Ekklesiastes

Gods and Demons

2012-01-29T13:51:00.001-05:00

Demons and Spirits take on form and power when we give ourselves over to them --- but so does God. The choice is ours... a sermon for Epiphany 4b

SJF • 4 Epiphany • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as in fact there are many gods and many lords—yet for us there is one God, the Father... and one Lord, Jesus Christ.+

Anyone who watches the TV trailers for the movies — whether you end up going to see the movies or not — knows that demons are and always have been a hot topic for film-makers. I’m sure many of you here remember “The Exorcist” — with its sequels and prequels and even the satires and fun-poking parodies about spinning heads and split-pea soup. That film was not the first by any means to take up the theme of demons and possession and exorcism — and nor was it the last, as the current fare offered by Hollywood continues to show. We are offered ample portions of demon possession and exorcism — and split-pea soup. This is like one of those restaurants where the food isn’t very good, but the portions are generous!

Why is it that people never seem to tire of such supernatural tales of terror — of demons and devils, of those possessed by them, and those foolish enough to worship them? Why is it that tales of supernatural evil — resident or just visiting — continue in the form of such a large part of our popular entertainment? Is it that there aren’t enough real horrors to frighten us, or enough real human evil in the world that we have to look for evil from beyond?

Perhaps after all it is just the fear of the unexplained or the unknown. When something strange happens, when we do not understand the natural cause of some phenomenon, we are likely to attribute it to something supernatural — and people have been doing that since the dawn of human consciousness.

That goes for evil nasty things as well as ordinary things, of course, and in ancient times all such things were divided up into the care and cause of numerous spirits, gods, and demons. Prehistoric people didn’t know what the seasons were or why or how plants grew and animals reproduced, so they put all this down to the action of various gods. Early historic people — the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians — began to record their stories of gods and monsters, whom they believed to be the supernatural source of the natural things for which they had no other explanation. The sun-god rises at dawn and rides his chariot across the sky, then sinks into the west and travels by boat under the earth to re-emerge the next day. Lightning and thunder are the work of the Storm-God, waves and floods the work of the Sea-God and his lesser cousins the lake and the river gods; and the evil fortune is the result of nasty wandering spirits who do their mischief in spreading sickness and disease.

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By the time we get to the first century, we find Saint Paul somewhat on the fence when it comes to the question of whether these gods and demons have any reality or not. The Corinthian Christians to whom he wrote were a sophisticated lot, who felt that since only the true God exists, it doesn’t do any harm to pay tribute to idols representing other gods. It was their rejection of these other gods that ironically had earned them the accusation of being atheists who would bring bad fortune on the cities of the Gentiles by offending their patron gods. So to accommodate, the wise-in-their-own-eyes Corinthians were ready to spill a drop of wine in sacrifice to the pagan gods, with a wink and a nod. “It’s just a formality...”

Saint Paul warns them they are treading on dangerous ground, warning them of the danger a horror movie fan will recognize when a person invites a vampire into their home! “Not so fast,” Paul says: Yes, we know there is but one God and one Lord, but not everyone is so secure in their belief. If you make offerings to idols, even though you know these offerings are meaningless and that you are just doing it so as not to cause offense in your pagan society — what if new Christians who still believe that these false gods are real are scandalized, and you cause them to fall away on that account? In the long run, you have done the demon’s work — you have made the demon real by your actions, and lost your brother or sister to their power.

The point, for Paul as for us, is that these gods and demons derive their power not from themselves — after all they don’t exist! — but from how people relate to them, and are possessed by them. Evil may not have a personal supernatural existence as a being of some kind, but when evil is at work in people, either as individuals or as a group, it might as well — and the damage is done whatever the case. Theologian Walter Wink has written about how it is that these “principalities and powers” can arise out of the human systems that give them flesh and blood — or ectoplasm. These human systems give the spirits bodies to work with and hands to do their evil.

Think for a moment about mob violence. I think in particular of the horrors of group assaults — lynchings, gang-rapes or bashings — that happen from time to time, when a mob seem to become possessed by some evil spirit that eggs them on to do something as a group that few or none of them would have done alone. There is an evil spirit in a mob — and whether natural or supernatural, it is real.

Good Christian people — or people who think of themselves as good Christians — can, when gathered in a crowd, do some very un-Christian things. I don’t want to get too far into politics, though it’s hard to avoid in campaign season, so I hope you pardon the illustration. I was twice struck in recent weeks by the irony of people in self-designated crowds of “Christian conservatives” — each time in response to Ron Paul — first eagerly calling out to let a sick man die if he couldn’t afford his hospital bills, and then actually booing the Golden Rule! What, you might well think, possessed these Christians so to forget the rudiments of the Christian faith? To what power or principality were they giving up themselves in that moment as instruments?

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The same goes for the spirits that Jesus encountered in his ministry, such as the one who possessed the man in our Gospel today. Although this is a case of an individual rather than a mob, the point is the same: the evil spirit has no effective existence apart from the one who is possessed by it — that’s precisely why the spirit is so desperate not to be cast out, not to be destroyed by being driven from the mind and body of the one who gives it the means to function in the physical world.

The spirits can only act in this world through and by means of those they possess. I cannot answer the question as to whether they have any existence apart from this time of possession, though the ancients well thought so. But it is doubtless that they do take on life in individuals and mobs who give themselves over to thinking that it is right to pay tribute to a demon or a false god they know — or think they know — doesn’t exist. The powers act through groups of people who do evil as a group that few would dare as individuals, as the group and its demonic driver gives each member some form of plausible deniability, or the opportunity to say, “It wasn’t me” or “I was only following orders.” Some of the greatest evil in our history is the work of people who thought it wasn’t their fault. The devil made them do it.

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The good news is that God works for good in the same way these evil spirits work for bad — through human beings. The good news is that people can do more good as a group than they can as individuals, and even as individuals — when we turn our selves, our souls and bodies, over to God as a reasonable and holy offering and sacrifice — God can and will make use of us for his good purposes. The good news is that the good that can be done is greater than the evil that is done, if only we will do it. Let us pray then that God will strengthen us to be of courage and good will to work his will. Let us not turn our hearts and minds to the dark-side of the powers, but to the light and the life of God the Father of us all, in whose name we pray, and to whom we give all glory, with God the Son and through the Holy Spirit.

A New Direction

2012-01-23T11:38:00.001-05:00

We receive many calls in our lives, in many different directions; only one of them leads us to Jesus -- a sermon for Epiphany 3b

SJF • Epiphany 3b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
When God saw what the people of Nineveh did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.

A few weeks ago, just prior to the Iowa caucuses, I was watching a CNN interview with some undecided Republican voters. One of them said something that amused me: “I think the country is heading in the wrong direction. We need to make a 360-degree turn!” You understand, then, that the reason I found this amusing, of course, is that a 360-degree turn puts you heading exactly the same way you were before you made the turn, maybe even a little dizzier than before — what this voter wanted was a 180-degree turn. I can certainly understand how dizzy undecided voters were in the Iowa caucus. In the weeks leading up to it and since we saw an electoral merry-go-round and roller coaster ride of a campaign — and the campaigners! One day one was in the lead, only to plummet on the next. No wonder people are feeling confused!

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But whether you are a voter or a cruise ship captain, if you really feel like you’re heading in the wrong direction, it’s the 180-degree turn you want. One thing I’ve experienced in years of traveling is that it is sometimes the sign on the other side of the street that you have to turn around and look backwards at to see that is the most helpful in getting you turned the right way round. Fortunately in these gymnastics I’m not the one driving!

I raise all this because our readings today strike the note of the second theme of Epiphany. The first theme, about which we talked last week, was belief. And in response to belief comes this second note — conversion, or tousethe classic word, repentance.

We see this perhaps most vividly in the story of Jonah — although the first part of Jonah’s story isn’t part of our reading today. You will recall that Jonah had tried to run away from God when God first gave him the task of preaching to the people of Nineveh. He headed 180 degrees in the opposite direction from Nineveh, out into the Mediterranean Sea. He learned his lesson in the belly of the great fish. Then God commanded him, as our reading begins this morning, a second time to do as he was told and to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh. And when he did head the way God commanded, and preached repentance, the people believed him — that’s the note of belief that we sounded last week. They believed, but not only did they believe him but they too repented. And I mean major repentance! The whole population of that great city — a three day’s walk across — a lot bigger than the Bronx! — fasted and dressed themselves in rags as a sign of humility and repentance. And then — surprise, surprise — even God changed direction — changing his mind and withholding the calamity he had said he would bring upon that wicked city for all its past sins.

This wonderful story of changing directions tells us three powerful truths: you can’t run away from God; you can change your ways and turn your life around; and even God will change in response to your repentance and amendment of life.

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When we turn to the reading from the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians we hear Paul sounding a bit like Jonah himself, announcing that the time has grown short and the end is near as the present form of this world is passing away. But while Jonah called for clear repentance — a complete 180-degree turnabout — Paul seems tobedescribing a somewhat different new direction. He does not tell people to walk away from their wives or their sorrows or their joys or their possessions or their businesses. Rather he counsels all of them to adopt what I’d call “an alongside attitude” towards all these things — more of a 90-degree relationship, or like parallel lines — continuing alongside all of them but at a little distance, perhaps arms’ length. For all these things, Paul assures them — everything about life as we know it — will be fundamentally changed by God when God comes. The change of direction is more in an attitude of detachment, than in actual movement in the opposite direction. The world, it seems, is to be taken with a grain of salt — not clutched to the breast, but held lightly. We are called to travel lightly through this world.

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Our gospel passage also involves taking a new direction. Jesus starts, again much like Jonah, preaching repentance to the people by the Sea of Galilee. But then he encounters Simon and Andrew and something changes in the nature of the call he issues. He offers a call to go in a totally new direction. Unlike the call of Jonah to the people of Nineveh, this new direction does not involve sorrow or repentance for what is past. Unlike the urging of Paul to the Corinthians it does not involve keeping a light hold on what is now. The call of Jesus is a call to let go of what is now and walk into the unknown future that is not yet. He calls Simon and Andrew and then James and John to come and follow him into a new life, in a totally new direction into a totally new world unlike anything they have ever known. He calls them, in short, into the kingdom of God. This is a call to a higher life. Not any kind of degrees — 360 or 180 — not left or right, or north, south, east or west; but up — up into the life of Christ, being, as John said,“born from above.”

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We all receive different calls in our lives — the calls can be like all of those we heard about this morning. When we have done wrong God does call us to make that 180-degree turn and repent — and has promised to forgive when we do so.

We are also called, as Paul called the Corinthians, to sit lightly with this world, this world that is passing away: our relations and our possessions are only ours for a time and we will one day have to part with all of them — and they with us — when we pass from this life — and so best to cultivate that sense of detachment, as Saint Gregory the Great once said, “To possess the things of this world without being possessed by them.”

Finally, God also calls us through Jesus Christ, in his own direction — towards him who is the shepherd and master of our souls. We have all received these different calls in our lives. But this last call — the call to the new life in Christ — that’s why we’re here this morning. Jesus calls us to follow him as surely as he called Simon and Andrew, and James and John. He calls us to walk in his way: he makes us his disciples and equips us to make disciples of others — to fish for people, as he told those fishermen.

Brothers and sisters, we share in that apostolic work as fishers of people. Even as we are drawn along in the great net cast out by those who have gone before us, we too can reach out our hands to offer help to others to bring them with us too. We may not be able to tell them with a certainty where we are heading. The only certain thing is that if we follow Jesus we will be with him where he is. And where ever that is, isn’t that the place you want to be? With all your heart and soul, with Jesus? Idon’t know about you, but as the old song says, “Where he leads me I will follow... I’ll go with him, with him, all the way...”+

Why Believe

2012-01-16T13:40:00.001-05:00

Belief comes by experience or testimony... and as a gift of God. A sermon for Epiphany 2b

SJF • Epiphany 2b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Jesus said, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these. Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

I’m going to ask a question of you that might seem odd coming from a priest to a congregation gathered in church for worship on a Sunday morning. And the question is, “Why do you believe?” I’m specifically thinking of why we believe in God — after all, right after this sermon I will invite us all to affirm our faith and the faith of the church in the words of the Nicene Creed, where we will sing a whole long list of things we say we believe about God.

But there is a larger question here: why do you believe anything? I think most of us would say, starting at the simplest and most personal level, that we believe the things that are evident to our senses — as the old saying goes, seeing is believing! There is an old story about an Anglican bishop who was confronted by someone who was from a church that believed only adults should be baptized. This Anabaptist challenged the bishop, “Do you believe in infant baptism?” To which the bishop responded, “Believe in it? Why, man, I’ve seen it!”

So for most of us the first stage of belief is based on our personal experience; we believe what we see. I know that London is real because I’ve been there, done that, got the T-shirt! But the fact of the matter is, I believed there was a London long before I got there and saw it with my own two eyes and walked its streets with my own two feet, and breathed its foggy air. And that brings me to the second reason for belief: testimony.

Much of what we know and believe, probably most of what we know and believe, is not based on our own personal experience — our senses — but on the experience of others reported to us. I spoke a few weeks ago about secondary sources in writing history, and this is precisely where they come in. We believe on the basis of the testimony of others. Unlike personal experience, which is by definition unique to each and every person, belief by testimony can be shared and multiplied. I can tell dozens of people that I have been to London, and talk to them about what I saw there, what the food and weather and the architecture are like, and if they accept my testimony they too will believe that there is a large and populous city on the River Thames, the seat of English government, full of incredible buildings and well supplied with fish and chips — and curry. And not only can I share my own testimony, but those who come to believe through me can share their new belief with others, and they with others still. In this way, many who have had no personal experience of London may come to feel well informed about it.

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So far, so good. It all seems free and clear. But what about people who believe things that are not true? Experience shows that experience can be fooled — the doors of human perception are not always open, and the windows are not always clean and clear. As we are only a few weeks from Christmas, I recall Ebenezer Scrooge’s argument with Jacob Marley’s ghost, right at the beginning of the story when the ghost challenged him to his face as to why he doubted his own senses:

“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” To which the Ghost responds, “Man of the worldly mind! Do you believe or not!?”

Our passage from the Old Testament this morning reveals some of the problems with the senses — and with our ability to make sense of them. The old priest Eli has grown blind — not just literally, but figuratively as well, as he has turned a blind eye to the blasphemous corruption and crime of his own two sons, who have corrupted the worship of the temple, stealing the people’s offerings for themselves. The whole nation seems to have lost its senses of hearing and sight, too, for the word of the Lord is rare and visions are not widespread. The corruption in the leaders has infected the people.

It takes a child — a child with fresh and open ears, young Samuel — properly to hear the voice of God gently calling him by name. And even though he does not at first — or even second — recognize who it is that is speaking to him, he eventually comes to know the Lord, and becomes a witness to the presence and power of God, so that the whole land, from Dan to Beer-sheba, comes to know and respect him as a trustworthy prophet of the Lord.

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Which brings me to the second problem with belief — it is one thing to trust your own senses, or not to trust them; but it is quite another thing to trust someone else’s senses, someone else’s testimony. The extent to which you believe someone else’s testimony is based on how much you trust them. Whether you believe will be based to a greater or lesser extent on the degree to which you trust their testimony, or their general trustworthiness.

When Philip tells Nathanael that he has found the Lord, Nathanael’s first response is one of doubt, not trust. Perhaps he’d had some bad experience with Philip; or perhaps he found it too hard to believe that the Messiah had actually come — especially from the unexpected direction of Nazareth; or maybe he was just a skeptical person by nature and didn’t trust anybody. Whatever the reason, doubting other people or their testimony can be a block to our believing what they say.

So, as Philip suggests, perhaps with a shrug or a smile, Come and see; if you don’t believe me, let it be your own senses that convert you, convince you, and bring you to belief. So it often comes back to personal experience. Just as Thomas said he would not believe in the risen Christ until he saw him with his own eyes, and even put his finger in the place where the nails had made the wounds, so too Philip offers Nathanael the only thing ultimately that you can offer to a doubtful skeptic: Come and see! And Nathanael goes, and he sees, and he believes. Big time.

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So why do we believe? Is it simply because you accept the testimony of those who walked with Christ, in those ancient days, and passed along their testimony in the form that eventually came to be published abroad in the Gospels we now have, those precious pages in that book? Do you believe because people whom you respect have told you of their experience of God at work in their own lives? Or do you believe because you have, in some way perhaps you cannot fully describe or even understand, heard the voice of God calling you gently by name, have felt the hand of God at work in your life, guiding you along right pathways for his Name’s sake? Very truly, I tell you, those who believe will see greater things than these. You will see the heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.+

Not Watered Down

2012-01-08T14:12:00.001-05:00

water on its own can do little other than removing stains -- to have power it must be raised to new heights by the sun, or moved by the wind of the Spirit -- a sermon for 1 Epiphany 2012

SJF • Baptism of Jesus • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSGJohn said, I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

Today is the feast of the baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ, always observed on the first Sunday after the Epiphany. We observe the baptism of Jesus in this way, at the beginning of the year, to start things off — for although Jesus Christ began his life on earth at Christmas, his ministry begins with his baptism as he emerges into our gospel history from that period of obscurity — that time from his childhood through young adulthood — about which we have no record apart from Saint Luke’s short account of the Holy Family’s trip to the Temple when Jesus was about 12 years of age.

But it is with the baptism of Jesus that his public ministry begins, and the first Sunday in the season after the Epiphany — which means, “showing forth” — appropriately commemorates this first public “showing forth” of Jesus.

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Baptism is clearly a time of beginning — a time of starting things off. And you might well say, what better way to start things off than with that short Scripture reading from the Old Testament: the opening words of the book Genesis, the very beginning of absolutely everything.

However, the reason the liturgists who assembled these readings chose the passage from Genesis is not that it is about beginnings. Rather it is the mention of the Holy Spirit — which I’m sorry to say the translation we use unfortunately chooses to designate as “a wind from God.” But this is the spirit of God. What the translators obscured, however, the liturgists sought to clarify and highlight, by coupling this reading from Genesis with the passages from Acts and the Gospel of Mark, which are explicit in highlighting the importance of the Holy Spirit.

And what those two readings demonstrate is that water alone is not enough. John’s baptism was a baptism with water. John was continuing and expanding on the Jewish custom of ritual bathing by which one would figuratively wash away impurity with water. Every Jewish town had a bathing pool — a mikvah — for precisely this purpose. I saw a TV program about the Dead Sea Scrolls community at Qumran a few weeks ago, and the archaeologists excavating that site pointed out that the people in that community — who lived out in the Judean desert — were very careful and concerned and spent to have well-constructed aqueducts, conduits and cisterns to bring water to those ritual bathing pools and an ample supply of water — water used solely for this ritual bathing, even in the middle of a hot, dry desert. They expended a considerable amount of their resources in constructing and maintaining this impractical but ritually vital construction. So we can tell that this ritual bathing was an important feature of their religious life.

John the baptizer — also a voice in the desert — called on people to come to the River Jordan to wash themselves. This was not just a washing from the ritual impurities that would occasion the more-or-less routine trip and dip in the municipal or village bathing pool — but a washing from the deeper and more troublesome faults and wrongs that cling to the human heart: John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance.

But as John himself confessed, his baptism was still only a baptism with water — even if it was the cold and chilly water of that historic Jordan, rather than a domesticated bathing pool. Water is water, but the one who would baptize with fire and with the Holy Spirit was yet to come.

The point in all this, and the reason for including that passage from Genesis along with the one from the Acts of the Apostles, is to show that water by itself is not enough. Water, as we know from that other account in Genesis — the story of the flood — water can destroy a world. But water by itself cannot make a world. Water by itself will just, as we know from our grade-school science class, or from a leaking roof, water on its own will seek its lowest level. It’s true that ingenious human beings have found ways to harness the power of falling or downward-flowing water, with mills and dams and dynamos. But the water itself, once it has reached its lowest point, cannot do anything of itself. It will just lay there in a pool or a puddle.

What is needed is that wind from God — that Holy Spirit of God — to move over the face of the waters and stir them up with waves of energy. And, as we also know from our science class, what is also needed is the heat and light of the sun, shining on the waters and changing the water — evaporating it — into vapor that rises and rises and rises up on high until it condenses into clouds, and falls again as rain to water the mountains and fill the streams that can pour down once more, once again full of power and energy it was given by being raised up, to go through those cascades down to the sea, in the meantime driving the mills and dynamos. But the water itself doesn’t have the power, it only gains the power by being raised up by the heat and light of the sun shining on it, to the point where it can flow down once again. It is the spirit of God, not the water, that is the creative force in Genesis, bringing light and life to the world. And it is the Son — that’s S-O-N — who is the active principle in creation, the one through whom all things were made.

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And it is that same spirit and that same Son of God who makes the baptism in his name — the name of Jesus — different from the baptism of John. John’s baptism was about removing old stains of sin — and water can be a pretty good stain remover! But there is more to Christian baptism than simply washing away one’s sins — even Original Sin — more, not less, since it includes that washing-away as well.

But Christian baptism also imparts light and heat: Sonship in Christ and the fire of the Holy Spirit to the one who is baptized. The Spirit of this re-creation is the same Spirit that moved over the waters at the beginning of the first creation, and the Son of God is he through whom all things were made. Christian baptism does not merely wash away the old; it imparts the new — the new life in Christ. It renders those who are baptized new citizens of a different land than the one of their birth; and it admits those baptized into a new family — the family of God’s household, the church. This is what the Son and the Spirit do as only they can do: giving life, a new life that is not simply watered down, but built up, renewed, restored, revived.

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We will very shortly welcome three new members into this household through this wonderful sacrament of baptism into the Son by water and the Holy Spirit. I do not expect them to speak in tongues or prophesy as happened in that account from Acts. They may make a little noise - and that’s alright: it is a joyful sound. But I do know that they will have been well and truly baptized and anointed and marked as Christ’s own forever. And I hope that you in the congregation will speak out loud and strong when at the end of the baptism we come to that part of the liturgy where we welcome the newly baptized. Welcome them as if they were your own long-lost children who had wandered far from home but have found their way back by seeking the light of Christ. Welcome them with the open arms and hearty greeting you would give to a hero returning home from a foreign war. For in this baptism these young children become our brothers and sisters, in this baptism they have returned to the home that God has prepared for them from before the beginning of the world — from before the time the Spirit first hovered over those waters and the light was separated from the darkness. This is the power of God working through the church and its sacraments, committed to the care of the church by its Lord, Jesus Christ. He is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit, and it is by that Spirit that we are — all of us — children of the Most High.+

Unspeakable Name

2012-01-01T14:28:00.001-05:00

God has done us the singular honor of asking us to call him by Name... a sermon for the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus

SJF • Holy Name 2012 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: speak to Aaron and his sons saying, Thus shall you bless the Israelites... So they shall put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.

One of the most striking features of the Jewish faith is that although the name of God is written throughout the Hebrew Scriptures — what we Christians call the Old Testament — no one is supposed to say that name allowed. In fact no one is supposed to say that name at all — except the high priest on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and even then only secretly and softly and quietly when he goes into the Holy of Holies at the heart of the Temple. And since the Temple was destroyed in the first century by the Romans, the name goes unspoken.

So holy is this name, spelled in four letters, Yod, He, Vav, He — or as we would say, Y H W H — that instead of pronouncing it aloud, every time it appears in the text of the Scripture, the pious Jewish person follows the instructions printed out in the margin of the page, where it says, “Read Adonai” — and instead of saying the unspeakable Name as written will say “Adonai,” which means “the Lord.”

You have no doubt noticed and perhaps wondered about the fact that in English Bibles and prayerbooks you will often find the word “LORD” printed in all capital letters, or sometimes “GOD” printed the same way — and this indicates that the Hebrew original at that point in the Hebrew text has the four letters of the unspeakable name.

So holy is this name, that even the paper it is written or printed on becomes holy — which is why the hand-written Torah scrolls, and even mass-produced printed Hebrew Bibles, are never just thrown away. When they become too damaged or worn for further use they are reverently placed into a kind of cemetery for Bibles. And if there is need to write down a Hebrew text, say of a Psalm for a summer camp worship service, something temporary: if there is a chance that the paper might simply be thrown away rather than being preserved, instead of writing the full four letters of the unspeakable name they will sometimes write instead two Yods, what we would call two Y’s, which doesn’t mean anything in Hebrew and which to us looks like a large quotation mark. The Name is so holy that whenever that double-Y appears, instead of saying it the person will say — not the Name itself, but that substitute, “Adonai.”

Some Orthodox Jews will not even write down the English word “God” for the same reason, but instead will write G-hyphen-d, or G_underscore_d, so scrupulous are they to avoid even coming close to taking God’s name in vain. And in conversation or even in a classroom teaching about God many observant Orthodox Jews will not even use “Adonai,” — the Lord — as a substitute, as it has taken on some of the holiness that belongs to the unspeakable Name itself; rather they will refer to “Ha Shem” — which simply means “the Name.” So, for instance, if you ask such an Orthodox couple if they are traveling to Jerusalem next year, they might say, “If Ha Shem wills it.” “If ‘The Name’ wills it.”

Of course the people of Israel had other ways to communicate the unspeakable Name, in addition to using such written or spoken substitutes. We see one of them in the reading from the Book of Numbers this morning, where the priests of the family of Aaron are given the authority to bless the people with the unspeakable Name by ritual means. They would hold up their hands like this — which looks a like two copies of the Hebrew letter Shin, the first letter of Shaddai (meaning Almighty) and Shekinah (meaning presence of God). The priests, while holding their hands like this, would pronounce a four part blessing of protection, light, grace and peace, as the people reverently bowed their heads — not even looking at the priests’ hands as they were raised above them.

This blessing is still given in synagogues to this day, and you may know that actor Leonard Nimoy borrowed this sacred hand-gesture when he played Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, recalling it from a childhood peek at the blessing as it was bestowed in his parent’s congregation in the synagogue. Thus the high and holy blessing to live long and prosper has become prosaic — or even Vulcan.

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Which ironically brings us back to earth. It is probably a bit hard for us to relate to all of this awe and holiness surrounding God’s name since we use God’s name all the time, either taken in vain, or even in causal conversation, is so common we scarcely notice it. We will casually say, “God bless you” to a sneezing stranger, who for all we know could be a Buddhist or an atheist. Perhaps we may not even know that the word “Goodbye” is just a short form of “God be with ye.” So we modern Christians speak this Name of ‘God’ all the time.

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And perhaps after all it is right that we should. One of the primary differences between Judaism and Christianity is precisely the belief that God has come to us to be with us as one of us — that God who created the universe became a human child — born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children, to become heirs in Christ. He grew to manhood and then suffered and died for our sake and for our salvation. God moved from being our Creator to being our Brother. And because Jesus is our brother we can join him in calling out to God as our Abba, our Father in heaven, as the Spirit inspires us and as Jesus taught us to do. Who would not call their own loving Father by name? And who has more right to do so than a child of that same Father — even if adopted?

In coming to us as one of us, the Son of God took on a new name, Jesus — the name which is above all other names, at which every knee should bend upon the earth and under the earth, and by which every tongue should confess that he is Lord — Adonai.

It is a holy name, a sacred name, and we should not profane it or speak it vainly. Jesus our brother is also our Lord and our God, as Doubting Thomas would eventually confess. It is through Jesus we earn the high and holy right to call God ‘Father,’ a privilege not to be taken lightly.

Even our earthly customs of the names we call each other often show more respect than some people do for God. But when a justly famed or important person, one you are accustomed to calling Mister this or Doctor that, or even by a formal “Sir” or “Ma’am” instead of speaking their name aloud — when a person like that invites you to call them by their name, we may be at first a little shy to do so. When an archbishop says to you, “Call me Rowan,” or a president says, “Please call me Barak,” you are invited to do something few would presume to do on their own initiative.

In the Incarnation, God has done just this. He has said to us, “Call me Father,” “Call me Brother.” The one whose name remained unspoken and too sacred to pronounce, only flashed in hand-signals or whispered in the Temple’s Most Holy Place, at the last and in the fullness of time, has come to us and said, “Call me Jesus.” And it is in that name we pray.+

You have a personal message waiting

2011-12-25T13:49:00.001-05:00

The Original Word is reissued in a new edition, bound in flesh and blood -- and swaddling bands... a sermon for Christmas Day

Christmas 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.

When I was working on the 150th Anniversary history of Saint James Church, I had a good deal of material at my disposal. One of the most important resources was the 100th anniversary history, the “gold book” as it used to be called because of its cover. Actually I had a copy of this book from long before I came to be Vicar at Saint James Church, left to me as a bequest from my brother-in-Christ William Bunting, who served over at Saint Andrew’s Church in the east Bronx for over thirty years.

The only problem with this “gold book” is that it is what historians call a “secondary source.” The authors of this book handed along to posterity their own understandings of all that went before, tinted by the views of what was important to them at the time they wrote Even concerning its own time, the 1950s, it turned out not to be a reliable source for me today, as folks were so accustomed to things of their own time — the 40s and 50s — they did not think it important to record them, since “well, everybody knows that.” So, fifty years later, some important information was no longer recoverable to me, now, because everybody back then, knew it at the time and no one thought it was necessary to write it down.

Fortunately, the “gold book” was not my only source: I also had the parish records at my disposal. In the safe there were old papers and documents, what historians call “primary sources” — records from the actual times that things happened. And these records bear the mark of personal testimony and connection. Among them are letters from young soldiers serving in the First World War, writing from the horrors of the trenches to their priest back home in New York. There is the pencil entry in the parish record book, of the burial of the curate’s wife with no further comment — and it was only through correspondence with her great-granddaughter (now that’s a real primary source) that I discovered that the reason for the silence was the fact that she had taken her own life.

There are the more prosaic items like the last cancelled check to Tiffany & Co. to pay for the Saint Augustine and Monica stained glass window, probably the last surviving work of the great artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, or the receipts of sixty-five years earlier from the quarry for the very stones that form the walls of this church, signed and approved by the head of the building committee, Mr. Gustav Schwab.

And the difference between the secondary documents like the “gold book” and the primary sources like these handwritten notes, is that the primary materials speak for themselves, while the later records come second-hand, with interpretation and editing, and most importantly, omissions.

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John opens his Gospel with an affirmation that the Word was God and was with God at the beginning. This is the Original Message — the first “text,” if you will — that God spoke to creation, the Word through whom all things were made, the source of light and life, the primary source of all that is, but at that point seemingly distant, past and inaccessible to us in the present day. In between come the messengers, such as the Letter to the Hebrews refers to — the secondary sources — most importantly John the Baptist, who comes as a witness to testify to the light, and John the Evangelist, another testifier. But then, surprise surprise and Merry Christmas, the Word becomes flesh: not the secondhand word of a transcribed or translated message, but the Original Word itself, coming with all the power that it had in the first place: the primary source issued in a new edition, bound in flesh and blood — and swaddling bands.

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews affirms this, this distinction between the secondhand word from the prophets, to the word of the Son himself, the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being. This Jesus, this Son of God, this Messiah is no mere messenger: he is the message!

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Yet still, John tells us, some turn away — the Word comes to his world which owes its existence to him, yet that world refuses to know him. He comes to his own, but his own people do not accept him, or at least not all of them. Those who do, who accept the message, the powerful message, the personal message who has been waiting to be delivered from the beginning of time, waiting for the moment the right instant when it is meant to be spoken — those who accept this message, who believe in his name, receive power themselves to become children of God.

This is the miracle of Christmas, that the power and the person of God became a human child so that we — we might through him — become children of God. He came to us, not through interpretation or translation, not through secondary sources or a third party, but directly and personally. The Original Word, the Original Text, appeared in a new, living, cloth-bound edition — a Christmas present for each and every one of us. As the great old hymn says

He sent no angel of his host
to bear this mighty word,
but him through whom the worlds were made,
the everlasting Lord. (Hymn 489)

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Beloved, we have a personal message waiting. He’s been waiting for two thousand years, for us. Let us, once again, open our hearts to receive him, open our minds to learn from him, open our eyes to behold his light, which enlightens everyone who will receive him and believe in his name, even Jesus Christ our Lord. O come, let us adore him.+

Merry Christmas?

2011-12-25T13:43:00.001-05:00

Word of a birth at the end of a war... a sermon for Christmas Eve 2011

SJF • Christmas Eve • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian. For all the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire.

Merry Christmas! I say that especially this year because our readings this evening put me in mind of the soldiers returning from their service in Iraq, able to spend Christmas with their families at the end of this long war. Other members of the armed forces remain in danger, in Afghanistan and other troubled parts of the world, and they remain in our prayers as well. God give them a moment’s peace, even in the field, to pause and listen for the angels’ voices.

We tend to look back at the first Christmas through the lenses of sentiment and sentimentality — the memories of our own childhoods blending with the borrowed traditions of Victorian England and the New York Knickerbocker Dutch. Christian though we be, and as closely as we hold on to the mystery of the Incarnation, in our culture we cannot ignore the jolly old elf Saint Nicholas — even though, as history tells us, he was a Bishop and not an elf at all, jolly or otherwise!

