Author Archives: mbj

The foolishness of the cross

The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. (1 Corinthians 1:18)

Tonight’s Gospel passage comes immediately after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The mood in the city was tense, excited, on edge. Passover was at hand, and Jewish crowds, chafing under the rule of the Roman Empire, had gathered to celebrate the memory of liberation from the Egyptian Empire. Riots against the Roman Empire sometimes broke out during Passover, and some commentators describe Passover as being “tinderbox time.” ¹ That year noisy crowds were coming out to meet Jesus, eager to see the man who had raised Lazarus from the dead, and who had just entered Jerusalem to confront Roman imperial authority and the religious leaders that were collaborating with it. Would he lead a political revolt? Would he call the Jewish people to arms and initiate a violent rebellion? Suspense was high. The authorities were alarmed, and set into motion the plot to kill him.

It is in this complex atmosphere of celebration, intrigue, and plotting that we hear tonight’s reading. Some unnamed Greeks have come to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. They approach Philip to say, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus” John 12:21. Philip tells Andrew, and the two of them report the message to Jesus, who exclaims, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” John 12:23. It seems that Jesus has received at last the sign that he was looking for, the signal from God that the decisive “hour” has arrived. It is the hour of what he calls his “glorification,” but Jesus’ idea of glory is clearly not like our idea of glory. As preacher Barry Vaughn puts it, “For Jesus, to be glorified was to embrace the cross, the epitome of suffering…Because non-Jews such as the Greeks were seeking to meet Jesus, he knew that his mission was no longer restricted to Israel but had become universal. It was time for him to be lifted up – that is, crucified – so that all people could be drawn to him.” ²

Tonight with Jesus we look ahead to the cross.

“Oh, but what foolishness!” the world will tell us, as it once told him. “Arm yourselves! Fight fire with fire! Call down the armies of heaven and wipe out evil from the face of the earth!” But Jesus’ response to oppression and violence is not to wield a sword or raise a fist. His response to violence is not to retaliate or to seek revenge, but to absorb it, endure it, and transform it in his own body. To words of hate he replies with words of forgiveness. To acts of violence he responds with acts of suffering love. To the power-driven evil and oppression of the world, he responds by being lifted up on the cross.

I want to make something clear that is not always made clear during Holy Week. Jesus did not value suffering for its own sake, as if suffering were somehow intrinsically virtuous or ennobling. Jesus was not a masochist. There are scenes in all four Gospels when Jesus deliberately avoided attack. In John’s Gospel, the one from which we read tonight, Jesus sometimes steered clear of trouble by traveling in secret John 7:10; 11:54, and during a visit to the temple he hid from an angry crowd that was about to throw stones at him John 8:59. Today’s passage ends with his removing himself from public view and hiding with his disciples until the night of the Last Supper John 12:36b.

Jesus did not seek out suffering, but kept his inward vision fixed on God. He listened intently for what divine Love was calling him to do, and, as we heard in tonight’s Gospel passage, at last the hour did come when the only and best and truest way to stand up to the powers-that-be, the only and best and truest way to drive out “the ruler of this world” John 12:31 — that is, Satan and the powers of evil — was to give himself in love, to offer his life freely on the cross.

As Richard Rohr, the Roman Catholic writer and priest, often remarks, when it comes to suffering, we either transmit it or transform it. We transmit suffering when we pass it along to other people, when we retaliate, seek revenge, and take an eye for an eye. We transform suffering when we find a creative, non-violent response to it, when we find a way, through God’s grace, to follow Jesus and to bear the cross with love and an open heart. It takes strength to transform suffering, and we need God’s help to do it. When we transform our suffering, we receive power to reach out in love, when love seemed impossible — power to forgive, when forgiveness seemed impossible — power to feel and express compassion, when so much within us wanted only to close down . As Wendell Berry puts it so beautifully, “the Christian Gospel is a summons to peace, calling for justice beyond anger, mercy beyond justice, forgiveness beyond mercy, love beyond forgiveness.” ³

Where in your own life have you found a way to transform your suffering?

Where do you transmit suffering? Where do you need to ask Jesus to help you follow more faithfully in the way of the cross, which is foolishness in the eyes of the world, but which to us reveals the power of God?

1. Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, “Collision Course: Jesus’ Final Week,” Christian Century, March 20, 2007, p. 29. The article is based on their book, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach about Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem, HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.

2. Rev. Dr. J. Barry Vaughn, http://www.episcopalchurch.org/sermons_that_work_106304_ENG_HTM.htm March 29, 2009 – Fifth Sunday in Lent

3. Wendell Berry, “A Citizen’s Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” Orion 22 (March/April 2003), p. 26, quoted by John Gatta, Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 206.

A loving father and his two lost sons

What if I told you that when you walked into church this morning, you were one sort of person, but that when you walk out at the end of the service, you will be someone new? That you will have changed in some fundamental way? That is the promise of the Gospel — that in Christ we enter a process of transformation that quickly or slowly changes how we see ourselves and how we look at life and the world around us. St. Paul makes this crystal clear in today’s epistle: “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” 2 Corinthians 5:17. As one writer puts it, “that’s a description of earth-shaking change that goes right to the core of our being — something so fundamental that it changes the axis of our entire bearing; which, according to news reports, is exactly what scientists have said occurred to our earth as a result of the recent … earthquake [in Chile]. Apparently the earth’s figure axis moved several inches, and as a result our days have been shortened by approximately 1.25 milliseconds.” ¹

In Lent we are given forty days in which to look closely at the axis of our lives, to notice where our thoughts, attitudes, and choices still revolve around our own small self and that ancient, anxious, defensive question, “What’s in it for me?” and also to notice where we have begun to find a new axis in the love of God in Christ. Transformation is what we’re up to in Lent — inner transformation that de-centers and de-thrones our little ego and reconciles us to God and neighbor. As St. Paul cries out in today’s epistle: “We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” 2 Corinthians 5: 20.

