Author Archives: mbj

 

Another look at Joseph

 

“Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.”  So begins Matthew’s version of the Christmas story, a story that in his telling gives Joseph quite a significant role to play.  Maybe it’s because I’m a woman and a mother, but it’s Mary – not Joseph – whom I usually think about at Christmas, Mary who gets the spotlight as the mother of Jesus, the mother of God.  Of course no crèche would be complete without Joseph, but usually I don’t pay much attention to him.  He wasn’t Jesus’ “real” father, and in the story of Jesus’ birth and infancy, Joseph never says a word, he doesn’t even speak, whereas Mary (in Luke’s Gospel) gets to sing the “Magnificat.”  I usually think of Joseph as a minor character in the drama of salvation, and soon enough he slips off the stage upon which Jesus’ life plays out, a guy with a bit part who disappears quickly into the wings. My Bible commentary points out that Joseph is mentioned only a few times in the whole New Testament, and that he drops out entirely by the time that Jesus begins his public ministry.

 

Yet here is Matthew in this morning’s Gospel, speaking of Joseph’s place in the story of Jesus’ birth, and I thought: maybe it’s time to take a fresh look at Joseph. Who was this man, and what did he do that enabled Jesus to be born?  Here we are, on the brink of Christmas, longing for Christ to be born afresh in our hearts, in our lives, in our homes, and in this world, and what can we learn from Joseph?  How does he help this birth to take place?

 

The first thing to say is that Joseph was a “righteous” man.  That’s not a word we often hear these days, unless we place in front of it that troublesome little word, “self.”  Self-righteous – now that’s a word we recognize.  “Self-righteous” conjures up images of a holier-than-thou kind of person who looks with contempt on lesser mortals.  When we feel a surge of self-righteousness, we pull back from other people, and look down on them with pity or scorn.  Self-righteousness makes us feel superior and gives us permission to blame and shame and to point an accusing finger at another person.

 

But that’s not how Joseph was.  He was not a “self-righteous” man but a “righteous” man.  To be righteous is to live in right-relationship with God, to be straight with God, to seek to do God’s will.  A righteous person is someone who in every situation keeps asking: What is the most loving thing I can do right now for this person or for this community or for the Earth on which all life depends?

 

Joseph didn’t indulge in self-righteousness, even though the culture around him would quickly judge and condemn a young woman who got pregnant out of wedlock.  When Joseph heard that his betrothed had conceived a child, I can imagine his confusion and anger and sorrow.  I can imagine him wrestling with shock and disappointment.  But it seems that Joseph’s deepest commitment was to do what was right in the loving eyes of God.  He asked himself: What is the most loving thing to do?  Rather than rush to judge or condemn, rather than take revenge by exposing Mary to public humiliation, Joseph treated Mary with respect and tried to protect her from the jeers of the crowd.  And so, the Gospel tells us, “[he] planned to dismiss her quietly” (Matthew 1:19).  That decision must have been a costly one, one that required a strong dose of self-discipline and self-restraint.

 

So that’s the first thing I see in Joseph: a man who wanted to do what was right, even when it came at a personal cost. I see Joseph in every person who is quietly trying to do the right thing, the loving thing, even when there are no reporters or cameras around to make it public, no witnesses but the eyes of God.  Some of you may have come across the rules for a good life that were laid out in the 18th century by John Wesley, the Anglican priest and early leader of the Methodist movement.  Here is what John Wesley wrote:

 

Do all the good you can, By all the means you can, In all the ways you can, In all the places you can, At all the times you can, To all the people you can, As long as ever you can.

 

I was so taken by that quote that for years I kept it on our refrigerator, and then finally went and got it framed.  I think those words fit Joseph.  He was a righteous man; he wanted to do what was right with God.  That’s our own first step, too, in preparing for Christ’s birth.  We clean up our life.  We re-commit ourselves as best we can to doing what is right.

