Following the Instructions, Following Jesus: Sermon for Ascension Sunday B

We are in the midst of a season of transitions. We've had some several changes in our own parish in the last few months: beloved parishioners whose health required them to move closer to relatives; others who have had hospital or rehabilitation stays; parishioners who have passed away. I will preside over my uncle’s burial tomorrow, and this summer we will lay my brother to rest. Yet there are also wonderful transitions happening all around us. We also have new members who have come to join us, as well, or who are seeking baptism, and we are blessed by their presence and their commitment to walking the path of faith alongside us.

For those of you who are students, or who have children or grandchildren who are students, there's prom, which my sister helped supervise at her school district last night, and I hope she is soundly asleep right now. And after prom, of course there are graduations. My dear friend Pamela's daughter Annabel graduated last week with her juris doctor degree from the University of California at Davis, and I look forward to seeing how she will use her knowledge of the law to make the world a better place, for I am certain that that is her intention. There are high school students preparing in a few short weeks to head off to college, and college students who are preparing to come home for the summer.

And thus, we also face some practicalities: the taking apart and putting together of dorm rooms and apartments and living spaces. So I have a question: Who here among us has ever attempted to put together a piece of furniture from IKEA, or from any foreign country in which the instruction manual, if you have one at all, reads as if it was written by a Martian?

I asked this because our daughter Lauren recently regifted us with an IKEA bed that we had originally bought for her when she was living in Chicago. She gave us this bed about a month ago. It may surprise none of you to know that this bed is still sitting in pieces in one of our spare bedrooms. Why is it in pieces, you might ask? Because even though we made sure that we had every piece that we needed for the bed’s structural integrity, we forgot about the special tools, and we forgot about the instructions. And since it has been years since we last put that bed together, we no longer have the memory of how we did it the first, second and third times we assembled it.

We've got all the pieces we need, but it is possible we may spend the rest of our lives trying to put this bed together. And every time I walk past the open door of that bedroom and see that bed in pieces, it occurs to me that it is the perfect metaphor for our lives as disciples, made especially more poignant on this Ascension Sunday.

In our readings today we hear Luke's two accounts of Jesus bodily ascension into heaven. Now, unfortunately, we get them in reverse chronological order. As you may know, the author of Luke wrote both he gospel, and then a sequel: the Acts of the Apostles. Both of these documents were addressed to a person Luke called “Theophilus,”-- which is a symbolic name that literally means “Lover of God.” So both of these writings are addressed to us.

With a strict economy of words, Luke's gospel account ends with reminding us that Jesus, one last time, explained all the scriptures to his followers, and then took his disciples to Bethany, a town two miles outside of the gates of Jerusalem, said farewell, and ascended into heaven. In the gospel account, they respond to this shocking event with great joy, worship, and witness in the Temple.

Apparently, Luke was dissatisfied with this terse description, for he begins his sequel with that same event, but in more detail. The account in Acts specifies that Jesus’ post-Resurrection sojourn among his friends lasted 40 days, 40 always being a significant number of periods of learning and transition in scripture. We also hear Jesus’s instructions not to leave Jerusalem just yet, and actually informing us, his readers, about political questions the disciples had for Jesus. Then Jesus ascends on a cloud, while his friends and followers stood there gaping and staring up at the sky for so long that God finally had to send two angels to nudge them out of their shock. Our reading closes with the implication that the angels are telling them to get to work.

With that, the incarnation of Jesus in human flesh is complete here on Earth. Yet Jesus’s bodily ascension into heaven is a pivotal point, because he continues as both human and divine, seated at the right hand of God. In ascending, Jesus brings his embodiment into the community of the Trinity. Human experience, human joy, human suffering, now enter into the very existence of God. When Jesus intercedes with us when we pray, for instance, he does so as the Son of God and the Son of Man.

But Jesus’s ascension is also a huge turning point in the lives of those who are disciples of Jesus, who call themselves followers of Jesus, for those who were yet living to witness it and those of us in the centuries since who have only second-hand accounts like the reading from the Book of Acts to go by. What does the Ascension mean for us today, symbolically and practically? And that leads us to the heart of the matter for us to consider yet again: why was it necessary for the Son of God to become incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth in the first place?

Over the first few years, when people expected Jesus back at any moment, the answer was very particular and specific. Jesus came to take our sinful nature upon himself in a transaction: Jesus removed our sins supposedly so that we could go to heaven when we die—heaven, where, Jesus reminds us in a gospel passage commonly read at funerals, God’s mansion has many swelling places and Jesus goes to prepare a place for us. And that was fine—when, like children, Jesus’s followers depended upon Jesus as their teacher and their savior to do everything for them.

Yet even during Jesus’s earthly ministry, he repeatedly insisted that his presence among us was NOT merely transactional. In fact he came to demonstrate to his followers that God’s love for us and for creation is NOT a transaction, that god was NOT keeping a great big ledger book ticking off every unkind thought that entered our heads. One of the greatest concepts Jesus emphasized was that we can’t earn our way into salvation. The insistence that grace, not merit, brings us within the embrace of God was a core teaching of Jesus—one that unfortunately gets drowned out too much in the loudest parts of Christendom, where depictions of hellfire and brimstone are excellent ways to distract us from the WORK we as disciples are called to do right here on Earth.

Jesus ascends bodily into heaven because HIS specific work here was finished. That may shock us—how can it be, with all the wars, and disease, and suffering, and genocides, that Jesus’s work on Earth is done?

The answer is simple: because Jesus’s work was NEVER just transactional. Jesus’s work was transformative, and relational. ALWAYS. And the transformation he most centered on was with US. To teach us how to LIVE, and live with each other. Not how to continue on in the ways of the world turning a blind eye to the need around us. The transformation Jesus calls us to continue as his followers is now, because eternal life is NOW.

The heart of Jesus’s ministry on earth was not to teach us how to die, but how to live. Specifically, Jesus’s own life among us was meant to show us how to live a God-centered life—and most of the time, that didn’t simply mean spending time in worship—in fact, during his life Jesus dissuaded his followers from worshiping him. Instead, he called his disciples to FOLLOW him—to emulate him as they could. Jesus insisted that a faithful life was not about separating people into camps of the worthy and the unworthy, sinners, and saints, but to go out and DO as Jesus did in the world to the best of our ability. To both embody Christ’s love and compassion in ourselves, and to see Christ’s face in others. Jesus gives us both the proper tools, and the complete instructions.

The fact that much of the world claims not to see that same love and presence is an indication that we, as Jesus’s followers and witnesses, need to take Jesus’s instructions to us more seriously. The instruction manual has been right there all along. It’s up to us now. But luckily Jesus is still with us, for he is still a Risen, living Savior, calling us to keep learning, to keep growing, to keep being symbols of hope and reconciliation contrary to the tug and pull of human systems based on oppression, exploitation, and callousness that washes over our modern societies in all their structures. The instructions are simple: to oppose systems and leaders who build their power and influence on oppression, dishonesty and contempt, and instead embody God’s love for the life and hope of a better world.

The Ascension reminds us that Jesus’s instructions were quite clear, and that Jesus’s Ascension has real significance for us as disciples. Those instructions, as we were reminded last week, were, are, and aways shall be based on one commandment: LOVE. Not as an emotion, but as an action and a way of life, not just for those we know but for those we don’t know, not just for those WE decide are worthy but for everyone, especially those we would like to turn our backs upon. Turning our backs on people or on the care of the world is NOT God’s way—it is exactly the kind of thing Jesus repeatedly told us to STOP doing.