I can think of no finer story about reconciliation with God and neighbor than the parable from Luke’s Gospel that we just heard. It is often called the parable of the Prodigal Son, but of course that title is not quite accurate, since the parable is really about a loving father who has two sons. However you name it, some folks consider it the greatest short story in the world, ² and it is certainly one of the best-known and best-loved parables that Jesus ever told. When I hear it, I can’t help thinking of Rembrandt’s painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son, so today I brought in a reproduction of a portion of that painting. The poster is a bit frayed around the edges, because in the course of leading retreats, my husband and I have carried it to different places, but you can still make out the basic scene: the father is a bearded, nearly blind old man in a red cloak who has placed his large hands on the shoulders of his returning son. The son — half-barefoot, exhausted, his head shaven like that of a prisoner or a survivor of a concentration camp, robbed of his identity — wears no cloak, only torn undergarments. He kneels before the father, and his cheek is nestled against the father’s chest, as if he were listening to the heartbeat of God.

The original oil painting hangs in the Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg, and it is much bigger than this poster. In fact, it is huge — 8 feet high and 6 feet wide — and it includes not only the scene that we see here, the embrace of the father and his wayward younger son; it also portrays the elder son and three other figures that stand at the side or in the shadows behind. It was probably one of Rembrandt’s last works, painted when the artist was close to death.

If you want to meditate more deeply on both the parable and the painting, I suggest you read Henri Nouwen’s book, The Return of the Prodigal Son, which has inspired thousands of Christians and probably hundreds of sermons, including this one. ³ For now, as we walk through this familiar story, I invite you to notice where you identify with the characters. I imagine Jesus lifting up this parable before us as if it were a mirror. If we can see ourselves in it, perhaps we can sense where God is inviting us to take the next step in our journey of transformation. Are we the younger son, who runs away from home and returns full of penitence and sorrow? Are we the elder son, angry, resentful, and holding back? Are we the father, who is filled with compassion, forgiveness, and a joy that know no bounds?

The story begins: “There was a man who had two sons” Luke 15:11. For reasons we are not told, the younger son decides to go it alone. He’s outta there, itching to leave, ready to hit the road and do things his own way. He asks his father not only for his portion of his inheritance, but also for the right to spend it. As Nouwen points out, in that culture it was normal for a father to sign over his possessions to his son, but ordinarily the father would live off the proceeds for the rest of his life. For a son to ask to receive and spend his inheritance now was to ask for what he had no right to have until after his father’s death. In effect the son was rejecting his father, blowing him off, even wishing him dead. ⁴

The loving father lets him go freely, for love cannot be coerced. The younger son takes off, money in hand, to what the story calls “a distant country,” and there he squanders it all in dissolute living, until he hits that rock bottom place of the soul. Lost, humiliated, almost starving, he wishes desperately that he could eat the very pods that he’s feeding to the pigs.

It’s a path that we’ve all taken and may still be taking today, the go-it-alone path, the I-don’t-need-God path, the rebellious path of “self-will run riot,” in which we do whatever we darn well please and never mind the consequences to ourselves or anyone else — until we end up defeated and at the end of our rope. Have you ever been lost in that distant country? Are you wandering there still? Have you ever tasted that bitter sense of shame, isolation, and loneliness that the younger son knows so well, wallowing with the pigs?

Then comes a beautiful line, one of the story’s turning points: “When he came to himself…” It is as if Jesus were saying that at the deepest level of our being, we are good and we belong to God; we are made in God’s image. When we come to ourselves, when we are truly ourselves, we begin the journey home to God. Our basic nature, our truest nature, is found as we head toward God, our divine Father and Mother, the Source of life.

So the young man comes to himself, turns, and starts to travel home, but he doesn’t really trust the father’s love. He has a plan and he starts making speeches, rehearsing his lines, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of the hired hands.” He is heading in the right direction, but he is still far away. He still doesn’t grasp the nature of the father’s love. Will the father be harsh with him? Will he make his son work hard as a hired hand to atone for what he has done, make him earn his salvation?

The father, who has evidently been waiting eagerly for his son’s return, catches sight of him while he is “still far off” and, “filled with compassion,” runs out to greet him. It is completely unexpected and undignified, this decisive moment when the old man hikes his robe above his shins and runs, breathing hard, sandals slapping and forehead perspiring, until he reaches his son and catches him up in his arms.

That moment of reunion is the one that Rembrandt portrays. It is a wordless moment, a moment of enormous stillness, in which the gentle arms of the father embrace the repentant son and draw him close. Can you imagine those kind hands on your shoulders? Can you imagine your face sheltered in the shadow of that warm red cloak, resting against the father’s loving heart? That experience of acceptance, forgiveness, and reconciliation is what our souls long for so ardently. We may need to gaze at that scene for a long time so that we can really take it in.

The repentant son tries to launch into his long apology, but the father will have none of it. “Quick,” he says to his slaves, “bring out a robe, a ring, a pair of sandals. Clothe my son in fresh garments and let’s have a party, for,” says the father, “this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” It’s all about joy — the father’s joy and the joy of the repentant son. Can you imagine the joy that God feels when you decide at last to come home?