 

Here’s a second thing I see in Joseph: he was open to God’s ongoing revelation.  He was open to surprise, available for fresh encounter.  When an angel of the Lord spoke to him in a dream, Joseph paid attention.  Joseph knew, as we know, too, that the holy Mystery we call God can speak to us in our dreams, in our intuitive hunches and flashes of insight.  I don’t imagine that Joseph went dutifully through the day following a rigid set of rules, as if being a faithful person is like having a paint-by-number kit and all you do is color inside the lines.  I imagine that Joseph lived with a prayerful awareness that the universe is much more magical and mysterious than that – that reality is not a closed system that contains a linear, logical, and predictable series of events.  No – reality is wide open.  An angel can speak to us in a dream; a voice can sound from a burning bush; we can quiet our minds in prayer and suddenly see something we’ve never seen before. As Hamlet says to Horatio, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”

 

And so, “when Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took Mary as his wife” and he named the child Jesus, which means Savior, just as the angel had told him to (Matthew 1:24-25).

 

So that’s the third thing to say about Joseph.  Not only is he a righteous man, committed to living in right-relationship with God and to doing all the good that he can; not only is he a prayerful man, listening to his inner wisdom, ready to let God speak to him in a dream; he is also a man of action.  He hears God speak in his depths and he brings it forth into the world.  He makes manifest the word from heaven that came to him in secret; he listens to it and decides to change course.  “Yes,” he says to God, and to Mary, “I will be a father to the child.  I will claim him as kin.  I will guard him and stand by him and keep him safe from harm.”

 

Because of Joseph’s willingness to respond to God and to accept the task that was given to him to do, Jesus Christ was born.  Joseph may not get all the glory at Christmas, but without him – without his commitment to doing what was right, without his prayerful, willing spirit, without his decision to take the action that God was calling him to do – who knows whether Jesus would have been safely born into the world.  It was Joseph who ensured Jesus’ safe delivery, and it was Joseph who protected his wife and newborn son by fleeing into Egypt and returning only when it was safe.

 

I’ll tell you why I am drawn to Joseph this year: because he was an ordinary man trying his best to listen to God.  And his willingness to serve God turned out to be enough: he had a role to play in the larger drama of salvation.  Some might say that Joseph’s role was only a small one, but who can measure such things?  What he did was necessary.  In fact, it was essential.  And that goes for us, too.  For all we know – and we may never know – the small good thing that you do, and that I do, today will make an immeasurable difference to someone else, and an immeasurable difference to God.

 

I think of Helen Keller, and her willingness to do whatever next good thing came across her path.  She knew her limits.  She knew that she was only one person, and that she herself couldn’t save the world.  But as she wrote somewhere, “I am only one, but still I am one.  I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something I can do.”

 

Joseph did not refuse to do ‘the something’ that he could do, and so Jesus the Messiah was born and life was changed forever.  What helps you to listen deeply to the voice of love that is speaking within you?  What is love calling you to do or say?  With Joseph beside us to encourage us and give us strength, perhaps we too will respond and will follow where love leads.  Perhaps we too will stand with Joseph in that Bethlehem stable, gazing at the newborn Jesus and marveling at the ways of God.

 

God of steadfastness and encouragement

May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant us to live in harmony with our selves and one another, and may the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in believing, so that we may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

How good it is to be on retreat with you!  In the world outside, the weeks before Christmas are marked by an inextricable blend of the tacky and the touching, the paltry and the poignant.  One minute we’re deafened by the jingle-jangle of cash registers springing open, the tap-tap-tap of innumerable fingers on innumerable keyboards pressing the “Send” button, the whoosh of millions of plastic credit cards sliding along a metal track.  The next minute we’re listening to music so beautiful, it melts the heart.  One minute our jaws are dropping at the crass commercialism of the season, the flood of catalogues pouring into our homes, the advertisements relentlessly plugging the greedy message that I actually heard on the radio, “Aren’t the holidays all about getting what you want?”  The next minute something surprises us by its tenderness – maybe a kind word, an unexpected phone call from a friend, or the sight of a December moon rising in the sky. 

I’ve been thinking about the enormous machinery of the quote/unquote “holidays” that kicks into high gear between Halloween and Christmas.  Some of us are making an effort to unplug from the “Christmas machine,” for it’s easy to be flattened this time of year by the frenzied pressure to buy, eat, and drink more than we really want to.  Just about everywhere we go during Advent the message is pounded into us that our true identity is to be a consumer and that our noblest purpose is to shop.  “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” cry so many voices around us.  “Only so many shopping days ‘til Christmas!”

