Saturday, September 03, 2016
Assumption of the BVM
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Sermon
for the Sunday near
the
Dormition of the BVM
August
14, 2016
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Holy Trinity & St.
Anskar
For you will not abandon my soul to Hades,
or let your Holy One experience corruption.
+In the Name of God,
the Holy and Undivided Trinity
St. Basil the great observed that the Church’s devotion
to the Blessed Virgin Mary belonged to the dogmata
and not the kerygmata. That is, to the inner, secret life of the Church
as opposed to our public preaching. Accordingly, I will say little so that we
can devote our time to praise her after the liturgy.
I
will note that the public, Papal definition of the Bodily Assumption of the
Mother of God was, nevertheless appropriate, in the historical circumstance.
The world had just experienced an unprecedented satanic assault on the dignity
of the human body, in the form of the Nazi death-camps. The celebration of the
Assumption of Mary may be understood as the Church’s defiance of those horrors,
the affirmation that all material creation is destined to participate in the
Divine Life. In 1950, perhaps, it was time to say so in public and to proclaim
it from the rooftops: Mary in her bodily Assumption represents Creation
restored to perfection, just as she represented all creation in her willing
coöperation with God in the Redemption: Behold
the Handmaid of the Lord. Let it be unto me according to your word. Mary’s fiat undoes the disobedience of Eve and
makes ordinary creation a participant in divinity.
St.
Irenaeus said God became human so that
humanity might become divine. The
Transfiguration refers to the first part of the saying: God became human and we
beheld His glory. And the Transfiguration refers not only to the Godman, Jesus
Christ, but to all His human relatives, beginning with his All-Holy Mother. She
is in no was different from us and the rest of creation, except that she has
already passed beyond the Resurrection and Judgment to the perfection God
intended in the beginning.
There
is an ancient tradition of her coronation in heaven. Here, again, she
represents creation. Queen of Heaven,
as we acclaim her, was a title that particularly bothered some reformation
theologians. It sounded way too pagan. It smacked of goddess-worship. In fact,
the Holy Pro-phet Jeremiah had railed against the Canaanite cult of the same
name. But Mary as Queen of Heaven is, actually entirely biblical! Gabriel had announ-ced
that God would give her Son the Kingdom of His Ancestor David. Well, the
ancient Davidic Kings were polygamists and none of their wives was ever called Queen. That title was reserved for the
King’s mother. The only Queen of Israel was the Queen Mother. So, if Jesus is
the King of Heaven, then His Mother is Queen of Heaven. Not a goddess, not the
oriental Great Mother worshiped at Ephesus, but the first human being to
participate perfectly in the Divine Life, which is what Christians mean by theosis or divinization. We do not become gods,
but we share in the Life of the Blessed Trinity.
God became human that humanity might become divine. It is appropriate that we should recognize the theosis of Mary. As God received our human life from her, so she is the first
to receive Divine life from Him. The iconographic depiction shows our Lady in
repose, having “fallen asleep” in the flesh. Behind her stands her Divine Son.
In a reversal of the image that shows her holding Him as an infant, He now
holds her soul. There is no depiction of what will happen to her immaculate
body. That remains a mystery, hidden within the heart of the Church. A
Byzantine hymn imagines her last words:
O Apostles, who
have assembled here
from the ends of
the earth,
bury my body in
Gethsemane,
but receive my
spirit, O my God,
O my Son!
But from earliest times
Christians have believed not only that He did receive her, but also that He did
not suffer to see corruption the human body out of which had come His own
sacred Body.
Arise, O Lord,
into Your resting place:
You and the Ark
of Your sanctification
AMEN
Pentecost 16, Year C, Proper 18 September 4, 2016
Sermon for the Sixteenth
Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 18 ~ September
4, 2016
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
…as
you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength,
so you never forsake those who make their
boast of your mercy.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
I boast of what I am or what I have. Or rather, of what
I THINK I am or have, because in
reality I am nothing and I have nothing. Thus the Israelites are
warned not to imagine that they own the land they are going to possess.
Likewise, Philemon imagines that he owns Onesimus. But Paul tells Onesimus that
even his very life is not his own, much less that of his slave; and Jesus says
that his disciples renounce all such imaginings:
none of you can become my disciple if you do not
give up all your possessions.
As advice specific to those who wanted to follow Jesus
around Palestine 2000 years ago, this statement simply recognizes practical reality:
disciples in that sense did have to give up everything. It comes at the end of
a series of startling pronouncements, beginning with the impossible declaration
that
Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and
mother,
wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself,
cannot be my disciple.