The Ascension removes our training wheels and anoints us to continue Jesus’s work of reconciliation and healing in the world, of witnessing physically in all we do to the goodness and love of God. Jesus has given us all the knowledge we need, and modelled for us a concrete example of what a God-centered life, a fully human life, entails. That life is 99% witness and living and loving as Jesus did, which is the hard but oh so rewarding and transformative part of a Christian life. Worship, as important as it is, means nothing if it does not energize and empower us to build our lives around Jesus’s instructions.

Christ has risen, and has ascended! Alleluia! Now we get to follow the instructions and BE Christ for the sake of the world and for the sake of living lives of wonder, purpose, and transformation. Thanks be to God!

Readings:

Acts 1:1-11 

Psalm 47

Ephesians 1:15-23

Luke 24:44-53

Preached at the 505 and the 10:30 am main service of Holy Eucharist, May 11-12, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

God's Concerto: Sermon for Easter 6B

This weekend, Bill and I were able to hear Yo-Yo Ma perform live with the St. Louis Symphony. Together, they gave a stirring performance of Sir Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor. Bill and I and hundreds of others in the audience sat enthralled as we watched the master cellist bring to life the beauty of this musical composition. Because this was a special, gala performance, Bill and I were not in our usual seats, in the second row right in front of the cello section, which is my favorite spot, as someone who played cello starting in 4th grade, through youth symphony and a college music scholarship myself. Instead we were all the way over on the very edge of the fifth row at the rear of the first violin section.

But no matter. Perhaps this was even a blessing, since if I had been sitting right in front of the great master, I might not have been able to take my eyes off Mr. Ma to perceive the entire experience. There were moments I could even close my eyes and focus on the skillful weaving of sound and silence, of melody and harmony, of soloist and ensemble, of individual sound and combined chords that is music.

We humans seem driven to break things down into their constituent parts. And that is natural—that’s the way we learn how some things happen, and gives us an appreciation for even the smallest of things. And at first, my attention flitted from one sensory detail to another.

From my vantage point, my lack of ability to focus on the great Yo-Yo Ma visually, allowed me to experience a profound truth: the performance of a concerto, or any piece of music, is never about just one thing. Music starts with sounds—and silences. It is timeless yet held together logically in each specific moment. In between those sounds and silences there are sounds that are fortissimo, and sounds that are so soft you miss them. There’s the great master, playing the melody on his cello—and then that melody is handed off or harmonized or even held in opposition by the players of other instruments in the orchestra and the appreciation of the audience. 

Every single person on that stage is vitally important for the piece to flower into its fullest potential beauty—and since this is a world-renowned orchestra, everyone from the concertmaster to the last chair of the second violins to the lowly timpani player who spends 95% of his time counting silently are in their own rights incredible at their instruments and contributors to the whole. All this is held together by the depths of knowledge and the sensitivity of the conductor, who is himself actually being led by the soloist and his interpretation of the piece. Each performer is also a listener, responding to those around them. The production of the piece of music is collaborative, unified, organic, bound within a set duration of rhythm and time yet transcending those limitations to lodge in the imagination of all who receive the gift of that music.

We see the same truth from observing the soloist himself. He holds against his body a hollow wooden box, upon which wires have been fastened and tightened in specific ways. The length of those wires has been expanded by the addition of a stick upon which the strings can be shortened through pressure upon them at specific places along the stick. The great soloist pulls sound from that box through the use of his fingers, a bow made of wood and horsehair made grippy with cured tree sap. But the precise placement of the hands—perfected through thousands of hours of practice, produces nothing without the strength of the arms, the firm planting of the feet and gripping by the knees, yes, as well as the prodigious memory (for he used no sheet music for either his performance nor for his encore), but also, most importantly, with each breath and beat of his heart. 

Yet the training and control of the gift of his body is not enough, for—and this is clear with such a great artist as Yo-Yo Ma—the very beauty of his spirit and soul are just as much engaged in the depth and richness of the music he makes: his humanity, his generosity, his activism in the promotion of understanding between cultures and world peace. This humanitarianism is evident in the choice of this concerto, which itself was created by the composer as a plea for peace after the horrors and aftermath of World War I. Yet even if we are unfamiliar with the context of the particular piece of music being performed, as we attend carefully to the swirl of sound around us we begin to make sense of it, to discern certain phrases or themes that get repeated, and that expand through variation and expansion to form the whole, just as a vine is inseparable from branches, just as the wave is inseparable from the ocean.

What if we applied this organic understanding as appreciators of music as a metaphor for our common life together—our common life together, that itself makes music possible? Then the sounds and the silences produced in those brief moments on Friday night become holy reminders of God’s image in all of us, of the wonders of the human soul and imagination in seeking to create things of beauty like concertos and believing that the sounds and silences in music can actually call us to contemplate our mutual humanity and our place within the web of creation. 

The same hands that drew music from their respective instruments were being employed in the cause of beauty and peace, rather than division or hatred, as is implied in today’s psalm that insists that creation is joined in a concerto of praise and love for and by God. And the magic is, even though music works in partnership with time, even though it has a beginning in time and an ending in time, the beauty and sensation the music produces lingers long after the last note has faded away. All works together for the sake of the whole, and in so doing, becomes far greater than the sum of any of that concerto’s constituent parts.

It is, my friends, the same thing with our lives together in this world. Perhaps you have been sitting here wondering about why this preacher is droning on and on about a classical music performance and engaging in flights of fancy making everything perhaps more complicated than it has to be. Perhaps you have been sitting here during the last few minutes looking at the readings for this Sunday and wondering how many MORE times we can hear the word “love” repeated as often as the notes in a concerto during our readings? I mean what is this-- week three already of hearing the word “love” ricochet throughout the week’s chosen passages? Isn’t this constant harping on this theme indicative of a profound lack of imagination on the part of the lectionary developers and the authors of our scripture passages?

It is at this point I want to urge ourselves to step back a bit from the atomistic dismissal or cheapening by repetition of that word “love.” With our hearts, let us look to the whole, instead. Let us be led to begin to recognize the wonder and glory of the beating heart of the gospel that has been being presented to us by the various passages we have been reading and hearing not just in this season of Easter but throughout the scope of our lives as human beings and disciples and members of the ensemble of creation, if we attend properly. 

These last weeks we have been being presented with the core theme of the ministry of Jesus upon this Earth—a ministry that seeks to reveal to us who God is, and, getting a small glimpse of that, who that then makes us? Jesus became incarnate and lived and worked and healed and especially LOVED in order to get us to lift our eyes from our own narrow perceptions and divisions to instead focus on something as richly profound as the beauty, the glory, the unity of our existence. There is a beautiful theme or melody running through our lives that we are often too fragmented, too distracted, and yes, too afraid to acknowledge unless we do have it repetitively placed before us, over and over again.

That word “love” is a single note in the concerto that has been shot through the universe since God originally sang all that is into being.  Our psalm for today begins with the command, "Sing to the Lord a new song, for god has done marvelous things." Yes we are called to sing just as God sings – God sings this universe, this planet, this human family and all that lives and moves into being with the same lyricism and joy in the creative act that we get a glimpse of in the face of a musician who is a master at their craft. Moving from the parts to the whole of the gospel, and perceiving it organically as we seek to perceive any work of art or music leads us to one theme that rings out repeatedly, handed off and shared in the various genres of scripture—in stories, in analogies, in prophecies, in proverbs and parables, in poems and songs, and in bald-faced statements.

We may think that the end and purpose of religion, of being religious, is to love God. And some people emphasize what they describe as the “loving God” part so that they can somehow de-emphasize the loving each other part. Like that is less-than. Like that can be separated from the melody and theme of our existence as beloved children of God made in God’s image. But God insists that the way we love God best is to love one another.

We may look at the imperative of the gospel, and desperately try to find the limits of the demands God places on us through love. We may want to slice and dice and divide things into parts, or worse, “sides” that are in competition with each other. 