But the story does not end here. There is someone else to consider: the elder son, who is out in the field. When he approaches the house, he hears music and dancing. Rather than being caught up at once in the merriment, he calls one of the slaves and demands an explanation. The poster I’ve brought in shows only part of Rembrandt’s painting, but Rembrandt places the elder son at some distance to the right of the embracing father and younger son. Like his father, the elder son is also bearded and wearing a red cloak, but unlike his father, he is standing erect and aloof, with his hands closely tucked together rather than open in a embrace of welcome and blessing. He is glaring down at his father and brother, for, as the parable tells us, he is outraged by what he sees. He thinks he has been neglected, and his sense of justice has been affronted. Sure, let the sinful brother come back, but give him bread and water, not the fatted calf; give him sackcloth and ashes, not a new robe and a ring.

The elder brother refuses to go inside. The father comes out looking for him, and the elder son says, “Look, I’ve been slaving for years. I’ve been dutiful, I’ve done all the right things — I’ve served on the Vestry, and tithed, and prayed the Daily Office. I’ve voted for the right candidates and lobbied for good causes

— heck, I even showed up for adult ed. classes and for every parish event! But here you are, welcoming back this wretched son of yours” — and you can practically see him waving his hand in dismissal — “and I don’t see you killing the fatted calf for me!”

Do you sometimes hear that voice of anger and jealousy and resentment within yourself? The elder son has done everything, and more, that he was (quote/unquote) “supposed” to do, but he has only been doing it in order to earn merit and to follow the rules, not because he is abiding inwardly in the father’s love. In his own way, he, too, is as lost as his younger brother, and he, too, has run away from home. He embodies that part of our selves that wants to trust in its own righteousness, in what we deserve and earn and produce on our own. As writer Cynthia Bourgeault explains, “The older brother with his indignant ‘This isn’t fair!’ is a textbook example of the [ego-centered] operating system at work. Through him, Jesus is asking us to look closely at that part in each one of us that insists on keeping score, that can’t let go into the generosity and the blessedness.” Bourgeault goes on: “The parable’s concluding image — of the older son standing alone outside, refusing to join the party because he feels he has been slighted — is a vivid symbol of the way the [ego-based] operating system holds us back from joining the dance of Divine Mercy in full swing around us. If we’re stuck in the ego, we can’t hear the music.” ⁵

The parable makes it clear that the father loves both sons. He runs out to meet them both, and wants both of them to sit at his table and to share in his joy. ⁶ “My son,” says the father to the angry elder son — and the Greek word, “teknon,” is an affectionate word for child, or daughter, or son — “you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” Sweet words. “You are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. Come home,” the father is saying. “I have always loved you, and my love for your brother in no way diminishes my love for you.”

What will the elder brother do next? Will he stay outside, holding tight to his angry self-righteousness, or will he follow his brother’s lead, accept his father’s love, and join the celebration? Jesus told this story with the elder brother very much in mind, for the parable is his response to the grumbling Pharisees and scribes who complained that he welcomed sinners and ate with them. Would the Pharisees and scribes let go their ego-centered self-righteousness and join the feast? Would the elder brother? Will we?

That is the scandal of the father’s love, and the scandal of the Eucharist, for everyone is welcome to the feast, prodigal and respectable alike, all of us equally dependent on and equally embraced by the unconditional love of God. It is a meal that can transform our consciousness and shift the axis of the self, so that we discover our center and true self in the unconditional love of God.

So, come to the table of Christ, as the old prayer says, ⁷ “you who feel weak and unworthy, you who come often and you who have stayed away.

“Come, you who love him and you who wish you could.

“Come, you who are hungry for friendship or forgiveness.

“Come, you who long for meaning or a just world.”

Come. The Father is waiting for you, arms outstretched.

1. Ronald H. Love, “Are we willing to throw a feast?”, SermonSuite,
http://www.sermonsuite.com/the-immediate-word.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20100302/sc_space/chileearthquakemayhaveshorteneddaysonearth

2. William Barclay, The Gospel of Luke, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975, p. 204.

3. Henri J.M Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Meditation on Fathers, Brothers, and Sons, NY: Doubleday, 1992.

4. Ibid., p. 32

5. Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, Boston: Shambhala, 2008, p. 49.

6. Nouwen, op. cit., p. 74.

7. Ray Simpson, Healing the Land: Natural Seasons, Sacraments, and Special Services, The Celtic Prayer Book, Volume 3, Suffolk, England: Kevin Mayhew, 2004, p.154, based on a prayer of the Iona Community

Out into the deep

“Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.”
Luke 5:4

Today’s Gospel is for all of us who feel as if we are skimming along the surface of life on a motorboat. It is for all of us who are busy, working hard, and hurrying along, but who sometimes feel enmeshed in things that are trivial, repetitive, boring, unsatisfying. Daily life can be a grind. Like the fishermen in this story who fished all night long and never caught a thing, we, too, go through times in our lives when day after day we throw our nets over the side of our boats and half the time, and maybe more than half, have nothing much to show for it. The nets are coming up empty, and we feel as if we are living on automatic pilot, stuck in our mindless routines. We drop off the kids; we pick them up again. We shop for groceries, cook the meal, and clean up — again. We drive to work, put in a day’s labor, go home and catch up on sports, the soaps, the latest scandal or crime. We fill our minds with the worries and cares of the world; we fret about things; we circle around our anxieties like a moth around a flame, and then we escape our repetitive preoccupations by paddling in the world of entertainment, maybe amuse ourselves with celebrity gossip, the latest movie, or the newest gadget. We post a note on Facebook, try out a new recipe, order something online, or check off another item on our list of things to do. The sun rises; the sun sets; and what does it all add up to? Another day passes, and even though we may be outwardly successful and have gotten a thousand things done, something in us feels restless, impatient, and unfulfilled. Something inside keeps tugging at us, keeps murmuring its baleful question, “Is that all there is?”

