Author Archives: mbj

Does God Play by the Rules?

Years ago, when my son Sam was twelve, after he had finished his homework we would sometimes sit down together and play a board game or a game of cards. Our favorite was a rather wild and disconcerting card game called “Fluxx.” It’s the sort of game you learn to play not by reading the rules but by plunging in. It starts with each person being dealt three cards. Then you draw a card and play a card. Simple. The trouble is, the game never stands still. The rules change with every hand. Depending on which cards are played, sometimes you end up holding a whole fistful of cards and sometimes you have to give them all away. Sometimes you must show your cards and sometimes you can hide them. Even the goal of the game keeps changing. Just when you’ve figured out how you’re going to win and are about to trounce your opponent, the goal changes and the game goes off in an entirely new direction. Or just when you think you’ve had it and you’re going to lose, the goal abruptly switches and all of a sudden you’ve won. Sam and I would laugh a lot as we played, but I have to say, the game made me dizzy.

Right now most of us are not just playing a card game called “Fluxx” – we’re living it. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch, the bailout of A.I.G. and the proposed bailout of the whole system of mortgage financing — well, our country’s entire economic system suddenly looks alarmingly fragile. There is talk that we may be facing the worst financial crisis in the U.S. since the Great Depression. While experts scramble to work out a solution, ordinary Americans worry about the security of their jobs and pensions, about how to cover the cost of college tuition or pay back college loans, how to meet mortgage payments and pay their fuel bills.

Many of us feel may feel rattled and anxious this morning as we consider our nation’s economy and our own family’s financial security. The rollercoaster of economic news this week is a stark reminder that life is like that: a perpetual state of flux, though some periods — like this past week, for example — are more unstable than others.

Today’s Collect goes straight to the heart of the matter, for we need God’s help “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.” I want you to know that I did not choose today’s Collect — it is the Collect that was assigned for this Sunday, and it’s just what we need to hear.

In a world of impermanence and constant change, what does endure? To what can we hold fast? Like the first group of workers in Matthew’s parable about the laborers in the vineyard, in a time of uncertainty we want life to be orderly and predictable. We want clarity. We want God to play by the rules.

“Tell me what to expect and then deliver the goods. Hire me for a day’s work and give me a day’s pay.”

The landowner says, “Fine.”

A few hours pass, the landowner needs more help in the vineyard, and at 9 o’clock when he sees other people “standing idle in the marketplace,” he offers them work and promises to pay “whatever is right” (Mt 20:3, 4). He does the same thing at noon, at 3 o’clock and 5 o’clock.

So far, so good! But in a move that would astonish both a proponent of free-market capitalism and an advocate of governmental regulation, at the end of the day the employer not only pays the last group first, he gives a full day’s pay to everyone, regardless of whether they’ve worked all day or only one hour.

The workers who were hired early in the morning begin to grumble.

“Hey, that’s not fair!” they say. “You’re not playing by the rules! Those latecomers worked only one hour, and you made them equal to us, who sweat it out all day!”

The generous landowner explains that no one has been cheated. No one has received less than the agreed amount. What the first group of workers finds offensive is not that they have been treated badly but that other people are getting more than they deserve. It’s the same irritation that Jonah felt when God forgave the people of Ninevah: forgiveness and generosity aren’t fair!

And that’s the point of the parable: God’s rules are not our rules. We may think that God will reward us according to how tirelessly we work, or how long we’ve been at it, or how much we do for God. But in a sense none of that matters to God. God loves us whether we deserve it or not. Even if we don’t give God a second thought until we’re on our deathbed and at last admit that we’ve squandered our lives on selfish things, and, like the Prodigal Son, we finally turn in anguish to God to say, “I’m so sorry — please forgive me!” — even then, at the eleventh hour, God gives the latecomer the full measure of God’s love, with nothing held back. As one commentator puts it, “The generosity of God…cuts across our calculations of who deserves what.”¹ In short – God plays by God’s rules.

This morning I am glad to hear the parable of the laborers in the vineyard not because it can tell us how to fix the economy. The Bible is obviously not a manual of political economics. But what we do find in the Bible, and in this Gospel story, is news of God’s economy, news of the kingdom of God, lessons of how to live in the midst of the world’s uncertainty and impermanence and fragility, while holding fast to the things that shall endure.

What endures? The love of God endures — the absurd, abundant, over-the-top, generous love that God offers to everyone. In the kingdom of God, there is no need to hoard or grab, no need to push yourself forward at somebody else’s expense, no need to put yourself first and the devil take the hindmost, because the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and first and last shall have no meaning, for all of us will be drawn into a circle of love that leaves no one out.

We don’t have to earn that love. It is already here right now and is being poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit [Romans 5:5]. So if you’re feeling tired this morning, if you’re stressed, if you’re worried and afraid, that’s OK. No matter how many changes you are going through, you are rooted in the love of God that nothing and nobody can take away. Get financial advice if you need to, and do your best to make wise financial decisions for yourself and your family, but rest assured that your value as a human being does not depend on your income or your net worth, on your material possessions or the size of your portfolio.

In a time of turbulence, the only thing to cling to — the only thing that lasts -is the love of God. That’s a rule that God won’t change: God loves you to the core. Jesus gave his life for you, and he gave his Holy Spirit to you, so that you too might walk through this world just as he did: with the conviction that the kingdom of God is at hand and that nothing can separate us from the love of God. Hold fast to that love, for it is God’s gift to you, and you don’t have to do a thing to deserve it. Yes, we need to work to survive, but at our core, we don’t need to work to be loved unconditionally. Our deepest identity is not tied to the stock market, and our deepest security has nothing to do with our financial situation or with the fluctuations or even the collapse of our economy.

When you catch that biblical vision that you are loved, and the next guy is loved, and that God’s love is particularly outstretched to the forgotten and the poor, then you not only walk through life with a deep serenity – you also walk through life with a fire for justice, with a longing to create a society in which no one needs to choose between paying a fuel bill or feeding a child, a society in which economic and political leaders are held accountable for their actions and in which greed, selfishness, and corruption at the expense of others and to the detriment of the common good are simply not tolerated. We are a new creation in Christ, and our ministry is to continually re-fashion our families, communities, nation, and world in light of that God-given vision.

I’d like to put in a good word for our adult ed offerings this fall, all of which are intended to equip us for this ministry and to give us the support we need to keep our eyes on the kingdom of heaven and to hold fast to the things that shall endure.

If you are looking for the “peace that passes understanding” and for a more vital and intimate relationship with God, I hope that you will come to one of the Quiet Days that we hold every month on a Saturday, or to the three-week series on prayer that I will be leading on Wednesday nights in October.

If you are fed up with the contempt and scorn, the lies and innuendo that are filling public conversations as we head toward the Presidential election — if you want to re-commit yourself to speaking in a way that is both truthful and compassionate — if you want to develop some skills in how to communicate in a centered, honest way when you are tempted to fly off the handle and say something you’ll regret to your parent or spouse or child — then I hope you’ll join me in a free class in nonviolent communication led by two guest teachers on a Wednesday night in October, and register for the special 6-week course on Monday nights that we will offer for a small fee.

If you want to learn how to live from a place of abundance and gratitude rather than a place of scarcity and fear, then I hope you’ll register right away for a special Quiet Day on stewardship that will be led in two weeks by the much-respected retreat leader, Charles Lafond.

If you want to dig into the Gospel of Mark and learn what it means to be a disciple of Jesus — if you want to think critically about the relationship between God and politics — if you want to befriend your mortality and to learn the wisdom that can only come from facing death — if you want to participate in the MDG movement to eradicate poverty around the world — then there is something in this program that should appeal to you. Today, after the service, we’ll hold our first Forum of the year, as the Rev. Chris Carlisle speaks about college ministry in Amherst and a new collaboration between UMass and Grace Church.

We may not like to live in a world of flux, but in these uncertain times we give thanks to the God whose love undergirds our lives and whose power radiates through our words and hands as we work together to create a better world.

