Saturday, August 29, 2015
Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 17B ~ August
30, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
Graft in
our hearts the love of your Name
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
There
are number of ways to interpret this prayer. I have, before, emphasized the
mystical practice of the Jesus Prayer, by which we invite God’s Love to be
united to our own personal centers. The prayer
may also refer to our story or narrative about God. As I have also said before, name means reputation, a person's public
story. So, here is an obvious meaning:
May God help us to love the story about His activity.
However,
since God's activity is love for us, the "love of your Name" could
also mean God's love as revealed in the story.
Not our love for the story, but God's love for us as revealed in the story. In that interpretation, we are not asking God
to excite in us feelings of piety or reverence for the Bible and tradition
(although there's nothing wrong with that!); rather, we are asking that the
whole import of the story — the awful Love of God — may take over our innermost
selves.
Graft in our hearts the love of Your Name.
The Love of God's Name also reminds us that
God has a Name known to us. Now, a name is a word. A reputation, a story, a narrative, is
nothing but a collection of words, a description. The presupposition of revealed religion is
that God has given us a self-description. God has identified Himself in language we can
understand. The problem is that our
words are limited, while God is not.
Therefore, the story we have been given is incomplete and, in a certain
sense, faulty. It has to be, because it is given in terms we can understand (up
to a point), but the Object of our understanding is, by definition,
incomprehensible!
Even though God has told us His Name, we must
not pronounce it, because it is holy. That means it is entirely removed from us —
"utterly other." To speak it is
blasphemy. That is the primary meaning
of the Third Commandment: the Name of God is holy, and so we may not even utter
it aloud. As Wittgenstein famously observed, “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof
we must remain silent.”
All this is a colorful way of expressing our
basic problem, as adherents of divine revelation: God has revealed Himself, but God is still
Utterly Other. We may know the Name, but
we must never say it, because to do so is to describe God as less than God, to
"take the Name… in vain." So
what are we to do?
At the very least, I think, we must recognize
that anything we say about God is conditional, provisional, and incomplete. It cannot be otherwise, since we are finite
while God is not. That means that it is
the extreme of arrogance — rising perhaps even to blasphemy — to say that my
pronunciation of the Name is right and yours is wrong. In giving us His Name, God has not given us
certainty, at least not the kind of certainty that warrants persecution of
those who disagree.
At the same time, God has revealed something of Who He is. If we must be very careful not to take the
Name in vain, it is because God Who so commands has already identified Himself as
our Liberator: "I am the LORD your God, Who brought you out of the land of
Egypt, out of the land of slavery." (The original Hebrew has the unutterable Tetragrammaton,
which we render as LORD, all in capitals, to avoid pronouncing it.) Who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
you see! We can say something about this Utterly Other One, something about His
identity. We can say that God has freed
us from slavery, because God has told us so.
The very One Who commands us not to take the Name in vain, also commanded
us to recognize God’s acts of Love in history – and to tell of them. We may not
be able to speak of God out of our own limited consciousness – “Whereof we
cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent” – but it is God Who is speaking
here, not us, Who says
I
am the LORD your God, Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the land
of slavery."
Of
course there will be those who deny this.
We have to say that they are mistaken, because we have experienced God's
liberation and heard God’s self-identification – we know God’s Name. That does not mean that we are permitted to
hate anyone or persecute them, just because they don’t acknowledge the Name. In fact, they may know things about God that
we don't. They may know God by another
Name, which is just as holy and faithful.
That is none of our business.
The paradox is that this salutary humility, arising
out of our recognition of our own limitations, is commanded by the One Who has
revealed Himself to us and identified Himself — Who has, in other words, told
us His Name.
Lately we hear many who describe themselves
as "spiritual but not religious."
I suppose this means that such people recognize within themselves the
desire for the Unnamable One, a desire we would say God has given them. In Augustine's great prayer:
You
have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests
in you.
I suppose our spiritual-but-not-religious
friends hesitate to be duped by all the counterfeits available in the religious
supermarket. I suppose they have come to Wittgenstein’s conclusion about the limits
of our ability to name God. Finally, I suppose they may hesitate to acknowledge
the Name, out of a kind of awe — an instinctive horror of taking the Name in
vain. If so, this is good. "The fear of God is the beginning of
wisdom."
