Saturday, June 20, 2015
Pentecost 4, Proper 7, June 21, 20015
Pentecost 4
June 21, 20015 É Proper 7B
Holy Trinity & St.
Anskar
Then they cried to the LORD
in their trouble,
and He delivered them from their distress.
and He delivered them from their distress.
He stilled the storm to a
whisper
and quieted the waves of the sea.
and quieted the waves of the sea.
.
É In the Name of
God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
I have no doubt that this incident really happened – that the
Son of God commanded the tempest to subside, so that He could go back to sleep.
My only question is whether that is the extent of the meaning – a display of
the power of incarnate God. So, what
follows is not an exercise in demythologization, but a reflection on what the
incident may mean in addition to the Divinity of Christ.
The lectionary pairs this passage with God’s derisive reply
to Job. In poetic terms, God seems to
say that Job can’t see the whole picture, and so he should sit down, shut
up. This approach was, in turn,
ridiculed by Voltaire in his novella, Candide,
in which the philosopher Pangloss
(meaning “all tongue”) assures the naïve Candide
that this is the best of all possible worlds.
At the time, everyone was aghast at the Great Lisbon Earthquake and
tsunami of November 1, 1755, which destroyed the entire city, killing as many
as 100,000 people, including the crowd gathered in the Cathedral for the All
Saints’ Mass. If God really loves us and if He can still the tempest on
Galilee, then why did He permit all those people to die, including those who
died because the Cathedral fell on them as they worshiped Him? This is known as
the problem of theodicy – and I don’t
really want to pursue it now. We can talk about it at coffee hour, but my view,
for now, is that God’s answer to Job is all we’ve got: there is more to all this than you are aware of.
So, what about the storm and the sleeping Jesus? The disciples are afraid they are going to
die, so they rouse Him. Their anxiety is
obvious in their accusation that He doesn't care. Isn't it interesting that this is Voltaire’s
accusation, pretty much? Obviously, God
doesn't care about those 100,000 Lisboans.
So, the Godman wakes up and says "Peace, be still!" And then the storm quieted down. But what if He were rebuking not the storm,
but the disciples' anxiety? "Sit
down and shut up," again. “Chill
and let Me sleep!” Could it be that the disciples' fear was an exaggerated
reaction to what was really happening?
Maybe the storm that needed calming was within their own hearts. Maybe the sea whose waves He quieted was
their own consciousness. Maybe, as they looked back on the incident, they
remembered feeling really afraid, and then comforted by His words, which they
later remembered to have calmed the external source of their fear, when in fact
He had calmed them down. “Peace! Be
still!” may have been our Lord’s reaction to His rude awakening. But as the
story was retold over the years until Mark finally wrote it down, the danger of
the storm became the main thing, not the disciples’ anxiety. In other words,
maybe the story reifies and objectifies what was going on in the consciousness
of the disciples themselves. Maybe their memory projects their inner state onto
the sea. Jesus seems to suggest as much
in His question: "Why are you
afraid? Have you still no faith?"
I believe in miracles.
I see no reason to reject the literal sense of the story. But, one might also ask, which is more
miraculous: turning a dangerous storm into a dead calm, or pacifying anxious
hearts? Which is more difficult, to
cancel an earthquake, or to win our love in spite of it? The Collect says that
God “never fail(s) to help and
govern those whom (God has) set upon the sure foundation of (divine) lovingkindness.”
What is it to be set there, if not to
surrender our anxieties? What is the
faith that the disciples, in Jesus’s words, still
did not have, if not trust in God's unfailing lovingkindness, all evidence
to the contrary notwithstanding? What is the case against that lovingkindness,
if not the entirely reasonable complaint of Job, who thinks God ought to do
better? God’s answer comes from the whirlwind, that is, from violent creation
itself, from the storm, from within the very earthquake:
"Where were you when I laid the foundation
of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements-- surely you
know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
É
AMEN!
MARANATHA!
COME, LORD JESUS!
Pentecost 3, Proper 6, June 14, 2015
The coming of the
Kingdom of God is the subject of the Gospels in this season. When Jesus speaks of it, He speaks in
parables only — metaphorical images that
give us a feeling for the reality that is beginning to appear. The Kingdom of God is like a seed planted
that grows into a plant producing much fruit, or even into a tree.
The significance of this image is that the seed grows by
itself, without any human help– once it is planted. I interpret this to mean that the Kingdom of
God comes upon us from without. It does
not come naturally out of our world, but it is given by God. The seed, for example, is not of our
making. Nor is the promise. It contains.
There is very little that we can do — nothing. In fact if we can do to make the seed grow or
bear fruit. The mere fact that we,
ignorant as we are of what we are doing, are clever enough to plant the seed
does not mean that we are the source or beginning of the process.
Nevertheless, we do have a role to play: we must plant the
seed: we must be willing to cooperate in a small way, with God's intentions
here. In fact, our cooperation is
indispensable, even though it has next to nothing to do with the process of
germination, sprouting, growth, and fruition.
Still, the whole process needs us.
God will bring the , kingdom.
That's a promise. We have to
trust that promise enough to cooperate with it, in however small a way.
The seed itself contains everything necessary for the future
harvest. All we do is put it in the
ground. True enough, without that effort
the seed would never germinate and grow.
But the planting, though necessary, is only a small part of the
process. Our human effort is not,
itself, the creativity. The, kingdom of
God is entirely the gift of God. Still,
it can occur only with our cooperation.
That doesn't mean that we can take credit for it, any more than the
farmer can take credit for the incredible transformation of the seed into the
plant and harvest.
The agricultural parables show the kingdom of God as a
process in time. The time from planting
to harvest may be understood as human history —history of the material creation., History is a tale told by us humans. "Human", Adam, means dirt. We are the
material creation brought into self-consciousness, and history is the story we
tell about ourselves. That is the way in
which we plant the seed. That is our
small contribution to the process of the Coming of the Kingdom of God. The Promise of the Kingdom, like the fruit of
the plant, can’t happen without the consciousness of the dirt itself, but with
the addition of that consciousness, there is what we call history. Salvation happens in history.