1. Fred B. Craddock et al., Preaching the New Common Lectionary, Year A: After Pentecost, Abingdon, 1987, p. 200.

From the Way of Caesar to the Way of Christ

I can’t say a word this morning until I thank God for the glories of late summer, this sumptuous season when a person can wander for hours in a country field, savoring blackberries and watching dragonflies and cedar waxwings. Farms in these parts smell like fresh-cut hay, and if we tend a garden, our hands probably smell of basil or the tang of tomato plants. The goldfinches are getting fat on sunflower seeds, and the first maple leaves have begun to turn. It’s a season of harvest and beauty, and the last line of today’s psalm probably says it all: “LORD, I love the house in which you dwell and the place where your glory resides” [Psalm 26:8].

It’s also Labor Day weekend, and this morning we give thanks for the men and women who fought for, and succeeded in giving us, the minimum wage and the forty-hour week, unemployment compensation, health and safety regulations in the workplace, and the right of workers to organize for collective bargaining. We give thanks today for those whose work benefits the community, and we hold in prayer those who have no job, or jobs that do not satisfy.

I also need to mention that for many of us, this has been a week of immersion in the world of politics, as we listened to speech after speech from the Democratic National Convention, and to the commentaries that preceded and followed those speeches. More speeches and commentaries will come our way as the Republican Party begins its national convention tomorrow. The battle for the Presidency has been joined, and as we head toward November, Americans will hear competing arguments about how to make this country prosper and how to keep our country secure; how to close the gap between rich and poor, and to heal the enmity between women and men, between black and white, as well as brown, red, and yellow peoples; how to provide for those who are sick or disabled; how to offer a world-class education to all children, not just the children of privilege; how to stop the drift toward endless war; how to protect the well-being of the planet upon which all human life depends.

For better or worse, we live in a time when it seems to be politically expedient, even politically necessary, for candidates to call themselves Christian, although you have to wonder whether we will be able to maintain our Constitution’s separation of church and state if being a Christian becomes a prerequisite for political office. Still, if some people in this country – in fact, a good many people – consider being a Christian one measure of a political candidate’s readiness for leadership, then let’s go for it – let’s talk about what we should look for in a Christian leader and what values should shape a society that is informed by Christianity.

Maybe there is no better place to begin than with today’s Gospel. This passage from Matthew 16 comes right after the passage we heard last Sunday, in which Peter confessed Jesus as the Messiah. As we heard last week, Jesus and his disciples walked all the way to Caesarea Philippi, a city more than twenty miles north of the Sea of Galilee and named after Caesar Augustus, “the emperor whose regime occupied and dominated Jesus’ people and homeland,”¹ and after Philip, the local ruler of the region. Jesus took his band of friends all the way to a place whose name symbolized the political machine of the Roman Empire, as if Jesus were intentionally walking into the very belly of the beast.

Standing in that urban symbol of his people’s oppression, Jesus asked his friends, “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter made his bold reply, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Among other things, that was a daring political statement to make, for to Peter and the followers of Jesus, the Messiah was expected to come as a conquering warrior, a liberating king who would sweep the Romans out of Palestine by force. It was also politically dangerous to call Jesus “the Son of the living God,” for the Caesars of Rome called themselves “sons of the gods.” It was as if Peter were saying, “The Greek and Roman gods are only idols, and they do not and cannot make the empire legitimate; the true and living God gives Jesus the authority and power to overturn the empire and to set us free.”

Jesus praised Peter for his confession of faith, and named him the rock on which he would build his church. But immediately we come to today’s passage, in which Jesus makes the first of four predictions that he will suffer and die, and rise on the third day. Peter is shocked. He associates the Messiah with victory and glory, not with suffering and death. If Jesus is the liberating king, the revolutionary leader whom God anointed to overthrow the Roman occupation, then, as author Brian McLaren puts it, “the one thing Jesus cannot do is be captured, imprisoned, tortured and killed. No, he must capture, imprison, humiliate, and defeat their oppressors.”²

Peter takes Jesus aside and vehemently rebukes him. “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!” [Mt 16:22]. What comes next, McLaren calls “one of the most dramatic cases of conceptual whiplash ever recorded in literature anywhere.”³ Jesus turns and says to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!” Just a moment before, Jesus had blessed Peter and called him a rock; now Peter is a stumbling block, an adversary. Just a moment before, Jesus gave Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven; now he calls Peter an agent of the devil, because Peter is tempting him to take the way of power. Jesus used almost exactly the same words during his temptations in the wilderness, when the devil took him to a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor, and promised them to Jesus if he would fall down and worship him [Mt 4:10]. “Away with you, Satan!” Jesus cried then, and almost word for word cries again now, as Peter gives voice to the temptation that Jesus is grappling with inside himself and to which he says a resounding No.

Peter was right when he confessed Jesus as the Messiah, the son of the living God. But – as McLaren puts it – “Peter was … wrong about what those terms meant. They didn’t mean a violent and coercive leader who would conquer through domination; they meant a leader who would be victorious through being defeated, who would demonstrate power through vulnerability, and who would establish a kingdom not of violent conquest but of faith, hope, and love.”⁴

Today’s Gospel passage gives us clues about the questions we need to ask our candidates for political office, whether they be from the left, right, or center, whether they be Democrats, Republicans, or anything else.

Do their policies follow the way of Caesar or the way of Christ?

The way of Caesar is the way of ‘power over’, of seeking prosperity through grabbing and hoarding everything we can for ourselves, never mind the cries of the poor or the cries of a groaning Earth.

The way of Caesar is the way of seeking security through violence and military domination, the path of silencing, torturing and wiping out our enemies.

The way of Caesar looks out for “number one” — and no one else.

The way of Caesar believes in what theologian Dominic Crossan calls “peace through victory… peace through the destruction of enemies… peace through domination.”⁵

By contrast, the way of Christ is the way of ‘power with’, the way that values forgiveness and reparation more than revenge — honest dialogue and mutual vulnerability more than manipulation, domination, and control.

The way of Christ builds prosperity by setting the rich free from our addiction to material possessions and by setting the poor free from misery and want.

The way of Christ finds security not in hoarding but in sharing, and seeks peace not through violence but through “justice, generosity, and mutual concern.”⁶

In short, it follows the leadings not of fear but of love.

Maybe it’s worth noting that in December 2006, “retiring United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan rejected domination as a response to terrorism. [He said,] ‘Against such threats as these, no nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others.’ Instead, in an application of Jesus’ ‘golden rule’ to international relations, he said that each nation increases its own security by safeguarding the security of its neighbors.”⁷

Of course it is not just our nation and its political leaders who must choose every day between the way of Caesar or the way of Christ – we ourselves are called by Jesus to pick up our cross and follow him. Flinging around Jesus’ name and calling ourselves Christian is hardly good enough — Peter himself in today’s passage calls Jesus “Lord” and is soundly chastised by the one who says elsewhere that “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” [Mt 7:21].

That is the grace that we pray for this morning, the grace to follow where Jesus leads us, both as individuals and as a nation — the grace to see through the lies of empire and the temptation to domination, the grace to lay down our lives for each other and for the well-being of the world.

1. Brian D. McLaren, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope, Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2007, p. 109. These paragraphs on Matthew 16 are based on McLaren’s argument.

2. Ibid. p. 112.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid. p. 312.

5. John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire, Harper San Francisco, 2007, Chapter 1, cited by McLaren, p.159.

6. McLaren, op. cit., p. 159.

7. Ibid. p. 316.

Behold what you are. Become what you receive.

The story of Jesus feeding the crowds is told more often than any other story in the four Gospels. Each of the Gospels tells at least one story of Jesus feeding a crowd of thousands, and the Gospels of Mark and Matthew tell the story twice [Mark 6:30-44, 8:1-9; Matthew 14:13-21, 15:32-39; Luke 9:10-17; John 6:1-13]. You can see how important this story was to the early community, for the story was clearly linked to the Eucharist. We often think of the Eucharist as originating with the Last Supper, but the early Church also put a great deal of emphasis on Jesus eating with his disciples in Galilee, and, after the resurrection, on his returning to eat meals with his friends.¹ In different ways each of these meals anticipates the sacrament of Holy Communion.