The good news is that God has spoken. God has told us
His Name. The Utterly Other, silent by
definition, is also the Word spoken from the Beginning, Who has become flesh
and dwelt among us. Our own hearts are restless until that Word enters them and
comes to dwell in them — until the Love of the Name grafts itself in our
hearts, as a new vine grafted onto an old root, causing the steady increase in true religion, which is to say increase in
our bond with Love Himself, by the Holy Spirit's nourishment with all goodness,
unto the fruition of good works.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME,
LORD JESUS!
Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 16B ~ August
23, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
This teaching is difficult. Who can accept it?
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
We pray today that we may be gathered
together in unity by God's Holy Spirit, and that we may show forth God's power
among all peoples. The power we are to show forth, however, is not what we
usually mean by power. It is not any
kind of coercion. It is certainly not military domination. This is what power means to the rulers of
this world, as Paul calls them. Imperial power. In the world of separation from
God, human beings try to dominate one another.
The world calls this "power".
It is opposite to the power of God, the Power the Church is sent to show
forth.
The power of God is
the power to give life. That is, it is
the power of love. The power of God is
the power to overcome separation and alienation, which is to say, Sin. The power of God is the power to include
everyone who wishes to be included, and to attract them, as our Lord attracted
the Twelve, who stayed with Him because they could not imagine anything better
– however difficult His teaching. The
considerable number of disciples who did stop going around with Him, show us
that God's power does not coerce. It
attracts, but it does not coerce.
Finally, the power of God is the power to suffer and to overcome evil.
All those evildoers
mentioned in today's Psalm — those whom God will punish and destroy — are not
to be thought of as human persons, but rather the mysterious forces of
wickedness that cause people to find His teaching too difficult. These forces are all around, they are found
in social and economic systems, as well as in our own psyches. Sometimes they are just annoying, at other
times they are really dangerous, in any case, they all are ways of confirming
our separation from God and from one another, and beckoning us toward death.
That is what the Psalm seeks to destroy – not other people, but the spiritual
forces of alienation.
I ran across an image
our individual psyche — ego, consciousness, subconscious — as a bus or light-rail
car, crowded with passengers, each of whom has a particular agenda. They get on and off the car at various stops,
sometimes they get very close to us and bother or delight us. The point is that what we usually think of as
"Me" is more like a crowd of tendencies, agendas, and forces, which —
taken together — are really Me. (This
would explain why other people may sometimes surprise us with their opinions of
who we really are: these opinions may differ vastly from our own.) I can use this picture to understand and
apply the notions of judgment and punishment I encounter in scripture, such as
today’s psalm: the annoying and dangerous passengers on the car will be thrown
out.
Evil shall slay the wicked, *
and those who hate the righteous will be punished.
and those who hate the righteous will be punished.
The LORD ransoms the life of his servants, *
and none will be punished who trust in him.
and none will be punished who trust in him.
The power of God, not
our own effort, improves the crowd on the streetcar of my inner being. Likewise, it improves the whole world, but
not by force. The Power of God in the
world is the power of the Cross: that is the power to endure all the abuse the
world has to offer, and thereby to overcome it.
The Joly Spirit gathers
the Church. That is, we are called out
of individual separation into unbreakable Communion — out of sin into
righteousness, out of slavery into freedom, out of death into life. But that is not the whole deal: it is not
simply about our individual salvation — not just about the improvement of the
population of our individual subway-cars, nor even about our rescue from
individuality itself; because the Church is also commissioned to show forth
God's power among all peoples.
That means the Church
is to exercise the divine capacity to absorb all the world's evil – all the forces of sin, slavery, and death –
and by absorbing to vanquish them. To
show forth the power of God among all peoples is to universalize the Victory of
the Cross.
The Cross, after all,
was the world’s assertion of ultimate power.
Crucifixions showed forth the power of Rome among all the peoples of the Empire. The crucified person
was utterly powerless, totally subject to the will of the Emperor. The Cross was imperial propaganda: the symbol
of the invincibility of Rome, and the folly of opposition, made legible in the
suffering victim. But Jesus Christ has turned that on its head. The Son of David has slain Goliath with his
own sword. The power of God in the world
appears as powerlessness, but Christ has turned the ultimate symbol of imperial
domination into the emblem of liberation from that kind of power, altogether.