Well, we are not called to follow Him around Palestine,
so what does this have to do with us, if anything? It must have something to do
with us, because now and then we like to imagine that we are, in some sense, His
disciples. But hate our parents and
all the rest of our closest relatives? C’mon!
Honor of parents is the first of the Ten Commandments
after those about our relationship to God. So, hating them seems extreme. I suppose what He means is not emotion, but
attachment. In another place, Jesus says that anyone who loves parents more
than Him is not worthy of Him. But the only duty one has prior to parents is to
God. So in saying that, Jesus puts
Himself in the place of God, as we
acknowledge that He is right to do.
On the other hand, it is possible to honor Father and
Mother instead of God. How many there are whose highest value is
their own family or clan or tribe – an extension of their own sense of self! This
is the foundation of religious nationalism – the great enemy of the Church.
Looked at this way, it is obvious that those who do not
hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers
and sisters,
yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.
A sense of tribal identity is one kind of possession. The
conclusion of the passage expands the notion to all possession:
None of you can become my disciple if you do not
give up all your possessions.
That is surely true of everyone
who wishes to be a follower of Jesus or an adherent of Christianity. We encountered
this a few weeks ago. Some ancient fathers went so far as to identify the very notion
of possession with the Fall. Possession is an illusion. First, because we are
all going to die. Everyone is, literally, a follower of Jesus in that sense. We
shall die, as He died. And then we shall possess nothing. Our possessions are,
at best, temporary. Devoting one’s life to accumulation is silly.
Worse, it amounts to wasting one’s limited time in this
world. This doesn’t necessarily mean adopting a lifestyle of total
renunciation, but one must be very careful not to be seduced into thinking that
one can possess anything. To think
so is to wallow in sin, an illusion that rapidly develops into dangerous
separation from Reality. Like the Israelites before whom God set the choice of
life or death, as they were about to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land,
the temptation is to forget that possession of the land is conditional. To
think that one can actually possess anything is the way of the wicked, which is doomed.
Because at bottom, the uncomfortable observation that
everyone who would be Jesus’s disciples must give up all possession is
ultimately about inner life. What is ego
if not a collection of illusory notions about self? I clasp these illusions to
my breast and love them as myself, I keep them and inwardly cherish them as prized possessions, but what are they? Are they
really myself? No, of course not. In
spiritual terms, they are merely possessions
and the spiritual life involves renouncing them, giving them up, which is to
choose life.
What I think I possess actually possesses ME, whether
it be external objects that I have accumulated or my fond, inner thoughts about
myself – my illusory self. Most terribly, this includes my
imaginings about my relationship to God. So, Jesus says,
none of you can become my disciple if you do not
give up all your possessions.
What seems like renunciation is really the path to
freedom, the Way of the Righteous, but
the way of the ungodly shall perish. All that I can ever really have is God’s mercy. All that I can ever
be is a recipient thereof. To boast
of anything else or to imagine anything else about God and my relationship to
God – even silently to myself – is death. From which, by the grace of the Holy
Spirit, may Christ our God deliver us and make us His disciples.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
Pentecost 15, Year C, Proper 17 August 28, 2016
Sermon for The Fifteenth
Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 17 ~ August
28, 2016
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Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
…go and sit down at the lowest place…
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
For some reason, I found myself driving around the San
Fernando Valley with an old friend, a priest who is a native. We passed a great
big Roman Catholic Church – about the size of our Cathedral, beautifully ornate
Byzantine/Romanesque pile, and we noticed that across the architrave, chiseled
in massive letters was the single word: HUMILITAS. We found this somehow ironic. And that is
always the problem, isn’t it? The chief
cleric always enters at the end of the procession, because the last shall be
first and vice-versa, but then the whole procession gets ordered according to
rank so that the first are the lowest-ranking and so on. You can still always
tell who is the most important!
Today’s observation about banquet-seating has a humorous
tone, in my opinion. On the surface level of meaning, anyway. But possibly our
Lord’s advice is not simply the suggestion of strategy for preferment at
important peoples’ parties! Maybe it has to do with our own inner lives and the
dangers of imagining that we are more advanced than we really are. For the
awful paradox is that if we appear to ourselves to be making progress, we are
probably not; while the more progress we actually make, the more lowly we
appear to ourselves! Better to occupy the lowest place in our own estimation
and possibly to be called up higher. The trick is to contemplate one’s own
spiritual lowliness without undue worry or despair, relying entirely on God’s
grace.