Today’s Gospel passage makes the connection very explicit. Jesus asks the disciples to bring him what little food they have — five loaves and two fish — and he orders the crowds to sit down on the grass. Take a look at the next sentence: “Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds” [Matthew 14:19]. If you had a pencil, you could underline the four familiar words that we always hear at the Eucharist: “take,” “bless,” “break,” and “give.”

This morning’s Gospel gives us a chance to reflect on how we are formed and shaped by the Eucharist. When you and I were baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, we discovered the deepest truth about ourselves: that we are the Beloved of God. That is our deepest identity: we are God’s Beloved. Yet it takes a lifetime to live into the truth of our Belovedness, to make it incarnate in everything we say and do, so that in the very nitty-gritty details of our lives, from the moment we get up in the morning until the moment we fall asleep at night, we not only remember in some abstract and rather distant way, “I am the Beloved of God,” but more and more fully become the Beloved, become who we really are.

You may have noticed a few months ago that we made a small change in the Eucharist, which is printed in the service leaflet. After the Lord’s Prayer, the celebrant breaks the bread and says: “Behold what you are.” And we reply, “May we become what we receive.” Rob brought these lines back after a visit to the monastery of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, and the words can be traced all the way back to St. Augustine, who, sometime in the 4th and 5th centuries, preached a sermon on the Eucharist [Sermon 57, “On the Holy Eucharist”] in which he reflected on “one of the deep truths of Christian faith: through our participation in the sacraments (particularly baptism and Eucharist), we are transformed into the Body of Christ, given for the world.”²

The point is that every time we receive the Eucharist, we are transformed — or should be transformed — a little more fully into the Body of Christ, so that the divine love that made us and that flows through us can become more fully expressed in the world. How are we formed by the Eucharist? One place to look is in those four gestures: “taken,” “blessed,” “broken” and “given.” I am indebted in these remarks to the priest and writer Henri Nouwen, a friend and mentor whose book, Life of the Beloved, is on my very short list of top spiritual books. As Henri says, the words “taken,” “blessed,” “broken,” and “given” summarize the life of a priest, because whenever I come together with members of this community and celebrate the Eucharist, I take bread, bless it, break it, and give it. “These words also summarize [our lives] as [Christians] because, as [Christians, we are] called to become bread for the world: bread that is taken, blessed, broken, and given. Most importantly…they summarize [our] lives as… human beings because in every moment of [our lives] somewhere, somehow the taking, the blessing, the breaking, and the giving are happening.”³

What does it mean to say that we are “taken”? To be “taken” by God is to be chosen, to be precious to God. As Henri puts it, “Long before any human being saw us, we are seen by God’s loving eyes. Long before anyone heard us cry or laugh, we are heard by our God who is all ears for us. Long before any person spoke to us in this world, we are spoken to by the voice of eternal love.”⁴ Claiming and reclaiming our chosenness is the great spiritual battle of our lives, for in a competitive, power-hungry, manipulative world, it is all too easy to forget that God has taken us, God has chosen us — easy to slide into self-doubt and self-rejection.

Knowing that we have been taken by God, that we have been chosen, is the first thing we need to claim as we behold what we are and become what we receive. The second is to recognize that we are “blessed.” The word “blessing” comes from the Latin word, benedicere, which literally means to speak well of someone, to say good things about someone. We all have a deep need for affirmation, to know that we are valued not just because of something we did or because we have a particular talent, but simply because we are.

Henri tells a wonderful story about the power of blessing in his community.⁵ For the last ten years of his life, this renowned spiritual teacher and best-selling author who had taught at world-class universities lived as a chaplain at the L’Arche Daybreak community in Toronto, a community for people who are mentally and physically disabled. Henri describes how one day a handicapped member of the community, Janet, asked him for a blessing. Henri was distracted, and rather automatically traced the sign of the cross on her forehead. Janet protested, “No, I want a real blessing!” Henri realized how unthinkingly he had responded to her request and he promised that at the next prayer service, he would give her a real blessing. After the service was over, when about thirty people were sitting in a circle on the floor, Henri announced, “Janet has asked me for a special blessing.” He didn’t really know what she wanted, but she made it crystal clear: she stood up and walked over to him. He was wearing a long white robe with large sleeves that covered his hands as well and his arms, and when Janet came forward and put her arms around him and put her head against his chest, Henri covered her with his sleeves so that she almost vanished in the folds of her robe.

As they held each other, Henri said “Janet, I want you to know that you are God’s Beloved Daughter. You are precious in God’s eyes. Your beautiful smile, your kindness to the people in your house, and all the good things you do show what a beautiful human being you are. I know you feel a little low these days and that there is some sadness in your heart, but I want you to remember who you are: a very special person, deeply loved by God and all the people who are here with you.”⁶

As he said these words, Janet raised her head and looked at him, and from her broad smile, Henri knew that she had really heard and received the blessing.

After Janet returned to her place, another handicapped woman raised her hand — she, too, wanted a blessing. She stood up and put her face against his chest, and before long many more of the handicapped people took a turn, expressing the same desire to be blessed.

Henri says that, for him, the most touching moment came when one of the assistants, a twenty-four-year-old student raised his hand and said, “And what about me?” When I heard Henri tell this story, he mentioned that this was a big, burly guy with a neck out to here, probably a football player. This fellow came forward and Henri wrapped his arms around him and said, “John, it is so good that you are here. You are God’s Beloved Son. Your presence is a joy for all of us. When things are hard and life is burdensome, always remember that you are loved with an ever-lasting love.”

As Henri spoke these words, John looked at him with tears in his eyes and then he said, “Thank you, thank you very much.”⁷

How hungry we are for blessing! And we are blessed, for God is always speaking a word of blessing in our hearts. When we know ourselves as blessed, we can’t help but speak good things to other people, and about other people, and call forth their beauty and truth. As Henri says, “No one is brought to life through curses, gossip, accusations, or blaming… As the ‘blessed ones,’ we can walk through this world and offer blessings. It doesn’t require much effort. It flows naturally from our hearts.”⁸

We are chosen and blessed. And we are broken, too. Everyone in this room is broken. We all have places of loneliness or fear, places of disappointment, shame, or grief. We all know the pain of broken relationships, and we all face death, which Henri calls “the most radical manifestation of brokenness.”⁹ Accepting and befriending our brokenness is part of the long journey of entrusting our whole selves to the care of God, so that, as St. Paul puts it, we know that “whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s” [Romans 14:8]. And it is important to place our brokenness in the light of God’s blessing, to experience it within the context of God’s love. When something ‘bad’ happens to us, it can be tempting to let that event fuel the fire of our self-rejection, to say to ourselves, “You see? Of course that happened to me. I always thought I was no good. Now I know for sure — the facts of my life prove it.” But when we know ourselves as God’s Beloved, we experience our suffering differently — maybe as a kind of purification, or as a way to enter a deeper communion with a loving God who, in Christ, allowed himself to be broken.

We are chosen, blessed, and broken — to be given. “Our greatest fulfillment lies in giving ourselves to others,” writes Henri. “…Our humanity comes to its fullest bloom in giving. We become beautiful people when we give whatever we can give: a smile, a handshake a kiss, an embrace, a word of love, a present, a part of our life… How different would our life be were we truly able to trust that it multiplied in being given away! How different would our life be if we could but believe that every little act of faithfulness, every gesture of love, every word of forgiveness, every little bit of joy and peace will multiply and multiply as long as there are people to receive it… and that — even then — there will be leftovers!”¹⁰

Do you remember our Gospel story? As Matthew puts it, “All ate and were filled” [Mt 14: 20], and even after those thousands were fed, the leftovers could be piled up in twelve baskets. That is the promise of the Gospel: that as we know ourselves to be taken, blessed, broken, and given, we will become bread for the world. Our lives will feed and bless those around us in more ways than we can ask or imagine.