Not a particular history, perhaps, but in the fact of history
itself. I do not propose any particular
theory of history a la Hegel or Marx,
but just that salvation is historical — it occurs in time, just as the plant
germinates and grows to fruition in time.
It is not a deliverance from time, but the sanctification of time. The inner life of private struggle for
mystical transcendence is good and it is part of the Christian life, but it is
not its end. The end is the Kingdom of God come, as we pray, on earth as in
heaven. And that Kingdom is communal:
interpersonal communion, extended to all flesh.
We understand salvation not as the individual Vision of God, but as
incorporation into the living Body of Christ.
Salvation is communal.
It has to do with relationships among people. It is coming together into communion. That communion can happen in this world in
history only.
The agricultural parables show us that the earth and its
history are not to be escaped. They are
not merely the backdrop or the theater of our individual struggles for
perfection. To be left behind. Once we have transcended our ego. And ego-transcendence. The earth and its
history are what the Kingdom of God is all about.
The agricultural parables show us that human life in this
world — human history — the history of material creation becoming conscious of
itself and its relationship to its Creator, is the vehicle of salvation. We are not saved from the world and its
history, but we are saved in it and for it.
And through us, the creation itself is transfigured and saved.
Corpus Christi June 7 2015
Corpus Christi
June 7 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
Alleluia. You bring forth
bread from the earth, and
wine that makes glad the
human heart. Alleluia, Alleluia.
+ In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
I would
remind you of something, I'm sure I’ve mentioned sometime in the past. The popularly influential Jesuit
paleontologist and visionary theologian, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once found
himself alone in the Gobi desert, without the bread and wine necessary to
celebrate Mass. He invoked the Holy
Spirit on the entire cosmos, in their place.
You can read this meditation in his essay called "Mass on the
World". Although, perhaps, not
entirely orthodox in the small sense of the term, the Eucharistic theology was
entirely orthodox in a larger sense: the Body of Christ realized in the
Eucharistic Liturgy, represents the Transfiguration of the whole world.
O bottomless mystery, and endless paradox! It can be compared to the notion of law and
sin as separation, which we considered on Pentecost: the law is not itself sin,
but in setting us apart the law convicts us of sin, in that it creates in us
the consciousness of separation.
Likewise, the bread and wine that we consecrate are set apart from the
rest of the world, to be made holy, yet, at the same time, they represent the
world. This holiness-as-apartness is for the sake of consecrating the world; it
is necessary to holiness-as-wholeness.
We witness this out-pouring of the Spirit at every Eucharist.
As we invoke the Holy Spirit on our bread and wine, the whole world becomes the
Body of Christ on our altar, every time.
God, through the mouth of the Holy Prophet Joel, said that in latter
days. "I will pour out my Spirit
upon all flesh." This promise is fulfilled
at Pentecost. But the event of the
Tongues in Jerusalem was only the beginning. The fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy
is an ongoing event, the Holy
Spirit’s pouring upon us continues in all time after Pentecost. This is
anything but ordinary time, in the ordinary sense of the word as quotidian
or hum-drum. This time of creation’s drenching in the Holy Spirit is extraordinary to say the least.
"All flesh" means all creation separate from God. All
flesh means creation understood as entropy
and stasis. All
flesh is lifeless matter, tending toward more and more separation. What cosmologists now call "dark
energy" pushes everything apart from everything else, in a struggle with
gravity that seeks to pull it back together.
If dark energy wins, everything continues to get farther apart from
everything else ad infinitum. Every
atom, every particle utterly separate and alone and lifeless. If gravity prevails, everything eventually
collapses into a black hole as in the beginning: the whole universe compacted
into something about the size of a baseball, no complexity or diversity, just a
uniform and incredibly dense plasma, equally lifeless. Either way current cosmology promises us
nothing but death.
The Body of Christ is the Cosmos brought to life by the Holy
Spirit, poured out on all flesh in these latter days. The Church born on Pentecost, is the
firstfruit; the End Result — what Father Teilhard called the "Omega
Point" — will be the whole cosmos transfigured, spiritualized in the sense
of being made alive by the Holy Spirit, so that — as Paul wrote — God shall be
All in all.
Anciently, the Paschal cycle ended on the day of
Pentecost. Later, Western custom
observed the first Sunday after Pentecost, as the Feast of the Holy Trinity,
and our time sees the increasing observance of the second Sunday after
Pentecost, as the Solemnity of the Body of Christ. I think this is appropriate, since the
pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon all flesh, which began at Pentecost,
started the process of revelation in which the Holy Spirit leads humanity into
all truth, which we celebrate on Trinity Sunday. And then, on Corpus Christi, we celebrate the
transubstantiation of flesh into Body, as the Holy Spirit, poured out on all
flesh, incorporates all material creation into the Divine Society of Father,
Son and Holy Spirit.
The Second
Person is God's Word, and the Third Person is God's Spirit, or Breath. As we must expel breath in order to speak, so
in our analogy God sends forth the Holy Spirit in uttering the creative Word,
All three Persons act together to create the cosmos when God says: "Let
there be light.
Now is the New Creation, when God speaks a second time,
saying of all creation, "This is my Body."
ALLELUIA!
YOU
GAVE THEM BREAD FROM HEAVEN
CONTAINING IN ITSELF ALL SWEETNESS.
CONTAINING IN ITSELF ALL SWEETNESS.
ALLELUIA! ALLELUIA!
Trinity June 1 2015
Trinity
June 1 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit
.
+ In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
It is
customary to observe that Trinity Sunday is the only, Prayerbook feast
dedicated to a doctrine instead of a Biblical event or person. While this is strictly true, it could also be
argued that the Feast of the Holy Trinity celebrates the ongoing fulfillment of
our Lord’s biblical promise to send the Holy Spirit to lead us into all
truth. The event it commemorates is a
process.
Jesus commanded us to baptize all peoples in the Name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
We noticed that the Creation story in Genesis told of God, God’s Spirit,
and God’s Word. Pondering all this, the
Church eventually arrived at an open-ended and partial understanding of God,
which we expressed in the philosophical terms of the time (the Fourth century),
not without enormous controversy. One of
the greatest minds participating was Hilary of Poitiers, who wrote:
We are compelled to attempt what is
unattainable, to climb where we cannot reach, to speak what we cannot
utter. Instead of the bare adoration of
faith we are compelled to entrust the deep things of religion to the perils of
human expression.