I don’t know if I am conveying it well, but I am trying to express that sense of quiet despair that can come upon us when we feel as if we are trapped in the shallows of life, and our lives feel too small. We can go very dutifully through the motions — we do what needs to be done at home, we show up at work, we even show up at church — but somehow we feel trapped, as if real life, what Dostoevsky called zhivaja zhizn’ — “living life” — has somehow eluded us and is out of reach.

Today’s Gospel is also for those of us who are getting older. A friend of mine who was trained in Jungian psychology used to speak about Jung’s idea that we have two distinct tasks in life. During the first part of our lives, most of us try to expand on the horizontal level: we want to become more competent in navigating the ways of the world. We want to enlarge our database, meet new people, see more places, acquire more skills, expand our horizons. We are like a rubber band that stretches out horizontally, growing larger and larger. But in the second half of life, it’s as if the rubber band tips on its end. We become hungry for the vertical dimension. We are no longer satisfied with the surface of things, but want to go deep. We ask new questions. What is the purpose of my life? What really matters? What really lasts? What is most deeply true, and how do I align my life with that truth?

So whether you are longing for the depths because you are getting older, or because — whatever your age — your skipping-stone self is tired of staying on the surface, today’s Gospel is for you. “Put out into the deep water,” Jesus says to Simon Peter, and to us, “and let down your nets for a catch” Luke 5:4.

How do we put out into the deep? There are many ways. Maybe we go on a pilgrimage or make a retreat. Maybe we enter an intensive period of prayer, begin psychotherapy, show up at 12 Step meetings, or set aside regular time for solitude, silence, and contemplation. Maybe we find a spiritual director or make a commitment to attend adult ed classes on Wednesday nights. Sometimes it is life itself that pulls us into the depths — an experience of illness or a brush with death, a failed relationship or a loss that overwhelms us with grief. Contemplative prayer is the practice that Christians have especially trusted over the years to draw us down below the surface of things, and simply closing one’s eyes for a little while and consciously breathing in the love of God is a way to begin to attune oneself to the Christ who dwells within.

But however we make the plunge, however we cast not just our nets but also our whole selves into the deep, we have to relinquish our small selves, our social selves, our selves that locate our identity in what we do, what we have, what other people think about us, and what we ourselves think. When we drop “like a stone [into] the quiet depths of each moment,” ¹ we are in over our heads, no longer in control. As one writer observes in a book about Thomas Merton, “To sink is to vanish.” ² The whole ego-project of proving ourselves and promoting ourselves, justifying ourselves and defending ourselves — all that gets stripped away, washed away in the deep currents of God. In the depths we are simply naked before the divine Mystery, unguarded, undefended, holding on to nothing, drawn moment by moment to a deeper union with the Lover of our souls. In the end, prayer is not about trying to influence God or to change God’s mind — it is about letting everything go so that we are completely free to belong to God. And in this experience of radical self-emptying, we discover that our deepest identity is to share in God’s own life, to enter into a relationship of deep intimacy with the Divine.

We have nothing, but we have everything. We possess nothing, but we possess everything. We hold on to nothing, but everything is being given to us. We have been drawn into an abundant life that we did not create and that does not depend on us for existence, but which, by the grace of God, is always flowing through the core of our being and which can well up into our lives, pour out of our hands, and bear good fruit in the world around us. The Gospels speak again and again of God’s surprising abundance — water turns into wine John 2:1-11, the loaves and fishes multiply Luke 9:10-17, and Simon Peter suddenly has so many fish leaping into his nets that he must enlist the help of his friends, and even then both boats are sinking and the nets are breaking from the abundance of the catch. I like to imagine how the jaws of those weary fishermen dropped in amazement, and how they threw back their heads to laugh!

It is a joyful and “a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” Hebrews 10:31. Peter drops to his knees before Jesus, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man” Luke 5:8. Peter is filled with humility and awe. His ego can take no credit for the fish; there is no room for pride. Peter did answer Jesus’ call, and he did cast his nets into the deep. He did have a role to play in the miracle, by doing what was in his power do and by giving himself fully to the task. But he knows through and through that he himself is not responsible for the outcome, and that the outcome of his efforts is in the hands of God. As Paul writes in his Letter to the Ephesians, the glory belongs to God alone, whose “power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” Ephesians 3:20.

If I were to summarize what I hear in our Gospel today, it would be something like this:

1) Notice where you have settled for a small life, for a life that is shallow, or wasted on trivial things.

2) Plunge into the deep. Take up the practice of contemplative prayer, or selfless service, or whatever helps you to relinquish your small self and to discover again that the deep ground of your being is love Ephesians 3:17. When our consciousness is open to the divine Presence in which we are submerged, then we can return to our ordinary tasks with fresh energy and a new perspective.

And finally — 3) Listen for your call. God has a mission for you! When you know that you are loved, when you know that your deep self, your real self, is in God and that you are made for union with God, then God will send you back out into the world to speak and act fearlessly for peace, for healing, for reconciling and setting free. “Do not be afraid,” Jesus says to Simon, and to us, as well. The outcome of our efforts is in the hands of God, and we trust that God will work through us, and that, in a way we cannot possibly imagine, our lives will bear abundant fruit. God is whispering in our hearts, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”, and we dare to reply, “Here am I; send me!” Isaiah 6:8.

1. James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere: A Search for God through Awareness of the True Self, Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 1978, p. 26.