In our Eucharist this morning, we see “a sign of God’s desire and intent to feed not only us but this whole hungry world.”¹¹

Once again, we behold what we are.

May we become what we receive.

1. Reginald H. Fuller, Preaching the Lectionary: The Word of God for the Church Today, Collegeville MN: The Liturgical Press, 1984, p.154.

2. Text written by Society of St. John the Evangelist, sent to me courtesy of Brother James Koester, SSJE. Initially, the celebrant at SSJE invited worshipers to the Table with a longer statement based on St. Augustine: “Behold the mystery of your salvation laid out for you; behold what you are, become what you receive.” This was later shortened and made responsive: “Behold what you are.” “May we become what we receive.”

3. Henri J.M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, New York, NY: Crossroad, 1992, p. 48.

4. Ibid., p. 58.

5. Ibid., pp. 70-72.

6. Ibid., pp. 70-71.

7. Ibid., pp. 71-72.

8. Ibid, p. 82.

9. Ibid., p. 86.

10. Ibid., p 106. 123.

11. From Prayers of the People, WALK OF WITNESS For the Fulfillment of the Millennium Development Goals, for use on July 20 or July 27, 2008.

Comfortable Words

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” [Matthew 11:28]. Before I say one more thing, let’s stop right here and give our minds room to do what they are probably already doing – going straight to Handel’s Messiah. First the alto sings, “He shall feed His flock like a shepherd,” and after a bit the alto steps aside and along comes the soprano, picking up the melody and launching into that exquisite passage, “Come unto Him, all ye that labour, come unto Him, ye that are heavy laden, and He will give you rest.” You’ll be glad to know that I don’t plan to sing it.

That sentence from Matthew is one of a group of sentences from Scripture that are often called the “comfortable words. ” If you grew up with the 1928 Prayer Book, you may remember that after the confession and absolution, the priest would say “Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all who truly turn to him. ‘Come unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy-laden, and I will refresh you.’” A contemporary translation of that sentence is also in today’s prayer book,¹ though introduced by a different phrase.

“Come unto me” – why do we call these “comfortable words”? It’s not that Jesus wants us to lounge around in an easy chair, but that he wants to give us strength. That’s what the word “comfortable” originally meant –“strengthening.” The word “comfort” comes from the Latin “cum” (with) and “fort” (strength). The Holy Spirit, the Comforter, sends us God’s strength. “Come to me,” Jesus says to us this morning. “I want to give you strength. I want to give you hope. I want to give you life.”

But many people didn’t listen to Jesus and turned him away, and today’s Gospel begins with Jesus’ cry of frustration as he says to the crowds, “But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn’” [Mt 11: 16]. It’s as if Jesus were inviting people to play wedding games, and the people said, “No, we don’t feel like being happy,” and as if John the Baptist were inviting them to play funeral games, and the people said, “No, we don’t feel like being sad.”² Human nature can be so perverse! John the Baptist and Jesus were saying in different ways, “Look, here is the doorway to God! Here is the path to life!” but no matter what each of them said, the crowds could find fault, if they wanted to. They could hang back — wary, critical, refusing to be satisfied. When John came, neither eating nor drinking, some people blew him off – “Hey, what’s wrong with him? He must have a demon.” And when Jesus came, eating and drinking, they shrugged him off, too, saying, “Forget that guy — he’s a glutton and a drunkard, and he hangs out with tax collectors and sinners” [c.f. Mt 11:18-19].

Catch us in a certain mood and we don’t want to listen and we just don’t care, and it doesn’t matter what the person is saying, it’s never going to be good enough. The person could be telling us the secret of life and giving us the keys to the heavenly kingdom, and we would stick our fingers in our ears. I don’t want to know this. I don’t want to hear this. My life is fine the way it is. I have my own way of doing things. I already know everything I want to know. I don’t want to change. I want you to leave me alone. Am I the only person in this room that gets like that sometimes? When I go there, I am stubborn and proud and my heart is as hard as a rock. Jesus ran up against plenty of people who pushed him away like that.

What did he do then? Today’s Gospel tells us what he did: he turned to God in prayer. He touched into the love of the divine Father that was always flowing through him. He refreshed himself in that harmonious, mutual indwelling of Father and Son, in which the Father knows the Son and the Son knows the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the love that circulates between them. And out of that deep sense of interior companionship and strength, out of that relationship of love from which he received his identity, Jesus turned again to the people around him and invited them to join him.

“Come to me,” he said, “all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

It is an invitation that Jesus extended to everyone, for to everyone he met he said, “Come.”

“Come down!” he cried to Zacchaeus, who had climbed high up in that tree. “I want to share a meal with you!” [c.f. Luke 19:1-10].

“Come up!” he said to the woman who had been bent over for eighteen years. “I want to see your face and look into your eyes” [c.f. Luke 13:10-17].

“Come out!” he cried to Lazarus, who was closed away in a tomb. “In me you are alive” [c.f. John 11:38-44].

“Come close!” he murmured to the children as he gathered them into his arms. “It is good to be with you” [c.f. Matthew 19:13-15].

“Come on!” he called to the fishermen. “Follow me! Let’s go” [c.f. Matthew 4:18-19].

If Jesus were to show up this morning, I wonder how he would invite you into his presence. Would he say, “Come down — come down out of your head and into your heart — that is your home; that is where you will meet me”? Or, if you are in a place of self-criticism and low self-esteem, maybe he would say, “Come up. In me you have dignity and worth.” If some part of you is dead, or closed off and locked away, maybe he would say, “Come out! I want to give you life.” If you feel lonely, uncertain, or afraid, maybe he would say, “Come close. I want to be with you.” If you’ve been holding back from jumping into the adventure of giving yourself to God 100%, maybe Jesus would say to you, “Come on. Let’s go.”

I invite us to pause for a moment so that you and I can listen inwardly as Jesus says to each of us, “Come to me. Come.”

………….. [silence] ……………

In leading retreats over the years, I’ve found that when many people try to imagine Jesus loving them and inviting them to come close, they can’t let him in. They worry that Jesus is judging them — that they are not good enough for him, not worthy of his care. If you notice this coming up for you, don’t worry — you’re in good company. So it’s worth noticing that Jesus says very explicitly in this passage that he is “gentle and humble in heart” [Mt 11:29]. He is not judging us or setting any conditions. You don’t have to become perfect before you can receive his love and be welcomed into his presence.

And he comes above all to those who are weary and whose burdens are heavy. What burdens are you carrying? Some of us have financial worries: will we have enough to get by? Some of us are burdened with fears about our health or the health of a loved one. We may be burdened by anger, by the weight of a fight we’ve had with someone, or a painful misunderstanding. We may feel the burden of loss — maybe the loss of a friendship or the loss of a dream or the loss of someone we love who has died. We may feel burdened by responsibility, by a difficult decision that we have to make, or by the effort to be in control, to stay on top of things, to make things go the way we want them to. We may be weighed down by guilt, or by worries about the future — our own future, our country’s future, maybe even the future of the planet. The burden we carry may be something new, or it may be something we’ve been hauling around for so long, we hardly know who we’d be if we let it go.

What burdens are you carrying? Can you drop them for a moment? Can you place them at Jesus’ feet? Can you let them go so completely that not even the tips of your finger are touching them?

Put them down, he is telling us. Let them go. I will give you rest.

It’s really hard to do this — it’s the discipline of detachment and self-emptying, the practice of letting go our obsessions and preoccupations — not just our worries, but even our noblest thoughts, our most cherished personal convictions and political opinions, even the ownership of our own lives. We put it all down when we come into Jesus’ presence, and we rest at last. We rest in that space of encounter, that space of love, holding on to nothing.