Trinity
Sunday celebrates the historical event of the Church’s experience of this
compulsion by the Holy Spirit.
To say anything at all ran the risk of error. To say nothing was impossible, because of the
Holy Spirit. As on the First Pentecost,
when the Apostles could not keep silent, but found they had to speak in many
languages, so their successors were "compelled to entrust the deep things
of religion to the perils of human expression." The dogma of the Most Holy and Life-giving
Trinity was the result. This Festival
celebrates not only the dogma itself, but the event of its development.
Hilary spoke of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as "and
the infinity of endless being, the perfect reflection of the divine image, and
the mutual enjoyment of the gift."
He also insisted that the Three Persons were really distinct, but only
in their origin. Each person participates
completely in the other two: a total permeation of each one by the others, so
that they differ only by the relationship of origin: the Father has really
generated the Son without losing anything of His Nature. The Son and the Spirit have received and
contain in Themselves everything of the Father, equal to Him in every way. The Life of the three Divine Persons is a
"dancing within one another," as St. John of Damascus would say 400
years later.
The gradual revelation of the inner Life of
God, though ultimately incomprehensible, is far from meaningless. The dogma glorifies God as Infinite
Community, in which the Persons are united in Infinite Love. This could be what the Apostle meant when he
said "God is Love." Since it
is also a matter of dogma that human beings are made in the image of God, it is
suggested that our life as God’s image means communal life, what one modern
Greek theologian called "being as Communion." All humanity — and through us all creation —
are called to be one as Jesus and the Father are One, that is, neither losing
our distinct identities nor separating from one another in any way.
Today we celebrate the Divine Unity in Trinity; next week, we
celebrate the incorporation of all creation into that “Infinity of endless
Being” in the Feast of the Body of Christ.
HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! IS THE LORD OF HOSTS,
WHO WAS AND IS AND IS TO COME
Pentecost May 24, 2015
Pentecost
May 24, 2015
Holy Trinity & St.
Anskar
When the Spirit of truth
comes, He will guide you into all truth.
.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
Pentecost
celebrates the giving of the law on Sinai marked by thunder and lightning
flashes. It is no coincidence that the
Holy Spirit fell upon the Apostles on the same feast, with the sound of a
mighty wind and flashes of flame, which we call tongues, identifying the Light
of the Spirit with the new capacity to address all peoples in understandable
language. It is tempting to see a contrast
or opposition between these two events: Law on Mount Sinai, Spirit on Mount
Zion. This may be a mistake. After all, we affirm in the Creed that the
Holy Spirit "spoke through the prophets," the chief of whom was Moses. What Moses brought down from the thunder and
lightning on Sinai was the gift of the Spirit, Who spoke through him.
It was Paul who noticed the paradox: the law convicted us of
sin. Some gift! Without
the law, there is no sin, Paul observed.
This is a paraphrase of an old Roman adage: without law, there is no
crime, woith which Citizen Paul would have been familiar. I always thought that was all it meant. Without the law, human beings don't know
right from wrong. We have no notion that
we ought to do the things the Law commands and not to do the things it
forbids. We had to be taught the
difference between right and wrong. But
is that all? Is Paul's observation that
without the law, there is no sin, simply a theological adaptation of the Roman
adage? I got to thinking about that in
the context of the notion of sin as separation.
The children of Israel are supposed to obey the law in order
to fulfill their part of the covenant with God, Who freed them from slavery. They are to be God's people. A holy people. A people set apart, separate from other
people. That is what makes them
holy. That's what it means to be holy,
to be set apart, and the Law is what distinguishes them from everybody
else. But hold on! If sin is separation and apartness, then it
seems as though holiness, defined this way – the consciousness of being apart from others and
carefully maintaining distinctions by ethical norms and ritual practices – is
sin itself!
Isn't that what Paul was wrestling with in his Epistle to the
Romans? The paradox is precisely this:
the law sets us apart, and thereby
imprisons us in sin, which is the condition of being apart. No wonder Paul kind of pulls out his hair,
rhetorically, asking “does that mean that the law is sin? God forbid!”
Yet, the very holiness the Law produces brings also a sense of
alienation: a communal identity of separateness. We needed a notion of holiness, but it wasn't
enough by itself. The Law had to be
fulfilled, not only in the sense of being observed, but in the sense of being
completed. Christ had to nail sin to the
Cross — He had to nail apartness and separation to the Cross, publicly, and
finally destroying alienation — what Paul called the dividing wall of hostility.
Thus Christ brought a new kind of holiness to creation: the holiness that is
not apartness and separation and distinctness, but the holiness that is
wholeness and communion: what the Apostle called Grace.
As Paul says in another place, the law was our pedagogue unto Christ. We had to have the gift of the Spirit in the
form of Law, in order to develop the notion of justice and communal oneness as
our part of the Covenant with God. But
in the fullness of time, when we were ready, — when the pedagogue completed the
service of bringing us to the Messiah — we found ourselves no longer under the
constraints of observances and practices intended to set us off from other
people. Now, we were brought together
with all peoples into the universal Communion that overcomes the apartness
(sin) that the Law illuminated at the very same time it was making us into the
Community of God's people.
The law is not sin – God forbid! — But the law "convicts us." Of sin — not so much that the law reveals our
own hopeless inability to fulfill the law, but that the law convinces us that
we are separate from all other peoples.
In that way, the law brought sin into clear view, in such a way that
Paul could also say that whoever is under the Law is under a curse. Apartness and alienation are, in fact, a
curse — a curse that the Law reveals.
But at the very same time, the Law was teaching us to honor
God, and our parents, to renounce human sacrifice and other idolatrous
abominations, to sanctify time instead of place, and to respect one another in
a minimal way. It also taught us to reboot the economy every fifty years. Among
God’s holy people there were to be no permanent classes of haves and have-nots
no castes, no hereditary privilege.