The plumes of steam rising from pots of hot cider or from wassail bowls may fog our glasses’ lenses; the twinkling lights obscure or distract our vision, and the jingle bells impair our hearing — all the stuff of the secular Xmas may make it hard for us to see the somewhat stark realities of that first Christmas of long ago, and of the long stretch of years leading up to it.

During the Sundays of Advent we heard readings from the book of the prophet Isaiah, from those long years of preparation; and we pick up with him again tonight. He sets the theme of a new deliverance coming at the end of another war: a time when the people enslaved and oppressed are set free, the yoke from their shoulders and rod from their back is removed.

It is a vision like something out of the end of the siege of Stalingrad — the Nazis have retreated in defeat and the victors are sorting through the plunder: scavenging the abandoned tanks and weapons for ammunition; stripping the bodies of the dead soldiers of any valuables; the piles of discarded and abandoned boots and uniforms are used to light bonfires not just for celebration, but to keep warm in that hard Russian winter.

And into this scene out of a war movie there comes word of the birth of a child: an amazing child, a wonderful child; a child who is not only a child, but the son of God, the Prince of Peace.

When we turn to our Gospel reading the scene shifts, but not really all that much. Perhaps no longer quite the time of war or open warfare, as it is a time of peace. But it is a political peace in a very political world — a world of governors — even of places like Syria, much in the news even now — and emperors of Rome, and a worldwide census mandated and decreed by Imperial authority. If it is a world at peace during the time of Caesar Augustus it is only because Caesar has conquered that world and enslaved all of its peoples under the yoke of Roman rule, and the rod of his authority —it is peace at a price.

And again, into this less than perfect world, there comes the announcement of the birth of a child — not by a prophet speaking to the returned soldiers or the liberated captives, but by a host of angels speaking to shepherds out in the fields by night keeping their flocks.

Just as we can romanticize and sentimentalize Christmas, we can do the same to these shepherds. Lets first of all note that the gospel tells us that they were terrified. Wouldn’t you be? It’s the middle of a cold, dark night — dark as it could only be out in the country in the days before the lights of cities robbed us of the ability to see the stars. You and your fellow shepherds are out in the fields keeping watch over a bunch of sleeping sheep; it is quiet as only it can be out in the country where no traffic or elevated trains rattle down the street or planes fly overhead. You huddle down to keep warm with your blanket wrapped around you, probably half sleeping — for let’s be honest: I have no reason to believe that night-watchmen were any more likely to be able to keep awake all night back then than they are now — especially outside in the dark and the cold and the silence.

And into that cold and into that darkness and into that silence there suddenly breaks forth out of the heavens the glory of God and a company of angels. Who wouldn’t be terrified?

And so just as Isaiah’s announcement of the wonderful child comes into the midst of a war-torn scene, so this announcement by the angel of God comes in a time imperial power, mass migration of peoples to comply with the mandates of that power, and a terrifying message bursting upon an unsuspecting group of poor shepherds living out in the field, minding their own business, the sheep-minding business.

The message is that the child has been born, a Savior and Messiah, the child who is also the Lord. This is a message such as we long to hear at the end of another war, in another time when the powerful rule the world and most of us have to obey their demands and pay their taxes; when we must be registered and counted — even in a land as free as ours, where the political season and the campaigning, like the Xmas season itself, seems to start earlier and earlier each year, and where we cannot miss the fact that we appear to be appreciated more for our ability to vote than for any other exercise of our citizenship.

Yet this same message is the message we long to hear: of the end of war, of liberation of captives and an end to oppression.

And you know what? We have heard it. It is the Christmas message: not just a promise made to Isaiah or a revelation to some shepherds, but the same word brought to us through the proclamation of this gospel: Isaiah promised, the angels sang, Christ came, and Christ comes still — here, and now, with and among us as surely as he came to Bethlehem in Judea; with us in our hearts as surely as he was in the manger; with us in our hands as we hold the sacred bread that is his Body, just as surely as this newborn body was held in Mary’s arms.

“Christ is born today” — and every day — at the end of a war, in a time of peace; when shepherds watch and night-watchmen sleep; when emperors rule and candidates hustle for your votes; when the skies are silent and when they rumble with the flights of helicopters and jetliners; when the night is dark and when it glows with Christmas lights — or dazzles with the light of the heavenly host. This night, this very night, the wonderful child, the Lord Jesus, is born anew: O come, let us adore him!+

Angelic Greeting

2011-12-18T16:02:00.001-05:00

The drama of the Angelus... a sermon for Advent 4b

SJF • Advent 4b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth...

Because Christmas falls on a Sunday this year — next Sunday — our Advent season is unusually long, and includes a full week between this, the last Sunday of Advent, and Christmas Day. But even a week seems far too short to jump from our Gospel account of the angel’s visit to Mary in Nazareth, to the birth of the child, conceived in that instant, in Bethlehem of Judea. And of course it is only the fact of liturgical time travel that gives us this drastically shortened one-week pregnancy. If we look back to March 25, the full nine months prior to Christmas Day on December 25, we will find this same gospel passage proclaimed on the feast of the Annunciation, where it most properly belongs. Still, every three years we get to hear this gospel on the last Sunday before Christmas — as a reminder of the momentous choice made by God, and the equally earth-shaking response made by Mary.
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Wrapped up in this gospel scene is another sort of Christmas present. Here it is that we find the origin of the prayer that many know by the name, the Hail Mary — or its Latin form, Ave Maria. It is also known as “The Angelic Salutation” because the angel Gabriel is the one who gives us the opening line of this famous prayer, right there in our gospel today, although we heard it in a more modern translation: “Hail, Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with you.” (We will get to hear the rest of this prayer on the Sunday before Christmas next year, when we hear of Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth, who says, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”)
Those two Scripture verses formed the original version of the Hail Mary as it was prayed for many centuries. (The part asking Mary to pray for us sinners now and the hour of our death was added by the Roman Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation.) The original form of the prayer comes entirely from the text of Scripture and is focused on grace and new life rather than on sin and death.
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And it is, after all, to that upbeat focus that this holy season calls us: it is the season of grace and new life. Now, there’s obviously much more going on in this gospel passage than just the angel Gabriel’s initial greeting. That is just what starts the encounter off, and the angel goes on to respond to Mary’s perplexity at the greeting, and further perplexity at the further explanation.
I’d like to look at this little scene of grace and new life through the lens of another prayer to which it gave rise. This prayer has formed a part of Christian culture for several centuries. It is connected with, and includes, the Hail Mary, but it plays out the whole scene as a kind of dramatic dialogue. It is a prayer that formed part of the daily life of many Christians, as they paused in the morning, and at midday, and dusk, quietly to recite this prayer to themselves as they heard the church bells toll. There was a time when it was commonly recited in many churches, including this one, but I think fewer and fewer have retained the memory of this pious and once popular devotion. You may know it by its Latin name, the Angelus, and you’ll find it printed on the last page of today’s bulletin, at the end of our worship, together with Millet’s famous painting of two farm-workers pausing in the field at the end of day to say the prayer together. We will use it today at the end of our worship as a prayer and a blessing.
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The prayer takes the form of a miniature three-scene drama in three couplets. The drama moves from the grace of invitation through acceptance and into its completion with the celebration of new life — much like those three readings from the book of the prophet Isaiah I spoke of on the last three Sundays.
The first couplet introduces the theme: greeting, grace and conception, setting the stage for what is to follow. The second, and pivotal, couplet represents the real drama in the story: as Mary accepts the angel’s news and what it might mean for her. In spite of her perplexity and confusion, she puts her whole trust in God, that God would not ask of her anything that she ought not do. Even knowing the impossibility of bearing a child while still a virgin, even knowing how the tongues would wag when an unmarried woman began to show her pregnancy — still Mary accepts God’s invitation and presents herself as open to the possibility: of becoming the mother of the holy child who will be known as the Son of God.
The final couplet, from the prologue to John’s Gospel, shows the completion and accomplishment of what has come before. Through Mary’s willingness to say Yes to God, Yes to the angelic greeting, the Word of God — the second Person of the Trinity, God from God, Light from Light, purely spiritual as God is Spirit, from before time and for ever — enters the world of matter and energy, and is made living, breathing, pulsing flesh, to dwell with us human beings as a human being. The life of God takes on human life.
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We observe this drama especially at this time of year, as we move from the invitation of Advent into the remembrance of the Incarnation on Christmas — in this last week of a short pregnancy from conception to delivery.
But this prayer, this Angelus, for many years served as a three-times-a-day reminder to people around the world, with the ringing of a church bell at morning, noon and dusk, to pause and remember and give thanks for this great mystery. I understand that the Irish radio still broadcasts the sound of the Angelus bell three times a day for the same reason, and perhaps you’ve heard the church bells ringing in your neighborhood from time to time that pattern of three times three, followed by nine bells during the saying of the final prayer. We will end our worship today with this traditional prayer, as a blessing and a reminder.
But I ask you not to let this be the only time you remember and give thanks for the mystery and blessing of the Incarnation that we will celebrate next weekend. Even if you do not hear the Angelus bell ring in the morning or at noon or at the close of day, let this sentiment stir in your heart, to give thanks to God, to the angel, and above all to Mary, for saying Yes to God when God asked of her a perplexing thing. May we too, always and everywhere, say Yes to God and serve him with such open, willing hearts, even when he asks a hard thing of us. Let our souls, like Mary’s soul, be the sanctuary of God, ringing bells or not, every day and every hour of our lives.+

The Arrival

2011-12-11T15:08:00.001-05:00

The good news of Messiah, among us to inspire us to work his will. — A Sermon for Advent 3b

SJF • Advent 3b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.

Over these first three weeks of Advent we have been hearing readings from the prophet Isaiah. And as I have said, they form a sequence almost like “ready, set, go.” The first showed Isaiah asking God why he did not show himself, and challenging and imploring God to do so. The second announced that God was indeed soon to show himself, and that unmistakably. And in today’s reading — a reading which, as we know from the gospel of Luke, Jesus identified with and proclaimed in the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth — in this reading the presence of the Spirit of God is formally announced: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me...” It is good to recall that the Hebrew word for one who is anointed is Messiah.

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God’s promise is fulfilled in this prophecy. and it is a time of great rejoicing and celebration. The imagery is that of people getting dressed for a wedding. The groom puts on a garland and the bride dresses herself in her finest jewels. These are not things one does long in advance of the event — these are the outfits you put on only on the day of the wedding itself, like the tail-coat and the wedding dress. That is how we know that the great day has arrived — and when we see the bride and the groom so attired, we know that it is already here.

But note that even these fine outfits are but a shadow of the glory of the garments of salvation and the robe of righteousness with which God will clothe his people for the celebration of the Lord’s arrival. Not just the bride and the groom, but all the guests at the wedding banquet will be gloriously dressed. It is clearly something to rejoice about.

And so Saint Paul continues that word of rejoicing, urging those to whom he writes to rejoice always, to give thanks in all things, filled as they are with the unquenchable spirit of God and sanctified by the God of peace to be kept whole and sound.

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And yet... and yet. The arrival that Isaiah appears to celebrate did not come in the time of Isaiah. It happened centuries later in the time of John the Baptist. Isaiah’s words about the arrival of the Spirit of God were prophetic — even though, fired up with the sense of God’s imminent arrival, it seemed almost, almost, as if it was happening even then. It seemed that God would break through that very day, as if the bride and groom rose from their slumber and dressed for the wedding that would take place that very morning.

So eager were the people for this arrival in the days of Isaiah, and in the days of John the Baptist, that they looked for any clue, any sign, that God and his Messiah had come. You can see that in the grilling to which the priests and Levites subject John the Baptist. The arrival of the Messiah is so close that they almost feel that they can reach out and touch him — but as John assures them, he is not the one. The time is not yet, though as the song says, “soon and very soon.” John sets the stage, even quoting the prophet Isaiah, casting himself in the role of the one who cries out in the wilderness the very same words of preparation that we heard on the first Sunday of Advent — “make his paths straight.” He is coming.

And it is notable that someone else quotes from Isaiah — not just quoting but actually reading, as I said earlier. And that is Christ himself, who, when he was given the scroll of the prophet Isaiah to read in the synagogue of Nazareth, found the very passage we heard this morning. And he not only read from it about the spirit of the Lord God and the anointing that would proclaim the Messiah — he not only read from the scroll but declared that it was fulfilled, then and there, in their hearing, in the presence of all who heard him read it. It was a proclamation that Messiah had come.

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Soon after, John the Baptist, believing but no doubt wanting to be assured, sent messengers himself to Jesus to ask if he was indeed the one — much as others had sent messengers to John to ask if he was the one! And Jesus gave to John’s messengers an answer similar to the one John gave to those who sought him out: look at what I am doing. And in Jesus’ case, he once again cataloged those evidences of God’s presence similar to the promises made in the passage from Isaiah: sight to the blind, healing to the disabled, release to the prisoners and captives. To comfort John with the assurance that Christ was indeed the one who was promised, he did not engage in a point by point Scriptural argument, but displayed his works of power — the power of God’s presence at work in him and through him, performing the signs of liberation that the prophet had promised. The evidence of God’s arrival is God’s work. This isn’t talk any more, but action.

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And God wants the same from us — action. It is very easy to talk about how much we love God, love the church, love our fellow Christians. But God wants more than talk: God wants us to put our hands to work as well. God wants us to proclaim in word and deed that same message of deliverance from bondage that Isaiah preached, that John the Baptist promised, and that Christ at the last brought into being. We live in a world that is still full of brokenhearted people — disappointed in their hopes and frustrated or maligned in their efforts to be and to do all that God intends for them. We live in a world that is still oppressed and hungry for good news; a world that is held captive by lust of possession that still works desolation, binding those enthralled by wealth and fame in chains — that while they seem to be made of gold, are cold iron underneath and weigh them down to the depths.

We live, in short, in a world that desperately needs to hear the proclamation of the year of the Lord’s favor, of the Lord’s forgiveness, of the Lord’s deliverance, and above all of the Lord’s arrival.

Will you do that? Not only in word but in deed? Will you proclaim with your lips and in your lives that God has come among us, and is among us still. Will you proclaim that Jesus lives, and that he reigns in your hearts and strengthens your hands to do his will? Will you follow up that proclamation with the hard work that shows that you mean every word you say, that what you proclaim with your lips is what you live in your lives? We, like John, may not be worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. But we can, like John, proclaim, and by our actions certify, that God is with us, acting through us, mighty in power and strong to save: even Jesus Christ our Lord.

Getting Ready

2011-12-04T15:49:00.001-05:00

Isaiah's theme of preparing the human landscape... A sermon for Advent 2B

SJF • Advent 2b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together.

We continue on this second Sunday of Advent with readings from the book of the prophet Isaiah. As I mentioned last week, these readings do not appear in our week-to-week worship in the same order as they do in the book of the prophet. But they do fall into a logical sequence as we’ve been reading them through the course of Advent and as we shall continue, almost as logical as “ready, set, go.”

Last week we heard Isaiah’s lament that God had abandoned and forgotten his people. We also heard his challenge to God to reveal himself, to tear open the heavens and come down, to shake the mountains and boil the sea if need be — to make himself known so that the nations might see, and tremble at his presence.

And today we hear word of God’s response. If, as I said last week, the initial appeal is like an injured child calling out for its mother to come and help, then today it is as if we hear the voice calling from the kitchen — I’ll be there in a minute!

God instructs the prophet to give the people a word of comfort, a word of assurance: God is most definitely coming and wants the way prepared, cleared, leveled out, all obstructions removed and a new four-lane highway built right through the desert so that God’s glory will be unmistakable when it is revealed, “and all flesh shall see it together” — as the text made unforgettable by Händel’s music puts it.

And there is a musical quality to this text today — just as last week we heard a dialogue, a duet of call and response between the prophet and God, so too in the midst of this text today there is a short interlude in the form of a duet — and I’m not going to try to sing.

The voice of God commands the prophet to cry out; and the prophet responds, “What shall I cry?” He then begins to fall back into some of that language of despondency and despair that we heard in last week’s reading. Shall I, the prophet asks, state the obvious: that people are as mortal as grass, as transient and frail and ephemeral as the flower of the field — living for a day or two and then parched by the heat of the sun or withered by the blast of a winter wind? Is that what God wants me to say? Where is the good news in that?

And in response, God orders not just the prophet but Zion itself and the holy city of Jerusalem to stand tall and proud and lift up voices full of strength as would a herald of good tidings, fearlessly crying out: Here is God! See, look! God is coming, the good Shepherd who will gather up the lost lambs, and lead the mother sheep.

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Today’s theme, then, is the primary Advent theme of preparation for the coming of the Lord. The apostle Peter reminds us that the coming of God will be sudden and unmistakable and that we are called to wait for that day, always being ready, always prepared by living lives of peace and purity and patience. And John the Baptist, while dressed in the costume of Elijah, fulfills the promise of Isaiah. He is the one who appears in the wilderness to call out for preparation — and indeed he does prepare the people with a baptism of repentance, to turn them back towards the place from which God will come, and the assurance that he is only the messenger and not the one for whom the promise was given; he is not the Messiah. No, he is not worthy even to take off the Messiah’s shoes, and while he has baptized with water, to prepare the people, the one to come will baptize with the Holy Spirit.

The preparation we are charged to undertake — as Isaiah makes clear — is a very personal preparation although Isaiah describes it in geological if not cosmic terms. The mountains that are to be removed and the valleys filled in to level out the way for building that four-lane highway for God’s coming are obstacles to us as much as they are to God. From the mountain of pride to the valley of despondency, these are obstacles that block God’s very entry into every human heart.

For that is where God seeks to enter in — through the empty desert of our needs and wants, past the fields of wilted grass and faded flowers of lost hopes and disappointments, filling in our deepest sense of inadequacy and weakness, as well as trimming down our pride and false self-sufficiency, leveling it down to size — past all these obstacles and impediments God seeks us out and bids us prepare for his coming by doing all we can — God giving us the power — to turn to him in faith, in hope, and with love.

For it is faith, as Jesus assured us, that can move mountains, even towering mountains of pride. It is hope that can guide us through the darkest valley, even the valley of the deepest sense of abandonment and despair, even the valley of the shadow of death. And it is love that will inspire us with the power of God’s own Holy Spirit to mount up on Zion and through the gates of Jerusalem to cry out to our beloved, Come, Lord Jesus Bridegroom, come! The Bride is ready. We have flung wide the portals of our hearts; Lord Jesus, enter in!+

Blaming it all on God

2011-11-27T13:27:00.001-05:00

One thing God cannot resist is his beloved saying, "You don't love me any more..." — a sermon for Advent 1b

SJF • Advent 1b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSGO that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence... You were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.

We come today to the beginning of a new church year, on this the first Sunday of Advent. In the four weeks leading up to Christmas — which falls on a Sunday this year — we will be hearing many texts of Scripture dealing with the theme of preparation for the Lord’s coming, both his first coming among us in Bethlehem as a child, and the second coming when he will return in power and great might to judge and rule the world.

Today we heard, and on the next two Sundays we will be hearing, passages from the prophet Isaiah. I will be taking them as my primary theme for reflection in this season of anticipation.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of Isaiah both in Jewish history and in how the Christian church made use of his prophecies — many of which came in short order to be understood as explicitly related to the person and work of Jesus Christ. Passages from the book of Isaiah are threaded through our Advent and Lenten seasons in particular: for Isaiah is the prophet both of the Lord’s coming and of the Suffering Servant.

For the Jewish people, the prophecies of Isaiah were a source of comfort and reassurance in the times leading up to their captivity in Babylon and through it and beyond. So extensive are these prophecies that some modern scholars suggest that there may well have been two or even three different “Isaiahs” all contributing to this collection of prophetic writing over as long as four hundred years.

But my purpose here is not to engage in literary criticism or historical speculation — my interest is in asking what this text meant in its own time and what it means for us today.

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The text we have before us comes from the later chapters of the book of Isaiah itself. In its form it represents a good example of a fairly common biblical model: a personal encounter with God, combining elements of accusation, confession, and petition. Confession and petition we are all fairly familiar with — as it forms a major part of our own ordinary Sunday worship. But accusation? We Christians don’t normally display that Jewish characteristic of chutzpah — evident in people such as Abraham and Job and Jeremiah — to stand up and wag our fingers in God’s face.

But Isaiah does. In the first part of the passage he is basically saying to God, in a challenge, “Why don’t you show yourself if you want people to believe in you? Especially to those who deny you — those pagan nations that have been persecuting your people? Why don’t you act as you did back in the old days; when you tore open the heaven and came down like a mighty fire; when you split open the earth and made it quake?” Isaiah is challenging God to act as he did when he brought his people out of Egypt, when he brought about tumult and destruction in the land of Canaan, leveling the walls of Jericho, and delivered his people from the hands of those who sought to destroy them, bringing them to and settling them in a land of promise: that promised land of milk and honey.

Now, so far, in all of this Isaiah has been saying the kinds of things that appear elsewhere in Hebrew Scripture, especially in the appeals made to God in the Psalms. He is lamenting the fact that God seems to have hidden himself; that God is no longer manifest to the world, no longer helping his people. But then Isaiah says something rather astounding: “You were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.” I’m tempted to say, “Oh now it’s God’s fault!”

But fortunately, Isaiah doesn’t stop with blaming God for the sins of the people. As he makes clear in the rest of the passage, he is simply trying to show how completely dependent the people are upon God. Without God helping them, of course they fall into sin — without God’s constant help and support, even the best and most righteous of them is like a filthy cloth. The autumn season of this people is well underway: they’ve faded like leaves and their iniquities like the wind have blown them all away. They are like a tree that has been uprooted and removed from its soil. They are no longer planted in God, and so they wither away and perish. They have even given up praying — they are so disappointed and despondent because God has not shown himself for so long, has hidden his face from them for so long, that they have given up. They have despaired.

And then, of course, out of the depths of this despond, Isaiah turns to his affirmation: and yet you are our God. In spite of all of the feelings of abandonment, even of betrayal, God is still God and this people are the work of God’s hand. God is the potter and they are the clay. And Isaiah ends with an appeal to God to remember and forgive his people. The uprooted tree will be planted once again.

What Isaiah, and the other prophets and poets who wrote and spoke in the same way have learned is precisely how powerful are those words, “You don’t love me anymore”!

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This is the appeal that a loving God cannot and will not resist. For of course God loves this people, loves them as dearly as any lover ever did, loves them with the fiercely jealous love of a husband who suspects his wife has strayed, loves them with the powerful and protective love of a mother for her child in danger.

This appeal reminds me of a very powerful scene in a Yiddish film that was produced in Germany just before the Nazi assault on the Jews began in earnest. In its own way it was, sadly, as prophetic as Isaiah.

The film is set in a nineteenth century shtetl, in Eastern Europe in the era of “Fiddler on the Roof,” when and where the main enemies of the Jewish people were Russians and Poles, not Nazis. A village has been reduced to rubble by a marauding band of Cossacks. They’ve burned down the synagogue, raped the young women and killed most of the young men in the village. One old man is left sitting in the midst of the devastation, having rescued a precious Torah scroll from the fire. He sits in the ashes with the Torah scroll in his arms like a wounded child, rocking and weeping. And like a modern Isaiah, he raises his voice to God in a lament:

Why have you done this to your people, O God? Why have you allowed this to happen? Down through the ages, again and again we are persecuted and killed for your sake! I will not be silent; I will raise my voice and cry out to you, like a child who calls out to its mother. “Mama, Mama; it hurts!”

That old man, like Isaiah, hoped that God would hear and respond to this lament — though the response might be delayed, God the just judge — and even more the loving parent to these children — would hear this plea, and ultimately save and deliver his people. When all else fails, when other defenders are ready to give up, when human justice fails, the only plea that makes sense is to appeal to the highest court of all, before the judgment seat of the Almighty, even if it means calling out, “Don’t you love me any more?”

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So, while appearing to blame it all on God, this is actually an appeal to God, a way to evoke a response from God who will not ignore or reject the appeal of those whom God does love so much. It is an appeal to God to be God. For God is love, and is always more willing to forgive than we are to pray. So, then, let us pray that God will be God. And in our own times of trial, personal and communal, and feelings of loss or abandonment, kindle the fire of hope that God will save those whom he loves, and has called to be his own. That God will plant our leafless trees by streams of living water.+

Feeling Sheepish

2011-11-21T12:22:00.001-05:00

The division of the nations, and God's threat and promise. A sermon for Christ the King, Year A.

SJF • Proper 29 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.

When I was a child, and behaved badly — at least the first time around — my mother and father would usually let me off the hook with a warning rather than a punishment. But they would always describe the punishment that would fall upon me the next time I behaved badly in the same way. And they would end that warning with a pointed reminder, “That’s not a threat; that’s a promise!”

Today’s passage from the Gospel according to Matthew is one of the greatest of the threats and promises made by Jesus Christ during his earthly ministry. It is a vision of the end of all time, when the Son of Man will return in glory with his angels to take up his place on the judgment seat, and judge the nations of the earth.

The passage portrays the king of heaven as a shepherd dividing sheep from goats, to one side and to the other. The sheep are told that they have done well even when they didn’t know they were doing so; and the goats are similarly told that they have done poorly, again even though they didn’t know what they were failing to do. And the doing or the not doing, whether by the sheep or by the goats, isn’t about how well or poorly they have treated their own kind, or about how the sheep have treated the goats or the goats the sheep. Rather it is about how they each and all have treated the members of the king’s family— and the least of them at that.

In other words, this vision of the final judgment contrasts with that portrayed in the book of the prophet Ezekiel. For the prophet, it is about the various members of the flock of sheep, and how the fat sheep have mistreated the lean sheep. The fat sheep have pushed and shoved and butted with their horns at the weaker animals and scattered them far and wide. And those pushy fat sheep are in for punishment when the shepherd judges between sheep and sheep.

So Jesus is using language similar to that of the prophet, but with a very different point. Obviously, as Ezekiel shows, it is wrong for the fat cats of this world to trod on the poor — the One Percent on the Ninety-Nine Percent — to take advantage of the weak, to push them out of the pleasant pasture to which all of the sheep are entitled.

But Jesus is making a rather different point — a more challenging point — and the threat and the promise are equally more demanding. It is not enough just to be good and fair to your fellow sheep and be content with your share of the pasture. It is not enough just not to butt with your horns or push with your flank and shoulder in taking advantage of the weaker sheep. The goats in Jesus’ parable suffer eternal punishment — and let’s be clear that that’s what Jesus is talking about here in his parable of the end of the world — they suffer this terrible punishment not because they’ve done bad things to the weak, whether sheep or goats, but because they haven’t done good things for those who needed good things done for them — and who those in need are, I’ll get to in a moment.

But first note that these goats are not punished because they’ve imprisoned people or stolen their food or stripped them of their clothing. They are punished because they haven’t visited those who were sick or imprisoned, or fed the hungry and given drink to the thirsty or clothing to the naked. They are not guilty of any great crime or tyranny, but of neglect.

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And now the other matter: who are those towards whom the sheep and goats have done or failed to do good? First we might well ask who these sheep and goats are. And the text reveals they are “the nations.” These are those of whom Jesus will speak at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel — and we are almost to the end with this chapter — when he orders the disciples to “go and baptize all nations.” The sheep and the goats are the people of the nations — those on the receiving end of the ministry of evangelism — the ones to whom the evangelists will go to bring good news and baptize. So the ones towards whom the neglect of the goats and the generosity of the sheep is shown, is not each other, not the nations gathered for judgment — but rather the disciples themselves, the “members of Christ’s family” — those who are sent to baptize and bring good news to those nations.

This parable, then, is not simply a lesson for Christians to be good to one another — to visit the sick and those in prison, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked — those are things we ought to do anyway under the commandment of Jesus to love God and our neighbor.

This parable is offered as a threat and a promise: a comfort to the disciples themselves, who in their coming ministry in the early days of the church would be going out into the world to carry out the commandment to baptize and spread the good news out there — out among all those sheep and goats of the nations. It is offered as a warning to those who would treat the disciples well or badly in their hour of need. Though they were ignorant of the fact that in relation to the disciples — by visiting and feeding and clothing them — or not — they had the king himself with them, in the person of the members of the king’s own family: as you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to me.

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Now, before we breathe a sigh of relief that this parable may be more about how we as Christians are to be received in the world when we bring the good news of the Gospel, than about how we are to behave towards one another, let’s not lose sight of the fact that we stand in relationship to one another much as the world stands in relationship to us. How we treat each other does matter — and it matters eternally — and that’s not a threat, that’s a promise. For if it is so vitally important that people treat strangers well, how much more important is it that we treat the members of our own family well. For all — all — strangers and family and friends — are under the rule of the great Shepherd of the Sheep. He is Lord of all. How we treat the members of the family to which we all belong is a judgment upon us — whether we know it or not. So the safest course is to do good to all, to visit and comfort those who are sick or in prison, to feed all of those who hunger and give drink to all who thirst, to welcome all strangers as well as all of our friends; and to clothe all who are naked.

As the beautiful prayer attributed to Saint Francis reminds us, “It is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” Where else are we to comfort the sick than at the bedside of the sick? Where else are we to comfort those in prison except in prison? Whom are we to feed except those who are hungry? To whom shall we give drink but to those who thirst? And whom shall we welcome if not the stranger or the homeless who seek us out? These may well be members of the family of the king whom we do not yet know, long-lost relations or distant cousins who have wandered far from home — and we can welcome them back, and treat them as we ought. God help us if we fail to serve the king in the person of those who are least among the members of his family. And God bless us when we do. He has not only threatened; he has promised!+

Wedding Banquet

2011-11-07T11:42:00.000-05:00

Saint James Fordham • All Saints Sunday 2011
The angel said to me, Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.

There is an old tradition that on the night before a marriage, the future bride and groom are separately wined and dined by their friends at bachelor or bachelorette parties — with perhaps more emphasis on the wining than the dining! Well, All Saints Day is the day on which the church celebrates the marriage supper of the Lamb. And since the marriage supper is yet to begin — we’ve received the invitation but it isn’t dated; we’ve just been told to be ready and alert — in one sense the church’s whole vigil here on earth is like a long bachelor or bachelorette party as we anticipate the great day to come. We who have yet to cross over to the life of the world to come, we in what is called the Church Militant (as opposed to the Church Triumphant), we who feebly struggle while they in glory shine, we, Christ’s body still at work, remember and give thanks for those who rest from their labors.

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Now one of the things about the parties surrounding weddings, is that the guests usually bring gifts for the new bride and groom. But what can we possibly bring as a gift for someone who has everything already! For the wedding we are talking about is the wedding of Christ and the Church, the wedding supper of the Lamb! And if anyone ever deserved the title The Man Who Has Everything, it is Jesus Christ, the one who draws the whole world to himself.

The answer is that Jesus wants one other gift, one thing we possess but which we can hold back if we will, or choose to let go of and give to him. And that is ourselves. We can choose to keep to ourselves, or we can choose to give ourselves to the one who gave us everything; we can give our selves, our souls and bodies, as a reasonable and holy sacrifice.

The Saints in glory, both the big famous saints with churches named after them, whose likenesses are enshrined in stained glass and icons, (or on the wall outside the parish office!), and the less well-known saints with likenesses preserved on our own little remembrance board there under the altar, the saints are those who gave themselves to God. And their example can help us to be as generous with ourselves as they were with themselves. The wonderful thing about the communion of saints — and I mean all of the saints, living and dead, including us here as much as the saints in glory — the wonderful thing about the communion of saints is that we help each other become gifts to God. We bear each other up when we are tempted to slide back and away from our best efforts to serve our Lord.

Ultimately all of us come to the wedding banquet carrying some of our brothers and sisters and being carried by others of them. No one gets in empty-handed! We are called and invited to the wedding, and we are to come bearing love for one another, which ofttimes means literally bearing each other up. The only wedding invitation we will have to show at the door to heaven is each other. No one gets in unaccompanied.

Remember the stern question that God asked the first murderer, and his cavalier response: Where is your brother? and Am I my brother’s keeper? Think of the sadness that pierced the heart of God when he heard those words in answer to the question, and left unsaid the response, “Of course you are." We are responsible to and for each other, connected through the bond of our common humanity. That bond is stronger than mere nationality or culture, and is fundamental and basic to our very being as human beings.

The weight of each other, as we bear each other and each other’s burden — as indeed Christ bears us — is the gentle and easy yoke of Christ. All of us are brothers and sisters in him, because it is through him that we become children of God.

What form that family will take, what we will become when we arrive, remains to be seen — it is not yet revealed. All of the blessedness that Jesus describes in the beatitudes is sometimes only perceived in that retrospective glance. In the present, most of those things are not pleasant while they are being endured! The road of sainthood is hard, no doubt about it. Being persecuted for righteousness sake is no bed of roses. It is only once we have arrived at the goal of the heavenly call — only when we look back to see our lives laid out in testimony, that we will see what a journey we have taken.