And as our souls rest in Jesus’ presence, we are drawn into the divine love that gave birth to the earth and all the stars. We discover that just as there is something for us to let go, there is also something for us to take up. “Take my yoke upon you,” says Jesus, “and learn from me.” A yoke is something that holds two oxen together. Where one goes, the other goes. They pull together in the same direction. When we put on the yoke of Jesus (a yoke that began at our baptism, when we were drawn into the life of the crucified and risen Christ, and marked as Christ’s own forever) — when we consciously and willingly take up the yoke of Christ, then we put ourselves at the service of God’s love. We let God’s unconditional love be our goal, for that is the direction that our souls want to head, and our brother Jesus is beside us as a constant companion to give us comfort and give us strength. We are yoked to a love that will never let us go and that wants to overflow into all our relationships, into all our decisions and actions. Our souls are at rest, because they are at ease. Love is what they were made for, and so the yoke is “easy” and the “burden is light” [Mt 11:30].

Yet there is also a work to be done, the spiritual discipline of staying connected to that love, moment to moment to moment. And that is why we are gathered for the Eucharist this morning: willingly and consciously to join our lives again to the love we find in Jesus, the one who invites us to come to him and to find rest for our souls.

1. Rite 1 Eucharist, BCP, p. 332, and the sacrament of Reconciliation, BCP, p. 449. The ‘comfortable words’ have been part of Anglican worship since the first efforts to produce an English language prayer book back in 1548.

2. The Gospel of Matthew, Volume 2 (Chapters 11-28), revised edition, translated with an introduction and interpretation by William Barclay, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1975, p. 9.

Building on Rock

Yesterday was a big day for our family – our son Sam graduated from high school. Soon he leaves home for a summer job far away, and then he heads off to a college that is farther away still. I am reaching the end of whatever capacity I had to guide and protect him, at least on a day to day basis, and for the last few weeks, I’ve been wanting to give him something that lasts — a touchstone, a compass, a rock. This week I went on the Internet and looked for a Bible with a leather cover. I looked at books and ended up buying one that was called Living a Life That Matters, and, in case that wasn’t good enough, another that was called, Leading Lives That Matter.

I felt like Moses in today’s reading from Deuteronomy, who wanted so much to pass along the deepest wisdom he knew and the most likely path to joy: to love God with our whole heart and mind and strength. As Moses said, “Put these words of mine in your heart and soul… Teach them to your children, talking about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise” [Deuteronomy 11:18-19].

We want so much to pass on to those we love the deepest treasure of our hearts, the hard-won wisdom that we’ve found. What a satisfying ceremony it must have been yesterday at the Cathedral to those of you whose children were confirmed and to those of you who were confirmed or received into the Episcopal Church. It is a precious thing to know that each day we have a choice to make between a blessing or a curse, between building the house of our lives on the rock of God’s love, and building it on shifting, unreliable, unstable sand.

Listening to God, carrying out God’s will in acts of love and mercy – that is what gives our lives a sure foundation. As Jesus says in today’s Gospel, “Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock” [Matthew 7:24]. Rains fall, floods come, winds blow, but that house stands firm – unlike the house of the foolish man, whose house falls down with a crash because it was built on sand.

I can’t protect my son from the storms of life, but I do know that in his life, as in yours and mine, storms will come. The day of reckoning will come. For a while we may be able to get away with building our lives on sand – on shopping and acquiring more things, on entertainment, on trying to gain power over other people or compulsively trying to please them. But sooner or later we will step forward, desperately reaching for something solid, something everlasting on which to stand.

I have a story for you. I heard it this week on an audiotape by Kathleen Rusnak, a Lutheran minister and hospice chaplain who travels around giving lectures on lessons learned for living from the dying.¹ Kathleen explains that when we learn that we have only a few months left to live, we often begin to carry out a “life review.” It’s a time of reckoning for us, a time of coming to terms with our lives as we look back and ask: What was my life all about? How did I spend my time? What was important to me? What was my purpose for living? What did I accomplish? What do I regret? What is left undone? What did I wait too long to do? Who did I love?

Then Kathleen talked about a man she met who had been given a three-month prognosis and was in the care of hospice. By the time she – the chaplain – met him, he had spent nine months in hospice and had refused to see most of the team – not the social worker, not the chaplain, but only the nurse. He was a strong, independent, 70-year-old fellow, a tough guy, a man who avoided feelings. “Married, grown children, retired, dying.” Ten days before he died (though of course no one knew that then), he told the nurse that he wanted to see the chaplain. Kathleen was glad to do it and made the appointment. The man’s wife answered the door, looked at Kathleen, and said, “I don’t know what he wants to see you about, but whatever you do when you go in that room — and I’ve put a chair beside his bed so you can sit there – don’t you tell him he’s dying, because he doesn’t know it.”

Kathleen said, “I don’t set the agenda in the room; he does. I’m not going in there to tell him anything. He asked to see me, and I’ll see what he wants.”

Kathleen walked into the room and was there for all of five minutes. Yet she calls this one of the most significant encounters of her life. The man, she says, was rude and crude; he didn’t say hello, didn’t look at her.

She sat down in the chair beside his bed and he said, “I’ve been thinking about my life. When I was a child,” he said, “my mother died and my sister raised me. She did a good job. I never told her that; I never thanked her. In fact, I’ve been mean to her my whole life.” Then he talked about work. “I spent forty years at the same workplace and the guys I worked with always reached out to me. They invited me to lunch and to do things together with their wives. But I always said no – I was interested in my own world, in my money, in doing what I wanted. I ignored everybody.” Then he talked about his marriage. “I had a fifty-year marriage. It was a bad marriage, a crummy marriage. I never told my wife I loved her. On weekends she had to go out with her girlfriends. Why? Because I’d stay home and read my book; it was my time.”

Then he looked at Kathleen. He was finished. He had told the chaplain three places where he was stuck. Then he asked, “Can you help?”

On the tape, Kathleen paused at this point to ask her audience, a group of hospice workers, what they would have said in reply. Oh, said one, I would have assured him of God’s love; I would have told him that God forgave him. Oh, said another, I would have reminded him that he must have done some good things, too; I would have tried to help him put the bad things in perspective.

Well, the chaplain didn’t do any of that. When he said, “Can you help?” what she said was, “Yes, I can. You’re not dead yet. Is your sister still living? Are some of your friends at work still around – are they in the neighborhood, in calling distance? Your wife is right here. What are you telling me these things for? Tell them. Call your sister and ask her to come in, or speak to her on the phone. Tell your wife you’ve been a bad husband. Don’t tell me – tell her.”

The man added one last thing. He said, “My wife doesn’t know I’m dying. Please don’t tell her; it would upset her.”

“Why haven’t you told your wife you’re dying?” asked Kathleen. “Because I think she knows. You did sign those hospice papers.”

Then she saw his vulnerability, for he said – and it must have been a difficult thing to say – that he was afraid that if he told his wife that he was dying, he would start to cry and never stop.

Kathleen replied, “I can only tell you what has happened when other people in your situation have told loved ones that they are dying. You’re going to start to cry, and then you’re going to sob, and you’re going to cry so hard and for so long that you’re going to think you won’t be able to stop, and she’s going to cry, and she’s going to sob, and then you’ll get these dry heaves of the eye ducts, and you’re not going to be able to cry anymore, so you’re going to look at each other and you’re going to get giddy and silly and you’re going to hug each other, and then you’ve got a beginning – because if you don’t tell them you’re dying, you can’t deal with any of these issues.”

The man said, “OK, come back next week.”

And she did. The man’s wife met Kathleen at the door and she said, “I don’t know what you did with him last week, but there’s been a stream of people going into his room, and they’ve all been coming out crying. His sister, and the people he worked with — and even my sister, whom he hates – they were invited in and they came out crying. He told me he was dying; he told me what a rotten husband he was and what a rotten marriage we had. It doesn’t make everything better between us, but it helps that he said it. We sat on the sofa and went through all the pictures of our wedding, the birth of our children, buying a house, vacations; he phoned his lawyer, he made his will; he called in the kids and gave them things; he called the priest and the funeral home; he even picked out his hymns.”