2. Ibid.

Fulfilled in your hearing

I like a good story, and I have been trying to imagine the Gospel scene that we just heard. The setting is a synagogue, but we don’t need to imagine a special building with distinctive architecture — buildings like that weren’t built until the later second and third centuries.¹ In Jesus’ time, synagogues were simply gatherings of Jewish families who came together in private homes or sometimes in public halls in order to pray and also to hear and discuss their sacred texts. Every town and village in Palestine had its own synagogue, which functioned as the center of the community’s life and worship. So we can imagine the space however we wish — maybe it was someone’s home, or a large hall.

What interests me more than the setting is who was gathered that day around Jesus in the synagogue. What sort of people do you imagine were there? I like to imagine the room being filled with people not so different from ourselves. I like to imagine there being a young man in the crowd, a rather shy and serious fellow just setting out in life and wondering what on earth his goals should be and to what he should devote his best energy and time. I like to imagine that an older person is seated there, maybe a woman who has given her life to many a good cause but who by now is feeling somewhat beaten down — despite her best efforts, there is so much that she hasn’t been able to change in the world, so much ongoing injustice, so much waste, so much misery and want. I like to imagine that there is a person there who feels grief or loneliness or guilt, and someone who feels emotionally stuck, and someone who is physically unwell. I like to imagine that somehow, in that small room, the whole range of humanity has gathered, and that there is room enough for us, too — that we, too, can slip into the scene and bring with us whatever is on our hearts this morning — we who contemplate the vast misery of the people in Haiti, we who may feel anger and frustration at this country’s current state of affairs, from its broken health care system to the appalling prospect of corporations pouring unlimited amounts of cash into political campaigns. In this synagogue where Jesus is about to speak, surely there is room for us, and for everything we bear. If you were in the synagogue that day, what would you bring with you? What longing or need would you feel most strongly as you gathered with your fellow seekers to pray?

Let’s turn now to Jesus and let him enter the scene, this man who was baptized just weeks before in the Jordan River, who heard through the power of the Spirit that he was deeply cherished by God, and who, as Frank Griswold puts it, “with the voice from heaven still ringing in his ears,”² was driven by that same Spirit out into the wilderness to face his temptations and to renounce any self-centered patterns of thought or behavior that might pull him off course. By the time that Jesus returned to his hometown of Nazareth, he had discovered his deep identity — he was the beloved of God — and he had purified his intention to give himself freely and fully to the service of God.

“Filled with the power of the Spirit” (Luke 4:14), as we heard in today’s reading, Jesus returned from his forty days in the wilderness, and began teaching in the synagogues of Galilee. “When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom” (Luke 4:16). It is clear that Jesus was a faithful Jew who shared in the liturgical life of his community. Synagogues generally did not have professional rabbis; instead, the person presiding at the service asked some respected person in the congregation to speak. Jesus was invited to teach that day, and so our scene unfolds.

The men and women of the congregation watch as he stands up and receives the scroll. They watch him unroll it and find a passage from the prophet Isaiah. They listen as he reads it aloud, and we can imagine the sound of his voice as he reads the text, the authority and urgency and purity of his words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18). The congregation watches as he rolls the scroll back up, hands it back to the attendant, and sits down — as was the custom of the time — before he begins his sermon. The eyes of all in the synagogue are fixed on Jesus as they wait in silence for him to speak.

What does he say? It is perhaps the world’s shortest sermon: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). Believe me, if I could have gotten away with it, I would have simply spoken that sentence from the pulpit this morning and sat down. Obviously I decided not to do that. But can you sense the shock of energy that was released around the room when Jesus said those words?

Today the Scripture has been fulfilled, he said — not some other day, not some distant day, some vague and far-off moment in the future, but today, this very day.

The Scripture has been fulfilled — what a sweet word that is! To fulfill is to make actual and to bring to completion. What is fulfillment like for you? To me it is like hearing a dissonant chord near the end of a piece of music, and for a few exquisite, painful moments you wait, almost gritting your teeth in your longing for those dissonant notes to resolve — and then they do — ah! Fulfillment! Or maybe fulfillment is like waiting at the airport for someone you love to come home, someone who has been away for what seems like forever, and you are pacing back and forth behind the railing, waiting for the doors to open, waiting to see that face again and to hold the person in your arms, and the suspense is nearly killing you, you are almost holding your breath, practically on tiptoe as you elbow the crowd around you, and the doors open at last, and there the person is, walking toward you, looking into your face and smiling — oh, that is fulfillment, too!

Today this Scripture has been fulfilled, and it is a fulfillment that the listeners have been waiting for ardently not just for a moment, not just for a few days or weeks or even years, but for decades, for lifetimes, for generation upon generation. The people of God have been waiting for the Messiah to come, for the anointed one who will come at last to heal the broken-hearted and set the down-trodden free, to liberate the captives and to give sight to the blind. Our weary, weary world has been longing since forever for fulfillment — “groaning,” as St. Paul says (Romans 8:22-23), as it waits to be set free and to be made whole, suffering like a woman in childbirth as it waits for an end to war and natural disaster, for the coming of peace, the flourishing of justice, the sounds of harmony and laughter.

And today Jesus says: “this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” What does this mean? Three things. First, Jesus has discovered his mission. In the course of speaking aloud the passage from Isaiah, he has realized that the words he is uttering have come true. He is the one who has been anointed, baptized by the Spirit, to bring good news to the poor and to proclaim release to the captives. He knows who he is and he has discovered what he has been sent here to do. He has found not only his identity, but also his mission, and everything he does from this point on — preaching, teaching, healing, suffering, dying — will be for the sake of following that true north on his compass. His whole ministry will flow from this inaugural sermon and its vision of carrying out God’s mission of healing and reconciling and setting free.

“Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” and that means, second, as Henri Nouwen points out, that the poor, “the captives, the blind, and the oppressed are not people somewhere outside of the synagogue who, someday, will be liberated; they are the people who are listening. And it is in the listening that God becomes present and heals.”³ God is healing us in our listening, setting us free in our listening, right here and right now. This is our day to be released, our day to hear the good news and to be made whole. It is so hard to listen deeply — we have so much clutter in our minds, so many impulses, memories, and scraps of information. Henri Nouwen invites us to listen deeply in the silence of our hearts as we hear the word of God, and to ask ourselves: How is God coming to me right now, as I listen? “Where do I discern the healing hand of God through the word? How are my sadness, my grief, [my anger] and my mourning being transformed at this very moment? Do I sense the fire of God’s love purifying my heart and giving me new life?”⁴

“Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” That means not only that Jesus has found his mission, and that as we listen to his words, we are being healed and made whole. It also means that we have found our mission, too. We have been anointed in our baptism and filled with the same Spirit with which Jesus was anointed and filled. We listen to the same inner voice of love to which Jesus listened. We are sent out, as Jesus was sent out, to embody and make real the healing and liberating presence of God. I encourage us this week to notice the opportunities that God sets before us to carry out this mission right in the midst of our daily lives. These Scriptures are fulfilled in our time when we as the people of God in the name of Jesus Christ put into action the words from Isaiah that Jesus read aloud in the synagogue. We are all members of the one body, and we each have our own part to play. I invite us to pick up our ministries of healing and liberating with fresh energy and resolve, whatever form that ministry may take, and to trust the deep peace that only God can give, the peace that comes from knowing that God is with us, and that the love of God will never let us go.

1. The Cambridge Companion to the Bible, Howard Clark Kee, et al., Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 458.

2. Frank T. Griswold, Going Home: An Invitation to Jubilee, Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 2000, p. 26.

3. Henri Nouwen, With Burning Hearts, pp. 45-48, cited in The Essential Henri Nouwen, edited by Robert A. Jonas, Boston: Shambhala, 2009, p. 96.

4. Ibid, p. 97.

A Place for the Singing of Angels

“The Lord has set his throne in heaven, and his kingship has dominion over all. Bless the Lord, you angels of his, you mighty ones who do his bidding, and hearken to the voice of his word.” (Psalm 103:19-20)

It may be raining, but today is a day for celebration. In a few hours we will join with throngs of people to commemorate the 250^th anniversary of the Town of Amherst, and take part in the largest parade that has ever marched these streets. Today we also celebrate the founding of Grace Church, and turn our attention to another sort of throng — the throngs of angels, led by Archangel Michael, who, as today’s Collect says, “serve and worship [God] in heaven,” and “help and defend us here on earth.” Today’s feast day reminds us that we live under the protection of the archangel Michael, the spiritual warrior who does combat with the powers of evil and who stands beside us and within us in the battle for love to prevail.

I don’t know the exact history of how Grace Church came to celebrate its anniversary on the feast day of St. Michael and All Angels. Rob tells me that our building is patterned roughly after that of the Parish Church of St. Michael at the North Gate in Oxford, England, whose tower, dating back to the 11^th century, is the oldest building in Oxford. The installation of our striking St. Michael’s window must have clinched the deal, and for years now, generations of the faithful have stood and knelt and prayed in this space, setting aside one special Sunday at the end of September to honor St. Michael and all God’s angels.

Today is a good day to ask ourselves: What do I believe about angels? Are angels real? How important are angels to the Christian faith? I was intrigued to learn this week that Mortimer Adler, the well-known philosopher, educator, and author who was a long-time editor of Encyclopedia Britannica and who helped to create that enormous, 54-volume series, Great Books of the Western World, once set himself the task of identifying the 102 “great ideas” of Western civilization. It turns out that the concept of angels is — at least in his view — one of those great ideas. His so-called “Synopticon,” a gargantuan index and analysis of the Western world’s great ideas, is arranged alphabetically, and its first entry is “angels.”

Now I have to tell you that this quite surprised me. I confess it — I feel a struggle within myself when it comes to belief in angels. From speaking with some of you, I know that members of this congregation hold a range of attitudes about angels — and that is fine, for the Episcopal Church has no rules about what we are “supposed” to believe about them. But the contrasting viewpoints that I hear from you also struggle inside of me.

On the one hand, there is a voice in me, a very rational, modern, sophisticated voice, which says that belief in angels is actually not a great idea. Angels are archaic. Angels are a throwback to a more superstitious time when religious people felt a need to populate the world with imaginary beings. Just think of the elaborate speculations by medieval theologians as they classified and ranked the celestial hierarchy of heavenly beings, from seraphim, cherubim, and thrones at the top, down to dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels, and finally angels at the bottom. Our Protestant sensibility may want to chuck all that as a profound distraction. Let’s keep our focus on the mystery of God — this voice within me says. Let’s keep our eyes on Jesus Christ, and not clutter our minds by piling up beliefs in a host of extra beings that add nothing to the faith. Turn the angels over to New Age folks. It would be embarrassing to admit to a childish belief in angels. We don’t need them. We have outgrown them. They are irrelevant to a mature Christian faith.

On the other hand, a voice within me argues something else. Not so fast, this voice wants to say. The idea of angels shows up across Western cultures, time periods, and religions. Angels are part of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thought. However skeptical we may be about the clear-cut hierarchies of angels in medieval thought, and however trivialized and sentimental angels may seem as portrayed in today’s culture, angels still have a central part to play in our lives as Christians.