And more importantly, who has been with us and bearing us up along the way. What unknown hands lift burdens from our backs? What unknown saints walk at our sides and help us over obstacles of which we may not even be aware? Only when we’ve reached the goal will we be able to look back and see.

And what we will see will be worthy of the vision of Saint John the Divine. All the church through time and space, all the prophets and apostles and martyrs, all the saints in their festal company, and all the holy people of God will be displayed as a huge inverted wedge of souls and saints carrying and being carried by one another, an inverted pyramid that focuses its sharp, heavy point on a man nailed to a cross outside the walls of Jerusalem — who bears it all, with arms outstretched.

Though that weight pushed him down to the very depths when he descended to the dead, yet the power of God working in him raised him up again, and the power of God working through him can and will push that whole great pyramid of charity right on up and out of time and space and into eternity. And the first shall be last: the first fruits of the resurrection, Jesus the Bridegroom, is behind us urging us on, bearing us forward, ushering us into the banqueting hall.

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God is full of surprises. We thought we were coming to the wedding banquet as servants, then found we were no longer servants, but friends. Then we were surprised to find that the bridegroom would act as usher. But a far greater surprise awaits us. We had just settled into the notion that we were to be guests at the banquet, friends of the bridegroom. But it turns out that we are much more even than wedding guests. All this blessed company — ironically blessed in poverty, meekness, thirst for righteousness, hunger for mercy and peace, and even under persecution — all this company of blessedness will gather at the banquet, as more than guests: we are the Bride herself.

We, in company with all those who have gone before, the apostles, prophets, and martyrs, all the holy people of God, the blessed company of all faithful people, the saints militant and triumphant are the Bride!

This is the mystery we celebrate today. We and all our beloved ones, together with the unnumbered saints who have gone before us, participate in God’s great saving act in Jesus Christ our Lord. We as the Church in the communion of saints are eternally united to him by his gracious gift of himself once offered for us all — for what God has joined together shall never be put asunder. And so, to our Lord and God — and loving Spouse — let us with grateful hearts ascribe all might, majesty, power and dominion, henceforth and forevermore.+

Minor Prophet

2011-10-30T13:50:00.001-04:00

The truth may well be in the minority --- but with the power of God can turn the worlds upside down. A sermon for Proper 26a.

SJF • Proper 26a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The sun shall go down upon the prophets, and the day shall be black over them; the seers shall be disgraced and the diviners put to shame....

We heard a reading this morning from the book of the prophet Micah. He is one of the “Minor Prophets” — one of the twelve whose much shorter works are gathered together at the end of the Old Testament after the big-league heavy-hitters Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel — each of whose works alone is longer than the twelve others put together. But they are none the less important.

Micah is one of these Twelve Minor Prophets, but in today’s reading he also appears to be in the minority among the other prophets of his own time — the ones whom he accuses of leading the people astray. These are the prophets for hire, who cry out “Peace” when they have something to eat, but declare war against those who put nothing in their mouths.

This stand-off among the prophets is not all that unusual — oftentimes in Israel’s history there was disagreement among those called prophets: some said one thing and some another, and it was often the case that the one telling the truth — the true prophet — was in the minority.

You may recall the story of Elijah at Mount Carmel, when he alone faced off against several hundred prophets of the false god Baal — ridiculing them as they danced about and cut and gashed themselves in an effort to induce their god to show himself. Or you might recall that Amos (another of the Twelve Minor Prophets) prophesied in the minority and was chided for doing so. At that he protested that he wasn’t even a prophet — just a shepherd who lived off the fruit of the land— until God called him to speak the truth to the people of that land.

Another early prophet, Micaiah — not to be confused with Micah — like Elijah also had to bring bad news of defeat to Ahab king of Israel, noting that God had sent a lying spirit into the mouths of four hundred other prophets who told Ahab that he would be successful. Talk about a minority of one! — and yet he was the only one who told the truth.

The sad fact is that there were often false prophets, like those against whom Micah protests in our reading this morning: prophets at a price, prophets who thought in terms of personal profit — with an “F I” instead of “P H E” — and who would give you what you wanted to hear, for a price — like the fortune-tellers who will always give good news so long as you cross their palms with silver.

For those against whom Micah speaks, it is all about the money: not just the prophets, but the rulers who take bribes to hand out the desired judgment; priests who teach falsely for a price, or prophets who give pleasing oracles of peace in exchange for silver or gold. Micah stands in opposition to all of this. Although the prophets and princes and priests can be bought, God will not be bought off, and will bring his truth, will bring his rule, and his judgment upon all who turn aside to evil ways. As Micah says in another passage from his writing: you cannot buy God off with sacrifices and burnt offerings — even going so far as to imagine that God would accept your own children in a human sacrifice. No, Micah says: what the Lord God requires of you — in that ringing phrase — “is to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

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The situation is not all that different by the time of Christ. The authorities — in this case the scribes and the Pharisees — enjoy the privilege of their station. They sit in the seat of Moses — giving authoritative interpretations of the Law — but they fail to follow through on the Law’s harder teachings about justice, fairness and equity. The return they garner in exchange is not so plainly financial, but rather the literal “fringe benefits” — like those fringes that decorate their prayer shawls in an ostentatious show of self-righteous piety. They have the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at the banquets, and the respectful bows and curtsies in the street and the marketplace, as people nod to them and humble themselves and call them “rabbi.”

Jesus, like Micah before him, stands as a minority of one against this comfortable establishment. He knows — as indeed only the Word of God can know, as the one who sent the prophets in the first place — he knows that a prophet’s task is not to cozy up to power and prestige, but as Finley Peter Dunne once famously put it, to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Those in the seats of power would later accuse the Christians of trying to turn the world upside-down. And indeed that is what they did, and what they were meant to do. A world in which even one child goes hungry or perishes from a treatable disease is a world that needs to be turned upside-down.

Our Gospel passage this morning closes with Jesus almost quoting his mother, Blessed Mary of Nazareth, who had herself spoken prophetically when she visited her cousin Elizabeth and said, “He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.” This is what happens when the minority has God on its side — when the truth that they proclaim is not something they speak for what they can get out of it, or to please others or to gain their support from it, or to exalt themselves — but simply because it is the truth.

Telling the truth will often not win you friends or earn you praise or reward. It can get you into trouble, as it did Elijah and Amos and Micaiah and Micah... and Jesus — and as it did for the Apostles who spread the word of Jesus and his teaching, and turned the world upside-down, so that the rich and comfortable might slip from their seats — whether the seat of Moses or the prince’s throne — and come to learn what it is to be among the poor and disenfranchised of this world.

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Jesus ends his words in this morning’s Gospel with a warning to his followers. They are not to purchase honor with flattery, to take upon themselves high titles and the best seats in the places of earthly pomp and circumstance. No, they are to turn their hearts and minds — and ears — to the one in heaven, who is their Father, and to Jesus Christ who is their teacher and instructor.

We are called to be like the true prophets of old, who listened for the word of God — both for the unfolding of the written word of God, and for the teaching of the living Word of God in our hearts. The ancient prophets saw his day, far off and as in a vision, and were glad. We are fortunate enough to live in the days since his coming, and what is more, to continue to welcome him among us in Word and Sacrament. No better seat of honor, or more prestigious banquet exists than the one to which we have been invited and at which we are nowseated — not because of our worthiness, but by his grace. To him be the glory, now and for ever.

Charity Does Not Stay at Home

2011-10-23T14:48:00.001-04:00

A call for outreach...

SJF• Proper 25a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
One of the Pharisees, a lawyer, asked Jesus a question to test him, Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?

There is an old saying that goes, “Charity begins at home.” You’ve probably heard that said from time to time. It usually comes up in a church context when someone on a vestry or church board suggests sending money or resources out to the mission field, and someone else points out that there’s plenty of work to do right where they are. And of course, that’s the problem with, “Charity begins at home.” It usually means, in practice, “Charity stays at home.”

When the Pharisees came to test Jesus, our Gospel today tells us, the lawyer among them asked him what the most important law was; natural question for a lawyer. And he answered, as many a Jew of his day would, by citing two laws from the Law of Moses. First, from Deuteronomy: that one must love God with heart and mind and soul and strength; and second from Leviticus: that one must love one’s neighbor as oneself.

What these two laws show us is that charity — love — does begin at home, with oneself and one’s immediate neighbors; but that it cannot stay at home. True love, true charity, reflects the compassion of God, and though it starts at home, it reaches to the ends of the earth — just as the love of God does.

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Charity begins at home: because if you do not love yourself you will not be a very loving person to anyone else. Many personal relationships go sour because people feel unworthy and unlovable, and they reject the love that others try to show to them. This was the lesson of many a fable and fairy tale, for example, of the Beast whose heart was finally warmed by Beauty, who taught him to stop treating himself as a monster, and to realize his own lovableness.

Yes, charity — love — starts at home. But charity cannot stay at home: few people are as unlovable as those who are so full of self-love that they don’t reach out to those around them. The truly loving person is able both to love and to be loved, starting at home but reaching out beyond it, from self, to neighbor, and to God.

For you can’t jump right to claiming to love God if you don’t start at home first. As the beloved disciple John wrote, “Those who do not love their brothers and sisters, whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” How many people down through the years have quietly and contentedly claimed to love and serve God while ignoring God’s children — their brothers and sisters in the faith! There is a powerful indictment in the words of Saint John Chrysostom: “Do not, in your journey to worship Christ in the church, pass him by where he lies starving and freezing in the street! You cannot claim to love God if you do not love God’s children.”

Jesus taught us, in fact, that the primary way in which we show our love of God is in how we love each other. He was highly critical of the temple authorities for putting on such a show of piety while taking the last few resources of the widows and orphans. He criticized the Pharisees for imposing rules of such high demanding virtue that they lost sight of human reality.

And so Jesus offered a stumper of a question to the Pharisees, who were trying to test him, to catch him and trip him and if possible bring him up on charges. Jesus asked them how it was possible that David could call his own son, “Lord.”

Now this question stumped the Pharisees, as Jesus intended it to do! They lived in a world in which the younger always served the older, a world in which it was inconceivable that a man would call his son, let alone his many times great-great-great-grandson “my lord.”

Things simply didn’t work that way in their neatly ordered world. The humble and the poor are the servants; the rich and the mighty are the lords over them. That’s the way the world works. The Pharisees didn’t understand that what Christ brought them, what the disciples would later reveal was a movement that would “upside-down” their neatly ordered world. Had they been able to understand this one riddle, they might have grasped what Jesus was about: that turnabout of true charity, in which those who have serve those without, in which a leader becomes a nursemaid, in which the master takes up the role of a serving-woman and washes his disciples’ feet, in which a many many times great-great-grandfather looks to the distant future to see his distant son and heir lifted from the earth, to draw the whole world to himself,
and calls him, Lord.

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As you know, I was traveling in South Africa and England this past two weeks, and in fact had a brief stop in Ireland when the plane developed problems and had to turn back. (Rather more travel than I had counted on!) But I learned something in South Africa, where I had a wonderful experience meeting people from across the continent — from South Africa of course, but there were clergy from Sweden, people from New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Nigeria, from Rwanda, from Kenya — many parts of Africa, discussing many issues. And the one thing that surprised me was that the most inspiring talk I heard came from Chicago, from the priest in a parish in Chicago who presented to the consultation some of what her work is.

Her parish, which is called “All Saints,” when she came there about 18 years ago, had about 25 members. And the first thing she did, to challenge that congregation, was to challenge them much as Jesus the Pharisees — to suggest that what they needed to do was to look out to their neighborhood, to see what was going on, and to try to meet the needs of some of the people in that struggling, difficult neighborhood. And they began a very modest feeding program, having a hot meal served once a week.

Well, 18 years later, that church now has over 600 members, and they serve, still, one day a week, 400 people: a hot meal every Tuesday. They listened to the Lord, who challenged them, and told them to look beyond themselves to their neighbors.

And what I want to do is challenge us, here at St James Church, to do the same. As you know, some years ago, we had a dinner served on Thanksgiving Day — to homeless people and whoever was in the neighborhood. We stopped doing that a few years back and switched to Christmas, and I have to say the Christmas meal was not nearly as successful. I think one of the problems being that by the time it gets into December it’sgotten very cold, and people aren’t out on the streets — God knows where they have gone, but they aren’t out there. But on Thanksgiving, they still are. And I would like to challenge us once again to do what we did a few years ago, and open our doors and welcome people in to eat in our parish hall, now that the hall has been restored and prepared, we really have no excuse not to do it.

And I’m reminded of a wonderful hymn, which we’re not singing today because this just came to me this morning, the text of which says:

For the love of God is broader than the measure of Man’s mind,

and the love of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.

If our love were but more faithful we should take him at his word,

and our life would be thanksgiving for the goodness of the Lord.

I’m sure you recognize that hymn. And I would like to challenge us today — and I’m doing this with the mind of honoring Bonnie’s parish, All Saints — with All Saints Day coming, and you’re having in your bulletin this morning an envelope for our annual All Saints Day remembrance, where we remember those who have died, our families and friends, and we normally put that money into our endowment fund, which is a wonderful thing, and a help for our future the church. But I would like to suggest that this year we take that offering that is dedicated to our own personal saints, our friends and family who have gone before us, and dedicate that money, and any other money we can raise, to put on a really splendid Thanksgiving Day celebration, and welcome people from far and wide, our neighbors in the Bronx, to come in and have a hot meal on a cold day.

Will you do that with me, will you do that, my friends. And next week I will ask for your help — and I’ll have a sign-up sheet prepared at the back of the church for those willing to pitch in, perhaps to cook something and bring it on that day. And the funds we raise will go to buy supplies and food, and whatever we need to help feed the hungry on that day.

Are you with me, my friends? Shall we allow God to challenge us and allow the love of God to grow in our hearts so that we can open our doors to our neighbors, who are less well off than we are? Let us do that, friends. It is what Jesus wants from us, and it is in his name we pray; in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Letting Go

2011-10-02T14:40:00.002-04:00

St Paul catalogues his virtues and then throws the catalogue away! --- sermon for Proper 22a

SJF • Proper 22a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.

There was once a very successful Turkish prize-fighter, named Ismail Yousouf. He traveled the world offering to fight anyone who would contest his strength, and he always won. In addition to his physical prowess, he also had a deep distrust of banks and bankers. Because of that, he kept his winnings in the form of gold coins that he carried with him at all times in a money belt around his waist. I suppose he might have re-written the Scriptural saying to read, “Where your treasure is, there will your stomach also be!” This decision, to keep his wealth as close to him as his skin, led to tragedy, however, when he had the misfortune to be sailing on the passenger liner La Bourgogne in the summer of 1898, when it collided with another vessel off the coast of Nova Scotia and sank. A few of the passengers escaped the disaster, but Yousouf was not among them: in spite of his physical strength, his gold money-belt weighed him down, and he sank into the depths like a stone. Perhaps after all the old saying isn’t quite true, and you can take it with you! But is it worth the trip?

Yousouf’s story is not unique — even on that ship on that day, in which fewer than a quarter of the passengers were saved, there must have been others who might have been saved had they resisted the temptation to turn back for some valued item — a necklace or a briefcase or a wallet — and waste valuable time and add to their burden in reaching the lifeboats.

In a similar vein Mark Twain wrote of his visit to the ruins of Pompeii where he saw the remains of a man who was caught in the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius just outside a door to a passage that might have protected him — now an ash-coated skeleton with a key to the door in one hand and ten gold coins in the other. Twain reflected, that had he not stopped to gather up the gold, he might have made it to the door.

The reality of someone dying because they won’t let go of some particular thing is so much a part of human culture that it has become what’s called a “trope” — which is a sort of fancy literary word for a cliché. How many movies have you seen where a character perishes for that very reason — failing to let go of some precious item. I’m sure you can think of many, and I won’t even start to list them,
but that word “precious” and the mention of volcanos can hardly pass without acknowledging poor Gollum and his obsession with the Ring of Power that ultimately leads him to his incinerated end at Mount Doom.

The moral of all of this is that some things are best let go of — and your life may depend on letting go. I reminded us last week of Jack Benny’s response to the challenge, “Your money or your life!” — “I’m thinking, I’m thinking!” — which is comical precisely because we recognize that tension in our own lives — that tension between what seems to be of value and what really is of ultimate value; and our recognition that some people really do choose money over life, dying because they won’t let go — or maybe living, but not really having much of a life.

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In our reading from Philippians last week we heard about how Jesus Christ let go — let go of everything — not to save his own life but to save the lives of all who would turn to him in faith. Though he was the Son of God, he did not consider equality with God as something to be grasped at or held on to, but rather emptied himself, taking on our human nature so as to live and die as one of us — for our sake and for our salvation.

In the continuation of Philippians we heard this morning, Saint Paul does a similar thing. He begins by cataloguing all of the things he could be proud of if he wished: his being an observant Jew, a scholar and a teacher, in zeal and devotion a leader of his people, a man rich in his own acquired righteousness under the law. But then he shows that he is willing to toss that glossy illustrated catalogue onto the rubbish heap. He will not allow all of these inheritances and accomplishments, these native qualities and acquired skills, to hold him back — as indeed they had held him back — from Christ and his resurrection. Ultimately Paul knows that he must let go of the things that were most precious to him in his life before he came to know Christ. For since knowing Christ, all of these things, however valuable and good they might be, are of no comparison to the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

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Think for a moment about your own life — what are the things that might hold you back? Is it pride in your family or your education? Is it consciousness of your skills or satisfaction with the uprightness of your life? None of these are bad things, mind — that’s the point. These are things worth valuing. They only become a problem when we hang on to them instead of letting go in order fully to grasp what is much more valuable than any such earthly good: to grasp our Lord, clinging to the hem of his garment, as if our life depended on it.

Because our life does depend on it. If anything — however good — impedes your ability to grasp Jesus and trust in his goodness in his righteousness; if your hands are full of anything else at all, however good or valuable they might be, trust in God and let go of it. Forget what lies behind and strain forward to what lies ahead, toward the goal of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. All else will be added unto you, if you put your whole trust in him who is the source of all good.

Let us pray. Lord Jesus Christ, you let go of everything for our sake, leaving the Father’s side to be with us as one of us, to save us from our sins. Help us to find the will and the way to strip off the money belt of reputation and rise from the ocean depths of materialism; to scatter the golden coins of pride, and place the key in the lock of the door that opens to salvation; to forsake the ring of power and prestige and accept the yoke of humble service; that we may at the last find our eternal home with you, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit live and reign for ever and ever.

One Mind One Heart

2011-09-25T15:31:00.002-04:00

Having the mind of Christ -- a sermon for Proper 21a.

SJF • Proper 21 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Be of the same mind, having the same love being in full accord and of one mind. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.

In last week’s sermon I spoke to you about the double-mindedness and indecision of Hamlet the melancholy Dane, in contrast to the relative single-mindedness of Saint Paul the Apostle. Just as Hamlet wrestled with the question, “To be or not to be,” so too did Paul wrestle with the question of whether it was better for him to give up his life and be with God or continue to struggle along with his fellow Christians to build up the church for which Christ died. And it didn’t take him long to come to the decision to do the latter.

This theme of single-mindedness or decisiveness — making up your mind and then following through on your decision — lies at the heart of all of our Scripture lessons today. It’s important to hear those lessons because making decisions and being firm in your own mind once you’ve made a decision can be very difficult.

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with or recall comedian Jack Benny — he was very popular in the days of radio comedy, and I have to admit I am just old enough to remember his popular early TV show from my early childhood. Over the years he had created a character notorious for his stinginess — he drove a car that was at least thirty years old, and squeezed many cups of tea from a single teabag he would bring to restaurants where he would order a cup of hot water.

One of his most famous comedy “bits” — one involving making decisions — was broadcast on his radio show. He’s returning home after an evening rehearsal — walking instead of taking a taxi, of course, because he’s too cheap — when a mugger comes up to him and says, “Your money or your life.” This is followed by several moments of silence, as the studio audience begins to giggle and chuckle; finally the mugger repeats, “Say, Mister, I said, your money or your life!” To which the cheapskate Benny finally replied, “I’m thinking! I’m thinking!”

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Most of us would not have to stop to think about such a matter — and of course that’s what makes Benny’s comment comical. And yet most of us face situations in our lives where reaching a decision simply isn’t all that easy. You may recall another favorite comedy portrayal of indecision with a character having a little angel on one shoulder and the little devil on the other shoulder — each of them a miniature replication of the person him or herself — and both of them arguing in one ear and then the other the various urgings of what to do or not do. So foreign and yet vivid can our own thinking become that we may project it out onto such imagined angels or devils on our shoulders. Sometimes indecision can feel like that — and the more important the matter the more likely we are to find ourselves in such a quandary of double-mindedness.

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It is a distressing situation in which to find ourselves, Because we want to know what it’s best for us to do. Sometimes we do know, but don’t really want to acknowledge it — which is why Ezekiel has worked himself up into such a temper addressing the house of Israel: surely they know better, well aware that the transgressions they have committed are transgressions. After all, they’ve had the Law of Moses for a thousand years and the words of other prophets for hundreds of years by that time, and they have the own sorry example to look back on, their own history — what happened time and again when their leaders turned aside to worship false gods. From Solomon on, most of the leaders forgot the Lord and turned aside to do what ought not be done. And the land and people suffered for it.

And so Ezekiel appeals to them to turn from the folly of their transgressions and make up their mind to follow the Lord — who, in all fairness, will save and restore them if they mend their ways. For when they have set their mind on God they will also have a new heart and a new spirit — one mind, one heart, devoted to God.

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Today’s gospel presents us with another form of double mindedness: those two sons who, when their father tells them to get to work, both have a change of mind, a change of heart — one for the better and one for the worse. It is important to note that neither one of them is a picture-perfect son to their father. That would be one who would both say he would do what he’s told to do, and then do it. But surely Jesus favors the son who changes his mind for the better and does his father’s will in the end, in spite of that initial back-talk. It is after that example that the tax collectors and prostitutes have turned towards God at the preaching of John the Baptist, changing their minds about their bad decisions, and turning their lives around to devote heart and mind to God.

Meanwhile, the chief priests and elders are caught in a two-minded dilemma. They failed in their ministry of inspiring the people to righteousness, and wrote off the tax collectors and prostitutes as beyond salvation. Along comes the layman, this unordained uneducated man John, whose powerful preaching cuts to the heart and soul and inspires those deemed hopeless sinners by the self-righteous to change their ways.

So Jesus puts the authorities on the spot with his pointed question — one they cannot answer without incriminating themselves. For if John was God’s agent, why didn’t they accept him? And if John was simply acting on his own, how to explain the people’s acclamation of him as a prophet who has changed their lives? Either way the evidence is against them. And so the ones who should be teachers are stumped like the dunce in the corner.

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Finally, Paul offers us the best way forward: the best answer to the double mind is to have in oneself the single mind of Christ. For the mind of Christ, which becomes ours through the Spirit of God and our adoption in baptism — does not equivocate, does not balance on the one hand this and on the other that, is not pulled from side to side by contrary temptations and urges for good or for ill.

Some of you may recall another figure from the 1950s, Harry Truman, who became President of the United States just at the end of the war, succeeding Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and then was elected President. At one point in those tumultuous post-war years, the country was going through great economic problems and realignments — not unlike what we’re going through today. And Truman called upon a series of economists to get advice about what he should to — again, much as we find today. And the economists came to him and said, “Well, you could do this on the one hand, or on the other hand you could do that.” Time and again it was the same message. “Well, on the one hand, you could do this; but on the other hand, you could do that.” Finally Truman famously said, “Will someone please bring me a one-handed economist!”

Now, far be it from me to compare Harry Truman with Jesus Christ. But there is another famous thing that Harry Truman said that does apply: “The buck stops here.” He had that on a little sign on his desk in the President’s office. And “the buck stops” with Jesus. He is the One to whom we are all called to turn — both as our Savior and as our Example, in single-mindedness.

The mind of Christ moves right forward — doing the will of God the Father without veering or delay or detour. And that same mind can be in us, the mind of the one who though he was in the form of God did not grasp at divinity to exploit the powers that were his by right, but emptied himself, in a single-minded decision, to the cause for which he came among us: to live and die as one of us, in obedience to his Father’s will, to save us and redeem us. If we have that mind of Christ, then God will be, as Paul said, “at work in us” as God was at work in him — giving us with one heart, one mind, the hope and assurance of salvation. To him, Jesus Christ our Lord, be the glory, now and for ever.

To Be or Not To Be

2011-09-18T14:22:00.002-04:00

Choosing life over death -- for the right reason. A sermon for Proper 20a.

SJF • Proper 20a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
To me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer. I am hard-pressed between the two; my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you.

In this morning’s reading from the prophet Jonah we encountered a rather petulant man prepared to die almost out of spite. Jonah is angry at God on two counts: for letting the wicked Ninevites off the hook because they repented in response to Jonah’s own prophetic warning; and more immediately and selfishly because the bush that shaded him from the harsh desert sun has withered at God’s command. Jonah the Impatient is not one to put up with such things, and one hopes he learns better by the end of the story. At that point Jonah appears to have been struck speechless in response to God’s final question putting things in perspective. He should, after all, be happy that his prophecy was heeded and saved an entire city.

When we turn to our Epistle there is no doubt that we are dealing with a much more positive assessment. In Saint Paul’s Letter to the Philippians we behold the efforts of a committed servant of God to wrestle with the issue of whether it is better to live or to die, but for the right reasons — not choosing to die out of spite, or even out of a desire to be with God, but choosing life instead in order to serve God’s people.

Living or dying: to be or not to be. That is the issue with which the melancholy Dane Prince Hamlet wrestles, though in very different circumstances from either Jonah or Paul. As you may recall, Hamlet is a philosophy student entangled in the midst of a family drama with supernatural overtones — his father’s ghost has appeared to him and told him that he was murdered by Hamlet’s uncle, who has since married his widow.

Shakespeare’s play is among the richest and most complex ever written, and the character of Hamlet can be played in many different ways. Sir Laurence Olivier’s version resonates most with our readings this morning — in weighing the question of life and death. You may recall that the film begins with Olivier’s voice-over introducing the theme, “This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind.” That is the heart of Hamlet’s dilemma, and it lies in that most famous of Shakespearian speeches, the one that begins, “To be or not to be.” That is, as Hamlet observes, the question — the one that faces him, and Jonah, and Paul, and ultimately every thinking person. Is it better to live or to die?

Hamlet’s short speech is a brilliant summary of the philosophical arguments for and against choosing death over life, or life over death, laying out an “on the one hand this and on the other hand that” kind of argument with himself.

Hamlet really would like to just end it all — in modern terms we would probably say he is suffering from clinical depression. Life itself has just become too much of a burden — especially with his father’s ghost getting into the picture and planting seeds of suspicion — and Hamlet doesn’t know if the ghost is telling the truth or if the ghost is trying to tempt him into committing the murder of an innocent person! So Hamlet is looking for a way out, and is even contemplating suicide. In an earlier speech he has already expressed the wish that he could just die — that his “too, too solid flesh” might simply melt and evaporate and disappear; but he immediately recalls that taking any action along those lines himself has been forbidden, as the Almighty has fixed his law “against self-slaughter.”

So in the more famous speech Hamlet returns to the question, Is suffering a thing that makes you more noble and virtuous by enduring it, or is it something you should overcome or avoid? Who after all would suffer if it were an option simply to end your life in an instant, and plunge into that endless sleep? But in that sleep of death what dreams might come? Ah, as Hamlet observes, “There’s the rub!”

In the end it is the unknown — what comes after death in that “undiscovered country” from which “no traveler returns” — that keeps Hamlet alive: not a positive will to live and a commitment to act, but fear of the unknown and the consequences of action. As he concludes, “Conscience makes cowards of us all.” So Hamlet continues on the course of his tragedy, only able finally to act against his murderous uncle when he finds a way to be sure the uncle is guilty — but too late to save himself or his mother, or his prospective father-in-law or his fiancée, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or anyone else, from a swift journey offstage to that undiscovered country, death.

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Saint Paul, on the other hand, is not a man of doubt and double-mindedness, but of faith. He weighs the options, true, but he comes to a very different conclusion, and that right quickly. And this is because unlike Hamlet he is fully confidant of knowing what awaits him beyond the veil of death. He has absolutely no fear of what dreams might come. He does not regard death as an undiscovered country from which no traveler returns, but a land to which one indeed has gone to prepare a place for him, a land in which there are in fact many dwelling-places prepared, and from which that same one has returned, when the bonds of death were not able to keep him down. You know who that is, of course: Jesus Christ, the one in whom Paul places all of his faith. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is at the heart of Paul’s faith, Paul’s gospel, and it informs everything about his life and his ministry. It is his trust, his faith, his knowledge that he is assured of passage into the new life with Christ. In fact, he longs for it — not as Hamlet did as a kind of oblivion and end to his troubles — but as a positive desire to be with Christ. But Paul also knows that he still has work to do among the faithful — and though it is hard work and will be a sea of troubles for him, though it will mean suffering and pain, he commits to stay with it. His conscience is at work, but not to make him a coward, but to make him a hero — one willing to suffer for and with others rather than to take the easy way out. He chooses this course, convinced that remaining in the flesh — that is to say, remaining alive — is for the benefit of the struggling Christians to whom he writes. Even though he longs to be with Christ, he chooses to remain in service to and with his spiritual children.

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In the Buddhist tradition there is a figure known as the Bodhisattva. This is a person who has gained the Buddhist equivalent of sainthood — they have risen to the level of spiritual consciousness where they no longer need to suffer “the slings and arrows” of life in an endless cycle of reincarnation, but have broken through to the pure land of nirvana, the land of bliss — and yet, instead of going off to that endless bliss, the Bodhisattva chooses to remain, to stay in the flesh to help guide and teach others in their spiritual journey.

This is the kind of choice that Saint Paul makes — no quite the same, but a similar choice: not to depart and be with Christ in bliss, but to stay in the struggle, a struggle he voluntarily shares with the Philippians, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel.

Paul chooses to be rather than not to be: to be in the flesh as long as the flesh is useful to himself and to others, and only to go Christ in glory when the time is right — when God has made full use of him and the cup of suffering endured in faith has been drunk down, and the vessel is empty and he has finished his course in faith. May we also serve so faithfully, working together as long as we have life, till by the grace of God this mortal life is ended and what is mortal is laid down to rest to wait for the day of resurrection, through Christ and in Christ, our redeemer and advocate, who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

Hard To Forgive

2011-09-11T16:47:00.002-04:00

There is no debt ceiling on forgiveness. A sermon for 9/11/11, Proper 19a.

SJF • Proper 19a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God. So then, each of us will be accountable to God.

It is timely that the Scripture readings appointed for this day should deal with judgment and forgiveness. As you are no doubt keenly aware, this Sunday marks the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on America, the day that will for ever live in infamy by its numeric nickname Nine-Eleven.

It is abundantly clear that much was done on that terrible day that cries out for forgiveness. America was viciously attacked; thousands of innocent people met death in its most terrifying and capricious form, doomed to die by horrible means, suddenly and unprepared. Many were vaporized in an instant, unaware what was happening to them. Others were forced to make that agonized and desperate choice between being burned alive or hurtling to their deaths on the street below. Many more were crushed under the weight of those buildings, suffocated and snuffed out in darkness. None of us who witnessed that horrible day will ever forget it, and the TV news shows will not let us forget even if we wanted to, as they run those video clips again and again, and endlessly analyze.

What makes forgiveness all the harder in this case is that those who carried out these crimes knew what they were doing. They wanted their acts to be as terrorizing as indeed they were — that’s why they are called terrorists: they did not mean only to bring destruction, but to instill fear, horror, and anguish; and this not only in those they directly harmed, but in our society and nation as a whole.

How can we forgive such wrong? How can we forgive such terrible crimes? We know how hard it is to forgive someone even when they say they are sorry — how much harder to forgive those who do not ask for forgiveness, who think that what they did was right and justified, and even think they were doing a religious duty!

If somebody steps on my foot in the subway, and then apologizes, it’s fairly easy for me to forgive, although I may still feel the pain in my foot. If someone steps on my foot by accident and then looks at me like it was my fault, I will not be in such a forgiving mood. But if someone looks me in the eye, and then deliberately stomps on my foot, with a “so there” thrown in — well, what am I to do?

My natural impulse is to feel that only the repentant deserve forgiveness; that forgiveness is something that must be earned and asked for. It is only logical, this calculus of tit-for-tat: only those who acknowledge their faults deserve to be forgiven. This seems fair and square.