Kathleen was amazed – she hadn’t expected the man to do a thing. She went into his room and sat down on the chair.

He said, “I did what you said… But I have one last regret.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“I didn’t live my whole life like this.”

Kathleen said, “Look what you’ve discovered about yourself, that you never thought existed in you.”

To use the terms of this morning’s Gospel, that man discovered rock. As death approached he saw that his whole long life had been built on sand. What a waste it had been, all that hiding, all that self-centered meanness and refusal to connect! By the grace of God, the man used his last days to touch the rock of God’s love. He re-connected with the people around him. He apologized and made amends; he expressed his gratitude; he shared his love.

That’s the rock we get to touch today: that place deep inside us where God is always speaking to us in a voice of love. If any part of your life is built on sand, let it fall. Let it fall. Today is the day to reach for the rock, to set our lives on the rock of God’s love. Whether we are launching into life, as my son is, or whether we are reaching the end of our days, today is the day to listen to God’s love and to act on what we hear.

1. Kathleen J. Rusnak, Ph.D., “Because You’ve Never Died Before: The World of the Dying”; her Website is www.thebrickwall2.com. The story as told in this sermon is a shortened, edited version of a story she tells. Used with permission.

Running to the Empty Tomb

Friends, I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be back in this chapel and to share this service with you. One of my great losses in moving away from Cambridge four years ago was the loss of easy contact with this place, and with you Brothers, and with this community of faith. I rejoice to be with you today and to have a chance to reflect on this morning’s Gospel.

What interests me most in the scene we just heard is imagining what the beloved disciple experienced on that Easter morning. Of course, other characters also appear in the story of the empty tomb – Mary Magdalene and Simon Peter – but it is the beloved disciple who most attracts my attention. That is lucky for me, I guess, because he is the one whose feast day we are celebrating this morning. But even more than that, I wonder whether his experience of the Resurrection can tell us something about our own experience of the risen Christ. I wonder if, by imagining the experience of the beloved disciple, we can take the journey with him and discover how his encounter intersects with ours, and ours with his.

I have to tell you right off the bat that I majored in literature. If you listen to “A Prairie Home Companion,” you know from Garrison Keillor how hapless English majors are – they’re the ones who end up lost in dead-end jobs because of their idiosyncratic interest in symbols and images and stuff like that. English majors get no respect. And yet, as my friend and colleague Rob Hirschfeld likes to say – (he is, by the way, a member of the Fellowship of St. John, but was unable to join us this morning) – as Rob likes to say, John’s Gospel is the gospel for English majors. Everything in this Gospel seems to have been written for a reason – every detail counts, every repetition is deliberate, every image has some meaning to convey.

So with the zeal of an English major I roll up my sleeves and dig into this text, and, maybe because I’m not only an English major but also an Episcopal priest – and you know how we preachers love to make three points – what I notice about the beloved disciple in this passage is that he does three things.

What does he do first? He runs. As far as I can tell, this is the only scene in the entire Gospel of John in which anyone runs. Elsewhere in the Gospel, people walk; they stand; they come forward; they step back; they come in; they go out. At one point Mary of Bethany “got up quickly and went to Jesus” [John 11:29, 31] – but no one runs.

Except in this scene. When Mary Magdalene sees that the stone has been removed from the tomb, she runs to tell Simon Peter and the beloved disciple. When the two of them hear the news, we’re told that they “set out and went toward the tomb” – the usual pace of things in this Gospel – but suddenly in the next verse they are both running, and the beloved disciple is moving so fast, he outruns Peter and reaches the tomb first.

Running – that’s an image of urgency and eagerness, an image of a passionate, whole-body desire to come and see. The beloved disciple wants to see what’s going on. He wants to see if what Mary told them is true. He can’t move quickly enough – maybe he is breathless, but he doesn’t care – he wants to make his way to the tomb as quickly as he possibly can, with no detours, no delays, no pausing to put his affairs in order first. He knows where he needs to go and he runs.

That to me is as good an image as any of what it means to be on fire for God. In those blessed times, we gather up all our scattered energies and we focus them on God. We want nothing more than God, nothing less than God, nothing other than God. We want our lives to be directed toward God, our hearts to be turning toward God, our prayer to be focused on God. Nothing else is enough.

That holy fire blazed up in all of us at one point or another in our lives, or we wouldn’t find ourselves here this morning. The decision to explore a monastic vocation, the decision to make a life profession, the decision to commit oneself to the Fellowship of St. John – all these decisions came out of some experience of clarity and fervor in which we saw that we wanted our lives to head toward God. Every time we sit down to pray and touch that deep longing for God, we become the beloved disciple and we start to run to the tomb.

But let me add this. Like the beloved disciple, what we will find, we don’t know. How God will show up, we don’t know. Whether God will show up, we don’t know. Whether we’ll recognize the signs of God’s presence when God comes, we don’t know. We run because we thirst for God, but what we will find we can’t possibly predict or control. As we run, we must drop our expectations behind us, as a runner sheds the stuff she’s carrying so that she can be lighter on her feet. Let your prayer be fervent and pure – that’s what the disciple says to me as he runs. But don’t imagine for a moment that we can know in advance what we’ll find. The mystery of the living God can never be grasped or tamed, never locked away in a box – or a tomb. When we run toward God, we always run toward the unknown.

So that’s the first thing. And here’s the second: when the beloved disciple reaches the tomb, the Gospel tells us, “he bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in” [John 20:5]. Now that’s a curious moment. The beloved disciple wants so eagerly to see that he runs, but when he actually gets there, he pauses at the doorway and does not enter. The text seems to highlight this move – or, I should say, lack of movement – by contrasting it with what Peter does. When Peter reaches the tomb, he heads straight in.

Why does the beloved disciple pause at the doorway? Of course the Gospel never tells us, so we can imagine whatever we like. Did he simply need to catch his breath after running so hard? Did he suddenly get fearful or timid and feel a need to hold back? Either of these is possible, of course, but I’m going to argue for something else. I think the beloved disciple stopped at the doorway because he wanted to gaze. He saw the same thing that Peter saw – the linen wrappings lying there, as if Jesus’ body had somehow released itself from the wrappings without disturbing them – but unlike Peter, the beloved disciple stopped to gaze. He needed not just to see, but to see deeply.

When it comes to prayer, we need ardor, yes; we need fervor – of course. But we also need to gaze. We need to be willing to give prayer some time, to let it unfold, to let a deeper truth come forward and to speak in silence to our hearts. How can we take something in if we only give it the quickest of glances? How can we apprehend the holy Mystery, the living Presence, if we treat it like a drive-by fast food joint – drop by, place our order, and go? God doesn’t work like that. Prayer takes patience – even if several of the latest books on prayer are sub-titled “101 Quick Ways to Pray,” “Quick Prayers for Compassionate Caregivers,” “Quick Prayers for Determined Dieters,” “Quick Prayers for New Moms,” and so on. There is certainly a place and a need for quick prayers, no doubt about it. And yet the beloved disciple reminds me that if I really want to see, if I really want to perceive the Risen Christ and to be drawn into the living Mystery of God, then I must pause at the doorway to gaze. As a friend of mine says about prayer, “Don’t quit five minutes before the miracle.”

Prayer can’t be hurried any more than love can be hurried. When my son Sam was a boy, we had a nighttime ritual of saying the Lord’s Prayer and then exchanging the words “I love you” several times – “I love you,” “I love you, too” – back and forth. Not only did we have to say it over and over several times – these had to be the last words that Sam heard before he went to sleep.

One night I finally admitted to myself that I found this repeated verbal dance rather tedious. “Why do we have to keep repeating ‘I love you’ over and over?” I asked my son. “Why can’t we just say it once?”

Sam’s answer was disarmingly simple. “I want to feel it inside me before I go to sleep.”