Law and spirit are not opposed. As the Law came down on Pentecost,
so did the Spirit. And Moses successors, the Prophets of Israel, through whom
the Spirit spoke, increasingly proclaimed the Law more than a mere ethnic
marker to set a particular people apart from everybody else: the Law of Moses
was to make them a Light to the Nations – holy in the sense of separate, so
that they could act on behalf of
everyone else, to make humanity holy in the sense of whole, in Jesus the
Messiah. There would be no more
distinction between Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free. All are one in the New Israel created by the Fire of the Holy Spirit
Israel was
to be a Light to Enlighten the Nations. The Fathers called the Spirit Light, and Light illuminated the
Apostles, when Jesus Christ cast fire upon the earth as He had promised,
causing them to preach the Good News to all peoples. This good news is God's intention to unite with all creation, through a new,
unified humanity. The ancient fathers
called this process divinization. Here is what St. Basil of Cæsaræa said:
Through the Spirit’s aid
hearts are raised on high, the weak. Are led by the hand, and those who are
reaching forward in life are led on to perfection. Shining on those whose hearts are purified
and stainless, the Spirit makes them truly spiritual through the intimate union
they have been granted. As when a ray of
light touches a polished and shining surface, and the object becomes even more
brilliant, so too souls that are enlightened by the, spirit become spiritual
themselves and reflect their grace to others.
The grace of the Holy
Spirit enables them to foresee the shape of the future, to penetrate mysteries,
to discern the meaning of obscure realities, to receive spiritual blessings, to
focus their minds on their heavenly citizenship, and to dance with the
Angels. This is their joy on ending and their
perseverance in God unfailing. Thus, do
they become like God, and most wonderful of all, thus do they themselves become
divine.
ALLELUIA!
THE SPIRIT OF GOD FILLS THE WHOLE WORLD, COME, LET US ADORE.
VII Easter May 17, 2015
VII Easter
May 17, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
God is gone up with a shout,
the LORD with the sound of a trumpet.
.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
When the Son
became flesh He did not leave the Father. He did not go anywhere. Hold that
thought. For now, how about this: GLORY means
the Holy Spirit. When Jesus says that He gives us the Glory that the Father gave Him, He is speaking of the Holy Spirit. Glory, here means something more than
reputation: it is the Light that shone round about the shepherds outside
Bethlehem.
Eastern theologians
called this visible Glory the Uncreated
Light. It is not the essence of God,
but neither is it a creature of God. It is energy that proceeds out of God’s
essence, as the warmth of the sun proceeds out of the sun itself. This seems to
me close to the notion that God is Light.
At least in some sense, light and God are connected. Is this merely metaphor? Maybe not. The shepherds saw something, and
so did the Apostles on the mountain of the Transfiguration. I understand that
modern physics regards matter and energy as a kind of continuum. In a sense, all matter is nothing but energy
organized into patterns. Some of this energy is visible, some isn’t. This
brings us to the Mystery of the Ascension, when the visible energy of Jesus’
risen Body became invisible.
The Ascension is an
aspect of the Incarnation. If God became human, and if in the flesh of Jesus
Christ dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily as St. Paul teaches, where
is He now? What happened to this Body after the Resurrection? The Ascension into heaven and enthronement on
the right hand of God is the dogmatic answer. But what on earth (!) does that
mean?
A few years ago, I
said that it was easier for the ancients to wrap this up because of their view
of the cosmos as three-storied: earth where we live, Hades underneath (where,
before Christ, all the miserable shades of the dead were imprisoned), and then
heaven – up above, where God is. So we
affirm as a matter of creedal dogma that the Son “came down” from heaven, and
returned thereto to sit at the right hand of the Father.
But where is this
heaven? I was mistaken about the early theologians, because using the
philosophy and science of their own age, they recognized that heaven was not a
place. After all, God is outside time and space. God has no location. God is
not up there above the clouds or among the stars. So where is He? He is
everywhere and nowhere. The categories of place, as found in the biblical
three-storied cosmology, do not apply to a pure Spirit. It is a mistake in
thinking to ask where God is, just as it is a mistake to ask what is north of
the North Pole. The category just doesn’t apply. Just as He did not go anywhere
when He came down from Heaven, so He did not go anywhere when He ascended to
the right hand of God. That is what the 4th-Century theologians
taught. OK, so what happened to Jesus’ Body and what do we mean when we say
that He ascended into heaven?
Perhaps it has
something to do with light and glory. As the ancient Mothers and Fathers used
the cosmological categories of their era, we are free to do the same, and our
modern physics is not entirely useless here. Probably more helpful to Christian
dogma, in fact, than the three-storied universe. If all matter is energy, it
means that creation is light organized by myriads of patterns, maybe we can say
that the Resurrection of Christ had something to do with the previous pattern
of His Body taking shape in a new and incorruptible way, so that it could be
seen and heard and fed, but was also capable of being several places at once
and passing through locked doors. One scholar has suggested that our modern
imagination is open to this kind of weirdness, at least in our science fiction:
“beam me up, Scotty.” Maybe what is beamed up to the Enterprise is the pattern
of light. What the Hindus call the “subtle body.” Not the molecules themselves,
but the pattern of their organization. The scholar suggests that Captain Kirk
might better command, “fax me up,
Scotty”!
Then there is the
unrecognized Lord cautioning Mary Magdalene not to touch Him, because he was
“not yet ascended to the Father.” What does this mysterious warning mean? After the Ascension, she would be
welcome to touch Him? And what about the Holy Shroud of Turin, which seems to
have been imprinted by a burst of light.
Glory. The Holy
Spirit. The images of chariots of fire and floating up in a cloud were the best
the eye-witnesses could do to describe the Glory they saw. What is even more mysterious is the apparent
fact that the Apostles did not experience the Ascension as a loss. You would think that they would have been
devastated by this disappearance. Quite
the opposite, however, they all experienced the Real Presence of the Risen Lord
even more intensely. A later teacher, Leo the Great, would observe that the
Lord’s visible Presence was transferred to the sacraments: now that He was
ascended, they could touch Him.
The ancient
theologians compared this experience of continuing Presence to the dogma that
the Son never left heaven when He came down from heaven, because heaven is not
a place. It is a relationship to the
Father. That relationship was not broken when the Son “came down from heaven.”