Unfortunately, God does not make things so easy for me. God does not say to me, Forgive those who say they are sorry. God does not say to me, Forgive others in proportion to their repentance for the harm they have done to you. God does not give me the option of measuring how much I forgive against how much someone else repents — or doesn’t. I am not told to balance my forgiveness against another’s apology; instead I am told to balance how much I forgive against how much I have been and expect to be forgiven. The wicked slave in Jesus’ parable is punished in the end not for his failure to pay his master what he owed, but for not forgiving the debt that was owed to him.

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This is a hard teaching, no doubt about it. How much easier to keep it to myself; to treat forgiveness as if it were simply earthly coin of the realm: to balance the books of grace as if grace were a commodity that I could control, so much forgiveness doled out for so much apology; no forgiveness given unless asked for, and certainly not given to those who do not ask for it or to my mind deserve it.

What does God think? That forgiveness should be free? Do I want grace to abound when I am the wounded party and no one says they’re sorry? Does that make sense to you? Don’t we want forgiveness to be costly, to be won from us, purchased from us, earned from us by those who have done us wrong? Like the worst of the medieval bishops who sold indulgences and offered the church’s absolution in exchange for gold, dare we fall into the corrupted tit-for-tat that puts a price on grace?

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And of course, there was a price for grace — it’s just that we did not pay it. For all the while we quibble and bargain, bartering forgiveness as if it were ours to dole out, a quiet figure hangs before us on a cross. He is the one who committed no wrong, earned no just punishment. He is the one who suffered so much at the hands of those who meant to do him ill, and even thought it was a religious duty to do so, who they were right and weren’t in the least bit sorry for what they did. As that innocent man was dying, after having been unjustly tried and tortured, as he hung up there to die, they did not look with sorrow or pity upon the one whom they hated. They cursed and mocked him as he died, spitting in his direction, putting out their tongues and treating him as the greatest fool who had ever born. All the weight of the world’s wrong gathered there and pressed down upon the crucified Christ: all of the hatred, all of the sin and ignorance and pride that had been stored up or would yet come to be. The sin of the whole world pressed down upon that dying man as he hung upon the hard wood of the cross.

And what did he do? He begged God to forgive them. He stretched out his arms of love. He did not cry out to his Father, “See what they do, O Lord my God. Punish them as they deserve!” No, he cried out, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.”

Christ is our example and our Lord. He to whom the greatest wrong was ever done, forgave in full, forgave it all. No wrong, however bad, however painful, done to us can match what was done to Christ, yet he called out to God to forgive in full, without being asked by those who most needed the forgiveness, without the repentance of those who sinned against him.

And he challenges us to do the same: to find the strength to forgive those who sin against us, recalling how, in him, our debts have been forgiven. In order to do so, we will need to fight against our natural human impulse for revenge. We will need to quell our anger and our wrath, to recall that God has said, “Vengeance is mine,” and to echo the words of Joseph in the Old Testament passage this morning, and say, “Are we in the place of God?”

After we have quieted our anger, we will also need to go further, to quiet our need to hear the apologies of those who have done us wrong, and what is worse, who continue to wish to do us wrong. This will not be easy. It is not easy to forgive when you have been badly wronged, seriously injured, terribly assaulted. Do you think Jesus found it easy — dying there on the cross? It won’t be any easier for us to forgive. It is not easy to forgive when you know that the hand stretched out to forgive may receive another bite worse than the first. It is not easy to forgive — but it is the only way to be forgiven. The wise man spoke truly, “We will all stand before the judgment seat of God.”

God challenges us to stretch our little fabric of forgiveness until it covers a multitude of sins. Not seven times, but seventy-seven — which is to say, there is no debt ceiling on forgiveness. God reminds us that he is judge, he is the one before whom every knee will bow, every tongue confess, the one to whom we will all be required to render our account: the account of how much forgiveness we have freely given away.

Let us pray. Eternal Father, help us to find the strength to forgive those who have injured us, to pardon those who have assaulted and wounded us, that when we come to the last day to stand as we must before your judgment seat, we may find the wells of your compassion and forgiveness overflowing for us, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Not Without Warning

2011-09-05T13:52:00.002-04:00

The individual Christian may be a plaintiff or witness, but never a judge. — a sermon for Proper 18a

SJF • Proper 18a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
So you, mortal, I have made a sentinel for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me.

Today’s reading from the book of the prophet Ezekiel was a favorite of Saint Gregory the Great, for two reasons. First of all, the name Gregory means watchman or sentinel; secondly Gregory was the pope — although the sixth century was a time when the powers of the pope were far less far-reaching than later popes would claim. But Gregory was particularly sensitive to his role and responsibility of caregiver and watchman over the church, for he was, first and last, a pastor. Such a wise pastor was he that the book he wrote on the subject of pastoral care was so highly regarded that for centuries after when bishops were consecrated they were given a copy of Gregory’s guidebook for pastors instead of a Bible. It is not for nothing that he gained the epithet, “Gregory the Great.”

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One of the major aspects of the watchman’s work — great or small — is the task of giving a warning. In Ezekiel’s case he is given the responsibility, when he hears a word from God’s mouth, to pass it along to the people as a warning, so that they may turn from their wickedness. Note that it is not Ezekiel’s own judgment that is at issue — he is given no authority to judge others. He has not authority to condemn or even to warn them if they are merely doing something that displeases him. He is only to pass along the warning he receives from the mouth of God himself; he is not a judge but a messenger.

And the purpose of the message is not condemnation but rescue: it is a warning to save those whom God perceives doing wrong, to be headed down the wrong path. For even God does not seek to punish the wicked but rather that they would turn from their evil ways, turning back from the path of crime and folly.

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Of course this fits in well with the teaching of Jesus, who commands us not to judge others. As you know he was particularly critical of the Pharisees and other busybodies who spent their time trying to take specks out of other people’s eyes when their own eyes were blinded by a beam or a log. Jesus gives us no right to judge another.

This does not mean, however, that people have to put up with bad behavior when it is directed towards themselves. As Jesus says, “If another member of the church sins against you...” you have every right to go to that person and make a complaint to them. Only if and when they refuse to hear what you say are you then authorized to take other members of the church with you to confirm the evidence of a crime committed against you. Then and only then, with continued refusal to listen, is the matter to be made public to the church at large. And it is the church that is finally given the authority to determine if the person is in the wrong. In short, the individual Christian may be a plaintiff or a witness, but never, on his or her own, a judge. Only the gathered assembly of the church has the right to pronounce the verdict of judgment — and what they decide on earth is also decided in heaven. In these matters the voice of the church is understood as speaking the verdict of God.

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This is why it is so important to understand that the authority of the church is not personal but corporate. Pope Gregory understood this — though some of his successors in the papacy began to accumulate powers as if they belonged personally to the pope rather than to the pope as the senior watchman among many sentinels.

The individualistic model, in which one persons sets him or herself up as the judge over others, inevitably leads to trouble — even when the individual is wise and prudent. We have all seen what happens, especially in recent months, in the political arena when a leader ceases to listen to his people, and becomes a dictator over them rather than a good leader concerned for their care and their well-being.

This form of tyranny and judgment is particularly problematical when it happens in the church. And I say that not only because it goes against the teaching of Jesus, but because it inevitably leads to quarreling. Notice how seriously Saint Paul considered the gravity of quarreling — just how bad he considered it: listing quarreling along with jealousy, debauchery, licentiousness, reveling and drunkenness as utterly inappropriate behavior for the church.

And the solution he offers is the opposite of judgment, which is love: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” Just as Jesus himself summarized all of the other commandments under the law of love of God and neighbor, Paul repeats this message in his Letter to the Romans, summing up the whole law of Moses in that one word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” It is love, not judgment, that brings peace and harmony.

That is a solemn warning from the mouth of God himself in Christ Jesus our Lord: love and do not judge. If another member of the church does you personal harm, and wrongs you in some way, you have every right — perhaps even a responsibility — privately to let that person know they have done something to harm you. But gently, charitably, and in a spirit of forgiveness — not a spirit of judgment and restitution; for remember that Jesus also said that we are to forgive those who sin against us not on the basis of their repentance but in the knowledge that we will only be forgiven as we have forgiven them. This, ultimately, is the spirit of love, which, as Paul told the Corinthians, “bears all things.”

If the harm done to you is grave, seek out the one who has injured you and in all charity seek to fulfill the law of love in gaining that one back. If need be — if the person denies the injury or refuses to acknowledge the harm they have done to you — then and only then bring it to other witnesses or finally even to the church: but not in a spirit of quarreling or jealousy — for these are just as bad as all of the other sins that disrupt the good order of the church.

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We pass through life not without warning — warnings from God speaking in our own hearts, warnings from sisters and brothers alerting us when we have done them harm, and warnings from the church that calls us back to the fulfillment of the law of love that Christ himself ordained for us.

Beloved, let us love one another as Christ loved us and gave himself an offering and sacrifice of God, and in whose name we pray.

Formed-Conformed-Transformed

2011-08-21T12:48:00.002-04:00

We are not called to vest ourselves in the camouflage of this world — a sermon for Proper 16a

SJF • Proper 16a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God-what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Who goes there? That is the challenge put by the sentry to anyone who comes to the border-crossing or gate. The sentry of course wants primarily to know if the one approaching is friend or foe, and will then react accordingly. Any of you who travel, especially internationally, know the importance of having a passport at the ready in order to show your identity, which in this case boils down to your birthplace, citizenship and reason for travel.

Who you are, it seems, depends a good bit on who is asking the question, and what it is about you that they are interested in, rather than in who and what you really are deep down at the depths of your being.

In many cultures the primary factor that identifies a person is ancestry. The first question you might be asked is, “What is your name?” Or “Who are your people?” The prophet Isaiah comes from such a tradition; that Jewish culture in which ancestry is extremely important — in case you ever wondered why the Old Testament has all those lists of who begat whom! Isaiah challenged his hearers to recall that ancestry — to remember that they are descendants of Abraham the righteous and Sarah the faithful. He wants them to recall that they are God’s chosen people, God’s nation, by virtue of their inheritance and family connection: as with grace itself, it is not something they have done, but solely due to God’s ancient choice of Abraham a thousand years and more before their time, that identifies them as who they are.

In many cultures it is your job or occupation that determines who or what you are in that society. In medieval Japan, many people didn’t even have personal names, but were simply known by the name of their occupation. And let's be fair: we don’t have to go quite so far as medieval Asia to find that in our own heritage — especially if your name is Sawyer or Smith, or Cook or Cooper, or Brewer or Baker — your name may well tell you something about one of your ancestors or even your family business in former times!

More importantly, people can form an opinion of you or make a judgment about you on the basis of the most casual and superficial things about you. They can judge you by how you dress — and be impressed if you are well-dressed or write you off if you are too casual, with no real account taken of the person under the fabric. “Clothes make the man” as the old saying goes, and it probably goes double for women. This is a serious matter, because how you appear in the eyes of others will be a major determining factor in what you are able to do in life — and to tie two of these identity factors together: how you dress for a job interview may be more important than what you put on your resumé or what work-skills you possess! How you dress may determine or limit what you end up doing for a living.

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The fact is, however, that what your passport says or who your ancestors were or what you do for a living or how you dress do not really say who you are deep down. But if the powers that be, whether the border guards, or the customs officials, or the job interviewers, give more weight to these external signs and symbols — which to be fair to them is all they have to go on — you may never get the opportunity to reveal more of your true self. You will have been formed by these aspects of your past or your outfit, identified not as who you are but as who you appear to be by those to whom you appear.

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In today’s gospel Jesus is entangled in much this same situation. Rather than proclaiming his own identity he asks the disciples what the word on the street is about him — who do people say that he is? The disciples report the usual list of prophets old and new — the word is out and about that Jesus is somehow either the reincarnation of, or is acting in the spirit of, one of the prophets of old, or even of John the Baptist. John, as we know from the Gospels, is only six months older than Jesus. He knew the value of how to dress the part — dressed in the costume of Elijah the prophet. But he had already fallen victim to Herod the Tetrarch and his dancing daughter-in-law. Yet even Herod himself saw something of John in Jesus.

But Jesus knows that he is none of these things — although he is acting in the prophetic spirit that John revived, Jesus is much, much more than a mere prophet — and he will not be formed by that opinion or conformed by the expectations of the crowd. He will not become what they want him to be. He will be who he is, which is, as the old Greek Fathers said, “He Who Is.” And so he presents the disciples with a second question, a more personal question for their opinion, the opinion of those who know him best — asking, But who do you say that I am? — to see if they are more perceptive than those crowds. And Peter proclaims that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of the living God.

Jesus accepts Peter’s proclamation as a divinely inspired revelation — and there is a sense of relief in his words: finally, it seems, someone has understood who he is, in all of his transforming, transfiguring power. The feast of the Transfiguration was on the calendar just a few weeks ago on the first Saturday in August, but to give due credit to Peter and his inspiration, that miraculous revelation of Christ in glory on the mountaintop comes later in Matthew’s gospel — shortly after the incident portrayed today — coming as if to confirm Peter’s perceptive proclamation of Jesus as the Messiah. That follow-up revelation is a kind of certification, a kind of setting the seal of the power of God present and active in the person of Jesus Christ, God in man made manifest: Not just someone dressed for the part of a prophet, but deep down through and through, true God and true Man, He Who Is.

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As Christians we are called to be transformed from our merely ancestral identities, our biological and familial heritage; we are called to transcend society’s expectations and limitations; we are challenged to resist the temptation to dress ourselves in the camouflage of this world, and instead to be clothed from above with the likeness of Christ and the armor of God — not conformed to this world, but transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

This is how we will find our true identity. And there is in the long run a job description that goes with it. If we are to be known by the occupations of our lives — let them be the occupations that Paul describes as the signs of God’s presence and our true identity as God’s children: in prophecy in proportion to our faith, in ministry and teaching and exhortation, in generosity and leadership and diligence and compassion and cheerfulness. When the challenge comes, “Who goes there?” this is the kind of answer a Christian should be prepared to give. I don’t know about you, but if people are going to judge me on the basis of what I do, that’s how I would like to be known! Cheerful, truthful, generous, diligent, and compassionate. Sounds good to me. How about you?+

No Boundary to Grace

2011-08-14T12:19:00.002-04:00

We do not come to the banquet because of our righteousness but because of God's invitation. — A sermon for Proper 15a

SJF • Proper 15a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them besides those already gathered.

All of our Scripture readings today point in the direction of healing the division that has existed since the days when God first created a covenant with Abraham and designated him as the ancestor of a special, holy, and chosen people. This was a people separated from all the other nations of the earth. Brother Millard spoke last week of the end-of-Sabbath Havdalah ceremony by which Jews celebrate their “chosenness” and being set apart by God’s covenant with them, reflected in the separation of the Sabbath from the other six regular days of the week. The covenant of separation was cherished by the Jewish people down through the centuries as a sign of their unique status in God’s eyes.

That covenant was also renewed many times down through the years. Moses recommitted the people to obey the Lord their God at Mount Sinai. Joshua recommitted them, challenging them to obey the Lord as he and his household swore to do, when they crossed the Jordan and gathered at Shechem. Ezra and Nehemiah reminded the people of these commandments after their exile in Babylon, and the Maccabees did the same after their liberation from the Greek empire. Time and again that message was hammered home: you are God’s special, chosen people, unique in all the world because of your relationship with the God who made heaven and earth. As for the rest of the world, as the prophet Micah said, each of the nations walks in the name of its own god, but we walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever.

That message, as it came to be understood, was that salvation itself was only for the children of Israel — they alone were chosen and precious not only for this world but for the next as well. Among the Rabbis it became a topic of some interest as to whether a non-Jew could even have any share at all in the life of the world to come — that is, was it possible for anyone who was not among the Jewish people to be saved.

In spite of the promises of the prophets, such as Isaiah, that God had a special place reserved for the Gentiles who sought him out and dedicated themselves to righteousness in his name — in spite of these promises, the question of whether Gentiles were worth God’s notice, or God’s salvation, was still a hot topic by the time of Christ.

Jesus appears, by one reading of the incident recorded in this morning’s gospel, to have accepted that stricter view that Gentiles and foreigners (which is all the same thing to most Jewish people of that time), are not God’s concern — God’s interest is in making sure that the children of Israel are looked after, after the mess they’ve gotten themselves into, like lost sheep who have wandered off but who are still valuable to the shepherd. But then Jesus appears to be moved by the Canaanite woman’s persistence, and her chutzpah in talking back to him when Jesus indirectly compares her tormented daughter to a dog. She is bold enough to remind Jesus, who has himself brought up the analogy of food and the dinner table, that even the dogs are remembered and fed — along with the children — from the master’s table, even if it is only with crumbs.

Now, I’ve often wondered if Jesus really was being as cold-blooded as he appears to be to this poor woman with a sick child, or if he isn’t — in keeping with reading this passage as a test of his disciples — seeing whether they would abide by the prevailing view that foreigners are trash and not worth their trouble, or if they would show the kind of gracious openness Jesus himself shows on other occasions. You note that the disciples come first to urge him to send her away...

But that is a topic for another sermon. Because whatever the reason, whether Jesus was moved by this woman or testing the disciples, in the end he broke through that boundary to grace and allowed it to flow freely to a Gentile. And of course, by the end of Matthew’s Gospel it is abundantly clear that Jesus intends salvation for the whole world, as he sends the disciples out to baptize all nations — and we might even translate that as all “ethnics” — which is to say all Gentiles — into the faith of the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

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In today’s epistle, Saint Paul addresses the question of how this might work in the manner of a good Rabbi — which he often reminded those to whom he wrote he was, himself a student at the feet of Gamaliel, who had himself been a student of the great Rabbi Hillel. Hillel had been an advocate of the generous view that Gentiles could be saved, and Paul no doubt believed that in Jesus Christ this doctrine of his spiritual grandfather had come true.

Much of Paul’s letter to the Romans is an effort to explain just how this might work. In the section we heard today the image is almost one of a seating at a banquet. Those who had formerly been seated — God’s chosen ones — have lost their seats because of their disobedience, their misbehavior, and it is only that misbehavior that has opened up the possibility for the Gentiles to take their place for a time. And that “for a time” is important because Paul promises the eventual ushering back in of all of God’s people all whom God foreknew and chose as his own — Jew or Gentile — for the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.

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In God’s good time, there is plenty of room for Gentile and Jew alike on the mountain that Isaiah envisages. In God’s good time there is no boundary to grace, no limit to the abundance of God’s generosity and God’s patience with Jew and Gentile alike. The ultimate message that Paul is transmitting in his Letter to the Romans is that salvation is the work of God: just as creation is the work of God, so too is the new creation in Christ; it is God’s work.

It is God’s party, and God invites whoever God wishes. It is not for self-righteous party crashers to push themselves forward on the basis of their own righteousness, Nor, even worse, is it right for some at the party to seek to keep those others they judge unworthy out, but for all to trust in the saving of mercy of God as the only basis for admission to the banquet. We are not invited to the banquet on the basis of our righteousness, but his righteousness, and his generosity.

There is plenty of room at the table, and crumbs aplenty under it — but believe me, no child of God invited to that table will be made to eat those crumbs, but will be given the choice and richest portions of the feast. God’s grace is God’s, after all, and our God is a God of abundant blessing and not of parsimonious stinginess, a God not of crumbs and crusts but of marvelous abundance of multiplied loaves and bread showered from heaven. To God be the glory, henceforth and forever more.

Weeding Lesson

2011-07-17T12:38:00.002-04:00

SJF • Proper 11a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, where did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest.”

A couple of weeks ago I was watching a documentary on the National Geographic Channel about what has become the largest cash crop in the state of California. You might be surprised to hear that in a state famous for its citrus fruit, its grapes and its lettuce, that the biggest cash crop is now something that was once considered a weed. That’s right, it’s ganja, also known as marijuana, or perhaps less well known simply by the name it was called for ages. Long before people decided to start smoking it they called it hemp.

Northern California had always been a major source for this weed, even when it was illegal. But with the moderate legalization for medical use, growing marijuana is now a major source of legal income in many small towns dotting the rural countryside of Northwestern California.

The TV documentary charted the history of America’s ignorance of, neglect of, use of, hostility towards, and now moderate adoption of this curious plant. For a long time it was simply regarded literally as a weed. It could be found growing throughout the country in sunny spots on vacant lots and by the roadsides. It had fallen out of its long established use for making rope and canvas — and I learned that the word canvas derives from the Latin name for the plant: cannabis! Many a seagoing vessel down through the years has set sail under the banner of Mad Mary Jane without knowing it!

Some time after people started using it as a drug in the US, however, the government decided to approach the issue much like the servants in the parable today — they decided it was time to uproot the plants and wipe out its use as a recreational drug. And huge amounts of money and resources have gone into the effort to eradicate this dreaded weed.

Then, of course, came the discovery that thus weed actually has— in addition to its practical use as a source of hemp-fiber for rope, paper, and cloth — a legitimate medicinal use in helping people undergoing chemotherapy to find some relief from the severe nausea associated with it, and to help restore their appetite for food. Medical marijuana is now legal (with some restrictions) in sixteen states (though not our own!) and in the District of Columbia.

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Now, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this sermon isn’t really about marijuana! What it is about is the limitation on human knowledge, and the extent of human impatience. Marijuana, for all its usefulness as a source of fiber and in medicine, is still a dangerous drug — and like all drugs it can impair ones judgment and motor skills, and increase the appetite for food in people who need absolutely no encouragement! While it is clearly not the work of the devil, this weed isn’t wheat!

But the efforts of some completely to eradicate it are surely as misguided as the efforts of the servants in our parable — not that the modern zealots would have damaged any wheat in uprooting the weed, but they would have deprived those who actually benefit from the medicinal properties of the plant — that small comfort at a relatively low cost. I know that some of you here have suffered the rigors of chemotherapy, and I know that anything that can make that less burdensome is surely welcome.

But the message of the gospel today is, as so often with Jesus, Don’t be hasty to judge and take into your hands decisions best left to God. Don’t think you know everything. Recall that the stone the builders rejected is the one that became the cornerstone of the building. Even if what you do know is true — for surely the weeds were weeds, and the servants of the master knew that — still don’t be so hasty about putting your knowledge into action; there may be unintended consequences and collateral damage even to the most well-informed courses of action.

You see, the master, in addition to knowing weeds also knows his servants — the master knows that if they get themselves worked up in their excitement at getting rid of all those nasty weeds, they will inevitably damage the healthy wheat as well. The master has other workers better trained at this task — the reapers who will come at harvest time to do the work not only of harvest but of separation — to gather up all of the weeds first and bind them and cast them into the oven; but then to gather up the good grain and bring it safely into the barn.

And of course, just as this sermon is not about marijuana, so too Jesus assured his disciples that the parable was not about weeds and wheat: it is about the end times and the final judgment upon this world, when God will send his angels out to separate the children of the kingdom from the children of the evil one. This is no ordinary agriculture, but the ultimate fate of evildoing and righteousness, of evildoers and the righteous.

And lest we become too self-satisfied and too easily imagine ourselves, naturally, as among the righteous — as I reminded us last week, righteousness is not our natural capacity, but is itself a gift from God who adopts us as his own. If we are among the righteous, as I hope and pray — and trust — we are, it is not our own doing. We have no health in ourselves to help ourselves, no native righteousness, but only that which comes from God who is the source of all goodness and all righteousness. We are not God’s natural children — but children by adoption. And it is only by virtue of that adoption that we are able to cry out “Abba! Father!"

It is not that some of us are weeds and some of us are wheat, but that whatever it is that we are is determined by the one who makes use of us to his ends, and for his purposes. Just as even the weed of the vacant lot can be used for rope or cloth or even medicine— no human being is incapable of being adopted by God to serve God’s purposes and to be filled with God’s righteousness.

So let us not be eager to harvest or to judge, my brothers and sisters: let us leave that to God, and in the meantime spread the word that the adoption agency is open and that all are welcome to apply!+

What Comes (Un)naturally

2011-07-10T12:38:00.002-04:00

And so we do not trust in what is merely natural to make us good, but in the supernatural goodness of God to make us his.

Sermon for Proper 10a

SJF • Proper 10a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

Some of the philosophers of the romantic era and in the 17th to 19th century came up with the idea that people living in simplicity in the time before civilization were somehow more innocent, more “natural” and hence unspoiled. The notion is sometimes referred to as that of the “noble savage.” The concept became attached to Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but it isn’t exactly his idea. Still, he shared the tendency somehow to idealize human beings in their uncivilized condition. He saw civilization itself as a kind of introduction of morality and consequent decline.

The idea as Rousseau espoused it is that people in their primitive state were morally neutral, and that it was only with later civilization that evil entered the world as society began to corrupt the natural innocence of primitive existence. As Rousseau put it, the problems began “when the first man staked out a bit of land and said, ‘This is mine,’ and convinced others foolishly to agree.”

The Christian tradition is said by some to see things rather differently, but a closer reading may reveal that it is not quite so different. People sometimes look to the story of Adam and Eve and think of the innocent perfection of life that they enjoyed in paradise. But surely the point of the story is precisely that they were not innocent. They sinned — disobeying what at that point was just about the only thing God had commanded them — while they were in paradise. They may have been created innocent, but they were also created capable of committing sin, and it took them almost no time to do so.

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Theologians have wrestled with the question of human nature for thousands of years — whether people are good by nature or bad by nature, or started good and became bad, or whatever.

It seems to me that Saint Paul had it right, and made the most sense both out of that ancient story of the Garden and the Fall, and the practical reality of his own human experience. Human flesh — with its cravings, devices and desires — is weak. Human beings also have a natural tendency towards self-preservation, like most living things. And human beings develop very quickly the sense of property: at least when it comes to their own property. Much as Rousseau observed, children don’t take long to get to the point at which they have learned the first person possessive: Mine! It’s just that he saw this as part of a decline rather than natural, in contrast to another earlier philosopher, John Locke, who took the view that property was a natural right. Whether a right or a tendency, though, as a child, I had to be taught that not everything was mine — I had to learn how to share with other children.

For Saint Paul, this natural tendency is a part of the “mind set on the flesh.” It derives from our creaturely existence — our neediness. We need things; we need air to breathe, we need to eat. All of that is natural, natural to us. And that neediness has to be governed and ordered and civilized by some kind of regulation. Thus far Paul would be in agreement with Rousseau and the English philosopher Hobbes, with the exception that Rousseau was a bit more optimistic about the short-lived innocence of primitive humanity.

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But Saint Paul stands apart from all of these secular philosophers, in that, while they saw from rather different angles that law was society’s answer to the problem of human weakness, Paul saw that law was an insufficient solution to the problem. It is like a drug that comforts but does not heal. He saw law as an insufficient means of bringing peace to the warring hearts of fallible human beings. Even the law given by God could not bring compliance: in fact, God’s law only laid down the penalty: “Of the tree in the midst of the garden you shall not eat, for in the day you eat of it you shall die.” That was the law that God gave to Adam and Eve, and it was the law they broke, before the proverbial ink was dry.

So what is the answer? What does Saint Paul offer us as an answer? Paul looks to God again — for something different this time; not for the law, but something different — after all, God is the source of all good — the fountain of all goodness, as we sang in our hymns today: it is from him that everything comes, the source of all good — but Paul did not look to God for the same old kind of law that God had given in the past, the law that was weakened by the flesh and so could not bring true righteousness.

Instead God sent his Son, but not, as the evangelist John would say, to condemn the world. God sent his Son precisely to relieve the world of that endless cycle of law-giving and law-breaking that was getting us nowhere, as we spun our wheels in the dry soil or the mud of our own failings.

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For Paul had observed something in that old, old story: you may recognize it too — let me ask you, when was it that Adam and Eve sinned? While God was away from them, while they were on their own. (Of course God was not really “away” but that is how the story goes — and we had best pay attention to the details of that story.) And Eve was off on her own — away from Adam — when the Serpent whispered sweet nothings in her ear and tempted her to violate the only law on the books at that time. And her weak flesh — the desire to live forever and become like God (even though, as the text shows, she and Adam already were like God, being made in God’s image) — as I say, her weak flesh gave in, and then she persuaded Adam’s equally weak flesh to join her: all of this while God was “away.”

So the answer to all of this, Paul says, is to be always “with” God — such that God is never “away.” And this is made possible both through the fact that Jesus Christ came “in the flesh” — that is to say, in and through and by means of the very human flesh that was the problem in the first place. And further to know that God is always with us, always present to us through the Spirit. If the Spirit of Christ dwells in you, God is with you, and even though the flesh might still seek to drag you down to death because of sin, the Spirit — God’s presence — is life because of the righteousness of Christ.

This is the hopeful message that Saint Paul brings: Christ came in the flesh and remains with us in the Spirit, and his spirit is at work in us and there it can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: even though we have no power in ourselves to become righteous, his spirit working in us is life because of his righteousness.

And it is a life that contains within it the promise of new life, the resurrection life. The Son of God, the Word of God, is at work within the soil of our human flesh. Remember how the story tells, what God made us from, at the beginning. Our soil, our flesh, comes from the earth. It is like the seed of the word received and nurtured, which grows in the soil to bear fruit for righteousness, “in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.” We are not good by nature, but by grace: our soil cannot bear fruit on its own, unless the seed of God be planted in it.

And so we do not trust in what is merely natural to make us good, but in the supernatural goodness of God to make us his. That is the message of salvation and grace through Jesus Christ our Lord.+

No Pleasing Some People

2011-07-03T12:50:00.003-04:00

The curse of the double-minded judge, and the freedom of the children of God.

SJF • Proper 9a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.”

Some while ago I spoke about the fact that different people will find the same foods either enjoyable or awful. The same dish may be treated as a delicacy by some, and a culinary disaster by others — evoking delight or grimaces depending on the taste-buds of the diner.

It also appears to be true that some people are by nature “fault-finders” who will not be pleased whatever the dish set before them. Their noses are permanently upturned, and their manners ungrateful. Unlike the fussy Goldilocks — who at least found a bowl of porridge, and a chair, and a bed to her liking, and was at least satisfied a third of the time — there are folks who are just so picky that nothing completely pleases them. There is always something wrong for those who are impossible to please.

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Jesus confronted such people in the passage we heard from Matthew’s gospel. They’ve been offered two very different “dishes” — to continue my dining analogy. John the Baptist was what is called an ascetic: one who lived an austere life of fasting and privation. He lived in the desert wilderness, dressed in a camel’s hair mantle bound with a leather belt, and ate nothing but locusts and honey. And whether the “locusts” in question are the insects or the beans of the locust tree, it is a diet few, then or now, would be willing to duplicate. And what did these unpleasable people think of him? They thought he was crazy!
Then along comes Jesus, who, after his own relatively short but intense time of asceticism, during that forty days he spent in the wilderness fasting, returns to civilization and accepts the dinner invitations of well-to-do bourgeois tax-collectors, and passes his time in the company of women who, as the old euphemism has it, “are no better than they should be.” And what do these unpleasable people think of him? A glutton and a drunkard and a friend of sinners!

There is just no pleasing some people. If you don’t eat they condemn you as an overly scrupulous killjoy, and if you do eat they condemn you as a self-indulgent pleasure-seeking hedonist. And this condemnation — this refined ability not to be pleased with what is offered, this judgmental snobbery that wrinkles its nose towards whatever is presented to it — is held up as a kind of sophisticated wisdom.

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Jesus contrasts this snobbishness, this thing that passes for intelligence and wisdom, with the eager acceptance that infants will show for something that pleases them. How many times have I seen a child’s face light up at the first taste of a droplet of the sacred wine from the tip of my pinky finger on the day of that child’s baptism! Yet a connoisseur of fine wines would likely turn up his nose at the far from vintage port that we use as our communion wine — bought by the case from a liquor store in Yonkers with the distinctly déclassé name of Liquorfellers. Truly a certain kind of innocent ignorance is bliss!

But at a deeper level, this all points to the profound difference between judgment and enjoyment. One of the reasons that Jesus speaks so strongly and so often against judgment is that it actually is the biggest kill-joy of them all. It is very hard for a critic to enjoy whatever he or she is experiencing. A critic or a snob is always double-minded — of a double mind — because rather than simply enjoying what they are experiencing, a part of their mind is always standing back, comparing it, criticizing it, judging it. Off to the one side from the one enjoying and the thing enjoyed, is this analytical observer, this killjoy, the critic and the judge who tells you that you can’t really enjoy such a common or low-class thing.

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I don’t know how many of you may be familiar with “Keeping Up Appearances,” the television program featuring Hyacinth Bucket, who imagines her name ought to be pronounced Bouquet. She is a woman who has narrowed her own life, and that of her poor husband Richard, to the point where they can hardly enjoy anything any more. She is deeply embarrassed by all of her family members — except her sister Violet who married a well-off bookie, or as she says, a “turf accountant,” and who lives in a home with a Jacuzzi and a Mercedes and room for a pony. Hyacinth envies that one sister but she dreads encounters with the other two. She lives in terror that her only friend and neighbor will damage her hand-painted Royal Doulton tea-cups when she comes by for the obligatory visit. She spends so much of her life judging everything as not up to her standards, and in keeping up appearances, that she has little or no share in the raucous pleasures of her sisters Daisy and Rose. I’m sure that had she been around to hear the prophet Zechariah’s call to daughter Zion, to rejoice greatly at the coming of her king in humility riding on a donkey rather than in a chariot, she would have cringed said, “Really, Richard, a donkey!?”
This would be a tragedy if it were not for the fact that every once and a while Hyacinth is exposed — even to herself — for who she really is, and reluctantly lets her hair down and discovers she can in fact have a good time.

