Saturday, May 13, 2017
V Easter
V Easter
May 14, 2017
Holy Trinity & St.
Anskar
I go to prepare a place for
you.
+In the Name of God,
the Holy and Undivided Trinity
Today we hear the beginning of what is conventionally cal-led
the Farewell Discourse — St. John’s account of Jesus’ last teachings, set after
the Last Supper, after the departure of Judas and the purification of the foot-washing,
and before the Passion. I’ve often thought that they might just as well have been
spoken on the Mount of Olives, just before the Ascension, which is where we put
them in our liturgical lectionary — to be read on the final Sundays of Eastertide.
They are packed with important pronouncements about the Identity of Jesus, what
He has accomplished, and what the Church can expect. They have to do with the changes God has
wrought in creation: not only the repair of damage done by creatures — visible
and invisible — but the elevation of creation to new glory.
Our Lord begins by telling
us not to be disturbed in the core of our being by any outward events. “You
believe in God, believe also in Me.” Trust Me. He asks us not to believe things
about Him, but to trust Him, to believe Him when He tells
us “You will do greater works than I have done”. Indeed we have done. We have abolished crucifixion and gladiatorial combat.
We have covered the world with hospitals and orphanages. We have very nearly
abolished chattel slavery, and achieved formal recognition that it is outside
the norm of civilized practice. Same with torture. In the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, we have laid the foundation for the international law of human
rights, based on what our own Baptismal Covenant calls respect for the dignity of every person. This 70-year-old agreement
of almost all the nations of the earth is as close as we have come to a charter
of the Kingdom of God. The world has learned from Jesus the unique value of
every person, without exception. It has learned this through His Church,
insofar as we have been faithful to His teaching and kept His commandments.
Remembering the important reservation that no human system is, in itself, the
Kingdom of God, we may still recognize the work of the Holy Spirit in
propagating the Gospel precepts throughout the world, with or without explicit
reference to their Author. In my Father’s
house are many mansions.
It is possible to seek and
serve Christ in every person, as we promise at baptism, without consciously
thinking of it as such: without any reference to the Holy Name. Let’s remember Karl
Rahner’s famous category of “anonymous Christians:” people who do His will,
even though they may not think of it that way. On the other hand, to acknowledge the Name is
not simply a matter of tacking it on to the end of our petitions. It is not a magic
formula, which guarantees the doing of our
will! To ask anything “in (His) Name" means to ask what is consistent with
His Identity, His public reputation, and His Mission as revealed in Scripture
and tradition. We cannot expect Him to do anything inconsistent with that, even
if we say we are asking in His Name,
because we really are not. What we really do in that case is to take His Name
in vain! Furthermore, we can never know for sure whether or not our perception
of what needs to happen in order to fulfill His Mission is really accurate.
Just saying “in the Name of Jesus” doesn’t make it so. We always have to add “thy
will be done.”
What our prayers accomplish
is mysterious. The great Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the most influential theologians
of the last century, who marched with Dr. King at Selma, said:
To pray is to expand God’s Presence.
God’s action in the world
sometimes comes through our prayer,
through our bringing God’s will into consciousness and action. Heschel went on
to say
For many of us the march
from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and
walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words,
our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.
That is what it means to ask something “in the Name of
Jesus.” It is neither a magic word, nor
even a conscious glorification of His Reputation, but an act in solidarity with
His Mission, which is the Kingdom of God, God’s will done on earth as in
Heaven, an act that expands God’s Presence in time and space.
These astonishing sayings,
in the Farewell Discourse, unveil more of the Mystery of the Incarnation, and
its continuation in time, in the Church – the Body of Christ, living in the
world and chan-ging it more and more to resemble His Kingdom. Jesus says He goes
to prepare a place for us in His Father’s House of Many Mansions. It may be a
mistake to think of that as the preparation of a refuge from the world, a place
to which we flee, somewhere out of the world. The Son prepares the world through us, who do
works greater than He did when we really act in His Name, whether or not we know
that is what we are doing. The Son also prepares the House of the Father to
accommodate us. He says he will come to us again, so that we might be where He
is. We usually think that means He will take us out of the world, but what if
it meant that He will bring the Father’s House of Many Mansions into the world?
And how in the world (or out
of it) can we reconcile the House of Many Mansions with the proclamation that “No
one comes to the Father except through Me?" Tune in next week!
Alleluia!
Christ
is risen from the dead,
Trampling
down death by death,
And
giving life to all in the tombs.
Alleluia!
IV Easter ~ May 7, 2017
IV Easter
May 7, 2017
Holy Trinity & St.