But the life of faith calls us into the truth of the Mobius strip that I used in the children's message a few moments ago. The Mobius strip shows that the two loves we are called to embody-- love of God and love of each other-- is actually ONE love. Trace your finger around a Mobius strip, and you see the two "sides" are all one continuous loop.

There is neither beginning or ending for God’s love for us, and we are called and created to love as God loves. Like a Mobius strip, in the faithful performance of our lives lived in concert with God and each other there really aren’t two sides of existence, the worldly and the spiritual, the sacred and profane, the Godly and the human, that compete with each other. There is just ONE side that flows together infinitely. There is one melody that binds all existence together, and calls us all to play our parts mindfully, intentionally, and collaboratively, understanding that we are all part of the whole, conducted by God.

God IS love, our readings insist again. God is relational. There is no personal love of God without lending your heart, your body, your very essence to The theme, the melody, is this: “love one another.” That commandment is repeated more than any other in scripture. It repeats in those specific words, that boldly and that insistently, fourteen times between the gospel of John and the letters of John. And when we take a step back, we see Jesus insistently MODELLING that commandment in all the spaces and actions in between. Love one another. Love one another. Love one another. Love one another. Love one another.

Love one another when they are similar to you. Love one another if they are wildly different from you. Love one another whether you judge them worthy or not. Love one another in words, but love one another in action. Love one another loudly when the world seeks to silence love, and love each other in the silences and the gaps when all that comes at us tries to drown out this thread, this melody that holds all things together. Love one another when it costs you nothing, but love one another even when it means laying down your life for another.

We humans are certainly driven to break things down into their constituent parts. We get too caught up in breaking things down into sides. Once again, this is how we try to make sense of all the data and sensation coming at us. But when we use that breaking down of things from the whole to the part in order to place limits on this foundational obligation in the life of faith we reduce the beauty of God’s love within us into discordant notes and cacophony, rather than the demandingly beautiful coherence and unity of playing our parts within God’s concerto of creation.

Readings:

Acts 10:44-48

Psalm 98

1 John 5:1-6

John 15:9-17

Preached at at 505 on May 4, 2024 and the 10:30 am Holy Eucharist on May 5, 2024 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville.

All We Need Is Love: Sermon for Easter 5B

In 1967, human technology created numerous marvels. One perpetual favorite was automobiles, which I have been thinking about as we prepare for our car show and barbecue festival after this service. Car and Driver magazine’s fourth annual readers’ poll that year was revealing: the Corvette Sting Ray was voted overall favorite car—no surprise there. The Ford Mustang 390 GT, which had only been produced since 1964 and a half, won for the third consecutive time in its sport sedan division- “sedan!” Ha ha ha! The Porsche 911S with six cylinders and 180 horses, won what one might call the “pocket rocket” category. The VW Beetle 1500 reigned supreme in the imported economy car category.(1)

And speaking of Beatles, the little band from Liverpool bearing a different spelling of that name were doing quite well for themselves.

The year of 1967 also had numerous challenges and crises. The Vietnam War was fully engulfing southeast Asia, and Martin Luther King began making speeches about how that war especially impacted the poor and oppressed both in Vietnam And its neighboring countries, but also the poor and working class in America whose sons and daughters provided most of the troops. The Arab-Israel conflict erupted into open hostilities again that year in the so-called “Six Day War.” The island nation of Cyprus was being fought over by Turkey and Greece. American cities erupted and to civil unrest over continued issues in America with racial segregation and oppression.

Also that year, a producer named Aubrey Singer with the British Broadcasting Corporation had an innovative idea. Now that geosynchronous satellites made it possible, the idea was promoted to create a live broadcast from nations across the globe promoting peace and positivity. The broadcast was to be entitled our world. In the end 14 different national broadcasters were involved in the production after member nations from the Soviet Union backed out in protest over the six day war. Nations were encouraged to offer their best and most hopeful content. Britain was lucky that it had those boys from Liverpool, and so the Beatles were commissioned to create, produce, and perform live a song for this broadcast. 

With just a few of their friends, including members of The Rolling Stones, Crosby Stills and Nash, and Small Faces, they produced a little ditty that could not be misinterpreted, according to the words of their manager Brian Epstein. It went like this:

“There's nothing you can do that can't be done;
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung;
Nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game
It's easy!
Nothing you can make that can't be made;
No one you can save that can't be saved;
Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time;
It's easy!

All you need is love. All you need is love.
All you need is love, love.
Love is all you need.”(2)



Our readings today remind us that John the Beatle’s message overlaps heavily with John the Evangelist’s message. Both were trying to address the question of how we live our best life—our most authentic life. And our readings today remind us that they both arrived at the same conclusion: Love IS all you need. John the Beatle just added catchy music. But the message remains the same. Love is all we need. And all we need is love.

In both our epistle and our gospel from John the Evangelist, we see two words used repeatedly: “love,” and “abide.” “Abide” is an old word; in the Old English, it means to remain, to wait for, and to dwell. As the word developed over time, its meaning broadened, to mean to live with and remain in the service of someone. The repeated use of these two words reminds us that, in God, the way of life IS the way of love.

What does this mean for us? To put it plainly: As children of God, we are made to love, to abide in love, as present as each breath we take.

To “abide with,” as we see it here, is to open ourselves to trust in God’s love, fully, and without fear. It is to be able to depend upon God completely, as in the words of the old hymn, number 662 in our hymnal:

Abide with me: fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.(3)

Our epistle states it clearly: “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” And we hear almost the same phrasing in John 15:4-10, much of which is covered in our gospel passage today:

Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.

This is where we turn from our personal relationship with God, to our relationship with others. We aren’t meant to simply absorb God’s love for ourselves, but to reflect that love so that our lives are a testimony for the world Jesus came to save through love.

We are made to abide with God, and open ourselves so that God abides within us, but that love also changes our orientation from an inward direction to an outward direction. We are not meant to try to keep that love for ourselves, but to share the joy that it brings us with those around us. Through this sharing, God’s love becomes most visible to the world, especially to those who do not know God. Again and again, Jesus reminds us that love is the core of our mission in the world.

The full expression of the love we experience in God empowers us to fully participate as partners in the life of God. That’s what we mean when we live fully into the Eucharistic life we celebrate together, all of us together as ministers of Christ. Every time we gather around this altar, we are empowered to act as Christ’s body in the world. All for love.

And that love is not a passive thing, not just an emotion or an attitude. The love we are called to embody is rooted in action. Concrete, deliberate, self-giving action that is the foundation of the life that is fully human and fully faithful, which perhaps could also be pronounced “faith-filled.” Because it’s also important to remember that the love that draws us to be sustained by God also calls us to sustain each other. The Christian life is not a life lived for ourselves, but a life lived FOR God and FOR others. If we are to abide in God, we are made partners with God in the work of bringing God’s creative power and love alive for those who do not yet know it.

Our readings and our experience with God through Christ convince us of this: that sharing in the love of God is sharing in God’s very being. That means that what we do and how we love or do not love will be the most visible means for those who do not know God to see God in action.

As Christians, we ARE the branches of Jesus, the true vine. That’s a heady responsibility. We are made branches of the vine through the love that God has for us through Christ, who is fully human and fully God all at once. Jesus is the Incarnation of God in human form to try to show us the way in which we are called to go to get back to our true natures as children of the Most High.

How do we live a good life—an authentic life? By understanding that Jesus calls us to remake our lives so that we are focused outside ourselves, but that in conceding everything that we believe matters, we gain all that actually does matter. It starts with turning rank and privilege and honor and prerogative upside-down. It starts with embodying kindness when we could respond with disdain; listening when we could turn away; honoring the dignity and worth of those society casts aside. And it starts with not kidding ourselves that this is easy. We begin this journey of love by understanding that we can’t take the hand of Christ until we unclench the fists and the hearts that world sometimes scares us into making, and relax into the light and love of God, for our sakes, yes—but for the sake of the world as well.