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Closer to our biblical texts, Saint Paul struggled inwardly with that spirit of judgment that kept him from living into the freedom of God’s love, the simple enjoyment of God’s forgiveness and grace. What he called “the law of sin” was at work in him at the very deepest level — that slavery to the law that is the fate of all who devote themselves to judgment rather than accepting the blessed liberty of the children of God. And Paul realized that the only way out of that double-mindedness was single-mindedly to throw himself, as one weary of carrying the heavy burden of the “body of death,” into the arms of Jesus, the source of rescue and rest, redemption and release.

Jesus offers himself, to all who are weary of the need to be in charge, to be displeased at others or themselves, and to accept him as the end of all of their burdens. We are free, like those in the crowds who simply would not be pleased, secure in their own sense of judgment and critique, to reject the offer of rescue and relief. But how much better to accept the offer of peace and joy as a child who reaches out for the sweet reward that is offered by a loving Father.

We have such a Father, made known to us in the Son of God himself, who with that Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever.+

Prophet’s Reward

2011-06-26T15:20:00.000-04:00

audio link

SJF • Proper 8a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes true, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet.+

I cannot hear that short reading from the book of the prophet Jeremiah without picturing him with a wry smile. Jeremiah is, of all of the Old Testament prophets, the prime example of doom and gloom. He even has a separate book of the Old Testament dedicated to his Lamentations — the lamentations he delivered when his prophecies of doom and gloom came true.

In this brief passage, Jeremiah notes that the prophets who came before him — as far back as ancient times (which means ancient to him, which means really ancient to us — prophesied war, famine, and pestilence — much as he does himself. But, he seems to be saying, if a prophet predicts peace, and peace comes, then you’ve really got a prophet sent by the Lord.

He appears to be acknowledging, perhaps as I say with a slightly cynical smile, that given the state of the world it is fairly easy to prophesy war, famine, and pestilence; as these are more or less the normal state of affairs somewhere in the world at any given time — or if not, surely soon to happen somewhere or other.

A social scientist and historian once noted that in the entire documented history of the world there has only been a period of a few dozen years when there hasn’t been a war going on somewhere on our planet. Peace and war seem to be like an elusive balloon — squeeze it in here and it will pop out there. So prophesying war is almost a sure thing — there’s bound to be one somewhere sooner or later, and probably sooner rather than later. You can hardly go wrong!

But for a prophet to promise the coming of peace — that’s a much riskier enterprise, as it so very rarely happens. How long ago is it now that President Bush proudly proclaimed a “mission accomplished”? And yet how many additional conflicts have we become involved in since — Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and now Libya? Some of you here may be old enough to remember what they called “the domino effect” in the wars in Southeast Asia: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Well it sure looks like somebody’s unpacked the dominoes again and set up a card table out on the stretch all the way from Morocco Boulevard to Subcontinent of India Avenue. If, as Paul says, the wages of sin is death, there are plenty of people are working overtime, and getting a bonus into the bargain!

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Jesus, as is so often the case, turns the tables on this warring world. When he speaks of the prophets, it is not their message, whether of peace or of war, that is the focus of his attention, but rather on how that prophet is received and treated. When it comes to hospitality Jesus focuses on the host rather than the guest. Jesus has told his disciples, when he sent them out, to proclaim peace to those to whom they came. What is important is how the host received that greeting of peace.

I noted on Pentecost that “Peace be with you” is the standard way of saying hello in the Middle East — and the proper response is, And with you be peace. So the hosts whom the disciples greet will be judged on the basis of how generous their welcome has been. Do they return that blessing of peace, or not?

Jesus assures his disciples that whoever welcomes them, when they come bringing (after all) the good news of the peaceable Kingdom of God, are in fact welcoming him — and whoever welcomes him will receive the grace and blessing that comes with the presence of God: the true peace that surpasses understanding. “Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward.” Even a cup of cold water given to a disciple in the name of the disciple, will be rewarded out of all proportion to the simplicity of that gift.

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It is, of course, relatively easy to welcome the prophet who brings a promise of peace and good tidings. It is much harder to welcome the one who comes bringing bad news. Jeremiah himself learned that lesson when he got himself thrown into a cistern for having brought bad news to the king. No prophet’s reward for him — or for the king!

Nobody likes bad news. How many people avoid going to the doctor to see to that nagging cough, or that sore that won’t heal, or that abdominal pain — not because they don’t want to be healed but because they don’t want to find out that what they’ve got might be serious — and by delay end up making their condition even more serious.

And just as people will avoid the doctor and hearing his diagnosis, so too people will avoid the prophet and his truthful warnings; For there are maladies of the soul as well as of the body: that sin can eat away at one’s soul like a cancer, or clog up the arteries of one’s spiritual heart until it grows cold and unloving, and stops. And in their folly, some will turn such a prophet away, and refuse to welcome the words of the Good Physician himself, and all of his associates and assistants, who come to warn of the spiritual dangers that lie in our paths, if we allow ourselves to continue oblivious to them.

For the peace that God brings us through such ambassadors is not simply the comfy peace of oblivion, but the attentive active peace of engagement with the Shalom of God. For “Shalom” does not just mean “peace” but completion, wholeness, and integrity. Who would not want to return such a promise with more than a warm welcome or a cup of cold water? God, through the many messengers God has sent and continues to send, offers us this transcendent peace, this completion and wholeness and rest, the removal of the obstacles. Let us embrace it, for of this we can be sure: when a messenger of God, be it a prophet or a disciple, wishes us peace and promises us peace in God’s name, it lies in our hands to receive that peace, and to join in the proclamation as we too become messengers and disciples in the name of God, and of God’s Shalom. God promises us grace, and that’s good enough for me.+

Watch and Listen

2011-06-19T12:54:00.003-04:00

SJF • Trinity 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness...”+

We come today to Trinity Sunday, the day on which we are invited to think about who God is rather than what God has done — although with that wonderful reading of the story of creation from Genesis still in our ears, there is ample opportunity to reflect upon what God has done!

Thinking about the Trinity is something that theologians just can’t seem to get enough of. They also often don’t know when to stop! There are distinct dangers in trying too hard to understand what is beyond our comprehension. It’s especially hard if one has a curious and inquiring mind.

I learned the danger in that as a child of six when I tried to dismantle my mother’s wristwatch — all that exercise got me was a hopelessly damaged watch, and going to bed without supper and with a sore behind and, and an earnest talk from my father trying to explain — in terms that my child’s mind could understand — how much more valuable my mother’s Hamilton wristwatch was than even all of my toys put together. Strange to say, after all that, I still became a theologian!

But maybe it was because of that. Perhaps it was my father’s willingness to offer an explanation that did it. And surely it is good on this day which is Father’s Day as well as Trinity Sunday, for me to remember and give thanks for my own father, God rest him. For even though he gave me a good shellacking after my misdeed with the watch, he also took the time to explain what that watch was worth in terms I could understand. He didn’t teach me anything about its mechanism — which I as a child had vainly sought by taking it apart. But he did teach me about its value — and surely that is what a good theologian is called to do, especially when it comes to the Trinity.

As my father sat on the edge of my bed while I pouted under the covers, he held up one of my toys, a wind-up tank, and said, “Toby, do you understand that your mother’s watch cost more than a hundred of these?” I was awe-struck. A hundred tanks! What an armored division that would make! All the toy soldiers in my plastic army would not be able to stand up against such an assault! And it slowly dawned on me, How awesome is the value of that tiny wristwatch. I did not learn how the wristwatch worked, but how valuable it was.

My father took the time to explain the value of that watch in terms I could understand and in the form of a metaphor — a parable, if you will. My father taught me how to teach.

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And I pass along this teaching. God is not to be taken apart in the vain search to understand how God works. Rather God is someone to be supremely valued — valued as worth more than all creation. Even after we have taken in all of creation, in awesome wonder, our final word should be, How great thou art!

God is to be supremely valued, and loved — and listened to. God is, after all, more like my father than like my mother’s watch. Not only did I learn more from my father than from the watch, but my father showed his love for me — even though at the time the discipline was painful! — especially in taking the time to teach and help me to see where I had gone wrong. God is not to be dismantled, but to be listened to — and listened for.

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Author James Hamilton tells a story that resonates with my own childhood. In the suburb where I grew up some people still didn’t have refrigerators. Many had moved to Baltimore from the mountains of West Virginia to get jobs in the post-war boom, and they brought their iceboxes with them. The iceman would still come down the alley behind our houses with his horse-drawn ice-wagon, selling slabs of ice just the right size to slide into the compartment of the icebox — do any of you here still call your refrigerator an “icebox?” My father always did — in spite of the fact that he worked his way through night-school — studying to become a school-teacher — in the appliance department at Sears! So even though we had a Kenmore in the kitchen, it was always the “icebox” in our house.

The ice in the wagon came from the icehouse, where it was made and stored. Our neighborhood icehouse made the ice with a compressor, but back in the old days they would harvest it in the winter from the frozen river near which it stood. The slabs of ice would be covered with canvas and sawdust until it was time to deliver them. The long, low icehouse had no windows, and the thick door sealed shut to keep the coolness in. The ice would be secure there behind those well-insulated walls.

Well, one midsummer day, one of the workers in the icehouse discovered he’d lost his pocket-watch. It had been left to him by his father, and he was really upset to lose it. He searched up and down, pushing the sawdust with the big broom they used, but with no luck. The other guys helped him, but they couldn’t find the watch; and then they began to wonder if maybe he hadn’t lost it somewhere else.

Kids such as myself used to hang around the icehouse, especially in the hot, humid Baltimore summer, because when the men loaded the ice on the wagons with the big, scary metal pincers, occasionally a block would drop and shatter, and the kids would scramble for the sliding shards of ice, to rub on their forehead or the back of the neck, or to let the cool water drip over their heads. (I could use one right now!)

One of the kids was watching and listening to the men looking for the missing watch, and when they went off on their lunch break, shaking their heads and shrugging, he snuck into the icehouse, and closed the door behind him.

The dim light bulbs were spaced far apart, and even with them on there wasn’t much light; all to keep the ice from melting. The air was cool and he could see his breath, the first time he’d seen it in six months. And it was very, very quiet. The thick walls and sealed out all the heat and all the sound. He looked around at the stacked-up blocks of ice, like building stones mortared with sawdust, covered with canvas shrouds. He imagined he was inside the Great Pyramid, a silent, ancient tomb.

He saw a flat spot in the sawdust about his size, went over to it, and laid himself down; he folded his hands across his chest and closed his eyes thinking about Boris Karloff in The Mummy and keeping very, very still. And in that stillness, he could hear the sounds that ice makes as it gently creaks, and the drip-drip-drip of the water as it slowly melts off. But soon he began to hear another sound. Tick-tick tick-tick tick-tick tick-tick.

And after a few moments of careful listening, he got up and walked across the sawdust to right where the watch had fallen, stuck half under the edge of a slab of ice, wedged tight in a fold of the canvas and covered with sawdust. All of the men’s searching and sweeping had only pushed it deeper. And when he emerged into the bright summer afternoon, even though squinting against the sun, he greeted the astonished iceman with the watch he thought he’d never see again. And as a reward he broke him off a nice fresh corner of a slab of ice, just for him, pure sweet cooling ice that had never touched the ground.

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If God is like a watch — he’s more like that one. We won’t find God by sweeping up a sawdust storm of theological speculation. As the Psalmist says, I will still my soul and make it quiet like a child upon its mother’s breast; or, as I will add, this Father’s Day, like a child in its father’s arms. God is holding us close, and loves us dearly, this unsearchable and sublimely valuable God of ours, and all we need do is listen — listen — and we will hear the beat of the heart of the One-in-Three who called the whole world into being. Listen! Upon that breast, and in those loving arms, we are carried day by day, by this loving God whom we know by Name as the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.+

Peace - Spirit - Mission

2011-06-12T12:24:00.003-04:00

SJF • Pentecost A • Tobias S Haller BSG
Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Let me begin with one last, ‘Happy Easter!’ — because today, the feast of Pentecost, is the last day of Easter season, the fiftieth day that adds one to the seven times seven of days since Easter Day. This is the day that puts the exclamation point at the end of our Alleluia! For this is the day on which God’s Holy Spirit was poured out upon the disciples to empower them for the great mission of the church. This is the day that transformed a withdrawn group of believers into a force that would change the world as much as they themselves had been changed.

We heard the account of what happened on that day in our first reading this morning: the signs and wonders of tongues untied in a torrent of praise to God in as many languages as they could possibly give praise. We heard of the bewilderment of that crowd of pilgrims in Jerusalem, and their amazement, as their ears were opened as effectively as were the mouths of the apostles, so that they could receive the good news.

This morning, however, I’d like to back up a bit from the Pentecost event itself, and focus on the prelude we find in John’s Gospel. In this incident, Jesus Christ lays the foundation for what is to come. In this encounter, he gives the preview of coming attractions for the feature that is rated PG: Praise God!

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John sets the scene: it’s Sunday evening, the first day of the week — and we know how important first days of the week, Sundays, are in the history of God’s work in the world! The fearful disciples are locked behind closed doors. Suddenly, Jesus is among them. And he first thing he says is, “Peace be with you” — the standard way of saying “Hello” in the Middle East for thousands of years. Whether you say ‘Shalom aleichem’ or ‘As-salaam alaikum’ this is how you greet people in the Holy Land: ‘Peace be with you.’ Isn’t it ironic that ‘Peace be with you’ should be the norm in a part of the world that hasn’t known more than a few years of peace at a time for thousands of years! But then again, maybe it makes even more sense, the same kind of sense that led Jesus to speak those words to the frightened disciples — as if to say, “Don’t be afraid... Yes we live in terrible times; there is a lot to fear, but I am here to bring you peace. I am on your side; your friend not your foe. Peace be with you!”

So it is that God speaks to us today through the church. Even in the midst of turmoil and struggle, still the church is the place of God’s peace; which is not simply the absence of conflict but the presence of God’s overarching rule and justice. God’s peace — that is what Jesus speaks to the disciples, and speaks to us today and every day: Peace be with you; not peace as the world gives, but as God gives.

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Next Jesus shows them his hands and his side: to certify by these tokens who it is that stands before them. And though we might think it odd of him to show his wounds as a sign of peace, surely this is proper: for these are the very wounds, the ones which could not prevail against him. The nails and the spear did not bring about his eternal death, only that time of a few short days, and then through the power of Almighty God he overcame death and the grave, and the wounds are now trophies of his victory over death, as if to say, ‘Even these couldn’t keep me down.’

So it is that the church, which is the wounded body of Christ, is still here. Our church, Saint James, is a physical symbol of this: we may have some bad patches in our ceiling up there around the roof-line, and cracks in some of our windows, but the power of death cannot prevail against us, it cannot keep us down. In the power of God we will prevail and remain to witness to his grace and loving-kindness to us and to all who believe.

We know that as people we have suffered as well, and yet been restored. We have been tested and tried, but have never, though, been forsaken by the one whose promises are sure. So there is cause to rejoice, as the disciples do when Jesus comes among them, certified by the very wounds by which the powers of this world afflicted him, yet standing there among them, alive.

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And breathing! For then comes the crucial moment, the moment when Jesus breathes upon the disciples. In this he foreshadows the coming of the Holy Spirit that will equip them to carry out his command: ‘As the Father has sent me, so I now send you.’ Remember: this is, as I said, the first day of the week — and Jesus, as he breathes upon the disciples, is pouring out that same Spirit of God that hovered over the waters on that first Sunday, the first day of creation. For this is the new creation, the creation not of the world but of the church that will be sent on its mission to the world. Jesus is preparing them for the great sending, the great mission of the church, the reason the church exists as his body on earth, to be sent to do the work of God just as he himself had been sent to do God’s work.

And for this work the Spirit is essential. There can be no mission of God without the Spirit of God: if you take the Spirit out of the church it will cease to be the church. Without the breath of God filling the church, it is like a balloon without any air in it, just a little scrap of rubber than lays there.

Sad to say, the church has sometimes been more like that scrap of rubber just laying there than a Spirit-filled ambassador of God. As I mentioned a few weeks back, among great disasters of the so-called missionary era of the nineteenth century was that the Gospel of God’s love was transmitted through a church that was not only intolerant but prideful, and sometimes hateful. The European missionaries too often made the mistake of thinking that anything European was superior to anything they found wherever they went. Here in America native children were beaten and punished for speaking the language of their parents; artifacts were destroyed and cultures ravaged. Yes, people became Christians, but many of them, too many of them, came to understand the church not as a place of love and charity, but as a place of strictness and judgment, of narrowness, a place not of peace, but of wrath. That message was delivered in so many places in the world: that the way to be a good Christian is to be intolerant and judgmental of anyone who thinks or speaks or acts differently. And we live with the results of that missionary message to this day.

How different from the missionary effort begun on Pentecost. The apostles did not tell those to whom they spoke, ‘You must speak our language if you are to be saved’ — on the contrary it was they who were filled with the power of the Spirit so that they spoke all those different languages themselves, so that the word might be spread to all hearers.

There is an urgent need to recover that missionary message by which England itself was brought into the Christian fold. When Saint Gregory the Great sent the monk Augustine to Canterbury, he gave him specific instructions to respect the people of England who, even though they were pagans, were created in God’s image. What’s more, Gregory told him not to destroy the pagan temples and shrines, but to use them as places for Christian worship, so that the people who were accustomed to worshiping their gods in those places might be gradually become accustomed to worshiping the true God.

The church is challenged today to exercise its mission in this way. Not imposing its view upon an unwilling world, but welcoming that world to the great feast. The church’s message is proclaimed most clearly by means of the church’s own being and substance, in the life the church as it lives in its many members, each equipped with spiritual gifts through the one Spirit of God. By this, Jesus assures us, the world will know that we are his disciples, if we have love for one another. How we act is as important as what we say, whatever language we may speak; perhaps even more so: the church is the message of love for the world, the world that God loved so much that he gave his only son not to condemn it, and it is by showing that love to the world that we lead the world to God, who is Love. The church is called and empowered to deliver and to be a message of tolerance, grace, hope and restoration in the midst of a world filled with intolerance, fear, division and despair.

The church itself is called to be a sign of God’s presence; it is the Body of Christ, wounded and yet risen and alive. It is filled with the breath of God’s Spirit to sing and to shout out the good news to the ends of the earth, and above all to proclaim God’s peace to the nations of the world.

My sisters and brothers in Christ, we are that church: let us be that church, let us be that message, that mission. Let us rejoice in the presence of God with us, and spread the word to all whom we encounter: Shalom aleichem! As-salaam alaikum! Peace be with you! Alleluia, He is risen! Now and unto the end of the ages, through Jesus Christ our Lord.+

Witness Protection Plan

2011-06-06T09:33:00.001-04:00

Dare we think that Jesus' prayer his disciples would be protected in the Divine Name was unanswered? A sermon for Easter 7a 2011

SJF • Easter 7a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Jesus prayer to his Father, “Protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”

If you’ve watched any films or TV shows about modern crime dramas, you will be familiar with what is called the “witness protection plan.” It is no surprise that witnesses willing to testify against crime, particularly organized crime, put themselves and their families in danger by their willingness to come forward. Although the crime-boss may be in jail awaiting trial, there are plenty of henchmen out and about willing to see to it that the testimony is not delivered. And the vendetta may not stop with the conviction: even after the criminal is found guilty and sentenced, and put safely away in prison, the powerful urge for revenge against one who “turned state’s evidence” or merely told the truth will put the life of the witness in permanent danger of revenge.

So it is that police and state and federal investigators have taken special care of such witnesses — whether they are criminals who have turned on their former colleagues in crime, or virtuous citizens merely doing their duty in spite of the danger. The authorities have developed witness protection plans to safeguard the lives and livelihoods of these witnesses, both before and after they have given their testimony. Some such plans give the witnesses and their families whole new identities, a fresh start with a new name in a new city or a new state, far from the vengeful tentacles of organized crime, or the retribution of a fallen criminal.

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Last Thursday was Ascension Day, and this morning we heard Luke’s account of the events of that day from the opening chapter of his record of the Acts of the Apostles. Since Jesus is about to depart into heaven, the passage begins with the apostles’ understandable question about whether or not it is now the time for the restoration of the Kingdom of Israel. And Jesus tells them that it is not for them to know the time for such things. (And I note in passing that since we are all still here, and the Rapture didn’t happen on the Saturday before last, it was not for Rev. Harold Camping to know the time for such things either! Of course, now he says it will be in December; but in the inimitable words of our former President, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, well, you just can’t fool me twice!)

Jesus does tell his followers two things: first, they will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon them, and secondly, they will be witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

I spoke last week about just how far the Apostles carried that message, as witnesses of Christ. What I didn’t mention was the fact that this cost most of them their lives in that process. In this church’s large stained-glass rose window, there on the west end behind you, the outer circle shows 12 roundels with the emblems of the 12 Apostles — and in seven out of ten the emblems reveal the means by which the Apostles died! In case you ever wondered why we have a stained-glass window portraying clubs, saws, spears, hatchets or knives, that’s why.

Clearly, the Apostles were witnesses in need of a witness protection plan! And you might at first be tempted to observe that whatever it was, it didn’t provide much protection! Not only the Apostles, but many of the Christians who heard and heeded their preaching and accepted their testimony, suffered persecution in those early days of the church’s life, and the persecution have continued still, even to this day. Peter himself, represented in our window at about four o’clock with a set of crossed keys, ended his life crucified upside-down. He wrote to the believers in his care concerning the“fiery ordeal that is taking place among you,” to assure them that there is nothing strange in this. Jesus had already warned that those who spread the Gospel would not always be welcomed with open arms, and that persecution lay before them. Peter acknowledged this, this sharing in Christ’s sufferings, persecution experienced not only by those to whom he wrote, but, as he assured them, the common experience of their brothers and sisters in all the world who were undergoing the same kinds of suffering.

Such was the fate of many who witnessed to the Gospel. So what happened to that witness protection plan? What happened to the prayer that Jesus offered to his Father, “Protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” Dare we think that Jesus’ prayer would go unanswered. Dare we think that God would abandon his faithful witnesses to the prowling devil seeking someone to devour?

God forbid we should think such a thing! Nor should we think such a thing if we rightly remember that Jesus never promised his disciples, as the old song says, “a rose garden.” Their life in ministry would you not be a bed of roses, but a path of suffering and martyrdom. They would be reviled and tested and suffer, just as their leader, Christ himself, was reviled and tested and suffered. As Peter puts it, “If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the spirit of God, is resting on you.”

It was not from temporal suffering that Jesus prayed to protect his witnesses — on the contrary their proclamation as witnesses would definitely bring them temporal pain and suffering. That wasn’t a threat, it was a promise! What Jesus prayed to protect his witnesses from was not temporal suffering but eternal death. His prayer was to protect them from the evil one who destroys both body and soul in hell, to protect them from the devil, who Peter told them “prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour” —
— and it is the armor of faith that would protect them from the devouring power of eternal death and hell.

The Spirit of God, whose descent upon the Apostles we will celebrate next Sunday on Pentecost, was a witness protection plan that would save them, not from suffering but to eternal life: to the unity of God himself, the Son with the Father, that they might be one as God is one. And it’s a good reminder for us that at the center of that rose window is the symbol of God the One-in-Three. This witness protection plan would change them, not just in their names, but in their very selves — and they would be given new lives in a new country where they would be free finally and at last from sufferings, all the sufferings they had undergone, and most importantly from the ultimate suffering of eternal death.

This is the protection, that all of God’s faithful witnesses are promised. As we witness to the work of God in us, as we do the work that God has committed to our care, we will not always find favor with the world — in fact we will rarely find favor with the world! We will be thought mad for not heaping up wealth for our own pleasure and comfort; we will be thought mad for sharing with the poor and the needy, for giving food to the hungry, and for bearing with the abuse of those for whom power is the only sign of their worth. Truly they have received their reward.

But our hope is for a better and more lasting reward, a better and more eternal salvation, in the unity of the Son with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Those who remain faithful in their witness to the Gospel will be protected through the fiery ordeal of this world, and then restored, supported, strengthened and established as God’s own for ever. To God the Father be the glory, in the power of the Spirit, through Jesus Christ our Lord.+

That None May Be Lost

2011-05-29T14:14:00.002-04:00

Going to the furthest reaches of time and space — "to infinity and beyond"— with the Gospel! A sermon for Easter 6a.

SJF • Easter 6a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSGWhile God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness...

Some of you may remember the old Bible quizzes that contained questions such as, “What is the shortest verse in the Bible?” The answer, at least as far as the King James version has it, is — how many know? — “Jesus wept.” — You all score! Very good. That is surely the shortest Bible verse, but not the one best known. For there is a verse of Scripture so popular that it is known by its number: John 3:16. But how many who know the number really know or understand the verse?

They may be like the man who was sentenced to jail and on his first night in the lockup was confused when one of the other inmates yelled out “37” and all the other prisoners laughed. Another prisoner whispered, “248” and that brought a round of chuckles. Yet another then said, “22” and raucous belly-laughs echoed down the corridor. Finally the prisoner asked his cellmate what was going on, and he explained that the prisoners had told the same jokes for so long and over and over that they had assigned them numbers to save time. The next night the new prisoner thought he’d give it a try and in the midst of the amusement he yelled out “147” —— only instead of laughter there was dead silence. His cellmate leaned over the edge of the bunk and said, “You just don’t know how to tell a joke.”

Well, I wonder how well people who hold up those John 3:16 reference on posters at football games, really know how to tell the Gospel. Do they understand the message they blazon, or do they think the passage will get through to the throngs of people who may have no idea what that famous verse says, and may not have a Bible at hand or in their home to look it up —— if they even know it is a Bible verse? Such is the state of things in a world that has grown as ignorant of God’s word and God’s message as were the Athenians to whom Paul made his exposition of the faith in front of the Areopagus.

You, of course, know the verse very likely by heart, and probably from the King James Version: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” The next verse, number 17, is perhaps a bit less well known, which is a pity, as it completes the thought: “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” And, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, where the English says “world” the original language speaks of the cosmos. The point is that God did not love just the planet earth, or just the people living on it, or even just the Jews, or just the Christians, but the whole universe, and intends salvation, as Paul told the Athenians, for everybody everywhere. This is a message of cosmic hope and the possibility of literally universal salvation. For God wants nothing to be lost.

In our reading from Acts —— Paul’s address to the people of Athens —— and in the passage from the 1st Letter of Peter, we see the extent to which God will go to see that no one misses out on the message of salvation, that none is lost due to failure to hear the word of hope and salvation. God has a work in mind —— to combat human ignorance.

Now, ignorance is a word likely to be misunderstood. People will sometimes use it for someone who is foolish or stupid, but ignorance is not the same as these(though it always accompanies them.)Ignorance is the state of not knowing something. Even the smartest person on earth is ignorant to some extent —— for no one knows everything. The opposite of ignorant is not smart but informed.

Paul informs the Athenians that God has overlooked their former ignorance, the fact that they did not now God in Christ —— after all, how could they know about Jesus Christ until someone came and told them about him, filled them in, informed them? He even gives them credit for having an altar in honor of “an unknown god.” Until they were informed, they could not know the unknown God, the one who made heaven and earth and everything in them, the one who formed the entire cosmos, the who is the great King of the universe in whom all things live and move and have their being —— and they certainly could not know that God had just paid a visit to this particular planet, incarnate in human flesh that was put to death in the provincial outpost of Judea across the Mediterranean Sea, and most importantly by the hand and power of God raised from the dead. But once Paul tells them, the Athenians are no longer ignorant of these things —— they are hereby informed.

Our reading today stops short of recording their reaction. But the text goes on to say that on hearing of the resurrection of Jesus, some of them just say, “Whoa!” and others, perhaps intrigued, say, “Let’s hear more about this at another time,” and a very few are moved to join the Christian community. But many or few, convinced or intrigued or perplexed or even amused, they can no longer claim ignorance: they have heard the preaching of the Gospel of the resurrection, and they have been given a chance to accept it. No one is too far away not to be given the chance to hear God’s word of salvation.

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Nor is anyone too far away in time, at least according to Peter. Just as Paul traveled all over the Mediterranean spreading the Gospel, Peter says that Jesus, in the Spirit, even went to proclaim the Gospel to the generations who in former times did not obey. This has traditionally been understood as a reference to what Jesus was up to between his death and resurrection, and that is one possible understanding of what was incorporated in the Apostles’ Creed as “he descended into hell.”

But that is not likely what Peter actually means. Peter says that Jesus did this proclamation when he was “made alive in the spirit” — which is exactly what happened at his resurrection, not before it. So this preaching to the prisoners likely refers to a time after Jesus was raised from the dead, made alive in the Spirit. During that time you may recall he spends very little time with the disciples —— dropping in on them through barred and locked doors —— and similarly he may well have been making other rounds to other even more secure prisons —— such as hell itself, where the disobedient of the former generations had been so long imprisoned. They too are given a chance.

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The point of this is that salvation brought about by Jesus is cosmic —— as John 3:16-17 says. It is not bound by time or space. It reaches not only to the ends of the earth, but ripples out in time. This is partly the work of evangelists such as Peter and Paul —— who began spreading the word of salvation from Jerusalem through Greece and to Rome and beyond. It was also the work of the other apostles and evangelists: Thomas is said to have brought the gospel to India; Phillip, the Scripture records, passed the word along to an Ethiopian who no doubt brought the word back to the first Christian church in Africa; The later evangelists sent and brought that word to Europe —— Gregory the Great and Augustine sent from Rome to set up shop in Canterbury; Boniface who went to Germany and Anskar to Scandinavia; Cyril and Methodius who spread the word in Eastern Europe. And let us not forget those who in more modern times brought the gospel to China and Japan, and the South Pacific; and the evangelists who ventured to Africa and the Americas. Truly the word has gone forth around the globe —— not always well received, in fact sometimes not all that well presented: for the Bible sometimes came along with the sword and the rifle; some people just don’t know how to tell the Gospel!

And yet the Gospel, the Good News, was and is told —— the message gets through even though the messengers are sometimes not all they could or should be. And this is in the end a likely evidence that the message has a power and a truth of its own, for even when badly delivered, even through the static or the mispronunciation, even in spite of the cruelty or injustice that sometimes wrongfully accompanied it, the Word of God, the message of God through the Spirit of truth, is proclaimed. God so loved the world that he sent his son to save it, to the end that all who believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. That is the Gospel preached to the folks in Athens and to the ends of the earth, in the prison of hell where the departed spirits huddled in darkness, and to the end of time, and beyond. It is a message that we are called, each and every one of us, to preach to the ignorant of our present world, and to do so by more than merely holding up a sign with a Bible verse reference on it. Rather let us, as Jesus said, keep his commandment to love one another as he loved us, and then the world will see and know that our love is a gift which they too can share, as the Spirit of God abides with us, until Christ comes again in glory. It is that love we share, my friends, that shows the gospel most clearly. May we, in the power of God’s Spirit, proclaim with lips and lives the Father and the Son, who lives and reigns now and for ever.+

We Will Be Satisfied

2011-05-22T14:20:00.002-04:00

How much can our tastes change when we "taste and see that the Lord is good." -- A sermon for Easter 5a 2011

SJF • Easter 5a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
To you then who believe he is precious; but for those who do not believe, “The stone that the builders rejected...” and “a stone that makes them stumble.”

We are presented today with one of the great strangenesses of human experience: that a thing which can be delightful and wonderful to one person can be horrible or disgusting to another. Much in life seems to be a matter of taste: when it comes to food or music or art, or even religion — what one person finds delicious or pleasing or inspiring, another finds nasty, ugly or repulsive. This could be a matter of nature — something with you from birth — or of nurture — learning to enjoy something you found distasteful as a child, like broccoli — or to find displeasing something you really quite enjoyed as a child, like making mud pies.

Some of it clearly relates to the person him or herself: some people are by nature capable of hearing sounds or tasting tastes — either pleasant or irritating — that others cannot, and this has a real impact on their enjoyment of or distaste for certain kinds of music or food. In fact, there is a chemical — phenylthiocarbamide, in case you’re interested — that people with a particular genetic makeup taste as strongly bitter, while others cannot taste it at all. We all know that some people cannot abide broccoli or asparagus, and this is in part because they are genetically more sensitive to naturally occurring bitter chemicals in those vegetables. A taste which many tolerate or even enjoy due to the inability to taste it in its fullness, such people find intolerably unpleasant.