But just when we’re feeling most overwhelmed or saddened by the absurdity of this season, by the ways that a secular society tries to co-opt our religious longings and channel them into the idolatry of things, we are touched by a quiet moment of grace.  I remember visiting a mall one Advent, and passing a baby in a stroller who was looking up into an older woman’s face.  Crowds of shoppers were hurrying past, but the child and the woman seemed entirely oblivious.  The two of them were exchanging a gaze of such steady, mutual delight that I couldn’t help stopping to look.

The woman glanced up at me and smiled.  “This is my granddaughter,” she said.  “Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Yes,” I said.  “She is.”

In fact, they both were.  So much beauty is released in the world whenever we love each other, whenever we remember what matters most.

A voice is calling to us today out of the wilderness of materialism, out of the wasteland of worry and loneliness, out of the barren places of regret, nostalgia, and greed.  “Repent,” says the voice of the prophet, the voice that rings in our own deep core.  “The kingdom of heaven has come near.  Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” Someone is coming among us.  Someone is longing to be born.  Get ready to welcome Him.  Prepare for the birth.

How do we prepare?  By listening to the inner voice of love that is always sounding deep within us.  By attending to the steady pulse of God.  Here in the darkest month of the year, Advent invites us to rest our souls in the steady presence of God.  God is something like the basso continuo in a Bach cantata, that steady bass line that gives the music its foundation.  In the music of Bach, instruments carrying the melody often swoop and plunge and rise and soar, but beneath them all we hear the abiding, steady pulse of the bass line.  God is like that.  God is like a melody that plays under the surface agitations and changes of life.  In Advent we listen for that hidden music, the steadfast love that quietly sustains all things. 

Steadfast.  That’s a good word for God.  It’s a word that St. Paul uses in the passage we heard from his Letter to the Romans: “May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus” (Romans 15:5).  In English, the word “steadfast” comes from two old words that mean “a place that is fast,” “a place that is stable.”  When you are steadfast you have a place to stand.  You are firmly fixed, established, constant, resolute.  “Steady!” That’s what the helmsman cries in a rough sea to keep the ship on course.  “Fast” in this usage means firm.  Just think of that lovely line from one of the psalms: “Your right hand holds me fast” (Ps 63:8).

That is what Advent is about: an invitation to dwell in the steadfast love of God.  Life may be full of change and challenge, loss and stress, but behind and beneath and within all things, we abide in the steadfast presence of God. Trusting in that steadfast love, we set aside time to pray, to rest a while in the quiet running bass line.  Trusting in that steadfast love, we pause a while and share openly with God everything that lies on our hearts–our sadness and loneliness, our disappointment and frustration. Trusting in that steadfast love, we pray our grief and longing, our anger and hope, only to discover again–often to our surprise–that God is unimaginably close.

But as that prickly prophet John the Baptist reminds us today, God’s steadfast love does not only comfort and console.  It also breaks us open.  It creates upheaval.  John the Baptist proclaims that the one who is coming “will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Mt 3:11b). Jesus comes not only with the sweetness of a baby, but also with the turbulence of an earthquake.  In his baptism of fiery love, everything less than love is revealed and burned away.  As John the Baptist declares, the one who comes after him will take “his winnowing fork in his hand, and he will clear the threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Mt 3:12) – vivid words that describe the upheaval we experience in God’s presence, when the blaze of God’s light illumines our darkest corners, and everything that is false in us – all our patterns of lying, selfishness, and deceit – are revealed and stripped away, and everything that is sound in us is welcomed and gathered in.  Trusting in God’s steadfast love, we let ourselves be changed.  We let God’s love burn through us, like a purifying flame.

Expect disturbance when Jesus comes, not just quiet.  His all-inclusive love shakes up our inner lives, our relationships with each other, and the world’s status quo, upsetting every kingdom that hoards power and privilege for the few.  Expect agitation and upset.  The holy love that wants to draw the world to itself will always contradict the forces of injustice, intolerance, and greed.  Expect disturbance.  In the aging, overgrown forest of selfishness and empire building,  of militarism and over-consumption, “even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees” (Mt 3:10a).