The greatest way the world will come to know Christ as we who call ourselves Christians do is through our actions. Our actions, especially as Christians, as those who “wear” the name of Christ out into the world, is often the only testimony the world has as to who Jesus is.

This is the challenge facing us each day. What, exactly, DO our actions tell the outside world about who Jesus is, and how Jesus forms and shapes our lives?

Jesus shows us, again and again, that we understand who we truly are as children beloved of God by loving beyond ourselves. By loving each other, and thereby loving God. Love is the ultimate act of bravery and faith, because it requires so much of us.

And yet it requires so little of us, because God has given us God’s utmost first. God has made the first move for us, by holding nothing back. That’s made clear when we hear this: “God’s love is revealed among us in this way: God sent God’s only Son into the world so that we might live and know God through Jesus.”

It is God’s love first that draws from us the response of love. Just as the song says, “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.” In calling us to abide in love, God doesn’t ask us to do anything we aren’t made to be capable of.

Jesus embodied love in action. We are therefore called and charged with the holiest of charges, to do exactly the same, in our speaking, acting, and the way that we see each other. God’s abundant love and mercy, that we taste and see and share here around this altar, does not exist merely to comfort us, but to fill us to overflowing so that we then show the world in our own actions a light so lovely that those around us want with all their hearts to know that light too.

God is love. God abides within us. And that love- for God and for those we encounter—is all we need to help heal the world.

Amen.

Readings:

Acts 8:26-40

Psalm 22:24-30

1 John 4:7-21

John 15:1-8

Preached at the 505 on April 27 and the 10:30 principal Holy Eucharist service on April 28, 2024, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Citations:

1) "1967 Readers' Choice Winners: The Fourth Annual Car and Driver Readers' Choice Winners!" May, 1967, at Car and Driver magazine, https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15143564/1967-readers-choice-winners/

2) "All You Need is Love," written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, performed for the first time on the Our World broadcast, June 25, 1967.

3) "Abide With Me," lyrics by Henry Francis Lyle.

Image is the cover for the single of "All You Need is Love, which ended up being included on the Yellow Submarine album.

The official video for "All You Need is Love:"

One Love, One Flock, One Shepherd: Sermon for Easter 4B (Shepherd Sunday)

The Good Shepherd, watercolor, Yu Jiade, Shanghai

Every year, on the fourth Sunday in Eastertide, we hear special readings centered on the images of sheep and shepherds, and this year is no different. And although shepherd are mentioned 118 times between the Book of Genesis to the Book of Revelation, we get the strongest passages of them repeatedly. I mean if I were to ask you where you remember shepherds being mentioned in scripture, I imagine many of you, or even people who do not attend church regularly, who probably mention the opening line of Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”

Now I also am pretty certain, that, beside Miss Sherrie, and my spouse who grew up in the midst of the Navajo Reservation, not many of us would have much experience with actual sheep or lambs outside to the petting area in the children’s section of the St. Louis Zoo. And if you have ever been there, you might also have noticed that while sheep and lambs are certainly cute and fluffy, so adorable when they are being bottle or hand-fed, they produce some incredibly pungent poo even in an outdoor area. So see? They really are just like us humans. We can be cute, but we also can be mighty stinky and prone to head butting when things make us feel anxious.

The metaphor of a shepherd is also meant to remind us of two central claims echoed in our readings today especially our gospel and epistle, intimately related as they are: That at the heart of the life of faith is living in community, held together by the love of God and the love for each other. Herders of animals all know—and usually so do the herdees, themselves, that if the flock scatters, those on the fringes are easier to be picked off by predators, either animal or human.

Jesus called his friends and followers into community that was meant to be a tight as any well-tended flock. But the ingredient that was meant to hold the flock together was not fear or animal instinct. No, it was something infinitely better: love. But not the words. Love in action, as our readings, especially our epistle, emphasizes.

The Good Shepherd, mandala, Jhoti Sahi, India

It’s hard to be the kind of sheep that puts the needs of the flock first. It goes against our natures, sometimes, and our instinct to only think about now rather than the future. But Psalm 24 makes some specific comforting promises and uses images of comfort and encouragement.

The first 4 verses of Psalm 23 has the psalmist, and therefore us, imaginatively, on a journey with God; verses 5 and 6 depict God as a host at a wonderful feast of blessing. The image is of a dedicated, loving shepherd leading his flock into a fertile, verdant valley where the flocks can rest and have all needs fulfilled in peace and security; even if wolves lurk in the shadows, the sheep know that the strong hand of their shepherd will drive away any danger. Note that the right pathways have taken the sheep and their shepherd through the “valley of the shadow of death.” We are not promised that we will not face trials, even as we seek to follow God. The right pathways God wants us to follow may lead us into danger, even crisis, yet if we remember that God is with us and is OURS as well as we being God’s we cannot be afraid. Verse six uses covenantal language to emphasize that God’s promises are trustworthy and the foundation of all blessing.

Expanding upon this, our epistle continues imaginatively to pick up the theme.

Here’s the heart of it for me: “Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” We cannot do everything. But we can do something. Every day.

Some scholars believe that the first letter of John is an expansion upon the messages in the gospel of John. Ironically, 1 John 3:16 expands upon John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him would have everlasting life.”

Yet what does it mean to have everlasting life? Is this promising us that if we believe in a personal Jesus, and avow our belief, we will get to live in heaven forever? Many, many people believe exactly that. Yet to me, that makes faith a transaction: I do X and God saves me from eternal torment. How can you really “have something if you only have it after you die? Yet that is what millions of people believe. But when you study scripture broadly, which a lectionary forces us to do, you begin to see a broader message emerge: having the eternal life is a present tense statement.

Yet what if it is our actions right now that bring us either eternal bliss and peace or eternal torment? What if we realized that every time we treat with contempt, or callousness, we are wrapping around ourselves what songwriter Aimee Mann reimagined via Charles Dickens as “Jacob Marley’s Chain?”

Well, today a friend told me this sorry tale
As he stood there trembling and turning pale
He said each day's harder to get on the scale
Sort of like Jacob Marley's chain

But it's not like life is such a vale of tears
It's just full of thoughts that act as souvenirs
For those tiny blunders made in yesteryear
That comprise Jacob Marley's chain

Well, I had a little metaphor to state my case
It encompassed the condition of the human race
But to my dismay, it left without a trace
Except for the sound of Jacob Marley's chain

Now there is no story left to tell
So I think I'd rather just go on to hell
Where there's a snowball's chance that the personnel
Might help to carry Jacob Marley's chain (1)

Ms. Mann makes a more subtle point than in Dickens’s fable: the chains we ourselves forge from our actions (for even refusing to act is a choice) are carried with us in this moment, right now, often as regret and guilt. Mann’s 4th verse regarding to preferring hell speaks to another difficulty of our modern times—that people who think themselves righteous often have little sympathy for those whose consciences are burdened by things they have done. It is often the other acknowledged “sinners” who have the most sympathy for their fellow sinners, and may help to carry those chains of regret and guilt, forged by being … human.

But both Dickens and Mann agree that we can unmake them, too. Rather than move from the negative, our scripture reading in this epistle points us to a brighter truth, rooted and grounded in the love that we have to declare our allegiance to if we are disciples of Christ: God’s love abides when we choose to let go of our chains of anxiety, and instead take care of each other, without wondering about whether they are “deserving”--or not. The first letter to John reminds us that God so loved the world, even when it did not and sometimes does not deserve it—and so we are drawn to behave in the same way if we allow God’s love to overflow within us, if we allow our cup to run over. We are reminded that our shepherd will supply our need—and that our shepherd expects us to help with that mission of abundance, total trust, and compassion, for we are, as St. Teresa of Avila reminded us, God’s hands and feet in the world. Love in action.