My point is that the vegetables, and the chemicals in them, are just what they are: the difference lies, as is said of beauty, “in the eye of the beholder” — or in this case, the tongue!

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In our reading from the First Letter of Peter, he describes Jesus as a chosen and precious and living stone. He is the cornerstone of the spiritual temple which will be the church of God — for those who believe. But for those who do not find him to their taste, to the builders who reject the cornerstone, he becomes a source of scandal and stumbling and fall. The one and the same stone can be — for those who accept and believe in him — a precious protection from shame; but for those who deny or reject him, he will bring subjection to that very shame and stumbling. The point is that the joy or anguish is not in the stone itself, or I should rather say, himself — for it is Jesus of whom we speak here — the joy or the anguish is in that proverbial “eye of the beholder.” Whether the stone will be your rock of ages, cleft for you to find refuge; or a stumbling-block that makes you trip and fall depends on you, and how you treat it: with respect and acceptance, or with rejection and hatred.

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We see the two sides of this reaction in our first reading, and can side by side set the personalities of Stephen and Saul. For Stephen the deacon, Christ is Savior and Lord, worth dying for — and he sees the heavens opened to receive him as he dies. For Saul, this crazy new teaching is heresy of the worst sort, and Christ, the founder of this pestilent sect, is a mischief-maker rightly rejected by the authorities. One and the same Christ can lead a man to lay down his life in witness to him, and drive another to the extreme of murder — though, of course, we also know that once Saul came to know Jesus better, on that road to Damascus, he too saw the light — literally, and it blinded him for a time — and he developed finally a taste for Jesus, and even beyond that a bold willingness, like Stephen, to suffer and die for him. As I said, not all things are determined by genetics, and we can be nurtured in directions we might never imagine. Who would have thought that Saul the vicious persecutor of the church would become one of its greatest champions? More than his name changed when he became Paul!

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And that is ultimately the good news in all of this: our tastes can change. We are not always newborns who can only tolerate milk. As we grow older we can learn that a little bitterness — offensive to a child’s tongue, a sensibility that only wants sweets or pleasant things — that little bitterness or sourness actually makes certain foods taste sweeter. We come to understand that a little piquance actually brings out the sweetness of certain foods, or that a dash of Scotch Bonnet pepper — which to a young child can be a truly nasty experience — brings for the adult who has learned to enjoy it, just the right savor and relish to a dish, without which it would be dull, stale, flat, boring and intolerable. We can learn to appreciate certain kinds of music or art by studying them, and realizing that our first impressions may have been based on our own ignorance, not on some quality inherent in the art or music itself.

And when it comes to God — and Christ Jesus his Son — well, God is God, after all; and he assures us that he is in fact the Way; as he said last week, “the gate”; and if we enter, as we are invited so to do, he will invite us to “Taste and see.” He invites us to his supper.

In the old legends of the Holy Grail — the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper — it was said that the Knights of the Grail, those who dwelt in the Grail Castle and served there, lived on nothing but the Holy Communion. But the legend also says that each and every one of them experienced the bread and wine they received as if it were his favorite dish, whatever food they liked best. Though always and only bread and wine, though of course also the Body and Blood of Christ, one of the knights would experience its taste as roast pheasant, another as beef, still another as the finest venison. To each one it brought complete satisfaction and joy, though it was only and always what it was, and their only food.

Jesus similarly promises that in the Father’s house there are many dwelling places — and no doubt each of those blessed to follow in his way, abide in his truth, and live with his life will find the dwelling place uniquely suited and furnished to each one’s taste and desire.

And what of those who take another way, or reject his truth, or devalue that life and the lives of those who accept and follow him? It is not for us to judge. Who knows? If such a murderous and hateful one as Saul can be brought round in the end, who are we to set limits on the grace and the power of God? And more than that, ought we not examine ourselves in the meantime and see if something in our own behavior as Christians might be keeping others away?

When I was growing up, we lived next door to a man who had a large garden, and he always gave my mother vegetables. Among the vegetables there would always be one or two eggplants, which we never ate because my mother didn’t like eggplant, and always said, “You wouldn’t like it,” when I asked why she didn’t prepare it. And so we never had it. It was only years later when I was grown up and living away from home that I gave eggplant a try — and it turned out I loved it! (I told my mother the next time I saw her after that, and she just grimaced — she couldn’t believe it, — clearly she was more sensitive to whatever it is in eggplant that gives it that bitter taste; she had never learned to enjoy it, that bitterness that is part of “the eggplant experience.”)

But I had learned. You can learn. You can change. Saul changed...

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But it is not for us to judge the tastes or fates of others. God the Father has prepared a house with many dwelling places in it — and some of those places may have been prepared for some of the most unlikely people! As the old joke says, they may be the ones surprised to see us there! These may be people who had never imagined themselves as Christians; they may be people who have taken offense at something they’ve seen an individual Christian or a Christian church do; they may even be among those who have at first rejected the very cornerstone of faith. It is not for us to judge, however; it is our task to celebrate as much as possible, to show our joy in the Lord in such varied and persuasive ways, that even those who may have been at first put off or reluctant to do so, might venture to taste and see that the Lord is good. They may find that, after all, the thing they rejected in the past is now just what they most desire, and come and join us at the feast where there is room for all, and all are welcome, and all — all — all who come to the banquet shall be satisfied.+

At Your Service

2011-05-15T14:39:00.002-04:00

SJF• Easter 4a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Jesus said to them, “I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate.”

It has long been a tradition to take up the account of the early church in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles during worship in Easter Season. As I noted last week, this can be a bit confusing as it gets events into a disordered sequence — we won’t celebrate Pentecost for a few weeks yet, and most of what we are hearing from Acts takes place after the original descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, seven weeks — a week of weeks — after the first Easter. I noted last week that during this time we are a bit like Doctor Who, bouncing back and forth in time, as the story is told out of order.

But that being said, isn’t it a wonderful story! In today’s short reading we hear of the short period of peace the early church enjoyed before persecution from without and dissension from within began to trouble it. The preaching of the gospel has been such a success, and the church has grown so much! People are in awe, and the members of the church devote themselves to prayer, fellowship and praising God. Is it any wonder that people are beginning to seek to be added to that number? It is almost as if the church is running on auto-pilot, without any need for earthly leadership — just one big happy and growing family! Of course, they are happy in this way because at that early point they have put their whole trust in the one whom they know to be their true leader, the one who suffered for them, bearing their sins upon the cross, and healing them by his wounds. They have put their whole trust in the one who, when they were going astray like sheep, gathered them together as the shepherd and guardian of their souls.

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This Sunday is traditionally known as “Good Shepherd Sunday.” The theme is referred to in our opening Collect, and in the selection of the 23rd Psalm. And it is true that later in John’s Gospel Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd.” But we miss Jesus’ teaching in today’s gospel if we anticipate those verses.

In today’s gospel Jesus does not call himself the shepherd, but — twice no less — the “gate for the sheep.” Perhaps we are inclined to let our minds slip over this image because it is less evocative than that of a young shepherd carrying a lost sheep home on his shoulder, as in the hymn based on David’s most famous Psalm, which we’ll be singing later: “and on his shoulder gently laid, and home rejoicing brought me.” But let us stick with Jesus’ image of the gate, looking at what the text actually says, and listening to Jesus as he teaches us — lest we too fall into the same trap of misunderstanding as his original hearers, who, as it says in today’s gospel, “did not understand what he was saying to them.”

Very well, then. Let’s try to do better. Jesus says, “I am the gate for the sheep”; and “I am the gate.” This means that he is the one through whom the sheep enter and leave, through whom they pass in to safety and out to pasture. As he also says (and we’ll hear this next week), I am the Way, and the Truth and the Life. We are saved through him. He is the way; he is the gate. So if Jesus is the gate, who then, in this imagery, is the shepherd?

Let us again “look at the text” as my New Testament professor always used to say. What is written there? The shepherd is the one for whom the gate is opened, for the shepherd passes in and out with the sheep. The shepherd is not like the thief or bandit who doesn’t go through the gate (that is, through Jesus) but climbs in by another way. And the shepherd leads the sheep and calls them by name, and the sheep hear the shepherd, and, knowing and recognizing that voice, they follow the shepherd in and out of the gate, that is Jesus.

What Jesus is doing in this passage is showing that he chooses to share the work of the church — which is salvation — with other workers: with these shepherds. Jesus delegates part of his work to the apostles and they to their successors, the bishops, who also pass along the work to the priests and deacons who serve in the parishes, and who — in case you haven’t noticed my doing this — also seek to engage all of the members of the church — that’s you! — in taking up their share of the work. These are the shepherds for whom Jesus the gate is opened, who call the sheep by name, and who lead the sheep alternately to safety and to pasture, in and out, through the gate, which is Christ himself, whose body is the church.

As to the thieves and bandits, well, next week we will see Stephen — among the first of the deacons — dealing with some of the leaders who instead of bringing their people to salvation are getting in the way of the message, impeding the work of the Holy Spirit. Jesus too dealt with such leaders, to whom he said, Woe to you, who not entering yourselves have hindered others from entering!^{(Lk 11:52)} And surely over the last two decades we’ve heard the sad and shocking tales of priestly misconduct, of those who abuse the little ones committed to their charge, and of bishops who as senior pastors fail to keep watch, and instead simply shuffle the crooked deck in a kind of ecclesiastical Three Card Monte. All I can say is, there will be a reckoning for those who take up the role of shepherd only to molest or harm the sheep.

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But let us, dear sisters and brothers, look on the bright side of Jesus’ challenge to us, the tremendous honor that our Lord does us by asking for our help, by opening himself up to us to pass in and out, by allowing us entry by the gate, to take up these tasks of ministry, to allow us to go out through the gate, out into the world to serve the needs of the world, and committing to us all of these tasks of leadership and care. It isn’t just the clergy, the bishops, priests and deacons. The church has its lay members too, working in so many ways, who take up each their own tasks of teaching the young, taking roles in worship, visiting the sick and feeding the hungry, those who maintain the physical facility of this building and other buildings, and those who undertake the work of hospitality in the heat of the kitchen — and that’s hard work, believe me. And also, and perhaps most importantly, all of you, as you go out into the world, a challenging world that is hungry not just for earthly bread, but for the word of God. All of these tasks are important, all of them require time and talent and treasure. And the church needs all of them, as they are delegated to each one by the power of the Holy Spirit working in each one to build up the church.

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There is an old story told of a steamboat helmsman and an engineer who got into an argument as to who was more important: the one who steered the boat or the one who kept the engine running so the boat could go. So they decided to trade places to see just how hard the other worked, and how important the other job was. After a couple of hours of running along fine, the ship came to stop, and the engineer, now up on the bridge, got on the horn to the helmsman, down in the boiler room. “The ship has stopped! Are you giving us full steam?” The helmsman responded from below, “The engines overheated and stopped running! I’m coming up.”

The engineer on the bridge smiled to himself, figuring he’d won the debate as to who was most important. But as the helmsman came to the bridge and looked out at the river, he smiled ruefully and said to the engineer, “Well, I guess I know now why the boat has stopped. You’ve run us aground on a sand-bar!”

The church is too important, my friends, to run aground over arguments about whose ministry is more important. The church is too important to allow a few bad priests to destroy people’s confidence in the rest who are good. The church is too important to be injured by bishops more interested in the church’s reputation than in the good of the flock. But the church itself — Christ’s body — is not too important for God in Christ to have committed its care into our less than perfect hands — all of us. He has chosen us to go in and out through him. Mark and Catherine our bishops, I as your priest, Tony and Eliza as our former deacons, and Mark Collins and Sahra Harding as seminarians here (and now priests themselves serving in other parishes) and each and all of you as readers and teachers and ushers and cooks and cleaners and welcomers and visitors and hosts and musicians and altar serves, and most importantly of all as members of this church going out into the world and spreading the news — each of us has been given a job and a ministry by God, by our Lord, the gate for the sheep, and all of us have been empowered to carry it out by the Holy Spirit. Maybe we can — through the power and grace of God, help move the church into something resembling those early days when they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Wouldn’t that be awesome! The church being the church — coming and going through the gate and all working ship-shape and in Bristol fashion.

So let us not lose heart, let us not lose faith. When the job seems daunting or beyond our capacity, let us always remember that the Lord who is Way, the Truth and Life will provide other servants through the gate, who will join in the work of building up God’s kingdom, day by day adding to the number being saved, being brought through the gate of salvation, which is Jesus Christ our Lord.+

By All Accounts

2011-05-08T15:37:00.002-04:00

SJF • Easter 3a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom our God calls to him.+
One of the more interesting characters in television history is the inimitable Doctor Who. I don’t know how many of you are old enough to remember the low-budget Doctor of the 70s, you may perhaps be more familiar with the up-to-the-minute CGI and high-tech spectacle of the new Doctor. I mention this sci-fi TV series for two reasons. First, one of the unique qualities of this series is the way in which they’ve been able to explain having many different actors — three alone in the recently revived series alone — portraying the same character. The explanation is that the Doctor, while not precisely immortal, is very hard to kill; and when he is seriously injured, instead of dying, he “regenerates” in a new body, which may be quite different from the old body. It’s a very handy way to deal with actors who tire of playing the role and want to move on. So more than a dozen actors have come and gone, but the Doctor remains.
My second reason for mentioning Doctor Who is that the show is all about time-travel. The Doctor, you see, is a Time Lord, able to travel from the beginning of time to its end in his trusty blue box, the TARDIS, which because of a malfunction in its camouflage circuit is stuck looking like a 1960s London Police Box. Actors portraying the Doctor may come and go, but the TARDIS is always a blue Police Box — though in the last season I’m happy to note it regained its St John Ambulance First Aid sticker on the door, a detail for which I, as an officer of the Order of St John, am very grateful! The sticker is a fitting tribute to the Doctor, and that’s why it’s there, for he spends most of his time saving planets across the universe — including the earth — in one way or another, and so the TARDIS is a kind of cosmic emergency rescue vehicle.
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Now, you are probably beginning to wonder why I am talking about Doctor Who. Well, the reason I do so is related to the two things I noted about the series. Let me — as a demonstration of the point I hope to make — take the second first: time travel.
Our Scripture readings today present us with a very tangled time-line. Things are out of chronological order. Two of the accounts come from Saint Peter — and in both of them he is himself a time traveler, out of the normal sequence of things. The first reading shows him standing boldly and proclaiming the Gospel truth to the people of Jerusalem. Now, those of you who know your Scriptures will recognize that this is an event from just after the Pentecost descent of the Holy Spirit — the event that gave Peter the courage and the words to speak out. But our Pentecost celebration won’t come for five more weeks; and our Gospel reading also casts us back to Easter, two weeks ago in our time. It is set, as it says, “that same day” as two of the disciples are heading out of Jerusalem to the suburban village of Emmaus. In the verse just before this passage, we are told that Simon Peter has been to the tomb and seen that it was empty. But by the end of the Emmaus story Luke informs us that the Lord has appeared to Simon Peter. (And, as a side note, isn’t it interesting that Luke’s account does not recount the actual encounter between the risen Lord and Peter? It happens somewhere offstage — while Luke shifts his focus to these other disciples headed out to the suburbs and Jesus who walks with them. That appearance of the Lord to Peter is not in Luke’s text.)
But however it happened, the encounter of Jesus and Peter was not on its own enough to transform Peter into a powerful evangelist, ready to go out and address the people of Jerusalem and proclaim the Gospel. The beginning of Acts records him taking some leadership among the eleven, and praying, and proposing the selection of someone to fill the empty seat of Judas the traitor — but more has yet to happen to Peter to transform him into the dynamic leader who would proclaim the Gospel openly and fearlessly. That would take the coming of the Holy Spirit. We’ll hear more about that on our Pentecost Sunday. That is still a few weeks away, as we time-travel by what it seems is the only way we can — day by day and week by week!
But as we open the Scripture accounts before us, Peter seems able to move from time to time as easily as Doctor Who and his companions in the TARDIS. And in the second reading, from much later in Peter’s ministry, one of his letters, we can see him share his cosmic experience of the depths of time: not his personal experience, but his testimony to Christ, who is the true Time Lord (and Space Lord if it comes to it) — the one who saves not just a planet here and there, but the whole universe all at once — and who needs no blue TARDIS to do so. Peter affirms that Jesus is the one destined before the foundation of the world — and as the original text says cosmos that means more than just the earth — he is the one who at the end of the ages is revealed, and who was also there at the very beginning. It is through him that those who follow him have been born anew — regenerated — as Peter says, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.
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Which brings me to that other point: the continuity of the character of Doctor Who in spite of the dozen-plus actors who have played the part. It is worth noting that the account of the road to Emmaus is a bit like one of the episodes in which Doctor Who regenerates, but in which it takes even his companions a while to realize “Who” he is. But more than that, as Peter reminds us, in both the account of his Pentecost proclamation in Jerusalem, and in that first epistle written later in his ministry, we too are regenerated in the baptismal gift of the Holy Spirit — given new life, being born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, by the living word of God.
So it is by all accounts — Peter’s two testimonies and the story of Emmaus, we are given the opportunity, through these proclamations, to set aside the foolishness of the past and allow our hearts to be set on fire by the power of God’s word, working in us, and to know him in the breaking of the bread.
We shall soon be sharing that bread as we have this morning been sharing the word — and isn’t it just another reminder of the way the timeline can be woven into braids to recall how Jesus quoted Deuteronomy, to say, that “one does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God?” We have received that word this morning, in our hearing and meditation and reflection, and soon the bread will follow — not simply earthly bread any more than the word was simply an earthly or a human word — but as it was the word of God, so too this bread will be the bread of heaven, the Body of Christ, accompanied by his blood shed for us, the precious blood of Christ, the broken bread and the precious blood that saved the cosmos from destruction.
We have traveled in time this morning, sisters and brothers, from before the foundation of the universe to the end of the ages — in which we are blessed to live — accompanied by the One Who Is, by all accounts, the savior and redeemer of the world, even Jesus Christ our Lord.+

WIthout a Doubt

2011-05-02T11:34:00.002-04:00

How to certify a birth in the kingdom of heaven? Faith and doubt are sisters... A Sermon for Easter 2

SJF • Easter 2a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.

Any of you here with young children or younger siblings are no doubt familiar with the phenomenon of triangular conversation. This is what happens when you are trying to have a conversation with a person of your own age in the presence of those much younger than you are. It is a skill somewhat more difficult than the more primitive spelling-out of words that you don’t want the child to hear; which always risks the embarrassment of a wise child saying, “Mommy, I know how to S-P-E-L-L!” But for those who have mastered the art of triangular conversation, it can save many a headache, and a good deal of time. Once you have the system down, you may appear to be speaking to the child, but your message, what you want your spouse or friend to understand, gets across. When successful, the child feels included in the conversation but doesn’t understand the significance of what you are saying to the mature person.

The Gospel according to Saint John is in large part just such a triangular conversation. Although it is written as a series of encounters between Jesus and his disciples, much of it — if not most of it — is written for the benefit of those who will read it — including us. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is often speaking to us over the heads of the disciples.

This is perhaps nowhere so clear as in those closing verses of our Gospel reading today. The ones who “are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” aren’t the disciples, but are the members of the church who hear this gospel proclaimed to them — and that includes us at a remove of nearly 2000 years. Jesus may appear to be speaking to Thomas and the other disciples, but the message is for the church at large — for the many generations of believers who have come to believe not because of what they had seen but through what they have heard: the proclamation of this very gospel. As the last verse proclaims, this Gospel had a purpose, and is “written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah.”

The whole incident preceding John’s conclusion leads up to it with a kind of inexorable logic. Remember that this is Jesus’s first appearance to the gathering of the disciples — prior to this he has only appeared to Mary Magdalene, and though she has told the disciples about it, they are still cowering in fear behind locked doors. Suddenly — and as I said last week, magically — Jesus appears in the locked room and reveals himself to the disciples minus one. Thomas the twin isn’t there. Why? The Gospel doesn’t say. But it would be fair to note that Thomas may not have been quite so fearful as the rest of them — perhaps the only one courageous enough to be out and about in a city grown threatening, truly now a stranger in a strange land indeed.

For whatever reason, Thomas misses out on the resurrection appearance, and expresses his doubt in no uncertain terms. Or perhaps it would be better to say, in uncertain terms. He expresses his uncertainty, his doubt, not denial. He does not affirm something that he knows, but something that he does not know. He confesses he does not know that Christ is risen — but he doesn’t declare that Christ is not risen. That would not be doubt, but denial. He does not say, “He is not risen,” but rather, “Show me the proof and then I will believe.” And once the proof is given, so he does.

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People sometimes wrongly say that doubt is the enemy of faith; but that is not really true. Doubt and faith are sisters; and whether you say “I don’t believe it” or “I do believe it” you are speaking primarily about your own state of mind and not about the ultimate reality or unreality of some objective fact. Facts, after all, are just facts. People don’t believe facts, they know facts. So knowledge is not the same thing as faith, nor is ignorance the same thing as denial. No one would say, “I believe that one plus one is two.” You would say, “I know that one plus one is two” — or, as I said before, “I know how to S-P-E-L-L.” Nor does my saying, “I don’t know how to do differential calculus or speak Chinese” mean that differential calculus or the Chinese language don’t exist. Ultimately, one does not need to have faith in, or belief in, something which you know to exist. Faith only is needed where doubt is possible.

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When Christ appeared to the other disciples they did not gain faith in him — in fact they had been just as faithless as Thomas. They had not believed the testimony of Mary, who had seen Jesus. What they gained when Christ appeared to them was not faith but knowledge. And Thomas seeks the same thing: he says he will not believe, but he demands knowledge — he literally demands hands-on experience — but faith is belief in the absence of hands-on experience , in the absence of certain knowledge.

And this is precisely why Jesus, and John as author of this Gospel, speak to us over the heads of the disciples including Thomas, in saying, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” We do not have direct knowledge of the living Christ, in the same way the disciples in that room did. But we do have their testimony. And as Peter also affirms — writing to a congregation long ago but who just as well might be writing to this congregation gathered here today, “Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and you rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”

None of us has seen the risen Lord with the eyes of the flesh, or heard his voice with our earthly ears — but we have seen him with the eyes of our heart and heard him speaking to us through the Spirit. He speaks to us through the Scripture over the heads of the doubting world. But more than that, we see him through the acts of sacrifice and service, to the wounded, the captive, the hungry, and the sick. We believe, and believing, have life in his name.

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Doubt and faith are sisters. Doubt will not harm you unless it hardens into denial, unless it demands physical proof, and incontestable evidence.

In his first novel, A Separate Peace, John Knowles portrays two privileged young men at a posh New Hampshire private boarding school in the midst of World War II. The two boys have engineered a fantasy in which they have come to deny the reality of the war itself — like some modern day conspiracy theorists, they think the war is just an elaborate hoax. They have made, as the title of the novel suggests, a separate peace; and it ends in tragedy. Denial catches up with them in the end.

And you might well say, how foolish not to know what is going on around you, not to believe the evidence of one’s senses, even after the seeing the newsreels and press reports. Or, in a more recent context, how foolish not to believe even when the much-demanded long-form birth certificate has been produced. Yes, there are still some who will continue to live in denial!

But is our disbelieving world any better for not seeing the signs of the presence of God in the hearts and hands of faithful people everywhere? That is our task, my friends. Not just to believe for ourselves, but to put our belief into action so that others may see what we have seen — not the risen Christ himself, or his wounded hands or side, but the hands and arms and shoulders of fellow Christians reaching out to lift and carry the weak, to comfort and heal the sick, to feed the hungry and console the orphan and widow. These are a certification of a birth far more important than a merely earthly one. They are the signs of the birth of the spirit in our hearts, and they certify our citizenship in the kingdom of God.

It is not for us to hear words from the lips of Jesus himself like those gathered on the mountainside, but to hear that message carried forth as testimony by many messengers — and to become messengers ourselves — apostles each and every one of us — sent to the far corners of the earth to bring the message of salvation and new birth, shouting out the Gospel over the heads of a disbelieving and unbelieving world, which, like a wise child, may realize there is more to the conversation than they know — so that all people everywhere might come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of God, and that through believing they might have life in his name.+

Sleight of Hand

2011-04-24T17:29:00.002-04:00

Now you see him, now you don't! — an Easter Sermon, accompanied by infants awaiting baptism!

SJF • Easter 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.+

It will come as no surprise to anyone here, when I observe that Harry Potter has become a household name. The series of novels and the series of movies based on the novels are phenomenally popular. Almost everybody knows Harry Potter — though I’m curious to know how many of you here know the name of the author of the novels or the name of the actor who plays the role in the films? Show of hands?

My point is that it’s not the actor or the novelist, or even the character of Harry Potter himself, who is at the heart of the fascination and popularity of the books or movies. It is magic — magic itself: that is what draws such an attentive and loyal and fascinated audience.

Now, it may seem odd for me to be mentioning magic in the context of an Easter sermon — but surely there is something magical about the resurrection, isn’t there? In fact, there was an English stage production of a very old English play — one of the first English plays — about the resurrection — the play dating from the 15th century, and the production from just a few years ago, in England, at the Young Vic — in which the director staged the resurrection scene precisely as a magic act. The body of Christ was placed upright into a wooden cabinet, and chains were wrapped around it and locks placed on the chains. The soldiers stationed at the tomb shivered in their boots — they were costumed as British riot control officers, complete with helmets with visors, truncheons and transparent plastic body shields — and then at a great clap of thunder and flash of light and cloud of smoke, the four sides of the upright cabinet fell down flat to reveal that the body was gone!

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Surely, there is something magical about the resurrection — as there is something magical about so much of life, and death, and life again. It is no accident that there is an overlap between the magical world and God’s world. Even the magicians’ spell, “Abracadabra,” is said to be derived from a Hebrew phrase that only God could properly speak, “abara k’davra” — I create as I speak. Only God has the power to create — to bring into being that which is not — and to do so simply by saying the words, “Let there be...” With those words all things came into being. More than that, God appears to employ a kind of sleight of hand in dealing with the people of God both as audiences to his magic and as the object or props in that magic. God uses the magician’s standard tool of misdirection to deflect and distract the enemies of his people, dazzling them with pillars of cloud and fire, while keeping his people safe in the palm of his hand; hiding them in the wilderness before bringing them to the Holy Land; preserving them in Babylon until ready to be pulled from his sleeve, or like the rabbit out of the top hat, and returned to the land of promise.

And isn’t it a classic example of a magician’s skill for God to say, as he does through St Paul, “Keep your eyes on heaven, not on earth” and then suddenly to reveal Christ to our startled eyes, standing in our very midst? We’ll see Jesus perform that very magic act next week when he suddenly appears to the cowering disciples in their locked and bolted room, and hear how the disbelieving Thomas misses the first show.

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But this is Easter, and we have before us the first startling reappearance of Jesus after his death and burial. It is almost as if Jesus is trying the trick out on Mary Magdalen before he decides to debut it with all of the disciples. The stage is ready — the stone has already been rolled away, and Mary, seeing it, runs off to fetch Peter and the other disciple — the one Jesus loved. But even when they return they still do not find Jesus — only the linen wrappings and the cloth that had covered his head. Just as in the magic act, all they know is that he has disappeared: he was in the tomb and he isn’t there any longer. Mary even thinks that perhaps someone has stolen his body.

And then, just as in the magic act, he comes walking into the spotlight from off stage. Mary is still so blinded by her tears, so caught up in the fear and sadness that his body has been stolen, that she doesn’t even recognize him.

And then he speaks a truly magic word — not an abracadabra or an alakazam or even a presto change-o — but the truly magic word as personal to us as our own name; in this case, “Mary.” And then she recognizes him. The magic of hearing her own name called in a familiar voice opens her eyes to see what was already there — her teacher and her risen Lord. Such is the magic of God. None of us in this life is likely to hear the voice of God call our name quite so clearly. That will have to wait until the great day when the Lord calls us each by name and we rise from our graves to stand before him, and be welcomed into the life of the world to come. But even so, and even while we are here, we catch glimpses of the power of God and God’s magic. At the baptism of a child, which we will witness today, we call the child by name, and mark that child with the Triune name of God himself: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And that double naming — the naming of the child and the invocation of the name of God — brings about a transformation more magical than any work of any earthly magician. It delivers the child from a bondage more deadly than any strait-jacket ever escaped from by a Houdini. For baptism brings that child new life — new life in Christ — and it transforms the mortal body of the child by incorporating the child into the mystical Body of Christ, the blessed company of all faithful people. The child is born again — as each of us was at our own baptism — born again of water and the Holy Spirit, and anointed with the name and power of God.

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Before I close I want to mention one other magical phrase that has some bearing on our life in Christ; and that is, “Hocus pocus.” As strange as it may sound, this magician’s phrase also has its roots in the language of the faith. For it is based on the Latin phrase that translates the words of Christ at the Last Supper, “Hoc est corpus” — This is my Body. We celebrate that great magical mystery every time we gather at Holy Communion, as we do this Easter morning. As he instructed us, we take the bread that in this sacred mystery has become the body of Christ, and we eat the bread which is the sign and celebration of our membership in that body — a membership that begins in baptism.

And we do this because of that Easter morning so long ago when Jesus was raised from the dead and appeared first to Mary and then to the other disciples. The story of God and God’s relationship with his people did not end at the cross. The cross was the turning point, the close of one chapter before the beginning of the next. Jesus was hidden away for a few days between his crucifixion and his resurrection; hidden only so that he might be revealed in greater glory at his rising. It is not simply magic that we celebrate but majesty; not simply something wonderful to behold but miraculously to hold — to hold in our hands, like a newly baptized child, or like a fragment of bread: both of them a sign of the presence of God and the risen life of Jesus. And even more, just as a child is received into the body of the church, so too we receive the body of Christ in the bread of the Eucharist into our own bodies, and Christ becomes one with each of us as we are one in him.

And if that isn’t magical and wonderful, then I don’t know what is! Alleluia, Christ is risen!+

The Options Market

2011-04-17T17:16:00.002-04:00

So many choices, with so much at stake. What does it profit to gain the whole world at the loss of your life? — A sermon for Palm Sunday 2011

SJF • Palm Sunday 2011 • Tobias S Haller BSG
From my mouth has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return: To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.

It has been said that our lives are constituted based on the choices we make. At every point of our lives we are faced with options and choices, alternatives to go one way or the other — and the choices we make determine the shape of our lives, sometimes in dramatic ways, and sometimes more subtly.

This truth is laid out plainly for us to see in Matthew’s account of the Passion. We see the choices that people make all along the way, choices to act or refrain from action, and choices to act in one way or another. So many options for so many lives! And how each of these choices shape the reality of each one’s world — and our world!

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Think of the terrible choice that Judas makes: the choice of betrayal, the choice to accept a handful of silver to betray a man to death, in whose company he could have found eternal life. Instead, he chooses the path of delivering his master and teacher to death, and when stricken with remorse, he chooses death for himself.

Then look at Peter, the unsteady man who totters between heroism and cowardice, pulling out a sword at one point to defend his Lord, and then cowering in the shadows at another, denying that he even knows him. He chooses to deny Jesus, and only the rooster’s crow recalls him to himself, and rebukes him for his choice.

Then there’s the high priest, Caiaphas. Matthew doesn’t supply us with a window into why he acts as he does; for that we have to depend on John’s Gospel, which we will hear on Good Friday. Caiaphas is a practical man — who follows what would later be called the ethics of “the greatest good for the greatest number.” So, John tells us, he advises that, given the danger Jesus creates in the fragile political climate of Jerusalem, it is expedient that one man should suffer instead of many. In making this choice, Caiaphas is going against the teaching of the greatest rabbi in Judaism, Rabbi Hillel. who ended his ministry during Jesus’ childhood. In a powerful statement on the value of human life, Rabbi Hillel had said that to save a single human life is to save an entire world. Caiaphas on the other hand, weighs human life in the shopkeeper’s scale, life against life, and figures the trade-off is reasonable: one life sacrificed to avoid the possible loss of others. And by that choice he sets in course all that follows.

Then we have Pilate, another politician, a man who also weighs his choices carefully. It is easy to sympathize with Pilate — so much is pulling him one way and another — even his wife chimes in to warn him off. And so Pilate makes the interesting choice not to choose. Like many a politician before and since, rather than take a position — he takes a poll. Pilate is one of those leaders who leads from behind, safely insulated from having to take responsibility should things not work out, sheltered from the consequences of his inaction, able to wash his hands of the whole matter — a perfect biblical example of “plausible deniability.”

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All of these choices, all of these lives, swirling in the mix of options and opportunities! And step by step, each one of them choice by choice, each life hardens into reality as each choice is made, all the fuzzy options fading away as each choice becomes concrete, and the path is taken. And amidst this cloud of options, the most important choice, the one that is the eye of the storm around which all of these other possibilities swirl, is the one that Jesus makes, and he keeps right on making it through to the end.