With that introduction to tie it to today’s Gospel, I want to
read to you a passage from one of my favorite ancient fathers, Dorotheos of
Gaza (late 6th Century). His writings also contain more than a
little humor, mixed in with profound spiritual wisdom. Here is his advice about
receiving unjust criticism, and turning it to one’s spiritual advantage…
[There you are sitting peacefully, minding your own business, and a brother comes up and makes a disparaging remark, and you get angry. Instead of thanking him for revealing to you yourown latent anger, you send it back to him.]
Dorotheos has a point, of course. No one can make me feel emotions. I have a choice
to permit myself to be disturbed or not.
But what about unjust criticism or worse abuse? Well. I don’t think
Dorotheos is advising us to be complete doormats. If the critical brother came
every day to bully and abuse, it would be a matter for the Abbot. On the other hand, if the accused brother is
really on top of it, he can accept undeserved criticism dispassionately –
however unfair – seeking to learn from it.
None of us is in a position to evaluate ourselves. The critical brother
may be out of his tree, on the other hand, there may be more to the feedback
than one would like to think.
In any case, such unpleasant experiences may give us a chance
to take the lower place at the banquet, a difficult thing to do. And not for
the obvious reason that it is unpleasant to let injustice go. There is also the
problem of letting it go with self-conscious humility, which is not humility at
all, but rather like the inscription on the church. It would probably be better
to get mad and oppose the injustice openly than to pretend to humility that one
doesn’t actually have. The last shall be first and the first last. But if I
take the lower place in order to try to get the higher one, it is hardly
humility. Maybe if I want to be really humble, I should take the higher place
so that I will be humiliated! And on and on: the same old problem of infinite
regress.
Anyway, I think the riddle is good to bear in mind when I
think about my own inner, spiritual life. The side of me that is overly
self-critical needs to be acknowledged, but not reacted against. I need to tell
myself – OK, accuser-self (the translation of the word, satan, by the way!), you are probably right, and I will sit at the
lowest place, because I am not very advanced. But hey! What the hell? God is my
judge, no one else, not even you, that is not even myself! I might be pleasantly surprised! Probably
best not to count on it, but you never know. It seems to me that is nearer the
mark of genuine humility – the kind that is not proclaimed in two-foot-high
lettering, chiseled in stone.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
Pentecost 14, Year C, Proper 16 August 21, 2016
Sermon for The Fourteenth
Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 16 ~ August
21, 2016
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
And
ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan
bound for eighteen long years, be set free
from this bondage on the sabbath day?
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
First let us dispense with the mistaken notion that the Judaism of
Jesus’s time was altogether legalistic - devoted to the letter of the law, oblivious
regarding the spirit. Jesus was not the only rabbi to teach that performing an
act of righteousness or mercy – a mitzvah
– on the Sabbath was not a violation of its observance. Jesus’s dispute was not
with Judaism but with a certain kind of religious mentality, found in all religions,
that concerns itself with external, surface matters and ignores what He called the weightier matter of the Law.
This weightier matter in question today, the deeper underlying principle
beneath the commandment to observe the Sabbath, is that every creature needs to
remember God, and that every creature is entitled to rest and time for
recollection. There is more to life than work and preöccupation with our own
affairs. The Sabbath, by commanding rest, ensures the opportunity to stop, to
recognize that our time is limited, and to remember the infinite and eternal
context of all our endeavors. Part of the intention here is to make sure
everyone has a day off to pay some attention to what is really important in
life. Not just those who can afford it, but everyone gets the day off – hired
hands, slaves, even animals and the earth itself. That is already a meaning
deeper than the literal observance.
If the first deeper level beneath
the surface of the commandment is to give everyone and everything a rest, we
hear today that the violation of the letter may sometimes fulfill the spirit.
Think of the poor old woman – think how much WORK it was to have to go around
bent over all the time. Aside from her suffering, she had to exert lots of effort
to compensate for her affliction, and she NEVER had a day off. So, in healing
her, Jesus gave her a rest. It could even be said that He actually KEPT the
Sabbath on a deeper level by violating it on the surface, since He made it
possible for the woman to observe the Sabbath for the first time in eighteen
years. Furthermore, helping someone by relieving their suffering, cannot
violate the Sabbath, since it honors God in the divine image on earth.