Some people have a hard time saying the word “love”—and some people cheapen it by throwing it around as a descriptor for anything pleasing: “ I love this hairdryer! I love this fabric softener! I love these shoes! I love this toilet paper!” My dad had a hard time saying “I love you” in words—at least where he though anyone might hear it. But he showed me he loved me in a million ways.

Or the time there was an ice storm while I was in high school, and at dismissal everyone’s cars were coated in an inch of solid ice—everyone’s cars except mine—as he came before he went to work on the afternoon shift and spent thirty minutes de-icing and opening my car, turning on the engine so it could warm up as he scraped the ice off of every window and door in case I needed to take some friends home who didn’t have daddies that could do that.

In the end, of course, love is about selflessness, not about self-gratification. It IS about being willing to lay down your preferences and comforts in the name of making the beloved’s happiness a guiding goal of your life and relationship. Consider in your own life which is better—to hear someone say “I love you” when their actions show nothing but self- involvement, or to not hear the words but to know that someone will act to care for you, to feed you, to shelter you, and to help you bear your burdens.

That’s the kind of love Jesus in his earthly existence exemplified for us—and often for people who were considered less-than, or undeserving.

Let’s face it, we are not sure if shepherds actually sat around telling their sheep they love them. But they certainly cared for them, watched over them, made sure they were sheltered, made sure they had green pastures and still waters, and stood between them and the wolves and hyenas and thieves who often were just watching for the flock to scatter so they could scoop off the stragglers or the weak.

The command that we love one another in action and deed, not only in words, is not a contract, an agreement of tit for tat, that gains us everlasting life in exchange for mouthing a few platitudes while leaving our precious hearts and lives undisturbed. God’s love as revealed in Christ cannot be hoarded for our own benefit, just as manna cannot be stored, but each day we, like the Israelites in the wilderness, rise and trust that God has prepared a table for us in the presence of our enemies, even when those enemies are us.

Lovelessness and loneliness are overwhelming too many people in our world right now. Yet just before our reading, at verse 11. John makes a concise statement: “This is the message you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. “

What does a modern application of John urging us to love one another in deed and action lead us toward? Perhaps to a reconsideration of the violence, contempt, and hatred that plagues human life all around the world and in our own backyards. In the verse immediately preceding our reading today, John claims that hatred is basically equivalent to murder.

The cornerstone for the Christian life is Christ, and Christ is rooted in love and mercy. Therefore, if we are truly aligned with Christ, we too must align our lives in truth and action to that imitate that same love and mercy in our own lives. As beloved sheep, and ourselves called to be loving shepherds, enacating love in the world. For God’s sake, and our own. So that we will proclaim one love, one flock, one shepherd.

Readings:

Acts 4:5-12

Psalm 23

1 John 3:16-24

John 10:11-18

Preached at the 505 on April 20 and the main service of holy Eucharist on April 21 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Citations:

1) "Jacob Marley's Chain," written by Aimee Mann, from her album Whatever, 1993.

The Love That Upholds Us: Sermon for Easter 3B

See what love the Father has for us, that we should be called children of God…. What an amazing statement we hear in our epistle.

Dame Julian of Norwich expands upon this theme in her book, Revelations of Divine Love, the first book written in English by a female author. She writes:

The love of God most High for our soul
is so wonderful that it surpasses all
knowledge. No created being can fully know
the greatness, the sweetness, the
tenderness, of the love that our Maker has
for us. By God’s Grace and help therefore let
us in spirit stand in awe and gaze, eternally
marvelling at the supreme, surpassing,
single-minded, incalculable love that God,
Who is all goodness, has for us.

Meditations on God’s mercy, and God’s intense love for us both as part of creation and as individuals are particularly important, as our Psalm today also reminds us, when we have been cast into shock or turmoil by events that swirl around us.

This Sunday’s readings have contained many words of comfort and strength for me in the last few days. We have had two of our beloved parishioners pass into glory this week, and my mother, my sister and I have been dealing with the sudden death of my younger brother. Meditating upon verses such as Psalm 4:6-8 speaks directly to the trouble and doubts that plague us when we experience trauma and loss. I commend these words to you for comfort and assurance in times such as these:

Many are saying, "Oh, that we might see better times!"
Lift up the light of your countenance upon us, O LORD.
You have put gladness in my heart,
more than when grain and wine and oil increase.
I lie down in peace; at once I fall asleep;
for only you, LORD, make me dwell in safety.

All four of our readings this weekend speak to a lack of belief in response to being involved in pain and loss. Our gospel passage, from Luke 24, comes from the final chapter in the gospel of Luke, and, lain alongside the gospel from John we heard last week, give us Luke’s version of the events we heard last week: Jesus suddenly appears to all the apostles gathered together.

Jesus’s first words, just as we saw in the gospel of John, are to bless his disciples and friends with peace (v. 36). As in the portion of John’s gospel that we heard last week, this is in response to his friends’ fear, their swirling emotions, and their doubt that erupts as a result. Their response is natural and human—there is a reason why “I can’t believe it” is often our first response to shocking news like the loss of loved ones.

Jesus KNOWS that the apostles, having been through the trauma of his horrific, shameful death, can’t dare to believe that he is alive and risen. That is why Jesus then commands those present to look at him- to truly see him, and to know that he is real. Of course, their first tendency is to think that they are looking at a ghost. Yet Jesus eating and drinking is meant to underscore that this is a living, breathing Christ that they encounter—ghosts have no need for food or drink.

Luke’s recounting of Jesus’s actions directly addresses the doubts of those had insisted that Jesus was never fully human—disagreements of which have continued in Christianity to this present day. Passages such as these underscore the humanity of Jesus, risen and fully alive, hungry and thirsty, bearing scars in his crucified, yet living body-- signs of his bodily survival and triumph over the grave.

We see this argument continuing today. Some quadrants of Christianity play down Jesus’s humanity in favor of his divinity. This sadly all too often leads to a belief that one cannot imitate Jesus in our earthly lives, since he really was God masquerading as a human. No need to try to reconcile or love your enemies, much less forgive them even from the cross. Saying you believe in Jesus then becomes nothing about living a Resurrection shaped life, but a transaction where saying a magic formula will put you in line for heaven after you die—a heaven that is made all the more desirable by anticipating all the people you don’t approve of roasting in hell.

Other quadrants of Christianity downplay Jesus’s divinity in search of the “historical Jesus”—the first century Jewish peasant who formed a little band of followers to challenge the Roman Empire. This approach, sadly can lead to Jesus merely being a sage—or the subject of books by Dan Brown that people forget are FICTION. This Jesus never arose, never ascended. This belief is the product of Enlightenment thinking, that holds that there are no such things as miracles, and wonder is a mere product of naivete.

The Episcopal way welcomes those from both these tendencies. However, our theology creates a generous embrace of paradox—We fully embrace a High Christology that emphasizes Jesus’s divinity, AND a “Low Christology” that emphasizes Jesus’s humanity. At the same time. Without our heads exploding. We do that by embracing the wonders of mystery as not a threat or sign of ignorance, but as a sign of reverence toward the God whose self-revelation to mere mortals throughout history is always generous and imaginatively rich, but is a God who nonetheless is known to us only in part. We humbly acknowledge that what we know of God can never mean that we know all of God, or can limit God according to the limits of our imaginations.