The repose of the
Julian Bond has given occasion to remember the civil rights movement of a
half-century ago. The freedom riders,
the voter-registration organizers, the numerous martyrs like our own Jonathan
Daniels, and hundreds of confessors, who suffered short of death, had no power
at all, from the world's point of view. Their only power was their capacity to
suffer without retaliation. Yet, in the words of their hymn, they did
overcome. United by the Holy Spirit,
they showed forth the power of God among the people of the United States.
The Communion of the
Holy Spirit – God’s New Creation, the Church – shares Christ’s power to endure
all things, and by doing so shows forth God’s power among all peoples.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME,
LORD JESUS!
Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 15B ~ August
16, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
Jesus is also an example of Godly life. In other words, He
shows us how to participate in His Liberating work. What did He do? Healed the
sick, forgave sins, raised the dead, and proclaimed good news to the poor. We
too, are called and empowered to do all those things –we being the Church as a
whole. Some of us will literally heal the sick, many more will contribute to
the steady increase in physical well-being of all creatures. Others raise people from the death of
ignorance and slavery, beginning with the proclamation of the Good News of
their supernatural dignity as Gods image. All of us will exercise the divine
power to forgive sins – anything unjust done against ourselves.
Forgivenesss means the obliteration of any rupture caused by
human will. Human beings cannot heal the breach, but God can. The Cross gives
us the power to do the same in His Blood. God gives us the divine power to
forgive so perfectly that it is
as though the acts themselves had
never been done. They are obliterated – forgotten by the omniscient God.
That is the godly
life of which Jesus is the
Example. It is not a question of practicing virtue or developing character, It
is a matter of joining Him in the completion of Creation.
This week, we rejoice in a particularly stellar list of
saints who did so:
Laurence the deacon and martyr
Clare of Assisi
Florence nightingale
Jeremy Taylor
Jonathan Daniels
The Bl. Virgin Mary
These examples of Godly life come from widely different
times and places. You will know their stories, so I can be brief:
Laurence was an early martyr, who joked with those who were
roasting him to death on a grate! For that reason, he has become the patron of
cooks and chefs …and comedians! Although the legend is probably the result of a
copying error, which turned the word suffered into roasted,
Laurence is still important because he personified the diaconal ministry of
active work on behalf of the poor. In fact, the reason the prefect roasted him
was that when he commanded Laurence to produce the Church’s riches, the Deacon
brought the poor and crippled. Laurence had given the poor as much as he could
to keep it from the State. He also hid the Church records, which has made him
the patron of archivists.
Clare was a contemplative, who lived a completely cloistered life – St. Francis other half in the sense that while he went out
into the world to sing about God, she stayed in the monastery.
Jeremy Taylor was a faithful royalist, known for his
unsurpassed English prose and for his advocacy of tolerance in theological
matters. He was imprisoned, briefly, by the Puritans but made a Bishop in his
native Northern Ireland after the restoration. He authored one of our most
exquisite prayers: O God Whose
days are without end and Whose mercies cannot be numbered, make us deeply
sensible of the shortness and uncertainty of human life….
Florence Nightingale was a devout Anglican. Unorthodox only
in that she rejected the class prejudices of Victorian England, including those
of the established church, she was considered eccentric by her
fellow-aristocrats. But she believed her calling to serve the poor was from
God. Her active work on behalf of the sick and wounded, and later on behalf of
women’s rights, is well known. Less so is her contemplative side. She studied
and wrote about the Christian mystical tradition, as well as those of other
cultures, to whom she extended Taylor’s Anglican tolerance. Non-Christian
religions could also lead to God. Her openness in this matter seems
unremarkable to us, but in her time it was another mark of eccentricity or
worse. Florence Nightingale – one of the most famous activists in history – was
also a mystic.
Next Thursday is the 50th anniversary of the martyrdom of
Jonathan Daniels. (We observe August 14, the day his group was jailed in
Alabama, as the commemoration of civil rights marytrs). Upon learning of Daniels' murder, Martin Luther King, Jr.
said that "one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in
my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels". The teenager he
died to save, Ruby Sales, went on to Episcopal Divinity School. She later
worked as a human rights advocate in Washington D.C.