Likewise, the Presence God established with
creation in the Incarnation did not end with the Ascension. The symbolic
journey of the Son back to the Father, now clothed with human flesh, is a way
of saying that God’s Incarnation is permanent, the marriage with Creation
indissoluble. Jesus did not go anywhere. Heaven and the right hand of God are
not a place, but a way of being – a way of being that has to do with light and
glory. The account in the Acts underscores this Mystery by telling us how the
angels ridiculed the Apostles for gazing into the sky. The Ascension is not
about going anywhere, it is about the
transfiguration of the world.
After the initial
resurrection appearances, the Apostles were ready to go back to their previous,
ordinary life. Peter announces that he
is "going fishing." But after
the Ascension, their reaction is just the opposite: the Apostles wait, as a
community, for the Holy Spirit — the Glory
that Christ became — to descend upon them in the holy city, as it were in
tongues of fire (light again), and then they go out and change the world. The Ascension transformed them into
completely new people. Our new Collect gets it right, I think:
…Jesus Christ
ascended far above all heavens that He might fill all things:
The Ascension is the completion of the Resurrection, as the
Lord’s Glorified Body unites with all things – ta panta – all the energy bound in what we call “matter,” speaking
from within the limits of our sensory perception. The Collect goes on to ask
that God will give us new organs of perception: faith to perceive that,
according to His promise, He abides with his Church on earth, even to the end
of the ages.
This faith is the new
Apostolic capacity to perceive the Glory of God – the Light that fills the
whole creation – the gift of the Holy
Spirit, Who bestows that capacity, and Who is that Glory. The grace to see the
universe suffused with the Divine Energies, the Body of Christ as Light filling
all things. As the post-Communion prayer from the Liturgy of St. John
Chrysostom has it: “We have beheld your Resurrection, O Christ our God, we have
seen the True Light, we have found the true faith, we have received the Heavenly
Spirit.” And as St. Paul says to the Corinthians:
… we all, with unveiled face,
beholding the Glory of the Lord, are being changed into His likeness from
one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
Alleluia!
Christ the Lord
ascends into heaven.
Come let us adore Him.
Alleluia!
VI Easter May 10, 2015
VI Easter
May 10, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
You have prepared for those
who love you such good things as surpass our understanding… which exceed all
that we can desire.
.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
What God has
prepared for us surpasses understanding. We can’t even imagine it and so we
can’t desire it. God’s promises outdo
our knowledge and our love. They exceed all that we can desire, insofar as
desire is the longing to get
something. As I desire to get the lilacs, blooming now in their fragile glory.
I want to pick them and take them home.
The lilacs also make me think of Frankenstein’s monster. We
err when we think of the story and the movie as comical. It is natural to laugh
at what might otherwise terrify us, but what is really frightening about
Frankenstein is what the monster reveals about humanity. Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelly’s story is entirely serious: a horrifying look at human nature.
I have always felt sorry for the monster – at least as
portrayed by the great Boris Karloff. The monster himself is pitiful. He is
innocent. He is trying to do his best. He is trying to become human – as each
of us is, unless we have given up to depravity. He is also a blank slate, free
of sin. He knows nothing. Imitation is the fundamental human trait, and the
poor monster is trying to become human by imitating humans. He sees a little
girl. He immediately loves her beauty. He wants to relate to her as a human
being relates to delicate, beautiful things. He desires to be like her. What is he to do? He sees that this
perfectly innocent and beautiful creature is picking flowers and throwing them
into the lake. (Innocent though she be, she is not free of original sin. She desires the beautiful flowers, so she
picks them.) Imitating her, the monster does the same. He grabs the little girl
and throws her into the lake.
This is tragedy. This is our predicament – at least in part.
The monster is, in a way, better than the little girl, because he doesn’t want
to possess her – he want to be like her; he wants to imitate her humanity. She
is a flower – more beautiful even than the flowers she is killing and throwing
into the lake – and he does as she does.
But the little girl – the little human – desires the flowers in
the sense that she wants to get
them. To get them and to have them
just as I want to take the lilacs home. This is her response to beauty; in her
desire, she ends up killing the beauty that she loves, and she teaches the
monster to do the same. That is what is wrong with desire.
Desire in this sense is the urge to fill up something we feel
we lack. Desire is also our response to beauty: our longing to unite with it,
to be it. One way to do that is to
try to possess it and to devour it, which doesn’t work. I want to pick the lilacs and take them home
and put them in a vase, in which I know they will be beautiful only for a
couple of days. But I still want to do it. I want the lilacs. This desire to possess and to devour and consume
the beautiful is what the ancients called eros.
Socrates said the lover, in this sense, is always needy. We desire what we do not have. We don’t desire what we DO
have, but what we don’t have: what we need. In colloquial English, we use the
word want to mean both: what we lack and what we desire.
But when we try to fulfill our desire, we find that we
cannot. Satisfaction is a let-down, as Mary Shelly’s friend, John Keats,
observed, telling his skylark,
…thou lovest, but ne’er knew
love’s sad saiety.
Sad satiey. So-called fulfillment of desire is not
fulfillment at all, but a disappointment. Then the desire – the need – returns
and pretty soon we are on the road to addiction. That’s what Frankenstein is
about, among other things. We can understand that. We have all experienced it.
What we cannot understand is what God has prepared for us:
such good things as surpass our
understanding, exceeding all that we can desire. If we could desire them, in
the erotic sense, they would disappoint. To obtain these unimaginable promises
is not to get them, to snatch them and devour them, as our
first parents snatched the forbidden fruit, as the little girl snatched the
flowers, as the monster snatched her
in his attempt to be like her, as I
want to snatch the lilacs; to obtain the promises of God is to love in another
sense that does not know “love’s sad satiety,” to love in the sense of caritas or agape, which is to say self-forgetful, self-giving love. What the Neo-Platonist
fathers of the Church called the attraction of like to like.