But experiences like losing loved ones, friend or family, especially during Eastertide, call us to consider anew the wonder of Christ’s Resurrection. Jesus’s bodily resurrection has important implications for all of us experiencing loss. For if Jesus had a bodily resurrection, then we can anticipate the same thing for ourselves. If, as some claimed, Jesus was only a spirit in the shape of a human body, then Jesus’s ability to understand the human condition and bring it into the experience of the divine would be greatly limited.

No, Jesus being both fully human and fully divine is a necessary precondition for our salvation throughout Christian theology to today. This is why you are encouraged to cross yourself at the words of the Creeds as we affirm our faith “in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting.”

The Resurrected Christ, we affirm, “ascended into heaven,” bringing with him his scars, the suffering he overcame his experiences of human existence—hunger, cold, the love of friends and family, marveling at the beauty of the grasses and the lilies of the fields, welcoming little children in their purity—and in doing so, he merged all those experiences into the reality of the Holy Trinity, who dances in a circle of love, and through Jesus invites all of us in, as well. This knowledge is particularly comforting to me, as my brother was taken from us all too young due to the power and sway of the disease of addiction, working its evils within him for the last 35 years.

Seeing the doubt of Jesus’s disciples and friends, and hearing Jesus’s words to be at peace and believing in his being with us in life as well as death helps us as we move from shock toward acceptance and faith in the face of death that, in the words of the preface for the Eucharist at a Burial service:

For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended…

That knowledge, and assurance, brings peace, for the disciples then and us as disciples now, indeed. Even as the resurrection of spring bursts forth all around us, we pray for that flourishing of new life to take root within our hearts and our souls, so that we can truly see and put our faith and hope in “seeing what love God has for us, that we should be called children of God…”.

Fastening onto that promise, the promise that envelops our lost loved ones, even now in the embrace of a God who NEVER gives up on us, who tells us we can’t earn or bargain away into eternal life but accept it as a wondrous gift freely given. In doing so, we can LIVE Resurrection, right now. As an act of faith, and an act of being. For the love of the world.

Readings:

Acts 3:12-19

Psalm 4

1 John 3:1-7

Luke 24:36b-48

Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO, on the weekend of April 13-14, 2024.

Seeing Signs and Scars- Sermon for Easter 2B, April 6-7 2024

I imagine many of us are eagerly anticipating the solar eclipse predicted for Monday.

An eclipse happening right now is particularly interesting timing, since just on Good Friday mere days ago, we heard that at the crucifixion of Jesus, there was not only an earthquake, but the sun darkened in the sky. This has led some people to speculate that there was a solar eclipse on the day Jesus died on the cross. But it was just speculation—until modern science has ridden in to provide insight.

Come to find out, in 2012, a group of German scientists looked at historical data of earthquakes as well as the Jewish calendar, and theorized that Jesus was crucified on April 3, 33 CE. However, the problem is that Passover occurs on a full moon, and solar eclipses require a new moon. But then NASA stepped in with a chart of 5000 years of eclipses and where they occurred—and found that a LUNAR eclipse occurred on—get this—April 3, 33 CE over the Holy Land.

Many people get really excited about eclipses. Even though one happens roughly every 18 months, WHERE they are visible shifts all over the globe. The last time we had a big eclipse over the US was in 2018, and we were just a couple of miles from totality. We pulled our son from school and took him to my favorite retreat place to make sure he could see it—and it was amazing. Some people would be satisfied with seeing the event on TV—but that’s not the same thing as experiencing it live and in person. Seeing is believing, as they say.

And that brings me to my yearly defense of poor ol’ apostle Thomas. Hearing about Jesus being risen was not enough for him—just like it’s hard for us to believe it too. Seeing is, after all, believing.

Paul Simon, in a song off his Graceland album of 1986, sagely sang, “Faith is an island in the setting sun; but proof, yes--proof is the bottom line for everyone.” Thomas wants proof. Like we all do.

The author of John knows this, and this story is meant to encourage Christians from John’s time until now: those who have not seen, but take the leap of faith anyway. We live in a time two millennia after these events. Of course we have doubts- we have even more reason than Thomas. We are caught just as much as those disciples were in the thrall of empire where the powerful never have enough power, the wealthy never have enough wealth, the influencers never have enough influence. We are as much held in thrall by emotional as well as economic scarcity is those who lived in Jesus’s time were. If Thomas—and all the other disciples at that time-- can doubt and emerge the stronger for it, so of course can we. Further, given our distance in time and culturally from the events depicted in the gospels, it is only through engaging our faith through questions and doubts that we can seriously engage our faith. Just as a muscle only gets stronger, when stressed, so too our faith.

Sadly for Thomas, this is the only story in which he plays a starring role. And so he gets that “doubting label” attached to his name like it was superglued there and very unfairly, too.

However, there’s a lot going on here besides Thomas demanding proof, and that gets obscured when we fasten just on Thomas and his very understandable reaction. So let’s circle back to the beginning.

While we have loudly proclaiming alleluias all week, our gospel today takes up the story on Easter Sunday evening. The first emotion that is noted right from the very start is “fear--” which is right where the end of Mark’s gospel leaves us at the end of that gospel, as we can hear in the alternative gospel for Easter Sunday in the B years of the lectionary. The doors are locked because the disciples are still afraid of the religious authorities, which John’s gospel troublingly refers to as “the Jews,” even though practically everyone in the story is a Jew as well. It is despite those locked doors that Jesus appears before his fearful followers. In response to this fear, Jesus gives them his peace. Ever since John 14:27, Jesus’s response to fear among his disciples has been to wish them peace. He also links peace to courage at 16:33, as well.

At v. 20, Jesus then shows the disciples his wounds—or more specifically, I believe, his scars. If they were still wounds, Jesus might still be a ghost. For his wounds to become scars indicates that his living body has engaged in the process of healing. This is another important point that gets overlooked by focusing on the “Doubting Thomas” story. Jesus’s risen body will always be the body of the Crucified One. His wounds and scars do not disappear—but now they are a part of who he is, and their presence helps prove his identity. And knowing that those wounds are there are important to us. We all carry the wounds and scars of our lives with us.

Upon seeing Jesus’s wounds, the disciples go from fear to joy, because now they know that this is truly Jesus. It could be that his face is different, but the wounds convince them, and they are filled with joy to know that Jesus has risen. At v. 21-23, Jesus again wishes them peace, and then in the same breath (word choice deliberate) commissions them with the same mission Jesus himself had from God: to go and forgive sins and engage in the reconciliation of the world to God. In an action reminiscent of the creation of Adam in Genesis 2, he breathes upon them the Holy Spirit. Remember, the fact that he has breath also proves that he is truly alive, not a ghost or a spectre or a spirit.

There are people who have been shamed for questioning, for doubting, like that’s a bad thing—just like poor old Thomas there, who gets that damning “Doubting” adjective permanently glued in front of his name forever, even though what he experiences is SO common and relatable, unlike all the apostles except for Judas. 

Going back to church for those who have been hurt and marginalized by this kind of Christianity is more like returning to the scene of a crime than getting your spiritual batteries recharged. And those of us who identify ourselves as actively Christian thus are presented with our first chance to ourselves take part in the salvation of Jesus which bring healing and reconciliation. And we don’t even have to do it by glomming onto every stranger that walks through our doors, especially at Easter.

We don’t have to do this work by starting at trying to scare people into belief and by that I mean a bargain with God so that they can avoid “hell.” We do this by defining salvation as a life moving toward healing even for those who feel like they have lost every shred of hope they ever had. We can start by actually SEEING these people the same way that Jesus did—as beloved. Beloved as we all are and not excluded due to some checklist created by fearful people. Beloved even as we all are, even as we find our ways out of various wildernesses like addiction, racism, homophobia, taking advantage of others, or misogyny. 