Finally, August 15
is the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin. Her Son is the Firstfruits of the
Resurrection of the Dead, but He is not alone in His bodily glory. The
Assumption of the BVM is an impenetrable mystery, which we can only adore. We
Anglicans do not speak of it officially, even though it is a widely held belief
from ancient times. It points to our hope for every human being and for all
creation: corporeal transfiguration and glorification. What happened to
Christ’s Body happened also to his Mother’s, as it will happen to ours. So that
the Godly Life of which
Jesus and the Saints are examples, will be achieved as actual participation in
the Life of God.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME,
LORD JESUS!
Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 14B ~ August
9, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
….the bread that I will give for the life of the world
is my flesh.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
Today’s first reading suggests
a pattern: Elijah is despondent, God sends what he needs to revive his spirit
and persevere. Elijah tells God he wants to die, and then he goes to
sleep. (Even the greatest of prophets, who had lots of personal experience of
God, had his bad days.) He was depressed and wanted to quit.
But God wouldn’t let
him. God sent an angel with food. Elijah ate and then went back to sleep. That
is the detail in the story that struck me. Even after being visited by an angel
and nurtured with miraculous food, Elijah still wanted to die! God didn’t try
to cheer him up, but neither would He let him sleep. God’s angel kept poking
Elijah until he got up and ate enough to sustain him on the difficult journey
ahead.
So, like last week,
it is possible to see ourselves in Elijah. How often we would just like to go
to sleep. Even when we get what we need, we happily take it and then go BACK to
sleep. But, it seems, God won’t let us alone. For some
reason, God wants Elijah to go on a journey. To Horeb, the mount
of God. Another name for Sinai, perhaps. Doesn’t matter. It means heaven,
where God dwells. The point is Elijah’s three states: sleep, waking, and the
mount of God – ordinary consciousness, spiritual awakening, and
union with God. I notice that this is the same form as last week’s story about
the rebellion in the wilderness: the people despair and complain and God feeds
them, so that they can journey on to some unknown destination, which for all
they know may be purely imaginary.
Once again, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, in that this seems to be the
pattern of our individual spiritual lives, too. Elijah’s example makes it at
once more individual and more communal. I suppose we are never more alone than
when we sleep - except when we die. Of course, sleep is a metaphor
for death. Elijah wants to die: to lose consciousness. But God won’t let him.
God keeps prodding the great prophet and God also provides everything he needs
to keep awake and to keep going. Bread and water.
It is obvious why the
lectionary pairs this account with our Lord’s proclamation that He is the Bread
of Life. Elijah suggests that it is all about consciousness: sleep is our
ordinary consciousness. We have moments of awakening but our inclination is to
go back to our ordinary state. God’s Bread and water help us to wake up more
and more, so that we can go to the mount of God, a third level of
consciousness, perhaps: something beyond imagining.
The bread and water
are the center of Elijah’s story. They are what he must have to make the
journey. They bring him out of sleep into consciousness, out of death into
life. They give him the strength to go to the mount of God. But it’s not just
about him. The bread and water belong to the world.
Christ gives His Flesh for the life of the world, that is, of
all the cosmos together. Furthermore, while water occurs in nature, bread does
not. Bread is a human artifact the product of civilization. Is this meant to suggest
the communal nature of the journey? Even our journey to the unknown heights of
Horeb? To get there, Elijah needs not only God’s gift of water, but
bread, God’s gift through human society. If Elijah’s sleep
represents death and solitary alienation, is not his awakening the opposite:
life and communion? Elijah’s Bread represents the Communion that Paul
describes, the Body in which we are “members of one another.” Is not that the
Communion that brings the world to life?
The bread that I will give for the
life of the world is my flesh.
Bread is the center of the story. Bread
awakens Elijah and Bread also gives him what he needs to go on through the
desert.
Elijah’s destination represents our encounter
with God, which is to say eternal life,
a condition as far exalted above ordinary waking consciousness as that
consciousness is above sleep, a condition as far exalted above ordinary life as
that life is above death. In today’s Gospel, our Lord calls it heaven.