According to Plato, opposites do not attract, as in a magnetic
field, but like attracts like. We are, in our deepest reality, the image and
likeness of God, Who is perfectly beautiful – Who indeed, IS Beauty, and so we are
attracted to God – not as I am attracted to the lilacs, desiring to possess by
devouring and thus to slake my desire, but to become one with God in some
other, unimaginable sense, by self-giving, self-transcendence.
This is to obtain the promises that exceed all that we can desire.
But it is not something that can be done
in the sense of being accomplished or
completed. We cannot ever obtain union with God in the sense of getting it, for God is infinite. The
more we behold of the Divine Beauty, the more we are capable of enjoying it,
world without end. God is infinite and we are finite; but God has made us
capable of infinite growth. God has prepared for us such things as pass our
understanding. That is the great insight of our holy father Gregory of Nyssa.
Who saw eternal life – in prayerbook language – as endless growth in the
knowledge and love of God. Here is what he relates from his dying elder sister,
Macrina, in their dialogue on the Soul and the Resurrection:
Our rational nature came to birth for this purpose… a kind of
vessels and voluntary receptacles for souls were fashioned by the Wisdom which
constructed the universe, in order that there should be a container to receive
good things, a container which would always become larger with the addition of
what would be poured into it. For the
participation in the Divine Good is such that it makes anyone into whom it
enters greater and more receptive. As it
is taken up it increases the power and magnitude of the recipient, so that the person who is nourished always
grows and never ceases from growth.
Since the fountain of good things flows unfailingly, the nature of the
participants who use all the influx to add to their own magnitude (because
nothing of what is received is superfluous or useless) becomes at the same time
both more capable of attracting the better and more able to contain it. Each adds to the other: the one who is
nourished gains greater power from the abundance of good things, and the
nourishing supply rises in flood to match the increase of the one who is
growing. Those whose growth is not cut
off by any limit will surely continue to increase in this manner. Then, when such prospects lie before us, do
you complain because nature proceeds by the road which is ordained for us
towards its proper goal? Otherwise our
course cannot reach those good things, if we have not shaken off from our soul
this heaviness which weighs us down (I mean this earthly burden).… But if you have some fondness for this body
and you are sorry to be on yoke from what you love, do not be in despair about
this either. For although this bodily
covering is now dissolved by death, you will see it woven again from the same
elements, not indeed with its present coarse and heavy texture, but with the
thread respun to something subtler and lighter, so that the beloved body may be
with you and restored to you again in better and even more lovable beauty.
Alleluia! Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down
death by death, and giving life to all in the tombs. Alleluia!
V Easter May 3, 2015
V Easter
May 3, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
As in Adam all die, even so
in Christ shall all be made alive.
.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
We are born
into a sense of alienation — apartness.
This sense of apartness is what we call sin. The opposite of sin is love. John tells us that God is love. I think this is more than a metaphor. Being is life in love. In fact life is love. Almost the same
word, in German: lebe, liebe.
. Without God there is no life,
which means that without love there is no life.
So, in Adam — the symbol of apartness, all die. The New Adam destroys apartness — In Christ shall all be made alive. Interpersonal communion in love is
life. The only life.
Today’s Collect prays for know-ledge: that we may so perfectly… know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the
truth, and the life that we may steadfastly follow His steps in the way that
leads to eternal life. But this
complete knowledge of Jesus Christ is not information that we receive and
understand, or a creedal affirmation about Jesus that we accept. Complete knowledge of Jesus Christ is the
experience of God as love. How do we
experience that? By loving.
John tells us that anyone who loves is born of God and knows
God. That is a pretty radical thing to
say. Anyone who loves.
Anyone. For love is the opposite
of sin and death — love destroys apartness; love is eternal life. To love completely is to know Jesus Christ to
be the way, the truth, and the life.
This is so, even for those who do not know His Name. That's why Karl Rahner cal-led them
"anonymous Christians," Christians who do not know the Name. Because they love, they are born of God and
know God, even if they don’t k now His Name.
This is the
Gospel: Good News indeed! All who love are born of God and know God…
for God is Love. Furthermore, Love
is victorious and invincible. All who
love are ultimately immune to death.
Christ’s death overcomes the ultimate apartness, trampling upon death by
death, and bestowing Life — that is, the Communion of Love — upon all who had
been subject to death. As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall
all be made alive. Speaking symbolically, the stronghold of death is the
place where there is neither love nor life – the place of utter apartness,
which is to say nothingness. By breaking into that stronghold of non-love and
non-life, God has freed Adam in whom all die, and united him to the Body of His
Son, in Whom all are made alive.
Having died
to sin – having gone to utter apartness – once, Christ will never die again,
death has no more dominion over Him. Nor over any who love. Christians are
privileged to know this Good News – to think of ourselves consciously as
enjoying eternal life right now – to consider ourselves dead to sin and alive
to God in Christ Jesus. That doesn’t mean that Christians are the only ones in
that blessed state. All who love are born
of God and know God. We may not even
be the only ones who have the joy of consciously considering ourselves dead to
sin and alive to God, as understood in these terms. All we know for sure is
that we are among the blessed. As
John says: God abides in those who
confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known
and believe the love that God has for us.
John tells us nothing about those who do not confess that
Jesus is the Son of God. He just says that all
who love are born of God and know God. And that those who say they love God
but do not love their neighbors are liars. Even if I confess that Jesus is the
Son of God, I do not abide in God if I do not love, for God is love. So
whatever I may think I am confessing, I am not actually confessing Jesus as the
Son of God if I do not love. God is love,
and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. To be perfected in love, perhaps, is to live
more and more in conscious awareness of abiding in love. Maybe that’s what Paul
means when he advises us to consider
ourselves dead to sin: to be
aware that we are beyond the reach of apartness and alienation. Perfection
would be constant awareness of abiding in the love of God. Fearlessness is the
sign of that perfection, because perfect
love casts out fear.
As in Adam all die, even so in Christ
shall all be made alive.
Alleluia! Christ is risen from the
dead, trampling down death by death, and giving life to all in the tombs.
Alleluia!
Easter 4, 2015
SERMON FOR THE FOURTH
SUNDAY OF EASTER
April 26, 2015
HOLY TRINITY
& ST. ANSKAR
…the wolf snatches them and scatters them…
+In the
Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity.