This was the kind of
argument the rabbis loved, and the whole dispute is typical of Talmudic
scholarship. As I said it would be a mistake to think it illustrates a
difference between Judaism and the teaching of Jesus. Plenty of contemporary
rabbis would have agreed with Him, taking the view that a mitzvah does not violate the Sabbath. What the dispute does illustrate is a difference in
mentality or consciousness that is to be found among adherents of any religious
tradition. Those who do not penetrate the weightier
matters of the Law, are to be found, sadly, in every tradition, including
our own. I am afraid that there may be lots of us who share the mentality of
Jesus’s critics. Today’s Gospel warns us to examine ourselves for such a
tendency.
That is not to say that externals are of no importance,
or that they are nothing but an evil hindrance, to be renounced. We cannot do
without them. They are the door, the entrance to the deeper chambers. We need a
framework on which to hang those weightier
matters, or to use other metaphors, we
need channels to deliver the spirit, earthen vessels to carry the treasure. No
channels, the spirit disappears; no earthen vessels, the treasure is lost. It
is just as bad to renounce all the surface matters of spiritual life as is to
attach ourselves to them as if they were the goal of the whole business. They
are not. But neither are they simply dispensable. They may be only the beginning, but we
are all beginners.
Surely, the external rules and practices of religion
are not ends in themselves; they are only the beginning of our journey to God.
But they ARE the beginning: the door the strait
gate through which we pass to enter on the Way. Jesus’s healing on the
Sabbath shows us not that it is OK to ignore the rules, but that all externals
point to a deeper spiritual reality. Keeping the Sabbath may sometimes involve
an observance more profound than surface compliance. We are all called to deeper and deeper
observance – not laxity or forgetful indulgence, but ever deeper immersion in
the Reality to which the external matters of religion point and to which they
are the door.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
Feast of the Transfiguration
Sermon for the Sunday
after the Feast of the Transfiguration
August 7, 2016
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
Peter and his companions were weighed down with
sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw His glory and the two men who
stood with him.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
This strange story may illuminate the dilemma
of whether we must try to change the world, or concentrate on changing
ourselves. Three details are essential, though they may seem accidental:
· The Apostles were sleepy, but stayed awake
· The three heavenly beings discussed Jesus’s “departure,” which He
was about to accomplish in Jerusalem
· Peter wanted to build three temples, whereupon the vision ceased.
Let’s take them in reverse order:
Peter’s response
was natural, but wrongheaded. As soon as he expressed the desire to take up
permanent residence in the Transfiguration, he stopped seeing it, and was
ordered to obey. He could no longer see the Glory of God, but fell back to the
level of hearing and obeying. In a
sense, he fell back asleep.
Peter knew
something unprecedented was going on, but he didn’t comprehend it. Who could? We can’t really blame him for his
diminished understanding, He wasn’t completely awake, but weighed down with sleep, so that he had no idea what the three
transfigured creatures were discussing. He must have found out later because
the Gospel tells us that the agenda of the Council of the Transfigured was
Jesus’s imminent “departure” in Jerusalem. So on to the second point.
Departure. This translation is
correct, but misleading. Anyone reading the original would find the same Greek
word that names the pivotal event of the Old Covenant: the Exodus from slavery in Egypt and all that went along with that
earlier Departure: the Passover of the Angel of Death, the terrifying Shekinah the visible appearance of God
as the Pillar of Fire, the parting of the Red Sea and the great walls of water
on either side, the annihilation of the forces of enslavement, the Manna in the
wilderness and the encounter with God on Sinai, and so on. THAT is what Jesus
was about to reënact, to recapitulate, to ”accomplish in Jerusalem.” The two
other transfigured humans, represented the two poles of Hebrew religion, the
Law and the Prophets. What Jesus discussed with Moses and Elijah was nothing
less than a whole new Exodus, extending the Covenant to all flesh – ta panta.
This was not just about
raising the consciousness of Peter, James, and John – though it was about that,
too. Sleep and awakening is a common metaphor for enlightenment. Buddha, I understand, just means awake. Which brings me to the first
point. There is consciousness that is to ordinary human consciousness as waking
is to sleep. The drowsy Apostles were somewhere in between ordinary, somnolent
consciousness, and the higher level of vigilance or being fully awake. Full
vigilance is connected to the New Exodus. A new consciousness – a higher consciousness – is a feature of the
new deliverance.