Jesus showed his own scars to his believers after resurrection because our scars are the signs that we all bear of what has shaped us, for good or for ill. We are all known by our scars—and with wat we do with them. Do we use them as excuses to hurt others and leave scars of our own as we pass by? Or do we see them as signs that we have persevered and have healed? After Jesus shows his scars as a sign that the cross did not have the last word with him, Jesus commissions his followers—including you and me, even those of us who have to cross our fingers behind our backs at a lot of the claims made in the Creed to go out and continue his work. Not a transaction, but a transformation.

We can with honesty and hope share our scars with those around us too—share our scars, and the healing grace we have received from God in our own specific lives. That’s a sign we can all see, and a sign that heals the scars we carry all our lives.

Readings:

Acts 4:32-35

Psalm 133

1 John 1:1-2:2

John 20:19-31

Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church on the weekend of April 6-7, 2024.

Lifting Up Jesus: Sermon for Lent 5B

• Jeremiah 31:31-34
• Hebrews 5:5-10
• John 12:20-33
• Psalm 51:1-13

The events of our gospel reading take place during the holy festival of the Passover in Jerusalem. Passover was the most solemn observance in the Jewish religious calendar. It is a festival centered around community, family, and the shaping of a ragtag bunch of former slaves into a people.

A specific people singled out by God and preserved over and over again from death, even the literal angel of death who swept across the land of their captors, and whose savage reaping finally convinced the Pharaoh of Egypt to, in the words of the famous spiritual “Go Down, Moses,” to “let my people go.” And so Jewish people, as well as Gentile converts and those attracted by the Jewish faith from all over the Mediterranean, if they had the means, would gather in Jerusalem to celebrate in and around the Temple.

We hold this in mind as we look toward next week’s pageantry of Palm Sunday in the Christian calendar, with Jesus triumphantly entering Jerusalem during Passover to shouts of Hosanna and the waving of palm branches—a hero’s welcome. There will be declarations of his rightful claim to be the Messiah, the anointed one appointed by God to liberate the people of Israel, some believe—to with power throw off the oppression of Israel by the Roman empire. Jesus will ride triumphantly into Jerusalem in the name of liberation during the festival which celebrates the liberation of the people of Israel from bondage. That’s what so many of those cheering expected.

But there were two processions parading through the streets of Jerusalem at that moment. As Jesus and his band of followers come in from the east, a much more impressive procession would be entering from the west. The Roman governor would himself put together a huge military display and ride through the streets of Jerusalem with rows of infantry and a powerful show of force of cavalry.

Each year, as the people of Judea started dangerously talking about their freedom and about the power of their God, the Roman authorities would put on their own show of force, reminding the people that they WEREN’T free, that they were still enslaved under the relentless forces of empire.

As Jesus’s followers proclaimed him the heir of King David and dreamt of a return to the glory days of Israel seen through the lens of myth and legend, the Roman governor would remind the people that they could be crushed at a moment’s notice. That he represented someone who also claimed to be God’s son on earth—the Roman emperor. An emperor who represented the oppression, impoverishment, and enslavement by right of conquest. Certainly not a prince of peace—but also representing forces still at loose in our own world today.

In the midst of all this hubbub, we have this little detail that two outsiders approach two of Jesus’s closest disciples and ask to see Jesus. The Gentiles who are in Jerusalem are probably “God-fearers,” people drawn to the worship of the God of the Torah and the Prophets, and they attempt to contact Jesus through the two disciples whose names are—pay attention-- Greek.

Maybe their appearance is a throw-away detail in the story at the time. And yet, I am drawn to these two Gentiles who screw their courage up and approach these two disciples who also have “Greek names” and ask to see the infamous wandering rabbi. Do they get to see him? Or do they get turned away in the hustle and bustle of the festival and all the demands upon the disciples’ and Jesus’s time and attention.

Yesterday, at our Diocese’s Healing in the Heartland gathering, the Rev. Traci Blackmun, our amazing sister in Christ, told a story to underline the importance of being seen. She shared an anecdote about the Zulu Nguni people of Southern Africa. In their culture, when one person greets another, they say, “Sawubona.” This roughly translates in English to “I see you.” The common response is then “Yebo, sawubona,” which means “I see you, seeing me.”

These is not just statements of sensory recognition. These are statements of equality, of valuing each other, of recognizing each other’s humanity, of welcoming someone into our presence. And it reminds us all of how we must move beyond superficialities to truly see each other not based on our differences but by our own common heritage that goes beyond race or nationality. 

And as people of faith, this is our calling: to, as we affirm in our baptismal covenant repeatedly throughout each year, to honor the dignity and worth of every person. To see the face of Christ in each person, and to BE the face of Christ to those who see us. That is the deeply political act that is at the heart of the Gospel. To make Jesus visible in ourselves, and to seek the face of Jesus in others as we remember that we are all created in God’s own image.

I wonder how many times someone has approached us, and asked US to help them see Jesus. 

Oh, I am not talking about directly asking us—that would be too easy. But what about all the people who look upon us as we are going about our days—acquaintances or strangers. They may be able to tell that we claim the identity of Christian. Maybe they see a cross hanging around our neck. Maybe they saw you with an ash cross on your forehead on Ash Wednesday. 

But maybe we didn’t even notice them. Maybe they didn’t ask out loud. But we know that there are people every day who seek the filling of a perhaps nameless hunger within them. In this world that too often denigrates attributes like faith, hope, charity, self-giving, and community, we are surrounded by people who nonetheless yearn for these things, if they could put it into words. They long for connection, for the experience of being loved.

They want to see Jesus. Just like all of us.

Maybe they were the person who was having a bad day near you last week. Maybe they were angry, or close to tears. Maybe it was a dad in a grocery store with a screaming three year old who is screaming because dad didn’t let him eat the strawberries out of the carton before they were washed. Maybe it was the kid with the lip piercing and neck tattoo who made you a smoothie. Maybe it was a person in a nursing facility who never gets visitors. Maybe it’s a refugee who can never return to the only home they’ve ever known but are trying to make a home here, where everything is different and bewildering.

But the thing is, we brush up against people all throughout each day who may not be able to put it into words, and may not even be aware of it, but who are hungry to see Jesus. The Jesus-on-a-cross thing possibly scares them, or confuses them, and makes no sense, so that’s not the Jesus they are ready for right now. We celebrate Christ crucified—but also Christ who is risen. Christ who lives still within all of us.

No, they are looking for the Jesus in us. They are looking for the flash of recognition—for each of us to look at them, to see them as an individual despite our differences. They are looking for a smile, a small kindness, a dropping of pretenses and aloofness and a demonstration of compassion and really seeing people for who they are: beloved children of God, made in God’s very image.

Jesus says, “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” What caused this hour to finally come at this particular point? The world—in the form of some “Greeks,” which means us—has come to Jesus, to experience yet another Epiphany. And now—NOW--Jesus is going to be exalted—lifted up—on the cross and beyond the cross. The cross that, as we have contemplated it this Lent, is a sign of hope, of the victory of love over sin and death. Jesus’s entire life—ministry, passion, death, resurrection, and ascension—was a gift to bring all of the world to God—the world, we remember, that God SO loves. Not just the descendants of Abraham. ALL the world. The world that longs to see Jesus, and know Jesus sees them.

John says Jesus’s language here about being lifted up is to indicate the kind of death he was to die. But we know, from our distance of two thousand years, Jesus’s words also indicate the kind of life that awaited him—and all of us who follow Jesus-- on Easter morning.

The season of Lent is not one that centers on deprivation. It is meant to be a gift of contemplation and renewal—which is why it is held in the spring. It is meant to be a tome of remembering God’s covenant with each of us—that God so loves us that God’s own son calls us to see how to live a God-shaped life of love and commitment to healing and grace as a fully human being.