The wolf scatters. The Good Shepherd gathers. I want to
suggest a possible interpretation of this famous metaphor: a Trinitarian one
about human consciousness. All the world
religions seem to be about getting together, overcoming our apartness, our sin, the Teutonic root of which means apart. Sin is, first of all,
not a misdeed but a state of consciousness.
Our misdeeds arise out of our congenital sense of being apart. The Wolf scatters us. The Wolf drives us apart; the Good Shepherd
gathers us. The Good Shepherd brings us together.
In the parliament of the great world religions, Christianity
has to offer the revelation that apartness is overcome not by dissolution into
the One, but by interpersonal communion as revealed in the Most Holy And
Life-giving Trinity. The gathered flock
is one, but there are still many sheep. As individuals, we go astray. "All
we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own
way." That is the definition of individual. What if this silly, ovine scatteredness is about
our self-consciousness? Not our transgressions, but our sense of being apart?
The wolf scatters. The Good Shepherd gathers. How does He gather? By "laying down His life for the
sheep.” The Blood of Christ overcomes
our apartness. The Blood of Christ makes
Communion. Blood is life. The Blood of
Christ is the Life of Christ. Since Christ is one with God, His human Blood is
the Life of God, the Life God now shares with us, and through us with the whole
cosmos. The Blood of Christ is the Life of the New Creation.
John the Divine says that, as Christ laid down His life for
us, so we ought to lay down our lives for one another. Obviously, John did not mean that we all
ought to try to get ourselves crucified!
At least not literally. I think what he did mean was that we ought to
renounce our sheepish, individual sense of life as separate, scattered selves
in favor of the Life of interpersonal Communion. Probably that is what Jesus meant when He
said that those who are willing to lose their life will find life. What they
find is Eternal Life in the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit, which is to say the
Church, Christ's Body , now living on Earth in history, quickened by His Blood,
and at the same time already participating in the Life of the Three Divine Persons
by the same Spirit — the Spirit that filled The Holy Apostle Peter, causing him
to inform the high priests that “There is salvation in no one else, for there
is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.”
Does that mean that perdition and destruction await those who
do not know the Name? I don’t think so. Just the opposite, in fact. Jesus is
quite clear that He has plenty of sheep “who do not belong to this fold.” But
they listen to His voice and he knows THEM by name. Still, it is only through
the One Who gathers – through the Good Shepherd – that we can be saved. Salvation means perfect health – the
wholeness that the cured cripple symbolizes. Wholeness means gathering as
opposed to scattering. Whatever their cultural and conceptual framework, any
who gather in love gather in the Name
of the Good Shepherd, Who defeats the Wolf’s scattering depredation. To be
whole is to be gathered. That is what it means to be saved.
We are not saved by any other Name. We are not saved by
defining ourselves as other than
anyone else. We are not saved by holding ourselves – or our group – apart. We
are saved by the Good Shepherd who overcomes our apartness and gathers us into
one flock together with sheep of all those other folds, who also listen to His
voice and follow Him, though they may not know His Name.
ALLELUIA!
CHRIST IS RISEN FROM THE DEAD,
TRAMPLING DOWN DEATH BY DEATH,
AND BESTOWING LIFE ON ALL IN THE TOMBS!
Easter 2, 2015
SERMON FOR THE
SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER
April 12, 2015
HOLY TRINITY
& ST. ANSKAR
The Blood of Jesus … cleanses us from all sin
+In the
Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity.
The metaphor
of cleansing in Blood is a striking contradiction of traditional religion,
since any contact with blood or dead bodies was considered a defilement. Moreover, no blood was ever to be consumed – that’s the most
basic law of kashrut. Yet Thomas
insisted on precisely that contact: thrusting his hand into the wounded side of
Christ. It’s all about touching the Body. Thomas’s finger of doubt might be seen as our own probing, in the sense that
the Reconciliation of the New Covenant means overcoming our own separation from
Christ’s Body, through even more outrageous contact with His Blood: we are to
drink it.
In the New Covenant of Reconciliation, Blood does not defile,
it purifies. What is impure is the alienation scripture calls sin. Blood is
life. Christ’s Blood is Divine Life – the interpersonal
Communion of the Trinity – poured out to
undo the apartness we call sin. The Precious Blood is not the price of reconciliation in the sense of an appeasement so that God
will forget our debts. The Blood is not a propitiation,
as we used to say, but Life itself, poured out upon us and on the whole
universe. We drink it into our own
mortal bodies, so that God’s Lifeblood flows in our own arteries, and through
us into the whole cosmos. As in Adam all
die, even so in Christ shall ALL be made alive. We say that the Blood of
Christ washes sin away – cleanses us from sin. Yes, but we must stop thinking
of this legalistically. The Blood is Life that does away with sin because the absence we call death and sin are filled
with the Real Presence of the Blood
of Life. As Gregory of Nazianzus said – a few drops recreate the whole
universe.
John writes of Life in
His Name. A life. Not many lives, but one life.
There is only one life. We live
insofar as we participate in it. If we separate ourselves from it, we die –
tautology. If we cut ourselves off from Life, we die. The One Life is the Life of the Trinity – Whom we
call the Most Holy and Life-giving Trinity. The Apostles
understood this Life in His Name in a
startling way: life in common. Everyone renounced individual possession.
Christians have been doing so ever since – and those who do have usually been
sectarians. One thinks of utopian communities like the Amish and Shakers and
Mormons. Or the whole monastic movement, in all its variety. The Christian
answer to the philosophers’ question about the good life is: communal life. The good life is life in which individual possession is no longer an
issue. The opposite is avarice – the will to regard one’s own being as having. The Ancient Fathers, singled it out as the primary distortion
of consciousness that produces separation (sin). Carnal indulgences are not so
serious, though they too can be deadly. Adam and Eve first take and eat. The root of
sin is taking for myself. The result is the Fall into mortality – the
ultimate weakness.