One of Dostoyevsky’s
characters in The Brothers Karamazov
says “the tragedy of human life is that a paradise of beauty blooms around us
and we fail to see it.” This may be
related to an older theological observation that what changed on Mt. Tabor (the
traditional name of the Holy Mountain of the Transfiguration) was not Jesus
Himself, but the Apostles’ view of Him. After all, the text itself says not
that He changed, but that His appearance
changed. What changed was how His Apostles saw Him. As we now agree, our senses
receive external stimuli, which are then translated into perceptions in our
brains. These stimuli are waves of sound or light, or tactile sensations having
to do with pressure and temperature. But is that how the world really is? There
is no way to tell. This is not to say
that there is no reality out there
but our perception of it is only in here.
Things
are not as they seem. Long before Immanuel Kant taught us that
what we perceive is in our minds, and that we cannot really be sure how our
perception relates to the things themselves, the theologians understood that
Jesus always radiated the Uncreated Light, but human beings lacked the ability
to perceive it. Just as some animals can apparently hear things we can’t, so
there are levels of awareness that human beings must develop, a higher faculty
that must be brought online, if we are to see the Glory of God in the Face of
Jesus. On Tabor, the sleepy Apostles
enjoyed that faculty, temporarily.
Human consciousness is
Creation becoming aware of itself. But our consciousness is a work in progress.
It is Peter’s mistake to imagine that the purpose of this process is our own
individual awakening. To think so is to fall back into sleep. The goal of the
process is the New Exodus, also called the New Creation, in which all Creation,
down to the humblest atom of dust, reaches its fulfillment, transfigured in the
Love of God. Our occasional glimpses of Divine Beauty may be ravishing, but
that ecstasy is merely a foretaste of the ultimate Transfiguration of the
world. What the Apostles saw with their
human eyes is called the Uncreated Light.
That is, the Glory of God, that has no beginning or end and that always
radiates through the Creation. On the Holy Mountain the Apostles saw this Glory
radiating from creatures. The Apostles saw the Glory of God suffusing and
radiating from humanity, not only from the humanity of the Godman, but from the
other two as well. That is significant: Jesus was not transfigured alone, but
in conversation with other human creatures. St. Irenaeus put it this way:
On the one hand, the Glory of God is living humanity; on
the other hand, the Life of humanity is the vision of God.
This vision – this waking up
– is real human life, but it is contemplating the communal transfiguration of
the whole world. This is the New Exodus: the communal transfiguration of the
cosmos. Dostoyevsky’s character may have been right – Divine Beauty radiates
constantly from creation, though we fail to see it, just as the Uncreated Light
shone in the material world from the Nativity on, without interruption. Humans
can learn to perceive this New Creation. We can wake up, so that creation may
become conscious of the Divine Glory that surrounds and infuses it. The paradox
is that in so learning, the creation itself is gradually changed into what it
has always been: the Glorious Body of the Risen Christ. Wherever a human being
wakes up in this way, the whole cosmos benefits. The Communion of Saints is real – and not
confined to those who call ourselves Christian. The Spirit blows where She
will.
There is an old argument
about whether we should try to change the world or concentrate on changing
ourselves. Genuine spiritual guides agree that the two cannot be separated. It
is futile to dispute about which comes first, action or contemplation, because
they are effective only together – two sides of the same coin, two poles of
Redemption, like Moses and Elijah. The Glory of God shines through creation.
That is the deep mystery of the Incarnation. Our life is the Vision of God, but
what can be seen of God – the Glory of the Uncreated Light – can be seen only
in Living Humanity, which I take to mean all humus, the entire material cosmos.
Peter’s understandable error was to want to
enjoy the new consciousness by himself, and forget about the rest of creation –
and to institutionalize his forgetting: IT
IS GOOD FOR US TO BE HERE – good for US, you see. To hell with everything
else. That is NOT higher consciousness: it is going back to sleep. So Peter slipped
back into hearing and obeying. If the Transfiguration is a change in our own
consciousness, it cannot be separated from the topic of the objective
conversation of the beings Transfigured: what was soon to happen in Jerusalem,
the Passion and Death and Resurrection of the Godman. Peter briefly saw the
Glory, but he misunderstood its meaning.
Individual enlightenment is
not the purpose of human life, but a tool in the liberation of the whole
cosmos. There is no enlightenment without liberation – in every sense of the
word – social, political, economic, and cosmic liberation. Our enlightenment,
our awakening, our own transfiguration is our participation in the New Exodus,
which He was to accomplish in Jerusalem.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