But something is different in the Gospel: Elijah has to go to the
Mount of God. But in the Gospel, Life comes to us. We don’t have to go anywhere;
Life comes down from heaven:
I am the living bread
that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.
AMEN
LORD, GIVE US THIS BREAD ALWAYS!
Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 13B ~
August 2, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
And as Aaron
spoke to the whole congregation of the Israelites, they looked toward the
wilderness, and the glory of the LORD appeared in the cloud.
The LORD spoke to Moses and said,
"I have
heard the complaining of the Israelites; say to them,
`At twilight
you shall eat meat,
and in the
morning you shall have your fill of bread;
then you shall
know that I am the LORD your God. '"
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
Manna comes to the Israelites when they are in the desert and
when they are hungry, and with the manna
comes knowledge of God. In other words, life
and knowledge of God comes to those who go into the wilderness and fast. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Each
soul recapitulates the paschal journey out of Egypt, through the desert, to the
Promised Land. The story of the Exodus and wandering in the wasteland has a
legitimate, spiritual meaning on the level of the soul’s journey. It is not the
only meaning, and it may not even be the most important meaning, but it is ONE
of the meanings of the Exodus: each of us must leave the fleshpots of Egypt –
the place security and slavery – and go out into the desert. There and only
there is where we encounter God. Salvation is communal, not individual.
Nevertheless, we feel our longing for salvation individually – just like we
feel our physical hunger.
To be in the desert is to be
hungry: in the wilderness, we will get hungry, and it will seem as though we
are sure to die. And we are going to die. That is the point. We must die
to our Egypt-consciousness in order to enter the Promised Land. Our hunger –
our fasting – is indispensable to this journey.
Fasting represents the whole array
of ascetic practice. It is not punishment of the body, but training. As an
athlete trains her body not to destroy, but to develop it, so too our spiritual
exercises are training. That’s what asceticism
means, from the Greek askhsis, meaning athletic training. It may not be altogether
pleasant, at the time. (To say the least.) To the Egypt-head it seems like
foolishness ending in death, and so we are inclined to grumble, like the
Israelites, and say that we had been better off in Egypt.
Sooner or later. We have ultimate doubts. "Why did we ever leave? We must have
been crazy to believe Moses. All in all,
we had a pretty good thing going back in Egypt, compared to this. Now we are just going to die." And all of that makes a good deal of
sense. In order to make any spiritual
progress, we have to take a big chance, trust the impossible, risk our lives
and go out into the empty wasteland, where we starve. And we do starve to death, because the death
of our old Egypt-consciousness — our old slave-consciousness — is the purpose
of the first part of the journey. We
don't shed that consciousness simply by walking across the Red Sea. In fact, it seems that we have to come to the
point where we think it was all a mistake, there is no God, and we wish we had
never started on the journey at all, before we can receive the manna.
God’s answer to our grumbling is a
rain of quails. This strikes me as ridicule, almost scorn. The Israelites got
WAY more than they needed, as if to say “Oh, you doubt ME? Well get a load of
this!” They couldn’t possibly eat all that meat. It would have soon become a
smelly nuisance in the camp out in the desert. The point seems to be that God
knows what we need and we don’t. When we start to think that we would have been
better off never to have started the journey in the first place, we may get a
sickening surfeit of what we thought we needed.
He rained down flesh upon them like
dust * and winged birds like the sand
of the sea.
He let it fall in the midst of
their camp *
and round about their dwellings.
and round about their dwellings.
So they ate and were well filled, *
for he gave them what they craved.
for he gave them what they craved.
I think it significant that the
rain of quail – the exaggeration of divine abundance – happened only one night, while the manna came day after day. God first has
to teach us to get over our own Egypt-idea of what we need. Making fun of us
with the quails is part of God’s mercy. Without the quails, we would probably
find the manna insubstantial. This is
why the Collect prays that God’s mercy may continually cleanse Israel (the Church) as well as defend her. The cleansing is an indispensable part of God’s mercy,
and it comes first – before the defense.
By the way, the mistranslation of
the Lord’s Prayer – calling it daily
bread instead of supersubstantial
Bread – is both ancient and deliberate.