Conversely, the power
of the Apostles’ testimony is juxtaposed with their renunciation of individual
possession. Are we not invited to detect a connection between that power and that
non-possessing? Many Christians have thought so. Whenever somebody suggests
that we ought to imitate the first Apostles in their communalism, the Church
puts on the brakes. “Hold on! This will have to wait until the Second Coming,
otherwise, there will be chaos and misery.” But still, the Church has always
tolerated, even admired, non-possessors like St. Francis and Dorothy Day,
within well-defined limits. In effect, the Church recognizes them as heralds of
the Kingdom. Possession, after all, is a sign not of life, but of death and
apartness.
Sin is just our shorthand for willful separation from Life.
Not immoral actions, but any turning from Life. We all do this continually,
since we are still being brought to life. Like Thomas, we are half in the dark
– we want to ACCEPT Life, but we keep turning away because of our darkened
consciousness. That is Sin – not something for which we deserve to be punished,
but something from which God want to save us – by His Blood.
The Collect speaks of the Paschal Mystery as the New Covenant
of reconciliation. What is reconciliation, if not the breaking down of barriers
among persons – all barriers? If Sin is
separation, Reconciliation is the opposite: communal love. Community property
would have been the natural result of the breakdown of the wall of enmity – the
sense of separation from one another – that the Pascha overcomes through contact with His Blood. To those who have
experienced that, who have already died to the Old Adam and put on the New,
what good at all is the “private ownership of any possessions”? None. Such Adamic grasping is nothing but the
sign of death. It would be laughable if it did not pose such a danger. I refer
not only to individual danger, though avarice and greed are what keep us individuals as opposed to persons in the Apostolic Community. The
danger is also cosmic, because avarice now threatens the very existence of
terrestrial life.
The Good News is that the Blood of Christ IS Life, and Life
Invincible. The world may change unimaginably, but Life and Love are victorious.
It may be that cultures and societies and whole civilizations must pass away –
as do our own mortal bodies – but if they do, it is only to make way for the
universal incorporation into the Risen Body of the One to whom Thomas cries out,
My Lord and My God.
ALLELUIA!
CHRIST IS RISEN FROM THE DEAD,
TRAMPLING DOWN DEATH BY DEATH,
AND BESTOWING LIFE ON ALL IN THE TOMBS!
Maundy Thursday, 2015
SERMON
FOR
MAUNDY
THURSDAY
HOLY
TRINITY & ST. ANSKAR
Take this and eat it
+In the
Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity.
The first Adam stretches forth his hand to
the tree to grasp and take, and we all die.
The New Adam stretches forth His hand to the tree to be nailed on it,
and we all live. Ancient Christians attached great significance to this recapitulation. One that occurred to me
is the beginning of the Words of Institution: Take this and eat it. Jesus
was not the first to offer this advice.
It's pretty much what the serpent said to Eve. The Last Supper is a kind of reënactment of
that Fall, undoing it. Adam and Eve took
and ate, and we all died. The apostles
take and eat and we all live.
The tragic irony of human sin — that is, our conscious
separation from God — is that we are already "like God.", to use the serpent’s language of
seduction. We are created in the Divine
Image and likeness. We don't have to
"take" anything in to achieve that.
It is our nature. But in grabbing
and trying to take it, we disfigure the likeness, and lose it. The profound mythic reality is that we try to
devour everything outside ourselves, in order to enlarge ourselves. We try to
become, by our own will, what we think we ought to be. But we achieve the opposite. We try to be like God, and thus disfigure the
image. We strive to save our life and, by our striving, lose it.
The Last Supper (which is to say, every Eucharist) reverses
this action, undoes the Fall by recapitulation. Now, God Himself tells us to "take and
eat" that which He calls His Body.
As he says in the Fourth Gospel, "My flesh is food indeed, and my
Blood is drink indeed." Now, every
kind of food we eat becomes part of our own body — it is transformed into our
flesh. The heavenly manna that
prefigured this Food became part of the mortal flesh of the, Children of
Israel. They ate it, and they died.
Your ancestors ate manna in the
wilderness, and they died. Whoever eats
my flesh will live forever.
For, alone
of all foods, what God gives tonight does not become our mortal flesh, rather, when
we eat it, our mortal bodies become His
Glorious Body. The ordinary process is
reversed, just as the Godman, reverses the primordial action of the Fall,
commanding us to "take and eat."
In so doing, we not only show forth His Death, we embrace our own: we
give up the illusory life that Adam wants to save and enlarge, and find Eternal
Life, in the Kingdom of God.
The Kingdom is the Church, the New Jerusalem that descends
from Heaven adorned like a bride for the Bridegroom, the Bride of Christ, the
Eucharistic Society of interpersonal love, participating in the Life of the Three
Divine Persons. Jesus Christ reverses
Adam and Eve’s grasping alienation from God and from one another in this
Communion – an entirely new unity, that we call the New Creation.
The Holy Gospel according to St. John, the latest of the four
Gospels, omits any mention of the institution of the Holy Eucharist at the Last
Supper. The other three Gospels speak of
it as happening “after supper." John places something else there the Maundy — the New Commandment to love one
another as He has loved us, and the Lord’s illustration of what He means by
washing the Apostles’ feet. John’s
omission is deliberate. At the Last
Supper, He had reclined upon the Lord’s breast; he was not ignorant of the Holy
Eucharist, rather he assumed that all his readers knew of it too. In fact his whole Gospel is full of
references to it — "I am the True Vine,” “I am the Bread that came down
from heaven,” “Unless you eat my Flesh and drink my Blood you have no life in
you,” and so on. John replaced the story
of the institution of the Sacred Banquet. In order to teach something about its
mystical meaning. He seems to be saying
that the pedelavium, the footwashing,
is another way to express the Mystery of Communion in the Body of Christ.
If the only-Begotten Son has undone the grasping of our
mythical progenitors, he has also overturned our fallen notions of social
relationship. Tonight, He shows us the nature of life in the Kingdom, how to
behave in the New Creation. The New Jerusalem is another reversal: the complete
reversal of domination – social, economic, and political. In the Eucharistic Community, there is no
higher or lower, each is the servant of all.
That is the Mandatum Novum,
the New Commandment we now reënact.
"If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet,
ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that
ye should do as I have done unto you.”
You have given us an example, that we should do to one
another as you have done to us. Despise not the work of your own hands, O Lord!