We all want to see Jesus. And our calling is to see Jesus in each other. To see Jesus, to know we are deeply loved and known by Jesus. And then to lift up Jesus in our own lives, so that the world may see him too. And to exclude no one.

Sawubona.
Yebo, sawubona.

Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO,  March 16-17, 2024.

The World According to God: Sermon for Lent 4B

Today’s gospel brings to mind two distinct memories from my childhood. One is seeing somebody sitting in every end zone on Saturday and Sunday and Monday nights, holding up a sign that said simply “John 3:16.” 

I am sure it inspired many people to either nod their heads knowingly, or maybe to have enough curiosity to finds out what that sign referred to. Nowadays it would be as simple as pulling out your phone and using a search engine. But certainly some people looked up that verse, and were intrigued. Those that were destined to be Episcopalians would then look over the entire section of at least John 3:1-21, knowing that a few words—in this case 27 words—pulled out of an enormous book will lack a certain contextual depth and precision. Those are OUR PEOPLE!

Especially with this famous verse, context is vital. If you just stick with those 27 words, following Jesus is simply a matter of assent, a magical formula like abracadabra, a spiritual get-out-of-jail free card. But it’s not—assent is required, and commitment to not just saying some words, but living and loving like Jesus, who embodied God’s love in human likeness to be a model for our lives.

For many, this verse is a full and complete summary of the gospel. Martin Luther summarized this verse like this: “For the world has me; I am its God.”

But I think the next verse is just as important. “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

God so loved the world, the world God made through speaking God’s wisdom into the world, that God sent God’s beloved Word to be incarnate—to take on human flesh to show us all how to be fully human and fully God’s children. Jesus is the embodiment of God’s wisdom in the world. Wisdom that can be lived in our own human lives-- if only we choose to follow.

That brings me to the second of my childhood memories, in the sweet little Methodist Church in which I was born and baptized, and that we attended until I was five. At Southern Hills Methodist Church, I remember singing this lovely hymn that so engaged my heart’s certainties, because it described the world according to God:

This is my Father's world, and to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.
This is my Father's world: I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas; His hand the wonders wrought.

This is my Father's world; the birds their carols raise,
The morning light, the lily white, declare their maker's praise.
This is my Father's world, He shines in all that's fair;
In the rustling grass I hear Him pass; He speaks to me everywhere.

This is my Father's world. O let me ne'er forget
That though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.
This is my Father's world: why should my heart be sad?
The Lord is King; let the heavens ring! God reigns; let the earth be glad! (1)

My own experience even as a very small child resonated so strongly with this hymn. Sharing the same sense of wonder and awe out in nature, delighting in the elephantine clouds slowly processing overhead down to the busy industry of ants moving among the moss on the north side of a tree, a tiny world humming with life beneath our feet, often too small to notice. I knew that God loves this world from clouds to ants to you and me, and made it a source of awe and wonder. I resolved never to lose that wonder—especially when things were hard. The signs of God’s love are shot through creation—and in our yearning hearts.

The message we hear in John’s gospel and in our Psalm is one of wonder and awe and gratitude, yes. But it is also a reminder that the Church goes astray when it puts limits on who God loves and who God does not. Our gospel also makes it clear that merely saying you believe in Jesus as a hedge against condemnation means nothing. Believing in Jesus means following Jesus in embodying that love into the world-- each of us.

Our first reading can lead us down a rabbit hole, with all its talk about God loosing poisonous snakes upon his maddeningly complaining people during the wanderings and discontent in the desert--unless we know the background behind it. The Priestly writers telling of this event is meant to support their belief that God smites and condemns those whose faith falters. Notice that Jesus does not repeat this belief in his referencing to that same event—he only talks about the cure. This aligns with his claim that God seeks always to save and redeem the world we have mangled through our own short-sightedness. Never to condemn it or all the living things who share this planet with us.

Last week we heard Jesus compare his body to the Temple, and we were reminded that God blessed and sanctified us in our bodies, too. In taking on our flesh, our human life, God continues to tear down the walls WE build to separate ourselves from God, and to remind us that God lives and loves within each of us right now, and through Jesus God keeps reaching over those walls and pulling us all over the top and never giving up on us.

In today’s readings, we hear about the blessings of light, of healing, and especially of love.

Light and darkness are important signs or symbols in John’s gospel, which makes sense, because they are important symbols to us. Our gospel today starts in the middle of Jesus’s conversation in the middle of the night, in the darkness, with a Pharisee named Nicodemus. Nicodemus comes in the night also because he lacks true understanding of who Jesus is, but at least he is straining toward the light.

When Nicodemus first approaches Jesus, in verses we don’t get to hear to help us understand the context, it is clear that Nicodemus is drawn to Jesus. Nicodemus is beginning to be drawn to the light of Christ, for at that start of chapter 3, he states: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who is coming from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” As a Pharisee and yet a seeker, Nicodemus is a man torn between two worlds, just as the church members in Ephesus were, and frankly much like many of us are.

Jest before our reading, Jesus tells Nicodemus he must be born again, which Nicodemus rightfully does not understand. Yet thinking about being born to a new life in Christ is a fruitful metaphor. We are born with an abiding hunger for connection, and for meaning even from the time we are infants. Babies want to be embraced, and they want to be fed. God helps this along by making babies helpless and also adorable, which goes a long way toward making up for the smell. With our poor eyesight, as infants we experience the world mostly through out hearts, and our bellies. Babies get anxious when either of these are not full—and I am persuaded that frankly, those feelings of hunger, especially spiritual hunger, remains one of the driving forces in our lives—one that we ignore or misuse at our peril.

Our own hunger for God within us brings us to this point, and calls us to repentance, to change. That change is scary. It means letting go of the familiar. But what will we gain? Only the certainty that we, and this whole world, are beloved by God.

How are our lives changed when we embrace Jesus as Savior? In our epistle, Paul states here that it is the difference between death… and life. We are asked to embrace our brokenness, and allow the light of Christ to wash over it. The world according to God is filled with reconciliation, discernment, self-honesty, and abundant beauty and grace. Paul’s words attest to the abundance of God’s love—abundant beyond our imagining, especially.

And here we see the blessing of healing that runs through all our readings, as well. Living as one of us, and dying as one of us, Christ in particular can reach into the shattered places in our spirits, and restore us from the shadow world in which we have lived into newness of life. Sometimes those wounds we bear were inflicted on us. Yet, other times, our own choices have wounded us. But God is always there.

Eternal life starts right now. It starts with understanding ourselves as living—right now-- in the presence of God. Right where we are. God loved us in this way, that God gave us God’s only Son. And why? So that NO ONE feels hungry, or empty, or lost—so that everyone can have a whole and lasting life. That Son didn’t come into the world to condemn us, but to save us, and remind us of who we are: Beloveds of a God who loves us and longs for us so much that God continually reaches out to us, asking us to align ourselves with God’s economy of abundance, grace, and peace.

The world according to God is one of grace, not condemnation. And as God’s Beloveds, we are called to bear God’s light into the world. The world that God so loves.




(1) Maltbie Davenport Babcock (1858-1901), American clergyman, poet, and hymn writer, “This is My Father’s World.” From the United Methodist Hymnal, 144.

Image: The famous "Big Blue Marble" photograph taken by the Apollo 17 crew on December 7, 1972 as the crew traveled toward the moon. This was the first photo of Earth that showed the southern polar ice cap. Image credit: NASA.

Readings:

Numbers 21:4-9

Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22

Ephesians 2:1-10

John 3:14-21

Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, on March 9-10, 2024, the Fourth Sunday in Lent.