It indicates the universal understanding that the Bread for which we pray comes
every day and is not ordinary bread. It is manna.
The Bread of Angels. The warrant for this apostolic identification is today’s
Gospel, in which our Savior says that He is the Bread of Life.
There is an old epicurean saying
that hunger is the best sauce. The manna, the supersubstantial bread, would
seem insubstantial to us unless we
were fasting – dying of starvation from the perspective of our old
Egypt-consciousness. On the other hand, we cannot do without food altogether.
The rain of quails reminds us that God’s bounty fulfills our needs and more.
When we recognize that, we can accept the supersubstantial manna as the fulfillment of a more basic need.
So, our inner spiritual journey
resembles the biblical wandering in the wilderness. I think it vital to
remember that the journey is a communal one. We participate in it as persons –
each soul suffers her own hunger, as her own individual Egypt-consciousness
complains about its death. Mystics call this the “purgative way,” or “the
soul’s dark night.” But “…in the morning
you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the LORD your
God.” And those who eat this Bread – this communal Bread – shall never die.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
Sermon for the Pentecost 8
Proper 11 B ~ July 19, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
God
did not make death…righteousness is immortal.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
Three words jump out at me: compassion, shepherd, and fringe.
Jesus had compassion on the crowd because they seemed to Him like sheep
without a shepherd, and they all wanted to get near Him and even just touching
the fringe of His robe healed them. The Collect also mentions compassion:
invoke divine compassion on our weakness. With that prayer
setting the tone, the readings seem to invite us to identify with that
desperate crowd who were like sheep without a shepherd.
In this context, shepherd
means a higher being that DOES have compassion. Not a ruler and judge, but the
One who leads beside still waters and restores the soul, our guide into green
pastures and our defender in the Valley of the Shadow of death. The Shepherd is
the compassionate One, who knows better than we do what we need and where we
want to go.
Look how desperately the people wanted to be near Jesus. He and the
Apostles were worn out and wanted to get a rest, but the crowds beat them to
the deserted place and Jesus felt sorry for them. Apparently He gave them what
they were looking for – everyone who touched the fringe of His robe was healed.
I suppose that is what they were looking for – healing, health, wholeness,
salvation. And although they may not have known precisely what they were
looking for, It didn’t matter: Jesus gave them what in their blindness they
could not and in their unworthiness dared not ask.
We are the same, aren’t we? We don’t know what we really need, and if we
do, we don’t dare ask. What strikes me about the crowd is that they didn’t give
up trying to get to where Salvation was. Their behavior seems to indicate a
kind of desperation. But it didn’t matter. They weren’t required to learn
anything or to profess anything, or even to recognize the precise nature of their
need. All that was necessary was contact with Jesus.
That is well to remember, when I consider the Church. The person of
Jesus is all that is important – whatever brings one closer to Him is the road
to salvation – spiritual health and wholeness. – since He IS that road. What does that for me may not necessarily do
it for everyone. There is more than one way.
I fully believe that the visible Church is the vestibule and gateway
into the Mystical Body of Christ, and that salvation is participation in its life.
But I must remember that all those people didn’t get directly into contact with
His Body. Most of them only touched his
outer garment. And some of them only its hem
(as in the older translations) and that was enough.
I like fringe better, because
of its meaning in our everyday speech. The robe isn’t Jesus’ Body, and the
fringe is even more external and removed. But even those who can only get into
contact with the fringe are healed. That’s an important detail, I think. I must
remember it the next time I am given to think someone else’s religion is fringey. And if I am honest, I also have
to admit that my own is certainly on the fringe! It is good for me to recognize
that, because there is always the danger for fringies like me to imagine that
what brings me closer to Jesus is the best way for everybody. Worse, it is also
tempting to think of my fringe as SUPERIOR. That is a temptation because it is
sectarianism rather than salvation – mistaking the fringe for the Real Body of
Christ.
But the Gospel insists that ANY contact with Jesus is salvific, however
distant. I would say that the only
proviso is that those who touch the fringe and are healed must not imagine that
theirs is the only possible approach. It would be foolish to think so. God is
the Fountain of Wisdom, Who knows our
necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking. Like those desperate
people in Gennesaret, we don’t know what we really need. The best we can do is
to rely on God’s compassion, displayed by His Son, asking Him to give us those
things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot
ask.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
Sermon for the Sixth Sunday
after Pentecost
Proper 9B ~ July 5, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
He could do no deed of
power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.