The more I think about it and the more I listen to this inner struggle, the more that the second voice makes sense to me. Angels are messengers of God, and the idea of angels is necessary within a religious school of thought that starts with God as divine Mystery, as transcendent Source or Wellspring that can never be fathomed. The Mystery that we name “God” is hidden, forever beyond the grasp of ideas, images, or words — indeed, Jewish people do not utter the name of God aloud. It is the very transcendence of God that makes the idea of angels necessary — these spiritual beings who serve as intermediaries between God and humankind, who speak for God and are sent by God to communicate and connect with the human race. We don’t have to limit our images of angels to sweet women with long skirts and large wings, much less to those little cherubic heads with wings sticking out on either side. In Western art, the earliest depictions of angels did not even have any wings. As one of the Church Fathers, John Chrysostom, explained years ago, angels are depicted with wings not because they actually have wings, but in order to express their sublime nature, to show us “that they leave the heights and the most elevated dwelling to approach human” beings. ¹

Jacob’s dream of a ladder between earth and heaven on which angels descend and ascend gives us a powerful image of this ongoing interchange or circulation between the earthly and the heavenly realms, between the ordinary world of solid matter, reason, and logic, and the divine world that is beyond human perception and thought. Angels symbolize the way that the divine Mystery we call “God” is constantly interacting with us, constantly inviting and challenging us, protecting and accompanying us. When our eyes are opened and we glimpse the interpenetration of worlds, the interweaving of the human and the divine, then, like Jacob, we, too, awaken from sleep and we say, “Surely the Lord is in this place — and I did not know it!… How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” [Genesis 28:16-17].

Today’s Gospel reading goes even further. Jesus Christ is what we Christians might call our “ladder” to heaven, our bridge between heaven and earth. As he says to Nathaniel, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” [John 1:51]. In other words, through his incarnation, Jesus has caught up in his very body the fullness of God and the fullness of humanity. He himself is the meeting-place, the point of intersection, the place where earth and heaven, the human and the divine, are woven into one. Through his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, Christ Jesus now fills all things on heaven and earth, which means that everything we touch, everything we see and smell and taste and hear, can become for us a manifestation of God, a revelation of divine presence. Welcoming angels into our imagination is a way of welcoming Christ himself, a way of opening ourselves to the infinite ways that we receive messages from God. If angels be among us, they are completely integrated into the being of Christ.

How do you tend to notice messages from God? Maybe you tend to sense the message internally, from an intuition or vision, from a dream or sudden insight that catches your attention and speaks to you a word from God. Or maybe a friend shows up at your doorstep at just the right moment, or calls you on the phone when you were thinking about that person just moments before. Or maybe you keep noticing the same word showing up on a billboard or license plate, on a book cover or a random scrap of paper. Or maybe you are hunkered down over your steering wheel one day, agitated and impatient, lost in worry and restless thought, when suddenly a red-tailed hawk soars silently overheard with outstretched wings. Suddenly your mind grows quiet, your heart fills with wonder, and you know that a wider, deeper Reality — capital R — is touching you, and that you belong to it and are immersed within it.

You might call such moments, experiences of angels. Why not? To the logical, analytic mind, such moments may have no particular value, meaning, or usefulness, but to the soul they give a glimpse of what it means to live life in a larger way, to be awake and responsive to the holy mystery all around us, and to live with a spirit of love rather than fear.

Despite the sophisticated voice of “reason” that speaks sometimes within me, I realize that I do, in fact, cherish angels. Why? Because welcoming angels keeps us attentive to the mysterious ways in which God meets us in the daily moments of our lives. Because they keep our intuition and imagination alive in a world that tends to flatten our sensibility and to make everything drab, as if the material world is all there is. Because, as Howard Thurman once said, “There must always be remaining in [everyone’s] life some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful… Despite all the crassness of life,” he writes, “despite all the hardness of life, despite all the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel, visited 9/26/09, with footnote citation: Proverbio (2007), p. 34

Healing the Senses

“Happy are they… whose hope is in the LORD their God: who made heaven and earth, the seas, and all that is in them.” (Psalm 146:4b-5)

I bring you greetings from Grace Church in Amherst, where I serve as Priest Associate.  Thank you for welcoming me here this morning.  I’ve been invited to focus on the Gospel call to care for Creation, and we have some good material to work with in this morning’s readings.  First I need to tell you that my husband and I have an old farmhouse in Ashfield, one of the hill-towns northwest of Amherst.   During the summer we spend as many hours as we can in Ashfield, walking in the woods or by the beaver ponds.  In those quiet interludes we look, and listen, and breathe, tuning ourselves to that buzzing, blooming, sensuous Creation of which we human creatures are so inextricably a part.

One summer day in Ashfield, as I was eating lunch on the back porch, a sparrow with a light-brown belly made a landing on a banister nearby.  I held my spoon of yogurt in mid-air, frozen in place.  Sparrow and I looked each other over, briefly taking each other in.  I tried to imagine its experience of the world.  I could see the bird’s sensitivity to every change – how it noted the tiny moth that zigzagged past, the puff of a breeze, the chirp of a robin, the shadow of a passing cloud.  Everything around the sparrow was alive and in motion.  The small creature was alert, tuning itself to every shift, cocking its head, picking up the tiniest scent, sound, and movement — and making almost perceptible decisions in response.  Should it eat the moth?  Duck from danger?  Linger a few moments longer? 