It begins in the garden of Gethsemane, as Jesus appeals to his Father for another option — another way for salvation to be accomplished without his having to drink the cup of suffering set before him. Matthew portrays this scene with only one side of the conversation: it is as if we were witnessing a telephone call — we hear what Jesus says, but not the response.

Is God truly silent? Is this the beginning of the terrible silence of God that will lead Jesus to cry out from the cross those words of agony: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? We do not know. What we do know is that Jesus has a choice, there in the garden, and throughout the rest of the suffering that would follow. There in the garden it is perhaps clearest: even though Judas and the guards are on their way, it is still not too late for Jesus to escape, to leave the city and head on back to the safety of Bethany, to flee to far-off Galilee. But he doesn’t.

That same choice is available to Jesus right on up to the end. When they bring him before Caiaphas, he could choose to deny himself and his mission as God’s holy one, the Messiah. But he doesn’t. When brought before Pilate, he could play on Pilate’s weakness, and work out a deal. But he doesn’t. Even when they nail him to the cross, he could indeed — as the taunters say — choose to come down now from the cross. But he doesn’t.

For he knows at any one of these steps that for him to do so would be to disobey his heavenly Father, to deny the very purpose for which he was born. To choose not to die on the cross — that is the most tempting option, but it is one that he refuses.

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In his novel, The Last Temptation of Christ, author Nikos Kazantzakis explores what it might have been like if Jesus had given in to this last temptation, this option to refuse God’s will: to be a disobedient son and cast it all aside; to refuse the cup of suffering. In a flash, as he hangs on the cross, Jesus envisions what it would mean to come down from the cross. He sees himself return to Galilee as an ordinary man, to get married, to run his carpenter shop — and to leave the world unredeemed.

But he doesn’t. Jesus doesn’t do this, in the novel or the Gospel. He rejects that dreamlike fantasy of an untroubled, ordinary life; he doesn’t give in to that tempting choice, that seductive option to live instead of dying. He gives himself to death on the cross, knowing that in the options market of Calvary, all of the conniving deals and bartering in human souls are turned upside down. He lays down his life because he knows that this is the only investment that will bring a return — and what a return it will be! What had he said? “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world at the cost of his life?” Jesus took that risk, as only he could do. His gift of himself, his one sacrifice of himself once offered, would bring redemption to the whole world. His act of obedience unto death, even death on the cross, will lead to his exaltation above all earthly things, and the sanctification of all things, in him.

This is the path the Son of God chose on our behalf, for our salvation. It meant pain and suffering and death for him — but life for us. At the cost of his life he gained the whole world.

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We are offered a similar choice each day of our lives: we too are offered the option to take up our cross day by day, and follow him? Or will we follow Judas’ choice to betray, Peter’s choice to deny, Caiaphas’ choice to victimize, or Pilate’s choice to abdicate?

Will we bend our knee at the name of Jesus, or bow to other earthly gods of wealth and comfort, or act like we don’t know who he is, or take advantage of our sisters and brothers, or act as if this all has nothing to do with us? Sisters and brothers, how we choose each day of our lives, how we play the stakes in this options market, will determine our fate for all eternity. As we sow, so shall we reap.

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You may remember that line from Charles’ Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” when Scrooge asks Marley’s ghost about the heavy chain that binds him. The unhappy ghost responds: “I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link... I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you? Or would you know the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this seven Christmas’s ago, and you have labored on it since. It is a ponderous chain!”

Such are the choices we make, my friends, day by day: the things we do and refuse to do — “things done and left undone.” The life and death of our Savior is set before us to show us how to free ourselves from the ponderous chain of self-interest that binds us to betrayal, and victimization, fear, and evasion of responsibility.

God is calling us to follow him, my sisters and brothers, and he will give us the strength to do so. So let us choose then, and choose wisely, to follow him, through whom alone we find the way to eternal life.+

Valley of the Shadow of Life

2011-04-10T16:06:00.002-04:00

Three foreshadowings of resurrection, from the valley of bones, the tomb of Bethany, and the hope that is in us... a sermon for Lent 5a

SJF • Lent 5a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.+

The season of Lent is fast drawing to a close. Next Sunday is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week and the slow walk to Calvary, to the garden tomb, to the Sabbath rest of Holy Saturday, and then in the midst of that dark night, the shuddering and sundering shaking as the stone rolls aside and the Risen Christ is manifest to the dawning light of Easter.

In today’s Scripture readings we begin to see the glimmerings of that light, a preview of coming attractions, as all three speak of life emerging from death, of the power of God to give life even to what seems past hope of living. In these passages we walk through the valley of the shadow — not of death, but of life. And this is not just any old kind of life, but miraculous life, resurrection life, life of the power and the presence of God. It is not simply the reanimation of the flesh, but the new life in the Spirit. Even more than that, it is the power of God’s own life: God’s own Holy Spirit.

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Arrayed before us, then, are three shadows of life, three reflections of the great resurrection — two foreshadowings, and one still a hope.

In the first we stand in a scene of utter desolation: the valley of dry bones. I imagine it must have looked a bit like the coastal fields of Japan a few weeks ago, littered with broken bits and pieces of anything and everything caught in the unstoppable flood from the tsunami that swept ashore at Sendai and so many other coastal towns: a scene of utter devastation. But here not boats but bones: bones piled on bones, and all of them dry after baking in the hot sun. Surely this is a valley of the shadow of death, and not of life! And yet, at the prophet’s word, spoken at God’s instruction, those bones begin to rattle and to move, and bone joins to bone — just like in the old song. Sinews and ligaments and muscles begin to form on those old dry bones, and skin covers them up as limbs and bodies form. And yet...

And yet there is still no breath of life in them. So God gives the prophet another instruction: a call to the breath from the four winds, which is the spirit of life, the spirit of God. And the breath comes upon those newly reassembled bodies, and they stand up on their feet, and they live and breathe by the power of God. God has opened the graves of the people of Israel, the very ones who thought that all was lost when they had been taken away to captivity in Babylon, the very ones who had given up hope; and God has raised them up from their graves and restored them to life as his people, on their own homeland, their own soil. The Spirit of God has brought them life. This is the first shadow of life in this valley of shadows.

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And the second is even more startling, because so specific. This is not a quasi-legendary event from the time of the prophet Ezekiel — a tale which even the rabbis could not agree upon, as to whether it was an historical event or a symbolic prophetic parable. But this second shadow of life is about an individual, not an anonymous collection of skeletons of the valley, but a man with a name, a household we’ve already come to know through the gospel. This is Lazarus and his two sisters, practical Martha the busy and hopeful Mary the prayerful, living in a specific town with a name we know, Bethany. We even know where it is, just two miles from Jerusalem. This is Jesus and the disciples. This is not, as Peter would later write about his own experience of the Transfiguration, “a cleverly devised myth.” This is not an allegory or a symbolic parable, but an event, recorded with all of those human details of misunderstanding, disappointment, sisterly concern and human questioning — and above all weeping: the weeping of the sisters and the crowd of mourners; and even the weeping of Jesus — such is his love for this friend, who suffered death, not because he was worse than anyone else or a greater sinner than anyone else. But just as the man born blind was given his sight precisely so that God’s glory might be revealed, so too God’s power is revealed in that cemetery of that little town of Bethany when Lazarus returns to life: and to the end that both the disciples and the whole community might see, and believe. This shadow of life is meant to prepare them all to understand the resurrection of Jesus when it comes — as come it will, and soon enough.

Soon enough the Passover will come, and Jesus will share a last meal with his disciples, and be betrayed, and be crucified and be buried. And not four days, but just shy of three he will lie in his own grave, borrowed though it be, and another stone will be rolled away, and the glory of the Risen Lord will be revealed: and all flesh shall see it together.

+ + +

But that is not yet... We are still in our Lenten journey amidst the shadows of that risen Life, though our reading from Saint Paul does carry us forward and beyond, to present us with a prophetic shadow not of Christ’s rising, but of our own. And yet our rising from the dead partakes — as it must — of Christ’s new life as well, for there is no life apart from him. It is, as the old hymn says, “because he lives” that we can face the tomorrow of our own deaths and the day after tomorrow of our own rising to life again. For just as the dead of Israel passed through that valley of dry bones before they were raised up, and just as Lazarus went through the valley of the shadow of death into his stone cold tomb, and just as Jesus himself would suffer on the hard wood of the cross for our redemption and die a mortal death as any mortal does — so too we creatures of flesh, feeble and frail, even as we have the mind of Christ and the Spirit of God, we too will one day face our mortality just as all these others did — including Christ himself.

The difference, as Paul assures us, lies in where Jesus stands in relation to us. Ezekiel had to call for the spirit from the four corners of the earth to breathe into the bones in the valley where they lay. Christ had to call on God to send his power down to raise up Lazarus, and had to call Lazarus forth from where he lay dead and bound in strips of cloth. God had to reach down with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm to roll aside the stone that blocked the tomb where Jesus lay.

But we — we who are in Christ as he is in us, since the Spirit of God dwells in us, as Paul says, “though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.”

And that, my friends, is not a mere shadow of life, but life itself. God’s spirit of life and of love is within us and among us, thanks be to God. And so let us give glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to him from generation to generation in the church, and in Christ Jesus our Lord.+

I Once Was Blind

2011-04-03T14:20:00.002-04:00

What was it like to be able to see for a man born blind. He is of age, ask him! — a sermon for Lent 4a 2011

SJF • Lent 4a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.+

Today’s Gospel tells the powerful story of how a man who had never seen came to see. He was not just a person who lost his sight at some point early in life, but one who had been born without that faculty. He was a man who went through infancy, childhood, adolescence and into adulthood never having seen anything at all. His condition was so unusual that he became something of a test case in his neighborhood, as people wondered at his affliction, and how and why it had befallen him.

You see, in those days people strongly associated all disability or illness with sin. If you fell ill, or a disaster befell you, then you must have done something to displease God, and you were being punished. It is an idea with considerable sticking power, no doubt fueled by those cases in which a person’s sinful actions do indeed result in some affliction or disaster. Even today it’s easy to think of God’s justice being worked out in this life — come on, admit it — you feel a certain sense of rightness and vindication when you watch a film or TV show and the villain, who thought he was cleverly escaping, falls down an elevator shaft instead.

We may well feel that this is God’s justice at work — but then we have to face the troubling reality of so many of the illnesses and accidents that happen in our own lives and the lives of those we love, things befalling people whom we know are good, or at least not so bad as to deserve what has befallen them.

For as the Book of Job and the teaching of Jesus show — as if we needed any further evidence than the daily news — the good and the innocent suffer illness and injury as well as the wicked and the guilty. Job’s wife seemed to think God was being unfair to have so afflicted her husband, and advised him to be bold enough to “Curse God and die!” (God help us if we follow that advice.) Job’s friends advised him to search his mind and realize he must have done wrong, and to ‘fess up and repent. But Job knew that was not true, as he had sought with all his might to live righteously — as God himself says at the beginning of the Book, “Have you ever seen anyone like my servant Job, upright and blameless.” And so Job suffers terribly, not because he deserves it, but so that the glory of God might be revealed.

None of us dare presume to such perfection and blamelessness as Job, God’s servant. Still we recognize the disproportion of suffering endured by people who are at least making the effort towards perfection.

We can, of course, chalk this all up to Original Sin — but while that may identify and name the condition — the human condition of mortality — it doesn’t really offer a very satisfying explanation. It gives the human condition a name, but it does not offer a treatment for the ailment. Being told that mortality is a result of original sin is a bit like telling the man with a cold sore that he is suffering from aphthous stomatitis. It diagnoses the ailment but does not treat it.

+ + +

So what does this Gospel offer us as a better way to treat this conflict between our hopes and our fears? I would like to suggest to you that it is the same answer given in the Book of Job — it is not the illness or the suffering that is the point of the incident, but the revelation of God’s glory: that bad things do from time to time happen to good people, and inevitably to all people, but that it is all, all under the grace of God who, as we heard a few weeks ago, takes notice of a sparrow’s fall and the wilting of the grass and the flowers.

In the case of this blind man, people wondered whose sin was at the base of his blindness: obviously it’s hard to pin the fault on the man himself since he was blind from birth and scarcely had a chance to sin. So some suggest his parents are being punished through him. But Jesus counters these anxious questions with his assertion that “this man was born blind so that the work of God might be revealed in him.” He is, after all, more like Job than any other figure in the Scripture, except Jesus himself: a man afflicted not because of anything he has done, but so that God’s glory might be revealed.

In the long run it is not his disability that defines him, but his spirit — and his healing. He is no longer “the man born blind” but the” the man who was formerly blind,” or “the blind man healed!” He is a witness, and more than that an eyewitness who testifies again and again — much to the annoyance of the prosecution — testifying to that simple and evident fact: I once was blind, and now I see. It is not his malady that defines him, but his healing; he is not defined by darkness, but by light; not by sickness, but by salvation: which means “healing.”

In all of this, Jesus shows himself forth as Savior, as Healer, as the one who is the bringer of light and life. And the blind man in this account tells us how we are to act towards our Lord and Healer — with heartfelt thanks. It is not our illnesses or maladies that should shape our lives, or even end our lives: rather it is the hope that is in us that should point us towards salvation, the healing of all that is wrong or broken or torn, through the power and the glory of God, revealed in Christ.

+ + +

I would like to end this sermon with a poem I wrote a few years ago. I was inspired to write it by a walk along Fifth Avenue, as I was heading to Mount Sinai hospital to visit our sister Ms Ira Butler. I thought of all of the infirmities that come our way in the course of life, and was reminded about this man who came into life already stricken with infirmity — and how when he finally came to see he might understand or express his new-found sight. And so I imagined him speaking to someone who asked him what it was like to gain his sight. And this is my imagined account of his testimony. As the Scripture says, “He is of age; ask him!”

+ + +

Because I was born blind I didn’t know
I was until they told me I was blind.

I used to sit beside my father in
the synagogue, pressed close against his side,
his arm around my shoulder. Once he let
me touch the velvet-covered Torah as
it passed, guiding my hand in his.

I never made bar mitzvah — couldn’t read,
and didn’t have the heart to memorize.

Still, how I loved the synagogue, especially
the prophets’ words. A few years back I heard
a man read from Isaiah and — I swear —
I thought the words would come true then and there:
“sight to the blind,” he said. Well, one can hope.

When I grew up, I earned my bread by sit-
ting on the corner, holding out my hand.
They knew me in the neighborhood. It wasn’t
a bad living; once a rich young ruler
even put a gold coin in my hand — a small one, but so heavy next to coppers.

From time to time discussions would take place
about my blindness and its possible cause.
All above my head — in every sense!

Then, of course, one day that man called Jesus
happened by. He said that he was light.
He put mud on my eyes and sent me to
the pool to wash it off. And then I saw.

What was it like to see at first? It looked
like trumpets sound on New Year’s Day, ram’s horn
and brass; it looked like gold feels in the hand —
I think I told you that I felt it once;
like smiles feel on my fingertips. It looked
like velvet felt that time my father, my
small hand in his, pressed it against the Torah,
and the jingling silver sounded round
my ears. A bit like that.

Funny, though,
that when I got back to the street, though I
could see, the neighbors didn’t recognize me.
Scholars grilled me, called my parents, wouldn’t
take my word. And finally they kicked
me out.

Do I miss the synagogue?
I miss the New Year’s trumpets; miss the Torah
scroll, its velvet cover and the silver
bells. I miss the prophets’ words. I miss
my parents.

But I do not miss the end-
less questions on my blindness; I
don’t miss the corner of the street or my
old “friends” and neighbors; I don’t miss the heat
and street-smells and the ache of outstretched arm
and empty hand.

Besides, I saw that man —
the one that said that he was light? He was,
you know. He was the one who gave me sight,
just like the prophet said. He is my Torah now, my New Year’s Day, my gold, my light,
my father and my God.+

Not As We Deserve

2011-03-27T15:32:00.002-04:00

We might get the idea that God hates us when we treat God so badly.

SJF • Lent3a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.+

There was once a man who hated his boss. That in itself is probably not all that rare or unusual a circumstance. But this man really hated his boss. I mean, he couldn’t stand the sight of him. He hated him so much he could taste it; literally: if he caught sight of him — or even worse had to deal with him in a meeting or work session — his stomach would churn and he would throw up a little bit in his mouth. It was that bad. This was hatred he could taste, anger and resentment that would bubble up inside and churn over.

And he didn’t keep this feeling to himself. Although he wouldn’t insult his boss in public, or confront him directly, he wasn’t at all shy about letting his distaste and contempt for his boss be made known amongst the other workers. He assumed, probably rightly, that word of this had gotten back to his boss, but he didn’t care. He said to himself and to his friends and co-workers, “As long as he doesn’t fire me, I don’t care if he hates me as much as I hate him. He probably does, but it makes no difference as long as I do my job, and do it well. He has no cause to get rid of me other than the fact that he hates my guts as much as I hate his. Let him just try to fire me and I’ll take it to the review board and the union.”

This went on for a number of years, and nothing would or could change it. The man did his job but went right on hating his boss and thinking that the boss hated him just as much, in spite of his good annual reviews — with which he always managed to find some fault, some oversight or underestimation of his performance which he attributed to the boss’s malice.

Still the pot boiled. At the company picnics the man could always be found in a circle of other employees, clustered in a group far away from the boss, bad-mouthing him and complaining about him.

Then one day something terrible happened. I should say, one night. For in the middle of the night an old frayed extension cord under a carpet in the man’s house sparked a fire. The flames spread quickly through the whole house — fortunately the man and his family escaped with their lives but the house was a total loss. They stood out on the street in their pyjamas and the overcoats they had hastily grabbed as they ran through the front hallway, watching the firefighters attempt to quell the flames. As the man stood there transfixed by the disaster unfolding before him, his home slowly collapsing in ruins, almost too numb to feel anything, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

He turned to see who it was. It was his boss. Still numb from the emotional weight of the disaster that had overtaken him, he was too surprised to recoil or withdraw. He just opened his mouth and his eyes wide, but no words came out. His boss nodded sympathetically and broke the silence.

“I was listening to the late news and I heard about the fire. When the reporter mentioned the address, I knew it was your house.” In the man’s mind a thought flashed briefly, “He knew my address?” But before he could say a word his boss continued, “I had to come and tell you how devastating it is for me for something like this to happen to one of my employees, especially one of my best and hardest workers.” With his other hand he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out an envelope. “I know that your insurance will cover a most of your expenses, but I’m sure there will be some things they just won’t pay for; so I want you to have this.”

The man, still unable to speak, took the proffered envelope and opened it just enough to see that it was a personal check for $5,000. If he could have spoken earlier he certainly couldn’t anymore. His boss nodded and waved his hand understandingly. “It’s o.k. Don’t say anything; it’s the least I could do for someone in such a state. And here you are out on the street with no where to go... what am I thinking! Let me arrange a place for you at the motel up on the highway until things are sorted out.” The boss pulled out his cell phone, stepped a few paces aside and busied himself with the call.

The firefighters had finally finished their work, put away their hoses and other equipment, and were prepared to head back to the station. The remains of the house, now a pitiful low pile of wreckage and waterlogged ashes, still steamed slightly, and the air was full of a smell of chlorine mixed with charcoal, of burnt plaster and wood and paint and the bitter tang of burnt asphalt shingles.

The man looked to his wife, still unable to speak. She’d heard all the stories, too, time and again — oh my had she heard them — and she was just as amazed as her husband. She shrugged and shook her head. Finally the boss came back and said, “It’s all set. Let me drop you off at the motel.” With that the man finally found his tongue: “I...I thought you hated me!”

The boss looked at him in amazement. “Hated you? Why would you think that? You’re one of my best workers; been with the company for years! I know we haven’t always gotten along, and I know you haven’t always agreed with some of my decisions or policies, or my work style — yes, word does get around — but hated you?” He shook his head. “It never crossed my mind. Now, please, it’s getting chilly — please let’s get you and your family into the car so I can take you to the motel!”

+ + +

Saint Paul the Apostle wrote, “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” As the Collect for Ash Wednesday reminds us, God hates nothing he has made — and that includes us. God loves us, and always has and always will, even though we have not always returned God’s love. Look at those crabby, thirsty Israelites in today’s Old Testament reading — carping and complaining at Massah and Meribah! And as Saint Paul reminds us, God is hard on us sometimes as a loving parent must be firm with a young child — and the child may not find the discipline enjoyable. But hatred! — hatred for us never crossed God’s mind even when we failed to mind his cross!

+ + +

It is on that cross that God shows us just how much he loves us. From that cross, even from that pain and unspeakable death, Jesus the Son of God spoke words of forgiveness. We did not earn God’s forgiveness and grace — that’s why it’s grace, by the way — something we didn’t deserve. We rebelled against God so much and so strongly that we came to think he must hate us for how we’ve acted towards him. But he doesn’t hate us, my friends. He loves us, not because of what we do, or have failed to do, but in spite of what we do, and because of who we are — we belong to God, who created us and redeemed us; God so loved the world. The fact that fallen humanity has disobeyed and badmouthed our creator — the clay talking back to the potter — means nothing to God, so great is God’s love.

And how much more, as Saint Paul says, now that God has come in Christ and reconciled and justified us by his faithful obedience — the unjust justified by the king of justice himself, the seemingly irreconcilable differences reconciled by the one who keeps the books of life and death — how much more then ought we to understand and rejoice and give thanks for this great gift. It is so much more than a check for $5,000, or even a few weeks at a motel while our house is being rebuilt. The house being built for us in heaven is eternal and everlasting, and the builder is God, who prepares such a dwelling-place for us. God in Christ has reconciled us to himself — has wiped the slate clean and set us on our feet again.

As we continue our journey through Lent, on up to Good Friday when we stand to face the cross of Christ, and kneel in silent wonder at the foot of that cross, and remember what he did for us, let us not be dumbstruck or astonished at this wondrous love: that the King of Bliss should set aside his crown for our souls, but let us sing out in rejoicing, singing on and singing on through all eternity, Blessed be our God who has loved us so much, who has saved us from our sins, and made us heirs of everlasting life!+

A Fine Mess

2011-03-13T16:05:00.002-04:00

How does the temptation of Adam and Eve in the garden relate to the temptation of Jesus in the desert? And what does this have to do with Laurel and Hardy?

SJF • Lent 1a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

And so we come to the first Sunday in Lent, and over the next six weeks we will journey with Jesus from his temptations to his sacrifice upon the cross — and then on to Easter. It is a journey that encapsulates the faith; faith in the crucial — and I use that word very intentionally because it is based on the Latin word for cross, the very crux of the matter — in the crucial decisions and actions of Jesus for our sake and for our salvation. Saint Anselm, who was Archbishop of Canterbury some nine hundred years ago, wrote a book about it called, Why Did God Become Human? The five word summary: “To save us — that’s why!” And over the course of Lent we will be filling out the background and the implications of that simple fact, the fact of salvation. And as is so often the case with such explorations, we had best start at the beginning — and so we turn to Genesis.

But before turning to Genesis, let me ask a question. Do any of you remember Laurel and Hardy? Some of the younger folks here may not know them — although I will say it was Oliver Hardy who invented the word “D’oh” long before there was a Homer Simpson — but I’m sure most of the adults here remember the portly and fussy Oliver and his skinny, mousy sidekick Stan. As you may recall they were invariably getting into scrapes of one sort or another, and whether it was his fault or not, Stan usually got the blame, as Ollie would put his hands on his hips and complain, “Well that’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into!”

Turning to our reading from Genesis, we can see the “fine mess” that Adam and Eve have gotten us into. Of course, they didn’t need Ollie to tell them that. As soon as the deed was done, while the taste of the fruit of knowledge was still on their lips, the light bulb went on. Well, not a light bulb, since those hadn’t been invented yet — but their eyes were opened, and they saw for the first time that they were naked, and a pair of human beings felt shame for the first time ever. It must have felt like a sleepwalker feels when awakening out on the street in his pyjamas — frightened, bewildered, and embarrassed — wondering, “How did I get out here?”

+ + +

Genesis tells us — all of us children of Adam and Eve — how we got out here. It tells us that God made us in the image and after the likeness of God — which the catechism in our Prayer Book explains to mean, in part, that we are reasonable creatures, we are capable of making choices. And Genesis tells us that God laid choices before us: Adam the gardener was given specific instructions about tending the garden and keeping it; and, as a laborer is worthy of his hire, and you are not to muzzle the threshing ox, God allowed his gardener to eat of the fruit of the garden — except for that one particular tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So Adam had his instructions and he also had the power to choose — to obey the instructions or not. Well, we heard the rest of the story: how the serpent crept in with his deceptions, and how Eve chose and Adam chose to allow their delight and desire to overcome their obedience. They did not fall by accident — but by choice. This was no comic slip on a banana peel, but a deliberate decision to take and eat of a very different fruit. They chose to believe the serpent’s lie rather than God’s promise that if they ate of the fruit they would die. As Saint Paul observed in his letter to the Romans, “Sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned.” And we would be justified in saying, along with Oliver Hardy, “This is a fine mess you’ve gotten us into!”

This is how it all began. Our ancient ancestors got us into this fine mess because they misused the very thing that made them like God, in a misguided effort to become like God. They used the power to choose — a divine power resident in human beings, a reflection of the divine image in humanity: for human beings are not mere animals driven solely by instinct and need. What does the Psalms say, “Do not be like horse or mule that have no understanding, who if you do not tie them down will not stay near you.” Human beings shouldn’t need to be tied down. They have the gift to reason and the choice to obey or not. Adam and Eve used that very power to choose, to choose wrongly and to fall into disobedience by means of the very thing they sought — their likeness to God.

+ + +

I mentioned Laurel and Hardy earlier; you may have seen their most famous short film, for which they won the Academy award in 1936, “The Music Box.” It’s the one where they are supposed to deliver an upright piano up an unbelievably long flight of many stairs. Time and again they get it halfway up or almost to the top only to lose their grip on it and have it role clanking and clamoring down the many steps. Finally, just as they’ve managed to get it to the top of the stairs the postman arrives at the house and tells them they could have taken the road up around the other side of the house and avoided the stairs altogether. And what do they do? Even though they are at their destination, even though they are ready to bring the piano into the house, what do they do? They bring the cursed piano all the way back down the stairs to put it on their horse cart to bring it up to the very same place they had it, by the road they could have used in the first place!

+ + +

Adam and Eve could have remained in Paradise; they were where they wanted to be, they were wear God wanted them to be, and they could have stayed had they chosen to listen to God in the first place. They were already like God and didn’t need the fruit of any tree to become like God. Instead, they listened to the serpent who told them that if they disobeyed God they could get to the place they wanted to be — even though they were already there! They lost what they had by trying to get what they had.

Fortunately for us there was a way out of this paradoxical dilemma. But we could not do it by ourselves. By making the wrong choice at the very beginning, humanity got so far off course that it could never find its way home again on its own. We tried and tried to get that piano of sin up the steps of the Law, but it always came sliding down again. We got it back on our cart, but then we couldn’t remember where the road was to get us where we needed to be.

Humanity had become so lost that it needed to be rescued — to be saved. And because humanity itself had become so weakened by this time, so debilitated, by that initial failure to choose rightly, that salvation had to be in the form of one who was himself fully human — so that in human flesh that perfect obedience could be undertaken by one who in himself summed up all of humanity. Just as Adam had been the beginning of all humanity, this one man had to be the culmination of humanity. But it was also needful that he be a human being who was in perfect unity and full communion with God — able to present the untarnished and perfect image of God that all other human beings through the fall of Adam and Eve had distorted and tarnished and worn out. And so the Word which was God became human flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. Why? To save us — that’s why.

And he accomplished this by doing the very thing our ancestors had failed to do. As Paul said, “just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” And the course of that obedience is set in the very first action of Christ’s ministry, immediately following his baptism. He goes right into the wilderness, and there confronts the very one whose tantalizing misdirections first got Adam and Eve off course and into that fine mess. Jesus confronts the devil, and faces each of his tantalizing temptations with obedience. He chooses obedience at each point. When the devil offers fast food, Jesus proclaims the primacy of Scripture. When the devil offers safety through disaster, Jesus proclaims that God is not to be so tested. And when the devil offers power, Jesus proclaims his dedication and submission to God and God alone. All of these temptations, as at the first, are, if you not carefully, are temptations for Jesus to grasp at things he already has. (The devil really can’t come up with anything new!) And it is through his obedience in spite of the temptations to take what is already his by right — to seize it rather than simply to be in it — it is through this obedience, demonstrated here against the spirit of rebellion who first tempted humanity to choose wrongly, that Jesus sets his feet firmly on the path that will lead to Calvary.

That is why God became human — to save us. We will be with him on this journey, this Lenten journey, seeing that process unfold once again. And so, sisters and brothers, let us journey with him, the one who shows us the way to God, who is himself the Way, Son of God and Son of Man, even Jesus Christ our Lord.+

Another Mountain

2011-03-06T16:04:00.002-05:00

SJF • Last Epiphany a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Six days after Peter had acknowledged Jesus as the Christ, the son of the living God, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain by themselves.+

Last week we ended a series of Gospel readings and sermons about the Sermon on the Mount. In one of those sermons, I pointed out that Jesus was acting as a new Moses in his teaching on the mountain. And today we hear in our first reading a reference to that original mountain: Mount Sinai, the place where God bent the heavens, came down in the appearance of a devouring fire on the top of the mountain, and a cloud covered the mountain and Moses went up into the cloud. There it was that God gave Moses the law upon which Jesus would later expand his teaching in his own sermon on that other mount.

In today’s Gospel reading we come to yet another mountain: the mountain of transfiguration. Jesus takes that trusted trio, Peter, James (our own patron saint) and his brother John, up a high mountain. Once there the three disciples witness a dazzling spectacle, a transformation and a Transfiguration. Jesus’s face shines like the sun and his clothes become dazzling white. As if that’s not enough, two others join the spectacle: Moses himself and Elijah the prophet. Peter is so awestruck he thinks he’s died and gone to heaven — and in a sense he has, for what he sees is a vision of Christ in glory. All Peter can say is that it is good to be there; so good he’s willing to build three houses for Jesus and these honored visitors from Israel’s past, the giver of God’s law and the prophet of God’s truth.

But suddenly, before anything else can happen, the cloud enshrouds them and the voice of God rings out: This is my Son! This is, of course, by way of contrast. Though Jesus was to some extent a new Moses, and hailed by many as a great prophet, God wants no confusion: this is not just the giver of God’s law nor the prophet of God’s truth but God’s own Son, the Beloved, with whom God is well pleased. Moses showed God’s way, Elijah proclaimed God’s truth, but Jesus brings new life as well.

In is perhaps good to remember at this point the first, the Number One of the Ten Commandments that God delivered on that other mountain: “I am the Lord your God... you shall have no other gods before me... you shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or under the earth. You shall not bow down to them and worship them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God.” It is good to remember that and contrast it to what is happening on this other mountain. If we ever needed evidence that Jesus is the Son of God, here it is: for the jealous God, the One who wants no one to bow to anyone or anything but him, here tells the three disciples who Jesus is and what they are to do regarding him. This is God’s Son — Way, Truth and Life — and the commandment this time is that they — and we — are to listen to him. They have seen Christ in glory, and are to do as he says.

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The ancient Greeks had the idea that by beholding beauty and greatness people could be made better. Whether it was in the noble tragedies of their theater or in the beauty of architecture or sculpture, they had the idea that beauty could elevate one’s heart and soul.

In is an idea with some staying power. Christians had the same idea when they built the great cathedrals and composed the soaring music of the liturgy. Who could fail to have their hearts lifted as they raised their eyes to trace the vaulted ceilings of those great cathedrals, or allowed their ears to be filled with the sound of an echoing choir in one of those vast spaces, dappled with the sunlight from glorious stained glass windows.

The idea was still at work in the middle of the 19th century. The great Anglican priest Edward Bouverie Pusey anonymously funded the decoration and repair of a parish church in Leeds, in the heart of a region affected by the Industrial Revolution, in a city that even today seems to be drawn in coal-dust tones of charcoal and whitewash. Every art was lavished on the creation of this place of worship, so that those who worked among what William Blake called “these dark satanic mills” might at least, on the Lord’s Day, have a glimpse of the beauty that might lift their hearts and make them better men and women. Pusey believed that a vision of heaven here on earth could point people in the right direction. He wrote, of heaven itself: “Where shall there be an end of loving, where love is endless, infinite? or of gazing on Beauty Infinite, where that very Beauty by our longing and its Sight shall draw us more and more into Itself.”(Sermons 280-81)

In a more modern context, religion professor Jacob Needleman writes of witnessing the night launch of the Apollo 17 mission. Before the take-off, people were joking, drinking, crowded together on the lawn, jostling each other in the twilight, waiting for the giant rocket — 35 stories tall — to take off. He put it this way: “The first thing you see is this extraordinary orange light, which is just at the limit of what you can bear to look at. Everything is illuminated with this light. Then comes this thing slowly rising up in total silence because it takes a few seconds for the sound to come across. [When it does] you can practically hear jaws dropping. The sense of wonder fills everyone in the whole place as this thing goes up and up. The first stage ignites this beautiful blue flame. It becomes like a star, but you realize there are humans on it. And then there’s total silence. People just get up quietly, helping each other up. They’re kind. They open doors. They look at one another, speaking quietly and interestedly. These were suddenly moral people because the sense of wonder, the experience of wonder had made them moral.”