And he was amazed at their unbelief..
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
I like to
think that the lectionary gives us these two readings deliberately on
Independence Day weekend, not to rain on
the parade, but just to remind us that no nation can presume God's favor. Even the Chosen People of Israel, favored by
the prophetic visit, and so much the worse for them. And Jesus' own hometown wouldn't listen
either.
For me, this is a reminder that no human group — ethnic or
political — can claim to be the Kingdom of God.
Nazareth was not an exception, and neither is the United States of
America. National idolatry is one of the worst kinds. Good to be reminded of this on the Fourth of
July. That doesn't mean that we
shouldn't give thanks to God for what we have got right, but that we should ask
God's help to correct what we don't. Our
Collect for Independence Day speaks of kindling a torch of liberty to pass on
to other nations. Okay, as long as we
remember that the liberty was tainted with racism and genocide, particularly
horrible because of the clarity of the ideal we espouse. But then, we are a work in progress.
Take a look at the back of the dollar bill, there is depicted
the Great Seal of the United States, which has a reverse as well as an obverse,
like a coin. The reverse shows the
Masonic symbol of a truncated pyramid, which symbolizes the Temple of
Solomon. It is unfinished, a work in
progress like the United States, the All-seeing Eye keeping watch. It seems to suggest that the Founders
recognized that we were a long way from the ideals we profess. Human rights, equality, and so on. Thomas Jefferson also wrote words — now
inscribed on the walls of his Memorial — "I tremble for my country when I
reflect that God is just, and that His, justice will not sleep
forever." I recently learned that
the country to which he referred was not the United States, but Virginia. He was right to tremble.
As are we. We seem to
be in decline. Many believe that the
very notion of human progress is an illusion. The truncated pyramid is
collapsing, not being built. But isn’t it also possible that our increasing
trouble is not altogether unfortunate?
Isn’t it possible that growing difficulty may stimulate salutary
reforms, as it has in the past? It looks
like that would be a miracle, which is our modern way of saying it won’t
happen, and to hope that it might is superstitious. So, today the lectionary confronts us with Nazareth,
Jesus’ hometown, where He "could
do no deed of power." Although he was still able to heal some of the sick,
He could only marvel at the Nazarenes’ unbelief, which means their lack of
hope.
It may be true that we are a plutocracy and not a democracy,
as Noam Chomsky says. On the other hand,
Bernie Sanders is doing better than anyone could have predicted. His events in Madison and New Hampshire have
drawn more people than any other candidate of either party, surprising the
Senator himself. Now, I would never
compare any candidate to our Lord, but I would go so far as to suggest a
possible analogy between our own weary pessimism, and the unbelief of the
Nazarenes. Even God Almighty can't do
much for people who want to cling to their hopelessness.
While it is the worst kind of delusion to imagine that we
Americans enjoy any kind of special divine favor — raving about exceptionalism
and “humanity’s last, best hope,"
it is not impious to hope that more of us may repent — change our minds — and
rise to the occasion. Like Israel, we
“have become nation of rebels
who have rebelled against (God);” like them, we and our “ancestors have
transgressed against (God) to this very day,” often claiming that our
transgressions were actually God's will! With Jefferson, we ought to tremble,
reflecting that God’s justice will not sleep forever. There is no guarantee for
us.
Even God couldn’t say whether Ezekiel would get Israel to listen;
even Jesus couldn’t predict who would receive the disciples He sent out in
pairs. Even so, apparently there was some chance that some would. Some room for
hope.
If we have any patriotic duty at all, it is to those before
us, who kept that hope alive. Even
though it seems impossible, I consider that I do not have a right to give up,
when I remember Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks and Medgar Evers, Eugene
Debs and Joe Hill and Mother Jones, Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony and
Amelia Bloomer, and on and on. They have
passed to us the torch of liberty to be shared with nations yet unborn. They represent the America I am proud of on
Independence Day— the only America upon which I would invoke God's
blessing.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