When the sparrow saw that I did not move and seemed to pose no threat, it relaxed on the railing.  It puffed its feathers and turned its head away to preen, as if to say, “I know you are there but right now I feel safe.”  It was a kind of subtle, non-verbal, and mutual communication.  My presence was affecting Bird and Bird’s presence was affecting me.  The only way that I could perceive the sparrow’s sensitivity was to become more sensitive myself, to pay closer attention.  I was not staring at the bird in some kind of fixed and rigid way.  Instead I simply let my senses open, and perceived everything I could with an open heart.  This act of perception and empathy filled me with wonder and quiet joy, for it seemed that briefly I had connected with this tiny creature whose consciousness was almost entirely foreign to mine, almost completely unknown.  In those precious moments we were in relationship.  Our two worlds overlapped.

I think of that encounter when I come to today’s readings and hear Isaiah’s exuberant poem about the transforming power of God: “The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped.”  In the fullness of time, God will heal our eyes and ears and hearts, will make the lame “leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.”  The psalm picks up the theme of healing and liberation – “The Lord sets the prisoners free; the Lord opens the eyes of the blind” [bbllink]Psalm 146:7[/bbllink] – and then we get to the story in St. Mark about Jesus curing the deaf mute. 

It is a very physical healing, isn’t it?  Unlike almost every other healing story in the Gospels, in this one Jesus does not heal so much through the power of speech as through the power of touch.  The story gives every detail.  Jesus does not just “lay his hands on” the man in some kind of vague, generic way.  He puts his fingers in the man’s ears; he spits, and touches the man’s tongue.  You can imagine the care with which he makes direct, even intimate contact with the man who has appealed to him for healing.  You can imagine the tenderness in Jesus’ eyes, the clarity of his intention to set the man free.  And then Jesus looks up to heaven – seeking and gathering in the power of God – and he sighs, as if releasing that power, breathing out the ruach, the Spirit, the breath of God.  As he breathes out that power he says a single word, which the text gives in its original Aramaic, “Ephphatha” – that is, “Be opened” – and at once the man’s ears are opened, his tongue is released, and he speaks plainly.

Like every biblical story, this one can be read on many levels.  In the Church of England, the day on which this story was assigned was once popularly called “Ephphatha Sunday” and was dedicated to expressing special concern for people who have limited hearing or speech.  But on a deeper level don’t we all need to have our senses healed?  Take our ears, for instance.  How often do we listen not just with the ears, but also with the heart?  How often do we listen not just for what is being said but also for what is left unsaid, for what the person might long to say if only he or she felt safe enough to say it?  How often do we listen with patience, not in order to grab a chance to get a word in edgewise, but in order to understand the other person’s point of view?  Do we have ears like that? 

And how clearly do we speak?  Often we have something like a speech impediment when it comes to speaking words that are both loving and true, or when it comes to admitting that we blew it and that we are sorry, or when it comes to speaking out for social and environmental justice.  What a grace it would be for Jesus to come among us today, to place his hand on our ears and to touch his own tongue and then ours, so that our ears would be opened at last and so that our words would be filled with his spirit and truth! 

As our senses are healed, we begin to relate in a new way not only to other human beings, but also to the other-than-human world.  At least that has been true for me.  When I renew my conscious intention to look more clearly, to listen more patiently, to pay attention with a more finely tuned sensitivity, I discover that I am created for relationship not only with human beings, but also with everything around me – wind and stone, sparrow and maple tree.  I wonder if we are fully human only by contact with what is other-than-human.

Communion with all God’s creatures opens us to communion with God.  But the more we attune ourselves to the glory of the natural world, the more we can’t help seeing that its glory is in peril.  There are many environmental issues to be concerned about, but the gravest and most urgent is climate change.  Unless we address climate change effectively and fast, we won’t have a chance to handle any of the other pressing social and environmental issues that we presently face.  In just the last couple of years, scientists have figured out that the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 350 parts per million.  If we want to keep living on a habitable planet, if we want human civilization to continue flourishing has it has for the past 10,000 years, if we want to pass on to our children and their children something like the beautiful, diverse, and lively earth into which we were born, then we have to keep the global level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere no higher than 350 parts per million.  What is the level now?  Close to 390, and climbing. 

If you do nothing else today, I hope you will go to Bill McKibben’s Website, 350.org.  Click on the box that says People, and on the drop-down menu, click on the word Faith.  There you can add your name to the Interfaith Call for 350, a call to world leaders from religious people around the world to set us on a path to bring the level of carbon in the atmosphere down to 350 parts per million.  I hope that St. John’s will also do what Grace Church is doing: sign up at 350.org and join thousands of people around the world in creating a public event on October 24, the International Day of Climate Action.  At Grace Church we will hold a rally on the Amherst town common that will involve ringing our church bell 350 times and having 350 people dressed up as maple-trees do a maple tree “die-in,” since our New England maple trees, with their delicious syrup and spectacular fall foliage, are among the many living creatures that will not survive if we don’t change course fast.

In a moment we will share Eucharist together, and will receive strength and solace in the holy bread and wine that we take in our hands.  The bread is made of wheat; the wine is made of grapes, and both are made from earth and sun, from rainwater and clouds, from the labor of farmers.  In the Eucharist, Christ Jesus comes to us in bread and wine, and God gives God’s self to us through the natural world.  We take in what is natural and we take in Christ.  When Jesus, and every priest after him, gathers up and blesses the bread and wine, is not nature itself being blessed?  When we stretch out our hands to receive the bread are we not declaring, Yes, I accept that nature itself is blessed by God, that nature itself bears Christ’s presence to us, that nature’s wounds – the broken bread – disclose the wounds of Christ?   As we receive the Eucharist, Jesus is whispering in our ears, in our minds and hearts, “Ephphatha. Be opened.”  Jesus is healing our connections with each other and with all Creation, and in the strength of this bread and wine we are sent into the world to proclaim God’s love wherever we go.