When we trust in God’s steadfast love, we listen to our heart’s deepest desire.  We listen to our deep yearning for the fullness of God, for the coming of God, for the reign of justice and peace in this beautiful and broken world.  Come, Lord Jesus, we cry in Advent.  We are hungry for you.  We long for your love.  We yearn for the day when the harmony of humanity and nature will be restored, for the day, as the prophet says, when “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them” (Isaiah 11:6).  The longing we feel for justice and peace is a God-given longing, a longing that God has planted in our hearts and that we hope never to betray.

So, friends, on this quiet Advent night, I invite us to listen for the melody of God’s steadfast love, that basso continuo that sings beneath all the changes and the stresses of our lives.  Come, Lord Jesus.  Help us discern your presence in silence and in upheaval.  When we are confused by the clamorous voices all around, sing us your inward melody of peace.  Transform us, change us, and make us your own.  Fill us, we pray, “with all joy and peace in believing, so that [we] may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13).

With me in Paradise

Today is the last Sunday of the liturgical year, the Feast Day of Christ the King.  In a sense all the prayers, all the Scripture readings, all the worship services of the past year lead up to this moment, for today we affirm the kingship of Christ, the one to whom we give our ultimate allegiance, the one whom we name as King of kings and Lord of lords. 

Now I have to stop right here and ask: What happens inside you when you hear the phrase “King of kings and Lord of lords” in today’s Collect?  What meaning does it have for you?  Are you drawn to the phrase or does it make you wince and pull back?  Personally, I have not always found the image of Christ the King particularly appealing.  At first glance the image evokes nothing more than patriarchy and arbitrary authority.  Many of us still entertain an image from an older generation of Christians, that Christ the King is a severe taskmaster and judge.  Many of us inadvertently confuse Christ the King with a punishing super-ego figure, like an angry father.  On top of that, we live in a democracy, in which our system of government began with getting rid of kings.  

So for years I found other images of Christ much more compelling: the image of Jesus as a child in his mother’s arms, the image of Jesus as the healer, as the teacher and truth-teller, as the good shepherd and guide.  I have turned in prayer to Jesus as the one who listens and gives life, as the crucified One who meets the world’s evil and suffering with love, as the Risen One who overcomes death and whose face is radiant with light – these have been powerful images of Christ for me, and for a long time I pretty much ignored the image of Christ the King.  Then, to my surprise, in a darkened cathedral in the city then called Leningrad, the image of Christ the King suddenly became very real.

It was in 1988, and I was on a diocesan trip to the Soviet Union to celebrate Easter and to mark the coming of Christianity to Russia one thousand years before.  One morning our group stood in St. Isaac’s Cathedral, which claimed to be one of the largest domed cathedrals in the world and has space in its sanctuary for 10,000 people to pray.  It was an impressive building, made of fourteen kinds of marble, and still graced with beautiful icons and mosaics.  But in 1988 Communism ruled the country, and the cathedral was not used as a space for worship.  In fact, ever since the Russian Revolution in 1917, worship in the cathedral had been forbidden.  Most of its priests had long ago been arrested, tried, and shot.  Jackhammers had ripped up the altar; placards denouncing religion had been mounted on the walls; and the dove of the Holy Spirit that once hung from the inner dome had been replaced with a pendulum to signal the rotation of the earth. 

Clearly, in the years after the Revolution, every effort had been made by the political authorities to mock and trivialize the holy, and to pour contempt on the deep human longing for connection to the divine.  Karl Marx famously denounced religion as magical wish-fulfillment, and condemned any notion of God as merely a human projection.  His followers scorned religion as nothing more than a relic of history. The powers-that-be had shrugged off faith in Christ as fantasy and superstition, as an opiate that distracted people from the real issues of the day.  And so the abandoned cathedral remained dimmed and dark and empty.  No candles flickered in the candlesticks.  No incense filled the air.  There was no choir-song to lift the heart, but just the slap and shuffle of shoes against the floor, and the constant murmur of the tour guides, commenting on this detail and that.  God was gone, and only a massive building remained, as empty as a worn-out shoe, as useless as a soda can discarded at the side of a busy highway.