Ah, don’t we all. There are times when God calls us to run hard and fast, but there are times when love asks us to linger and go slow. To say, “I love you” with complete attention. To say it a million times over, if we need to, until we and the other person are laughing with joy and those three small words can hardly contain the love that has poured into the room. To hear God say it to us again and again until divine love has penetrated the dry soil of our hearts and we spring up, as Isaiah says, “like willows by flowing streams” [Isaiah 44:4].

The beloved disciple is willing to wait and to gaze without grasping, until at last he feels drawn to step inside. And that is the third thing he does. He “went in” – that is, he stepped into the Mystery – and he “saw and believed” [John 20:8]. The Fourth Gospel uses the word “believe” a full 96 times, and the Gospel’s whole purpose is to invite its readers to do what the beloved disciple did: to see and believe, and so to live, to receive everlasting life.

What do you think it looked like when the beloved disciple saw and believed? Did his face begin to shine? Did tears of joy spring to his eyes? Did he throw his arms wide and begin to dance? We don’t know what he did. What would you do?

His journey is our journey, for the story of our faith may well have the same three markers along the way that his does – we run toward the sacred unknown because we want to see; we pause at the doorway because we see but also need to gaze; we enter inside and now see and believe.

I must say a word about the final sentence in this passage, the comment that “as yet they did not understand the scripture, that [Jesus] must rise from the dead” [John 20:9]. There is a wonderful freshness to the experience of the beloved disciple. He is the first to believe in the risen Jesus, but he does so not because believing this fits with what the Scripture says, or because he has figured anything out intellectually. His direct religious experience comes first. Later he will have a chance to think about it, because language comes later, and thought comes later – for now, he is simply immersed in the kind of innocent, fresh, direct perception that is ours in prayer when language and thought fall away and we find ourselves contemplating the holy Mystery in silence.

I must end by thanking the Brothers of SSJE, these dear friends of mine and friends of yours who have helped us and so many others to connect with the beloved disciple: to claim our own desire to run toward God, to spend time gazing, and to step forward and enter the holy Mystery so that we too may see and believe in our risen Lord. The retreats and spiritual direction that we find here; the sacred spaces; the sacraments and services of worship; the friendship and companionship along the way; the Rule of Life that supports us as a trellis supports a climbing rose – all these have inspired and strengthened us in our journey into the heart of God.

And now, of course, you and I have a chance to give something back: to help the Brothers re-build these beautiful spaces, to offer them not just our moral and spiritual but also our financial support, to become enthusiastic contributors to their new building campaign, “Stone and Light.” I can’t imagine what my own journey in faith would have been like without these dear colleagues and friends, these mentors and allies in the quest for God. I give thanks for you Brothers, and for this assembled community that seeks, as the beloved disciple once sought, to be faithful friends of Jesus and to bear passionate witness to his living presence in the world.

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Coming to Believe

The story of the disciple Doubting Thomas invites us to reflect on the meaning of faith, on what it means to believe. We often think of belief as simply a matter of giving intellectual assent to a proposition. Ask the typical American: Do you believe in God? And the answer is likely to be yes – and that’s that. But is belief really no more than reciting formulas and creeds, no more than lining up the correct ideas and passing some litmus test of orthodoxy?

Billy Graham tells a wonderful story about belief. One morning an acrobat begins pushing a wheelbarrow across a tightrope suspended high above Niagara Falls. When he reaches the other side, he turns around and carefully pushes the wheelbarrow back along the wire, as a crowd gathers to watch in amazement. Then the acrobat takes a 200-pound sack of dirt, places it in the wheelbarrow, and pushes the heavy load along the wire, through the misty air. Again, after reaching the far side he wheels the load back to where he started, while the crowd holds its breath. When the acrobat is back on solid ground, he points to a man in the crowd. “You,” he says. “Me?” the man says. “Yes, you,” says the acrobat. “Do you believe that I can push a man in a wheelbarrow across the falls?” “Oh yes,” says the fellow in the crowd, “I believe you can.” “All right then,” says the acrobat, pointing at him. “Get in.”1

Belief is obviously more than piously agreeing that a set of beliefs is true. The Gospel of John – the source of today’s story about Doubting Thomas – is a long meditation on the subject of belief. By my count, John uses the verb “believe” a full 96 times, almost four times more than the word is used in the other three gospels combined. In John’s Gospel the word “believe” repeats like a musical theme in a symphony, or like a shining thread that keeps showing up in a big tapestry.

Just listen to some familiar examples: If you believe in God’s Son, you will not perish but have eternal life [Jn 3:16]; if you believe in Jesus’ name, you will receive power to become children of God [Jn 1:12]; if you believe in Jesus you believe not in him but in the one who sent him” [Jn 12:44]; if you believe in Jesus, even though you die, you will live [Jn 11:25b].

The end of today’s passage, which is arguably the climax of the Gospel of John, states very clearly why the Gospel was written in the first place: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” [Jn 20:30-31].

But should we think of belief as the decision to accept something even if it flies in the face of the evidence? That’s the kind of belief that Lewis Carroll satirizes in a conversation between Alice and the Queen in Through the Looking Glass.

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again:
draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One
can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen.
“When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.
Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things
before breakfast.”

Thomas was not the type to believe in six impossible things before breakfast. Thomas wanted facts; he wanted evidence. He wasn’t there on the evening of the first Easter when the risen Jesus entered the locked room and stood among the disciples and said “Peace be with you” and breathed the Holy Spirit into them. Thomas missed all that, and so he refused to believe it. He had no use for second-hand testimony; he wanted to know things for himself, to find out for himself whether or not the Resurrection was true.

I like Thomas for refusing blind belief, for insisting on using his God-given mind and personal experience to help him discover what was true. That of course is part of the Anglican or Episcopal way: we explore the truth by consulting our direct experience and power of reason as well as by consulting Scripture and tradition. God wants us to use every resource at our disposal as we open ourselves to the truth and decide what we most deeply believe.

So it’s good to notice that Jesus does not rebuke Thomas for his doubts when Jesus appears again a week later – he actually welcomes them. “Peace be with you,” Jesus says again to the gathered disciples, and then he turns to Thomas and, without saying another word, as if he already understands what Thomas needs so badly to know, he invites Thomas to touch his wounded hands and side. “Reach out your hand and put it in my side,” he tells Thomas. “Do not doubt, but believe.”

“Reach out,” Jesus says to Thomas – and to us. Move beyond whatever place you may be stuck in your perception of reality and explore what is most deeply true. We all have our usual patterns of thought, our typical preoccupations and obsessions and concerns. It is when we reach beyond them – when for instance, our mind grows quiet in contemplative prayer and we discover that we can watch our thoughts arise and pass away and that we are not our thoughts, that we belong to a much larger, living, shimmering, non-verbal reality – it is when we no longer identify with our conditioned thinking that we begin to be freed of our tight little grip on both our certainties and our doubts. That’s when life really comes alive – when it begins to sparkle and to be full of surprise. That’s when we touch our direct experience and discover the deepest belief of our heart, which is deeper than what we think.

When Thomas reaches out to Jesus, what does he touch? He touches Jesus’ wounds. Jesus has risen from the dead, and his transfigured body can do things that no ordinary body can do, such as move through locked doors. You might think that the body of the resurrected Jesus would be entirely glorious, perfect, and intact, and yet his risen body still bears the wounds of the crucifixion. What does that mean? It means that the man who stands before the amazed disciples is in fact the same man who was crucified. The wounds in Jesus’ hands and sides are marks that identify him, marks that establish the continuity between the flesh and blood Jesus whom the disciples knew and loved, and the risen Christ who now stands before them – a continuity across the divide of life and death. The wounded hands and side of the risen Christ show us that Christ will never stop sharing in human suffering. He may rise to the Father and take his seat at the right hand of God, but his body will never lose its connection with our wounded humanity. He will never transcend his deep sharing in and empathy for our human brokenness and pain.

