do as Christ commands: to take and eat, to take and drink, to love each other as he loved us, serving one another rather than judging one another.

How much better to remain united in him through the three ships whose sails, when filled with the wind of the Holy Spirit, can bear us to the safe harbor of his peace. Pray, my sisters and brothers, that we and all the faithful throughout the world, may set aside our disagreements, our judgments, our divisions, and remain united in him, who has committed to us this task of leadership, this community of fellowship, and this call to worship him, who is the savior and redeemer of the world, even Jesus Christ our Lord.

---