And then I turned my eyes toward the darkness behind the holy doors that enclosed the place where the high altar once stood.  To my astonishment, out of the darkness a pair of eyes met mine.  There in the darkness stood a silent figure.  It was an enormous stained glass Christ the King, wearing brilliant, red robes.  His right hand was raised in blessing; his left hand was holding a scepter.  But it was his clear and steady eyes that grasped me, eyes at once compassionate and severe, eyes without a trace of sentimentality, the clear and loving eyes of the One who reigns in glory.  Christ was witnessing in silence to the power of love even here, where his sanctuary had been desecrated, even here, where his name was mocked.  Christ was King.  Even here, his loving, suffering, and triumphant presence was alive.  I could not turn away.  Christ’s eyes met mine, and my heart bowed in joy.

Who is this King to whom we give our hearts today?  Christ is King, but he is unlike any king on earth.  Christ is no patriarch who reigns above his subjects with impassive ease.  Christ comes among us not to dominate but to serve, not to exploit but to heal, not to force but to set free.  Christ suffers and dies with us and for us, and his loving arms sustain the world.  Even in the most desecrated and abandoned places of our lives, even in the most desecrated and abandoned places of our world, Christ’s love continues to abide and reign.      

We see that vividly in today’s Gospel passage (Luke 23: 35-43).  From out of the depths of terror and suffering, Jesus is able to speak a word of forgiveness: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”  When Jesus is taunted by one of the criminals crucified beside him, he absorbs the verbal blows as silently as he endured the taunts of those who nailed him to the cross.  When the other criminal has a brief moment of repentance and a momentary change of heart, that last-minute willingness to turn to Jesus to ask for help is the only opening that Jesus needs.  Jesus turns to the man and gives him everything. “Today,” he says, “today you will be with me in paradise.”  It is as if Jesus were turning to the repentant man with shining eyes, to say, “Come with me!  Let’s go!  I won’t leave you behind.  I will never leave you behind.  I will be with you always.  You will share in everything that I receive.” 

Jesus is the king who gives everything away, the king who shares his glory and who gives us a crown. When we are locked in our own small world, imprisoned by bitterness or anger or grief or fear, trapped by worry or compulsion just as tightly as the two criminals beside Jesus were nailed to the wood of their crosses, time and again we can do what the penitent thief did: we can admit that we’re frightened or that we’re lost or that we’ve blown it, and we can turn to Jesus.  All he needs from us is just the tiniest of signs, the smallest chink in the wall of our self-enclosed prisons – just a moment of honesty or repentance or compassion – and, if we are willing, he will give us everything he has, his very self to sustain us, to strengthen us and to guide us home.

My friends, it is difficult to say goodbye, but if I had to pick a day to do it, I can’t think of a better day than on the Feast Day of Christ the King.  For a goodly stretch of time, Sunday by Sunday we have opened ourselves to Christ’s living presence.  Sunday by Sunday we have gathered to find our story in his story, and to find his story in our story.  Sunday by Sunday we have listened for Christ in our singing and our silence, in our doubts and our yearning and our praise.  In worship together we have drawn close to Christ, and then we have been sent forth to share that love wherever we go.  As long as we live, I hope that we will always breathe Christ: breathe Christ in, and breathe Christ out, breathe in God’s intimate love, and breathe out that love in our acts of compassion and service.  Don’t think that I am gone for good.  I won’t be attending weekly services at Grace, but I will still be part of this diocese, and I will be counting on you to keep the Gospel alive in this beautiful corner of the world.

Here on this last Sunday of the church year, we lift up God’s well-beloved Son as King of kings and Lord of lords, the one whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, the one who searches for the lost and rescues the scattered, the one who brings back the strayed and binds up the injured, the one who longs to gather everyone and all Creation into a community of justice and love.  We bow today to the One whom we meet in our depths and in our midst, whenever we’re vulnerable to love.  We call Christ “King” because our ultimate allegiance is to Christ, who is love.  It is in love, and love alone – not in fear, not in power-over, but only in love – that we find our identity, our true destiny, and our home.  In good times and bad, Christ is King.  In times of gladness and of sorrow, Christ is King.  In our greetings and our partings, in our beginnings and our endings, in the sowing and the reaping, Christ is King. 

Here at this table, where Christ gives himself to us in the bread and the wine, we will always meet – you and I, and every one of us, the living and the dead, those who are near and those who are far away.  Whenever we share in Holy Communion, Christ will draw us again into the heart of God, where everyone is present, and where the limits of time and space have no meaning.  As we say goodbye – as we say to each other “God be with you” and “God go with you” – we give thanks that love is all, that love is everything, that love never dies.  Christ is King. 