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Maybe, maybe. For even as I tell this story, I am keenly aware of the danger in being so uplifted by the beauty of a man-made thing, the work of our own hands: whether a Greek temple or a stained-glass window; or a noble tragedy or a rocket bearing the name of a pagan God — do we fall into the danger of idolatry, the very thing warned against in that first commandment from that other mountain? Is this impressive beauty and wonder truly making us better and raising our hearts to God, or just impressing us with the kind of awe that our ancient ancestors must have felt in viewing the starry heavens or the sun and the moon and thinking they were gods, rather than the work of God’s hands. When we see the glory of nature, when we look down from lofty mountain grandeur, or hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze... do we always remember that the beauty and inspiration are meant to lead our souls to sing to God, and to proclaim, How great thou art? There is all the difference in the world between the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty!

For there are mountains and there are mountains, and various sorts of mountaintop experiences. Do all of them make us better people? It depends on whether we are willing, after our hearts have been lifted, to bow in humble adoration, and to do as God said at the end of that mountaintop experience on that one particular mountain: to listen to his beloved Son to follow him on his Way, in his Truth, by his Life.

For after the spectacle, after the glory, Jesus left the mountain; he descended into the Valley — eventually not just of the shadow of death but of death itself — and he took his disciples with him. This is where we will follow him through the next six weeks on our Lenten journey. We will be with him through his temptations and the challenges he faced — on up through the greatest of those challenges: to sacrifice himself for us upon the cross. That is where he was lifted high, so that he might draw the whole world to himself.

On the mountain or on the cross, he is the one to whom we should listen, the one whom we should follow and adore, Jesus the Christ, the Son of the Living God, to whom we bow in humble adoration and say, How great thou art!+

Seeking First

2011-02-27T14:30:00.002-05:00

SJF • Epiphany 8a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

I’m not sure about you, but as far as I’m concerned that doesn’t have quite the ring of, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.” But whatever the translation, old or new, authorized by King James or revised in the late 20th century, the sentiment is as clear as day, and what a sentiment it is! On this eighth Sunday after the Epiphany we come to the end of our readings in Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount. It really does end on an up-beat doesn’t it?

But let us not mistake the upbeat quality of this passage. It is not merely the cheery optimism of a Bobby McFaren sort of world where we can all just sing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Let us not mistake it for the kind of blind optimism displayed in Voltaire’s book and Bernstein’s musical Candide — in which the principal characters keep on smiling through plague, kidnap, pirates, mayhem and murder because they believe themselves to inhabit the best of all possible worlds! It is not blind optimism we are called to, but a careful and perceptive seeking after what is of true worth, a careful and persistent seeking and striving for God — and God’s righteousness. It is in that holy quest that we will find all things added unto us.

There is much more to Jesus’ teaching in this passage from the Sermon on the Mount than looking on the sunny side of the street or letting a smile be your umbrella! No, my friends, this teaching is about a life based on what is important, focused on the right goal, and leading to the right end, under the grace of God: to strive, as we saw in last week’s gospel passage, after God’s perfection and holiness.

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So let’s follow that advice, and take a closer look, and start at the beginning. Jesus begins by warning us of the impossibility of serving God and wealth. Notice he says, “serve.” How many people who seek after wealth find themselves serving their wealth rather than enjoying it or benefitting from it. I have to say I feel a bit like that in relation to my computer: in principle it is supposed to work for me, to help me do my work, but there are times that I feel like I am serving it. I carefully protect it from viruses and spam, I patiently wait for it to install its never-ending stream of updates and patches letting it complete its work so that I can actually get to some of my work!

So when it comes to the things of this world, including money, the question, “Whom do you serve?” is a good one to ask — it is a good reminder that money exists to serve us as a medium of exchange, and we are to employ it, and not to be employed by it — or worse, be enslaved by it.

Jesus follows this up with a “therefore” — always an important word when looking to implications — since we are obviously called to serve God rather than wealth, therefore we are not to become worried — about our life or food or drink, or what we will wear. If we serve God, God will provide for his servants.

Think of what happens to people who spend their whole life thinking or talking about nothing but food or clothing — apart from the fact that it’s really boring! — are they any better off in the end than those who simply wear what is suitable and comfortable and eat what is set before them?

Jesus offers a startling pair of images: the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. The birds are not farmers, nor do they store up a supply of food. (It’s a good thing Jesus didn’t have squirrels on his mind, or Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ant!) Birds don’t store things up; they eat what they can find day by day, whether its an early bird catching the worm or a flock o pigeons pecking up birdseed on the sidewalk, or geese carefully trimming the grass on the Bronx River Parkway. Jesus reminds us that God provides for them — and don’t we mean more to God than birds do?

And look at the flowers in all their glory of their color and finery — I mean it: check out the Bronx Botanical Garden some time if you want to see some spectacular beauty — for none of which did the flowers do a lick of work. If God provides such beauty to clothe things that live for a few days or weeks, how much more will he clothe and adorn us — we of little faith!

And so, again, therefore: do not worry about what you are going to eat or what you are going to drink or what you are going to wear. These are the things the Gentiles spend all their time worrying about — and by “Gentiles” Jesus really means people who don’t know God. These are the people not just of little faith but of no faith at all because they worship idols and false gods that are no gods: the literal idols of stone or metal, or the more insidious idols of wealth and fame and glamour — the junk food of the soul. They are far from God and God’s righteousness because they do not seek God or God’s kingdom; they seek only to grab what they can and fill their bellies with what they can amass.

But you — that’s us — do not strive for, do not seek, these things, Jesus assures us. God knows well enough that we need food and clothing; and God will provide. Strive for and seek God and the righteousness of God and all the rest will be thrown in.

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C S Lewis, the author of the Narnia stories, once made a sound observation. He said that if you study world history, that study will show “that Christians who did most for the present world were those who thought the most about the next.... It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they become ineffective in this one. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither.”

That last bit may be a little too strongly worded — Lewis wasn’t known to his friends as “Bluff Jack” for nothing! and he was known to be plain-spoken and direct — but this little saying does sit well with the teaching of Jesus concerning where we should focus our attention, and what we should strive for and seek. Remember that Jesus also said, What does it profit one to gain the whole world if he loses his soul? We are called to aim high — to aim for heaven, as Lewis said. Even in earthly things, doesn’t it make sense to aim high? To let your reach exceed your grasp? To aim beyond, and to seek the higher things?

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On this last Sunday in Black History Month I want to share a story that Jesse Jackson told some years ago. It was in an article in The New Yorker (2.10.92) as he reminisced about his first day in sixth grade. His teacher was Miss Shelton, and she began the class by turning to the blackboard and writing these long words on it, words the children in that class didn’t understand and had never even heard of before. The kids all looked around and started whispering to each other, “She got the wrong class. She thinks we the eighth grade class!” Soon enough somebody in the class got the courage to yell out, “Uh, Miss Shelton. Those are eighth-grade words. We only the sixth grade here.”

Miss Shelton stopped writing and turned around. She peered over the top of her eyeglasses and surveyed the room with a keen eye. “I know what grade you are,” she said. “I work here. And you will learn every one of these words, and a lot more like them, before this year is over. I will not teach down to you. One of you little brats just might be mayor or governor, or even president, one day, and I’m going to make sure you’ll be ready!” And she turned back to the blackboard and went right on writing those long scary words.

That moment, that wonderful moment, started something in Jesse Jackson’s heart. To think that one of the children in that classroom, one of his classmates, maybe even himself, might be mayor, or governor, or even president one day — when in that town at that time there wasn’t a single African-American even on the school board.

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God challenges us, he gives challenging words to us, through Christ. He will not teach down to us. All through the sermon on the mount he has taught and sought to bring us up to him, up to his standards and his vision and his call for each and every one of us. He will speak to us sometimes of words we do not understand, of things we do not know. But he knows us, beloved, he knows each and every one of us. He knows we are worth more than many sparrows, worth more than all the botanical gardens in the world. And he calls us, each and every one of us, to seek his kingdom and his righteousness, putting our trust in him. He knows that one of us little brats might be mayor, or governor, or even president one day. And more than that, he knows that one day we will be with him where he is and live with him for ever. Aim for that, my friends, aim for that.+

You Are Better Than That

2011-02-20T17:32:00.003-05:00

SJF • Epiphany 7a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
If you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

We continue our Gospel readings from the Sermon on the Mount and pick up on a theme that is woven through the whole of the text up to this point. We began by speaking about meekness as a humble acknowledgment of exactly where one stands, and not being afraid to stand there. This led to seeing Jesus calling each of us to be what we are — truly to live up to all God has gifted us with. Then last week we saw Jesus sharpen and refine the Law of Moses, getting at the Spirit behind the letter of the law, and calling us to faithfulness, honesty, fidelity and truth.

This week the gospel continues to challenge us, not just to be who we are, or to be all that we can be, but to be even better than that. “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Now that is a challenge if ever there was one. Most of has have a hard enough time being fair to middling, let alone being good — and we know in our better moments (or perhaps even our best moments) that we are very far from being perfect!

I mentioned in an earlier sermon in this series how people will sometimes say, “Be a man,” to someone who is not acting as he ought to — particularly when showing fear or cowardice. And today’s reading reminds me of another phrase you are likely to hear addressed to people, man or woman, young or old, who are not acting as they should. It is a phrase that expresses both disappointment and hope. And that phrase is, “You are better than that.”

I noted what was odd about that first phrase; that you can say “Be a man!” to one who to all intents and purposes is a man. And what is odd about, “You are better than that” is that since the ones to whom it is being said are acting badly, just what evidence is there that he or she is better than that. Maybe they are just as bad as they are acting at that moment!

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And yet we know we are called to be better than we often act. This is part of the challenge of life lived as a disciple — which means to be a student, to be one who learns, one who follows a teacher. If people didn’t need to learn anything, who would study? If we thought we were already perfect, who would go on trying to improve him or herself. As Jesus would also say, it is the sick who are in need of a physician! We come to our senses, so to speak, when we become aware of our imperfections — whether we are made aware of them by our own conscience speaking inwardly, or the voice of a friend or mentor or teacher speaking outwardly, facing us with that truly honest assessment, “You are better than that.”

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In his sermon on the mount, Jesus provided a measuring rod by which we could see where we might stand on that ladder of perfection. It is the law quoted from the book of Leviticus, from which we heard the original setting and context in the first reading from the Old Testament today. It is, by the way, the only Law that Jesus quoted from that most technical law-book of the Torah, perhaps because it does form such a useful summary: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Most of the laws in this section of Leviticus deal with rules that were already “on the books” — or at least on the tablets, the ones handed down at Mount Sinai: you know the ones: not to steal or to swear falsely or to profane God’s name. Some of the laws edge over into what we would call fair business practice: not to commit fraud or to withhold a worker’s pay. Some of the laws deal with cruelty or mischief — as if anyone needed to be told not to mock the deaf or not to put stumbling blocks in the way of the blind! (Though given the state of the world I suppose such things do need to be spelled out sometimes.)

But in the midst of all of these familiar and logical rules is one that sticks out as going beyond just being fair, to being generous. That is the law that instructs people not to reap right up to the edges of their fields, but to leave some of their own crops unharvested — a portion of the grain and the grapes alike are to be left unharvested so that the poor can gather them. And it is important to note that this section of Moses’ law-book is framed with the words, “You shall be holy as I the Lord your God am holy” at the beginning, and “I am the Lord your God” at the end. This section of Leviticus is sometimes called, “The Holiness Code.” In it, God calls his people to be holy, to be as holy as he is. Is there an echo of that in Jesus’ teaching, “Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect”?

For what else does it mean to go beyond the minimum of loving your neighbor as yourself? Just as Jesus sharpened the scope of the other laws, Jesus says we need to go beyond kindness just for our neighbors, our friends and family; but show it to our enemies and our persecutors. Just as the owners of field or vineyard are not to strip their fields and vines for their own use and their own families’ use, but to leave them, to leave what is left for the strangers, the wayfarers, the poor; so too we are called to go beyond doing good to those who do us good, but even to bless and pray for those who do us harm. As Jesus says, if you greet only your siblings, you are only doing what comes natural, nothing worthy of praise.

Jesus calls us to be like God in his generous perfection: God who sends rain on good and on bad, whose sun shines on the righteous and the unrighteous. Jesus calls his followers literally to “go the extra mile” and “turn the other cheek” — and in case you ever wondered where those expressions came from, here they are! We are called to be better than that.

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It has been said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who say that there are two kinds of people in the world, and everybody else. Among those who don’t divide the world into two kinds of people, there was once a wise old rabbi who divided the world into four kinds of people. The saying is so old that it isn’t even recorded which of the wise old rabbis said it, but this is what he said (in my own somewhat updated version!):

Of the four kinds of people, there are the ones who say, “What is mine is mine and what is yours is yours” — this is a selfish person; such a one, if he saw his house and your house were both on fire, would put out the fire at his house but leave yours to burn!

Then there are the ones who say, “What is mine is yours and what is yours is mine” — and that is either meshuggeh or no better than children swapping their sandwiches at lunch.

Then there are the ones who say, “What is mine is mine and what is yours is mine” — and that is a villain.

But then there are those who say, “What is yours is yours and what is mine is yours” — and these are the saints. (Pirke Avot 5:10)

As we are reminded from time to time, we are called to be saints; and in our Gospel today Jesus urges us to this perfection, the doing of good not only to those who favor us, of doing good not only for our friends and family, but even for those who hold us in contempt; to turn the other cheek and go the extra mile.

When I was a child, an annual ritual included standing in a doorway and having my height marked in pencil on the woodwork of the door-frame. I would always try to stand as tall as I could, to somehow get that pencil mark up a little higher. I think in the long run I failed in that; but I do seek — and I hope you do too — always seek to be better than I am.

What are the marks on your doorways? What are the grapes or grain you could leave untouched for others to be nourished by? Perhaps it’s the left-behind wheat and grapes that go to make the bread and wine that become God’s Body and Blood.

What extra miles have you trodden, or coats or cloaks provided — and has your cheek ever felt the sting of an unearned slap, and yet you’ve not returned it with a blow or protest?

These are the questions, brothers and sisters, that point us on the road to perfection, the road we are called to follow as disciples, challenged by our Lord to be better than we are, and to seek the perfection of God’s heavenly kingdom; where Father, Son and Holy Spirit live and reign, One God, now and forever.+

The New Moses

2011-02-14T10:54:00.002-05:00

SJF • Epiphany 6a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Moses said, “See I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity... Choose life, so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him.

We continue our readings today in Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount. In this passage Jesus speaks particularly about a number of passages from the Law of Moses, several of them from the Ten Commandments. In this, Jesus is taking on the role of a New Moses — he is, after all, as Matthew emphasizes, giving this teaching about the Law on a mountain, just as Moses received the Law from the hand of God on another mountain.

Matthew and others in the early church got the message about a new Moses appearing on the scene to teach the people, based on a promise Moses himself made in Deuteronomy, his farewell address to his people in chapter 18. He said, “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you shall heed such a prophet.” (18:15) Matthew wasn’t the only one who saw Jesus as fulfilling this promise. Simon Peter quoted those very words from Deuteronomy to the same effect when he defended himself before the people for having healed the afflicted man who sat by the Beautiful Gate, a scene from Acts 3 portrayed in the stained glass window just around the corner from me. Peter proclaimed that he worked this miracle through the power of God made known in Jesus, and through the faith of Jesus Christ, and he quoted that passage from Deuteronomy. This Jesus, whom God raised from the dead, is the fulfillment of Moses’ promise, and more.

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So what, acting as the new Moses, what does Jesus do in this portion of his sermon on the mountain? We are accustomed to thinking of Jesus as the one with the light touch, the lenient and tolerant one who forgives; the generous one. And indeed he is that — when dealing with individuals, especially individuals demeaned and judged by others, or those willing to throw themselves on the mercy of the court. In those cases Jesus is acting as a pastor — the best pastor, the Good Shepherd! In those cases, such as the one where he stands up for the woman caught in the very act of adultery, Jesus acts as a defense attorney.

But on the mountain Jesus is acting as a new Moses, as a supreme court judge who is giving a strict interpretation of the Law to those who have sought loopholes or made excuses. Here Jesus cuts through the evasive undergrowth to get to the spirit undergirding each law. And in this cutting to the core each law ends up being sharper and more demanding, not easier and more casual. Just as when you sharpen a knife: there is actually a little less of it — you have actually ground some of it away — but it is sharper than ever.

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Our reading from Deuteronomy sets the stage for this, showing Moses presenting the commandments of God, and following them or not, as a matter of life or death. This is not just idle speculation or trivial argument about nonessentials. This is a turning point in the history of God’s people, a decision made before crossing the Jordan; as weighty a matter for them as crossing the Rubicon was for Julius Caesar. The Law of Moses will be a source of life or a source of death, depending on how it is treated. It is like a very useful tool — a very sharp knife indeed — that comes with a warning note on the box advising just how sharp and dangerous it is. If you obey the commandments, using them in the way God intends, you will live and prosper; but if you are careless, or misuse the tool, you will fail and die.

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As I say, Jesus raises the ante — if you think getting beyond matters of life and death can be raised, seen, and called. But this is a game of strip poker Jesus is playing: He strips away all of the protective padding in which the Law had become encased over time, all those evasions and excuses, to get to its sharp and dangerous core. In the passage we heard today, Jesus addresses murder, adultery and swearing falsely — three commandments from among the Big Ten delivered on that other mountain, and he polishes the sharpness of these Laws so they cut like Ginzu knives!

He starts by quoting the law, “You shall not murder,” but immediately gets beyond the letter of the law to the spirit, beyond the crime itself to the evil energies that lead to the crime. He is like a good detective addressing the murder mystery by looking at the motives that lead to and underlay the crime: anger, hatred, insult, and dissension.

He takes up another of the 10 Commandments: “You shall not commit adultery.” But once again, he clarifies that it is what lies behind and beneath adultery — that is the real problem — the lustful eye that casts its gaze on another man’s woman, or the dismissive and unloving spirit that sends a wife away with just a piece of paper.

Finally, at least in the portion assigned for today, he summarizes another set of commandments from different parts of the law — not just from Sinai — under a single principle: “You shall not swear falsely.” But then he tosses even this basic principle aside to affirm one even more basic: do not swear at all and risk not being able to follow through on your promise, but simply say Yes or No, and then take or refrain from action, as appropriate.

In each of these moral situations Jesus sharpens the knife: he provides those who first heard him preaching from the mountainside, and us, with principles that are after all easier to understand than the complexities of the Law, with all those evasions and loopholes, but perhaps harder to follow and more demanding to obey. This passage, especially the part about plucking out your eye or cutting off your hand if either of them leads you to sin, is considered to be one of the “hard sayings of Jesus” the things that some Christians, including a few preachers, would like to soften and explain away. Volumes have been written by those attempting to make Jesus mean something other than what he said.

In doing so, such commentators attempt to redo the very thing that Jesus wants to undo: they want to dull the edge of the moral conscience; to wrap it in the cotton wool of legalism, to put it on a shelf out of sight and out of mind; to find a likely suspect and convict him rather than do the hard detective work of ferreting out the motive that led to the crime; or to cry out in this game of poker, ‘all bets are off.’

But Jesus will not have it so: and if we are to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world — as he told us in last week’s portion from this gospel — then we should not have it so either. Rather let us look into our hearts and our consciences with the same piercing examination, and honest evaluation, that Jesus calls us to. The sharp knife of discernment and judgment is like the surgeon’s scalpel; or like the knife that young man used to cut off his own arm when trapped by a boulder (you can even see the movie!). It is one thing to save your body by being willing to sacrifice your arm. How much more vital to save one’s immortal soul by allowing the Good Physician to heal us and restore us by his sharp teaching.

You have heard what was said by Moses; and you have heard what Jesus had to say. May each of us choose wisely, for it is life or death that awaits us, and the choice is ours to make.+

Be What You Are

2011-02-12T12:36:00.000-05:00

SJF • Epiphany 5a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.

Today our Gospel reading continues with a section of the Sermon on the Mount, and the theme with which this portion picks up relates to the theme from last week. As you recall, I spoke about the meaning of meekness as knowing how and where one stands both with God and with other people, neither blown up with pride nor groveling in false humility.

Today we continue with this idea of “being what you are.” Jesus gives two telling examples to make this point. He speaks of salt that has lost its saltiness, and a lamp hidden under a bushel basket. Neither the salt or the lamp is good for very much in these situations, for it is the saltiness of salt that gives it its purpose, and the light of a lamp that gives it its usefulness.

Here is a more modern example. This little pocket flashlight was a promotional giveaway that I picked up at some conference or other a few years ago. It no longer works, the battery is dead. But it doesn’t open — it is self-sealed in plastic — so there is no way to replace or to charge the battery. It is, as Jesus would say, good for nothing but to be thrown out — and now that I’ve dug it out of the bottom of the desk drawer to which it had found its way, that is exactly what I plan to do! I suppose I should in all charity towards the flashlight acknowledge that it has served one final purpose — as a sermon illustration! But I fear that is a bit like saying that a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day.

The real point is that a thing that can no longer fulfill the function for which it was designed — while it just might have some other use — is more likely taking up space and serving no purpose — it is good for nothing. This is why the image with which Jesus begins is so telling: salt that isn’t salty really isn’t good for anything — and a lamp — or a flashlight — that doesn’t shine a light is a waste of space.

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Now, of course, Jesus is using these images to provoke the people to whom he speaks — and that includes us! It is we who are the salt of the earth, and the light of the world: and if we lose our saltiness or hide our light, we are not being what we are meant to be, and equipped to be, designed to be, by God.

It is a funny thing about people — as I observed last week talking about meekness — that people often want to make themselves out to be more than they are, and they often treat others or themselves as less than they are. The hardest thing, it seems, is for us to simply be what we are!

If I can quote one of my favorite preachers, an old friend who died a few years ago, Canon Richard Norris: He observed that people will often say to themselves or others such things as, “Act your age!” or “Be a man!” He said, “No one would think of saying to a penguin, ‘Be a penguin,’ or to a cat, ‘Be a cat.’” The penguin would likely give you a strange look and just go on being a penguin; and the cat... well no one can really tell a cat anything. “And yet,” Norris continued, “Wewill say to a man, “‘Be a man!’” It appears we recognize that we human beings, unlike penguins or cats, often act as if we were not what we are.

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And of course, that comes about because we so often act as if we were less than we are. We deny our gifts, fail to share what we have, perhaps because we fear it will not be enough, or that people will think less of us if they see us as we do ourselves — not as we are, but low in our own estimation in spite of God’s powerful promise and charge. “You are the salt of the earth! You are the light of the world!” Jesus assures us of both. Perhaps salt is not such a telling image in our time, when salt is easily available and our diets actually contain too much of it! But in the ancient world, salt was a valuable commodity with many uses, in some places worth its weight in gold. And it is good to remember that the amount rationed out to every Roman soldier gave rise to a modern word with which we are all familiar: salary.

So imagine Jesus is saying, “You are worth your weight in gold!” and perhaps you will get some sense of how valuable each of us is in his service. The point is that, like the gold talent buried in the ground instead of being invested in trade, we dare not hide our gifts or let them rest idle, but put them to use: to be what we are. You know the slogan, no doubt, “Be all that you can be!” That starts with being what you already are, accepting your gifts and putting them to work through practice. Practice: That is, as the old joke has it, how to get to Carnegie Hall!

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You all know that the verse, “Let your light so shine before others,” has long standing as anoffertory sentence, used just before the collection of the people’s offerings. That is taking the relation of salt with salary literally! And far be it from me to limit the reality that our offerings play in keeping the church functioning,
from the prosaic matters of heat and light on up to all the work of prayer and praise. We all know too well that these lights won’t shine if we don’t pay Con Ed!

But being a shining light or the salt of the earth means so much more. We are, as Jesus assures us, gifted with many capacities to be salt and light — to be what we are and rejoice in all that we can be. We each of us have many gifts that we may not be using for the service of God, the praise of God, to the glory of God. Let us not adopt a false modesty that says, “Who am I?” God knows who you are, who each of us is, and knows we are worth our weight in gold, salt of the earth and the light of the world. Let us not, as the Lord challenged us through Isaiah, engage in the wrong kind of fast, a groveling in sackcloth and ashes, and bowing our heads like a bulrush, acting as if we were less than we are. Let us rather rise up to break the yoke of injustice, to feed the hungry and set free the captive, using all we have to those ends. What a shame it would be if we did not make use of who we are to help make this world a better place, a more loving place, a more just and peaceful place.

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A wise old man, Rabbi Zusya, used to say, “When I come before the throne of the Holy One, Blessed be He, He will not say to me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ or ‘Why were you not Elijah?’ He will say to me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’” We are the salt of the earth, the seasoning that preserves it and gives it flavor. We are the light of the world, called to be lights to each other and to those who live in the darkness of fear and ignorance. Let us be who we are, sisters and brothers, and put our gifts to work for God and God’s kingdom, making the most of all the skills and talents with which we are equipped by the grace of God, through the Spirit of God and to the glory of God. In whose name, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we commit ourselves in service.+

Meek, Not Weak

2011-01-30T16:05:00.002-05:00

SJF • Epiphany 4a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Because Easter comes late this year, we will have a full set of nine Sundays after the Epiphany — which means we will be hearing, starting today and for the next four Sundays, selected passages from the Sermon on the Mount. I want to take advantage of this opportunity to reflect with you on some of the key elements in the teaching that Jesus gave the people.

Today, we start with the Beatitudes — a well-loved text of promised blessings. But who are the blessings for? Not the powerful, but the meek. And in keeping with Micah’s prophecy and Jesus’ words, I want to explore today the meaning of meekness — which is not weakness, but humble strength that trusts in God.

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To get some idea of what it means to be meek, let me tell you a story. Some years ago, a governor was running for re-election, and one day he arrived late at a church barbecue, having skipped breakfast and lunch on the campaign trail. As he moved down the serving line, he held out his plate, and the elderly woman on the other side of the chafing dish smiled graciously as she placed one barbecued chicken breast on it. The governor looked down at the lonely piece of chicken, and then smiled and bowed a little, and said to the woman behind the chafing dish, “Excuse me, could I get another piece of chicken.” The woman replied, “I’m sorry, sir, but to have enough to go ‘round it’s one piece to each person.” He appealed, “But I’m starved,” and again, shaking her head gently and smiling, said, “One to a customer.” Finally, he decided to use the weight of his office and said, “Madam, do you know who I am? I am the governor of this state.” She answered, “Governor, do you know who I am? I am the lady in charge of the chicken!”

That is meekness — a humble power that will stand up for what is right and fair regardless of who is issuing challenges, who is using position or power to take advantage. Meekness is not lying down as a doormat to be walked over, but the strength to be true to oneself and, as the Quaker tradition puts it, to “speak truth to power.” It is the pin-prick that takes the air out of all fo those who are too full of themselves; it is the strength of a Rosa Parks to stay in her seat when told to move; of an unarmed man standing there to face a tank in Tiananmen Square; dare I say we’re seeing some of this at work in Tunisia and Egypt even now — people who have had enough standing up. It is the voice of the child that is honest enough to say that the emperor has no clothes. It is not weakness, no not at all, but a kind of confidence and trust in what is right and true and just and fair, regardless of the powers arrayed against you. It is reliance on that promise given by God, who chooses what is weak to shame the strong, the foolish to shame what is wise. It is the answer of truth to the lies of power.

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This is all the more important when people pretend to impress the one who has the real power — God himself. All of us stand in that situation in the face of God. And today’s reading from the prophet Micah shows us the absurdity of trying to impress God. As I’ve said from this pulpit before, God knows us, through and through. God not only knows who and what we are, but knows every possible who and what we might become, for God is not only the Lord of what is, but of all that might be. So it’s no good trying to fool God, or trying to impress God.

Not that people don’t try. I suppose sometimes we get so used to impressing each other that we figure we can impress God, too. And rather than trying to frame our lives along the best possible course that God has laid before us — and since God can see all our journeys and our resting places God knows which is best for us — instead of trying to do what God wants for us, we, like the ancient Israelites, worry more about how good we look in God’s eyes, or think how good we look.

Micah, like most of the prophets, shows us that God has a bone to pick with his people. They’ve gotten the idea that God’s primary interest is in how many sacrifices they can carry out. We all know it is a sign of wealth to show how much you can give up — when people buy hundred thousand dollar cars when they could do perfectly well for a quarter of that to get where they’re going, but want to spend more to show off — like the rich man who lights his ten-dollar cigars with twenty-dollar bills. So the people of Israel wonder how high they have to pile their sacrifices: these burnt offerings and calves, thousands of rams, ten thousand rivers of oil. They are even willing to sacrifice their own sons and daughters — imagine — that is how far they have strayed in their foolishness and wickedness.

But God is not impressed by all this show. Remember, God knows his people intimately, and will not be fooled by their showy display of sacrificial zeal, showing how much they can give up in their religious exercises. As Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple once said, “It is a great mistake to think that God is chiefly interested in religion”! God isn’t interested in religion, God is interested in people, in the standing of their hearts, not in the number of their sacrifices. God cannot and will not be bought off. You can’t fool God, and you can’t impress God.

So Micah tells the people what God really wants, or rather reminds them of what God has always wanted: for them to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with their God. It is meekness that God desires in his people: a commitment to fairness, justice, integrity and humility.

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Paul, in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, and Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, reaffirm this timeless teaching. Those who are blessed are not those who succeed in making themselves look good — the rich, the powerful, the wise. No, on the contrary, the blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the seekers after justice, the workers of mercy, the peacemakers and the pure in heart. Within and behind all of this blessedness, all of these beatitudes, is a simple attribute, a simple virtue: meekness, the attitude of humble witness to the truth.

Although it is the opposite of pride, which is pretending to be more than you are, meekness doesn’t mean pretending to be less than you are. Meekness isn’t about pretense at all, it is about knowing exactly what and who you are, and speaking the truth you know. Such an attitude is merely reasonable here in our present life: who looks more foolish than one knocked from a high horse! But it is all the more reasonable as we stand before the one who can’t be fooled, the one who knows us through and through, from beginning to end. Meekness is integrity and authenticity and honesty — for if honesty is the best policy when dealing with each other, it is all the more so when we are standing before the one who already knows the truth: God, who is, as we well know, the only foolproof lie detector.

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But though ultimately it ends with God, it starts with us: learning and understanding that meekness is important in our interactions among ourselves: knowing exactly who we are and who it is we’re talking too, when we speak to each other. Though I may be the governor, that doesn’t entitle me to extra chicken; and though I’m the one serving, I don’t have the right to deny that one piece or to dole out extra helpings. Meekness is about understanding exactly how and where one stands, and not being afraid to stand there.

It is both in treating each other with proper respect, and acting with proper dignity — both sides of what it means to be a child of God — that we can come to learn how to walk in true humility and meekness with the one who is above all. This life, sisters and brothers, this life is the school of charity, and we spend our semesters learning to love our neighbors so we can learn to love God. Why is it that Jesus so often used stories about household servants and their interactions among themselves as they awaited their master’s return? (I’ve been watching “Downton Abbey” on PBS, so this is on my mind!) How impressed is the master when he sees his servants treating each other badly? Rather than that kind of power-playing, the proper operation of God’s household depends on each doing the task given to us, the gives given to us, working with the skills God has given. When we learn to honor and celebrate the gifts that others have, not denying our own, but offering them so that all can share, we will by walking in meekness, doing justice and loving kindness with each other, and that is how we will learn how to walk humbly with our God.

Meekness, as I said, isn’t about pretense; it is the ultimate reality check; And as with each other, it doesn’t need to take the form of telling God, “Look how small I am” — God knows that already! — but confessing “Lord, how great thou art!” As we stand before him on our last day, God will recognize and welcome us there because we have not feared to stand before him and walk with him here, in our earthly pilgrimage, following him in the way of justice and humility practiced towards each other.

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Let us not boast of anything, except the cross of Christ. What does God ask of us? Not countless sacrificial offerings; not the cleverness of human wisdom, nor the pomp of earthly majesty, not reliance on noble birth, nor the wealth of things that are valued in this world; not physical strength, not power nor boasting. God wants each of us just as we are, without one plea, boasting only in the cross of Christ, boasting only in the Lord, and doing justice to each other, showing loving-kindness to each other, and walking with him in meekness, knowing who we are and who he is.+