Anskar
I have other sheep that do
not belong to this fold. I must bring them also…
Now when Ananias heard these
words [of Peter], he fell down and died.
+In the Name of God,
the Holy and Undivided Trinity
The Good Shepherd calls each sheep by name and leads
them. But as we each have a different name, so also we each have a different
vocation — a different path in which we are led. Despite these differences, we
are all of the same flock. Furthermore, if we read on in this passage, Jesus
says that He has “other sheep that are not of this fold.” This says to me that
we had better be careful about excluding anyone, of the delusion that our path
is the only path. We Anglicans usually like to think of ourselves as given to
including people. Sometimes we are derided for that value; but, what is worse,
sometimes we don’t really live up to it.
There is tension here
between inclusivity and fidelity to the deposit of faith and the living
tradition that grows out of it. Our distaste for exclusion, arising out of the
political circumstances of the reign of the great Queen Elizabeth I, may be our
particular charism, as a branch of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
We want to be faithful to the Apostolic tradition, but also to be open to the
leading of the Holy Spirit, “Who makes all things new.”
The fact that each of the
precious sheep of the Good Shepherd has a personal name — a unique identity — supports the notion of
inclusivity. The sheep are not simply interchangeable. Each one is
irreplaceable. Each one is led along the path of its own particular calling,
some to green pastures and still waters, and some through the valley of the
shadow of death. The Good Shepherd also guides sheep from other folds, of which
we know nothing. It is a big mistake to try to enforce uniformity. That kind of
rigorism is the mark of thieves and robbers.
Maybe that’s why
our lectionary averts its eyes from the rest the story about Apostolic
communism. We hear that the first Christian community had all things in common,
that if anyone had anything, they laid it at the feet of the Apostles, and that
those who had property sold it and turned the proceeds over to the commune too.
As the Church grew, it became impossible to maintain this kind of organization,
but there have always been Christians who tried to live according to this norm,
with varying degrees of success.
Rarely, however, do we hear
the other part of the story, later on in the Acts, in which one couple named Ananias and Sapphira held back some
of the proceeds of the sale of their property, and kept it for themselves.
Peter somehow knew it and rebuked them, whereupon God struck them dead on the
spot! Talk about an exclusionary policy! We Anglicans never read it in church.
After all, we do not like to imagine the Father of Jesus behaving as
depicted in the Book of Joshua.
Neither do I. I think we
must interpret this story metaphorically, not literally. What I mean is this:
God requires everything from anyone who proposes to follow the Good Shepherd.
To hold anything back is to die — devoured by the Wolf. It is up to each of us
to discern how we dedicate everything to God — each sheep has its own name; the
Good Shepherd leads each along its own path. One size does not fit all. No one
lifestyle or social organization is uniquely Christian.
That said, we still confront
Ananias and Sapphira struck dead by God at the feet of the Apostles, and the
Church has been uncomfortable with the notion of private property ever since.
The Fathers and Mothers of the Church in the next few centuries continued to
regard it as having the nature of sin. If something is mine, it is not yours.
That means that you and I are separate, alienated from one another, and that is sin.
Wealth is redeemed only by
devoting it to the relief of the poor, but the wealthy are always in danger of
deceiving themselves and serving their own wealth, instead of God, which is to be
devoured by the Wolf.
This basic ecclesiastical
distrust of wealth has never evaporated entirely. When Pope Leo XIII endorsed
private property, it was on the basis of the Labor Theory of Value: a person is
entitled to the fruits of his/her labor. Property is “stored labor.”
Withholding the wages of a worker is a sin that cries out to heaven for
justice. Depriving a worker of property is the same as confiscating wages. In
the same encyclical, the Pope also endorsed labor unions, at a time when they
were illegal and persecuted in most countries, including the United States.
Later encyclicals built on this foundation, further defining the legitimacy of
private property as secondary to labor, which is prior.
Moreover, the Church has always
regarded Apostolic Poverty as the way of perfection – the anticipation of the
Kingdom of God, here and now. The current Pope does his best to model that for
us. He took the name of the one who called himself the “little poor guy",
who regarded himself as married to Lady Poverty. Pretty much every time he
opens his mouth, Pope Francis reminds us of what the Second Vatican Council
called “the preferential option for the poor,” what the Protestant theologian,
Karl Barth, described in my favorite paraphrase “between rich and poor, heaven
does not adopt a position of neutrality: the rich can take care of their own
future; God is on the side of the poor.”
Alleluia!
Christ
is risen from the dead,
Trampling
down death by death,
And
giving life to all in the tombs.
Alleluia!