Ellen Safford Goodwin

November 7, 1922 – November 6, 2013

There is a custom in Episcopal churches, and maybe in congregations of every denomination, to maintain a register that keeps track of funerals.  We list the name of the deceased, along with the person’s date of birth, date of death, cause of death, and burial place.  When someone very old passes away, instead of recording the particular illness that led to death (such as heart disease or cancer or whatever), instead we often write, very simply: “full of years.”  I like that gentle phrase: “full of years.”  We give thanks that Ellen died peacefully just before her 91st birthday, surrounded by family members, full of years. 

We knew Ellen in many different ways, and each of you here brings your own memories.  She was your beloved wife or your mother.  She was your mother-in-law or grandmother, your aunt or cousin, your colleague or co-worker, your sister in Christ or simply your friend.  All sorts of memories fill this room, and a great deal of affection, for what we treasured about Ellen was not that she lived to a ripe old age, but that she lived those years with such verve, such vitality.  Ellen was not only full of years – she was full of life.  So much of what she did, so much of who she was, was about living life to the full. 

When I think of Ellen, I picture a woman in motion, her beloved George close by her side.  I picture the two of them bending down, hard at work in a garden, or I imagine her reaching for a vase and arranging an armload of flowers.  Ellen seemed to me to be someone who knew who she was, and who liked who she was, a forthright woman with a sense of inner dignity and natural authority, yet able to size up a situation with a twinkle in her eye.  It seems that Ellen had a rascally sense of humor: her daughters inform me that she was an inveterate and unrepentant cheater when it came to playing games like Red Light, Green Light with the grandchildren.

Ellen delighted in life and all its beauty.  She loved the inner circle of her family and friends.  She was passionate about children and food, about flower gardens and music.  Her zest for life also extended outward to the big wide world – to public service and volunteering, to engaging in big issues like feeding the poor and building housing for the homeless.

I never talked privately to Ellen about her faith, but her family tells me that she found her own way to the Episcopal Church when she was a kid.  She joined a teen youth group and she got herself confirmed.  As far as I can tell, it was always important to Ellen to be an active member of a Christian community.  For years she served as choir director of First Church Congregational, right around the corner; for a long time she was a dedicated member of Second Church in Newton; and when she and George moved back to Amherst in 1986, they began worshiping here at Grace, where she served on the Altar Guild and worked with George on the flower gardens, and, along with her husband, generally became an essential and much beloved part of our parish family.

The God that Ellen worshiped was a God whose lively presence among us was made visible in Jesus, the one who announced, as we heard in today’s Gospel reading, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).  If you want to go looking for Jesus’ mission statement, if you want to search for a single sentence that summarizes and crystallizes what Jesus came to do, you can’t do better than to absorb what he announces here: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” – or, as some translations put it, “I came that they may have life, and have it to the full.”  

Christianity – like every great religion – is all about coming alive.  It is all about finding the path and the practices that set us free from living small, and fearful, and self-centered lives that are overshadowed and undergirded by the fear of death.  Christian faith tells us that in a sense we have already died.  Our death is already behind us – we have been baptized into Christ’s death, and so we have died to our small story and our small self, died to a life that is centered on nothing more than “I” and “me” and “mine.”  We have died with Christ and we have risen with Christ, so we are connected to something greater than ourselves – we are joined to the divine life that will never die. 

Ellen knew full well that the divine life we know in Christ has no beginning and no end.  It does not begin after we die.  It does not start beyond the grave.  It is given to us in every moment, right here and now, and we glimpse it, don’t we?  We sense it.  We feel it flow through us every time we love generously, every time we speak a kind and truthful word, every time we gaze with gratitude at a flower or a child or any part of this marvelous gift of a world, every time we renew our intention to heal or to be of service or to lift a burden from someone else’s back. 

Being fully alive in Christ means knowing that we are deeply loved – and not only by our family members and friends, if we are blessed, as Ellen was blessed, to have such a stable network of support.  Being fully alive in Christ means knowing at a deep level of our being that, no matter what, we are intimately known and loved by God.  Quickly or slowly, as we mature in faith, we come to realize, as the psalmist says, that “Lord, you have searched me out and known me; */ you know my sitting down and my rising up;/ you discern my thoughts from afar.  You trace my journeys and my resting-places */ and are acquainted with all my ways” (Psalm 139:1-2).  God is the Holy One who sees us and knows us and loves us, through and through.  The more we come to trust in that love, the more we dare to believe that really and truly we are God’s beloved – the more we are set free to love other people well, to live with joy and a sense of purpose and meaning, to become seekers of justice and healing, of reconciliation and peace. 

Back in the 2nd century, a theologian named Irenaeus famously said, “The glory of God is a person who is fully human, fully alive.”  Doesn’t that remind you of Ellen?  She was certainly fully human and she was certainly fully alive.  In her presence – in her vitality, her self-confidence, her generous self-giving, her joy, above all in the way that she was so thoroughly herself – I dare to say that we glimpsed the glory of God.  I give thanks for her life. I give thanks for the God who sent her to us and who received her home at her journey’s end. 

I hope that each of us here will live a long life and will die peacefully and “full of years.”  But even more than that, I hope that each of us will do what Ellen did – in whatever way is right for us, in whatever tradition we belong to.  I hope that we will welcome into ourselves the divine life that longs to be made visible and tangible and real – and that we too will live and die full of life.  

God of the living

I have been thinking about change – no surprises there.  Many things have been changing here at Grace: a new rector is on board; work is underway to restore the Parish Hall; a labyrinth has been painted on the chapel floor.  Some changes may be welcome, and some may not, for I am aware of my own mixed feelings as I prepare to leave in two weeks.  It turns out that parish life is like every other kind of life: always in flux.  You’ve noticed that, right?  Nothing holds still.  Moment by moment things are coming and going.  Things are arising and passing away.  Groups form and groups dissolve.  People are born and people die.  This fall, as I watched the colors change in the maple, beech, and sumac trees, I was absorbed by the sight of leaves falling.  Leaves fall with such simplicity!  When the right moment comes, they simply drop – no drama, no fanfare, no resistance, no holding back – they just let go, giving themselves freely to the wind.  I felt as if I could watch those leaves forever, for I’d like to learn to let go like that, with that kind of ease.  Instead, here I am with all my mixed feelings about comings and goings, about impermanence and flux and change, digging my heels in half the time, wanting things to stay put, to be manageable, to be under my control and to turn out the way I want them to.   Thank God for stability and duration, but the problem is that we can get attached to keeping things the same, and then we suffer, and we add to the suffering of others.

My thoughts turned not to today’s Collect, but to a Collect that we hear every year at the end of September.  It goes like this: “Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure….” Love things heavenly, and hold fast to what endures.  But what is it to which we should hold fast?  What is it that endures?

For example, does life endure?  Is there life after death?  Is there a heaven?  These age-old questions have surely perplexed human beings ever since we evolved to the point of self-awareness and of realizing that we were going to die.  Over the millennia, across various cultures and traditions, all kinds of answers have been supplied, some of them very elaborate, imaginative, and speculative.  On the other hand, some individuals and groups have been reluctant to make any conjectures about what heaven is like, or whether an after-life exists at all, because they trust only what they have directly experienced.  I heard a story last week about a Zen student who asked his teacher, “What happens to us when we die?”  “I don’t know,” the teacher replied. “But aren’t you a Zen teacher?” the student retorted.  “Yes,” he said, “but I’m not a dead Zen teacher.” 

“I’ll wait and find out for myself” might be what some of us say when we’re asked what we believe about heaven and life after death.  And some people flat out reject any possibility of life after death.  That was the position of the Sadducees, a group within Judaism that considered the Torah, the first five books of Moses, to be their only source of authority – if you couldn’t find something in the Torah, then it couldn’t be true.  Based on this material, they found no reason to believe in the resurrection.  The Pharisees, by contrast, believed that Moses had provided an oral as well as a written tradition, and that the oral tradition justified believing in the resurrection.  Whether or not to believe in the resurrection of the dead was the subject of heated, even violent, argument between the two groups (Acts 23:6-10). 

So when the Sadduccees came to Jesus to ask a question about the resurrection, they were not posing the question from the point of view of a grieving person who is looking for solace or hope, nor were they posing it from the perspective of a seeker who is sincerely searching for truth.  They already knew exactly what they believed – that resurrection and the after-life were a fantasy.  In presenting Jesus with the hypothetical case of a wife who died and found herself confronted in heaven by seven husbands, each of whom presumably wanted to claim her as his own, their purpose was to show that belief in the resurrection or after-life was absurd.  They were out to trick Jesus and to make him look like a fool

What did Jesus say in reply?  Well, he says, the after-life is real; there is a heavenly life beyond the grave.  But our risen life is not merely an extension or repetition of life on earth.  In some sense it is beyond our imagining – there is no marrying there, he says, and no death.  Jesus doesn’t go into details about what heaven or the age to come is like; he does not indulge in fanciful speculation.  But what he does say is that it is real, and mysteriously different from the sensory world that we know on earth, just as the Risen Christ was Jesus of Nazareth, but not recognizable in the usual way.  In today’s passage, Jesus turns to the Torah, the part of Scripture that the Sadduccees recognized as valid, and recalls what God revealed to Moses beside the burning bush: “I am… the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6).  Jesus takes this statement as implicit recognition that resurrection is real: God is God “not of the dead, but of the living, for to [God] all of them are alive” (Luke 20:38).  In God, all live.

What this means is that within all the comings and goings of life there is something eternal. Our loved ones may die, but in God they are alive.  Our days may disappear like smoke, yet within and beyond all the arising and passing away we glimpse something that will never die: the enduring love and life of God.  Where is heavenly life found?  Right here.  And when does it begin?  Right now.  Do we need to die in order to be in heaven?   No – to be in heaven, we need in fact to be very much alive.  Moments when we are caught up in love, moments when we are fully present, moments when we look deeply into life with eyes of love, are moments when we touch what is ultimately real.  

I’ll tell you one way to get a glimpse of heaven.  I invite you to close your eyes for a moment, and to bring to mind someone who is easy for you to love.  Take a moment to relax and to let someone who is easy for you to love come to your mind.  It may be someone who lives close by or it may be someone far away.  It may be someone you saw just this morning, or it may be someone you haven’t seen in years.  Let someone come to mind who is easy for you to love, and if no person comes to mind, see if there is a beloved pet that you want to hold in mind just now.  For just a moment, let’s enjoy what it feels like to gaze with love on this other being, what it feels like to honor fully our affection for him or her.  If you like, you may want to imagine the person gazing back at you with tenderness.  The person sees you just as you are, and loves you just as you are, and you don’t have to change a thing.

Can you sense that love?  In a way it doesn’t matter if the person is physically close to you or is somewhere far away.  Even if they have died, they are always as close as your heart.  Love knows no boundaries of time or space.  Sometimes a person may even be more present to us when the person is absent.  Love is reckless, abundant, and ever upwelling.  It crosses time zones; it passes freely between this world and the next; it knows no bounds and no frontiers.  God is God not of the dead but of the living, and when we love, we come alive and we step into heaven.  As St. John puts it in his First Letter, “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another” (1 John 3:14).  Or, as the philosopher Gabriel Marcel once said, you know you have really learned to love someone when you know that you see in the other that which is too precious to ever die.

I wonder if that experience, that knowledge, is what enabled Job to proclaim, even from the depths of unimaginable loss and suffering, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth… [and] in my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:25-26). 

That is the Christian message of hope, a message that can carry us through life with joy, even as we watch the leaves fall, even as we recognize the truth of impermanence and change.  When we hand in our stewardship pledges next week, it will be with grateful hearts for the heaven that is proclaimed and made known in this community, and that we anticipate knowing in fullness in the age to come. 

I will end by quoting part of a song¹ recorded by Celtic folk singer Mary Black: 

In your eyes
Faint as the singing of a lark
Somehow this black night
Feels warmer for the spark
Warmer for the spark
To hold us ‘til the day when fear will lose its grip
And heaven has its way
And heaven has its way
When all will harmonize
And know what’s in our hearts
The dream will realize

Heaven knows no frontiers
And I’ve seen heaven in your eyes
Heaven knows no frontiers
And I’ve seen heaven in your eyes.

1. “No Frontiers,” lyrics by Jimmy McCarthy.