Jesus invites Thomas to touch his side, where, John’s Gospel tells us, a spear pierced Jesus during the crucifixion and “at once blood and water came out” [Jn 19:34]. That is an image of giving birth, for in the crucifixion the old humanity died and a new humanity was born. It’s an image of baptism, too, the sacrament that Matthew Ryan Dineen will experience in a few moments, and through which we are re-born by being buried in Jesus’ death and by rising to new life in him [Romans 6:3-11].

Something decisive certainly happened to Thomas when he reached out to Jesus – some kind of inner transformation. His doubts fell away, his fear turned into confidence, and his sorrow into joy. “My Lord and my God!” he exclaimed, in the Gospel’s climactic recognition scene. Yes, it was Jesus – and at last Thomas understood who Jesus really was and who he had been all along.

Every Sunday we’re invited to state what we believe. “We believe in one God,” we say in the Nicene Creed, or “I believe in God, the Father Almighty,” if we’re using the baptismal covenant. Usually we name our beliefs rather solemnly and with restraint – and that’s fine – but what an eye-opener it was last November at our “Creation Mass” – whose DVD, incidentally, we hope to release next week – when the choir launched into Horace Boyer’s Gospel setting of the Nicene Creed. Suddenly we were all rocking – do you remember that? We were all moving in our seats and feeling the beat and grinning from ear to ear. ‘Belief’ in God suddenly wasn’t a formal affair anymore, a tidy list of propositions to recite by rote and then tuck away in a drawer until next week. Suddenly we got it: ‘belief’ is alive. It is on the move. It can capture us – body and soul. It can make us want to climb out of the pew and into a wheelbarrow suspended high above Niagara Falls – to leap into life, to give ourselves fully to God, to trust with our whole heart and not to hold back.

1. Adapted from the paraphrase by Martin M. Davis, The Gospel and the Twelve Steps, quoted in Spiritual Kindergarten: Christian Perspectives on the Twelve Steps, by Dale and Juanita Ryan, Brea, CA: Christian Recovery International, 1999, 2005, p. 18.

Kindness in the Night

“One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see. “
– John 9:25

The night was closing in, and a little circle of people was gathered for the evening meal – Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead, and his sister Martha, who was serving the meal, and his sister Mary, who took a great quantity of expensive perfume, bathed Jesus’ feet with it, and then dried his feet with her hair.

We hear this story every year on Monday of Holy Week, and I’d like to wonder with you about this gesture of Mary’s. What might it mean? Because John’s Gospel reads rather like a poem, every word and image has multiple meanings, not just one, so we can ponder a number of possibilities.

One meaning is the one that Jesus named: whether Mary knew it or not, when she anointed his feet she was anticipating his approaching death, anointing his feet as a mourner might anoint a dead body. His death was very close; the tension around Jesus was rising to a breaking point. The civil and religious authorities were plotting to take his life and looking for a way to arrest him. Mary seems to have sensed that. She understood the urgency of the moment; she longed to be of use, to offer a gesture of kindness; she felt the same longing that you and I feel when someone we love is near death. No one would speak a word of kindness to Jesus when he hung on the cross; no one would anoint his body after he was crucified; but Mary was there, on that dark night a few days before his death, offering Jesus what she could: the love that naturally flows from us when we know that someone we love is going to die. She anointed the feet that only a few days later would be pierced by nails.

A second meaning of the gesture – it praises extravagance. What a wild thing to do – to pour a pound of costly perfume over someone’s feet and then to wipe it away with one’s hair! It was scandalous, too — respectable Jewish women would never appear in public with their hair unbound. Mary had for the moment abandoned any concern about propriety; she had in a sense forgotten herself. She had relinquished the usual restraint that keeps us watchful about the impression we’re making and what other people think.

I think that’s how the deepest part of ourselves, our soul, wants to love God – with no holding back, with no hand on the hand brake. What would it be like to pray with our whole bodies, not just with our minds – to raise up our hands when we feel full of praise, to throw ourselves on the ground when we need to pray our penitence or sorrow – what would it be like to give our whole selves to God, body, mind and soul, to love God openly, with less caution and reserve? Maybe here in church we like our worship quiet and dignified, but when we pray alone at home, who is to stop us from letting our prayer be completely expressive? There are people who dance their prayer, or weep their prayer, or in other ways use their bodies to let their love for God be physically communicated. That’s an invitation I hear in Mary’s gesture: an invitation as we move into Holy Week to love God more boldly.

And finally, anointing Jesus’ feet brings to mind a familiar gesture of hospitality in that ancient culture: anointing the head of a dinner guest. If Mary had anointed Jesus’ head with oil, her act would have been quite normal, a gracious and traditional way of welcoming a guest. Anointing Jesus’ head would also have recalled how in Old Testament times a prophet anointed the head of the Jewish king [2 Kings 9:1-13, 1 Samuel 10:1]. Anointing Jesus’ head would have meant that she recognized him as the Messiah – literally, the anointed one.

Instead, she anoints his feet, and I can’t help but wonder if this gesture means to say that she does recognize Jesus as king, but as a lowly king, as a humble king, as the Lord of life who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey because he was the King of Peace, not a warrior king. Maybe she anointed his feet because that is the only way to anoint such a king, a king who on another dark night just a few days later would gather his friends for another supper, get up from the table, remove his outer robe, tie a towel around his waist, and wash his disciples’ feet. Perhaps Mary was anointing Jesus as the king who serves, the one who calls us to wash each other’s feet.

And here’s the last thing I’ll say – in that extravagant, loving gesture that combines anointing the dead and anointing a servant king, Mary herself is anointed. She wipes off the perfumed oil with her hair. The oil that she offered Jesus is now on her own head. That to me is a wonderful image of how this works – we give ourselves to Jesus with no holding back and we in turn are blessed. We express our love for him as fully as we can, in our prayer and in our lives, and we discover that we in turn have been anointed, that we in turn have been filled with his life and presence and energy, as if there is nothing we can give him that won’t be given back to us tenfold.

Ride on in Majesty

“When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil,
asking, ‘Who is this?’“

-Matthew 21:10

“Ride on! Ride on in majesty!” we will sing in a moment, as we contemplate Jesus entering Jerusalem, riding on a donkey. The crowds gave him the red-carpet treatment, spreading their cloaks and branches on the ground to smooth his way. They gave him a royal welcome, a welcome fit for a king. I can imagine people streaming from their houses and running to catch a glimpse of him. I can see them craning their necks and elbowing their way forward. A father swings his daughter onto his shoulders so that she can get a better look; a dog starts barking, and then a whole pack of dogs; a mother grabs her child’s hand so that he won’t get lost; and then look – here he comes on his donkey, with a crowd of people walking ahead of him and another crowd behind, and everyone is shouting, everyone is cheering and carrying on.

What do you imagine that Jesus was feeling? Was he caught up in the excitement and commotion? Was he smiling? I can imagine him drinking in these moments of praise and support, and his quiet joy when he looked into the crowds and spotted some of the people he had healed – maybe the man who had been born blind, and the man with the withered hand; maybe the woman who had been hemorrhaging for twelve years, and the little girl whom Jesus raised from the dead – all of them rejoicing and grateful for the surprise of being healed. And the prostitutes were there, and the tax collectors, the lame and the lost, the hungry and the hurting – all of them welcoming Jesus as a king returning to his throne.

But for all the excitement that swirled around him, I imagine that there was sorrow and determination in Jesus’ heart, too, for he was riding into that city to confront the powers that be. He rode as a humble king, not as a conquering hero. He rode with no army but a crowd of well-wishers and a handful of friends, most of whom eventually melted away into the darkness, betraying or denying him or simply running away. He rode with no weapon but the weapon of truth, with no power but the power of mercy, with no strength but the strength of love.

He could have picked up a weapon – he could have marshaled his ragtag followers into a makeshift army – but he didn’t. He could not have done that and remained faithful to who he was and the deepest truth he knew.

Jesus entered the city without a weapon, and yet, the Gospel tells us, “the whole city was in turmoil” – it was stirred up, it was shaken. The Greek word used here is the one used to describe an earthquake. The powers that be in this world are shaken up when the king of peace rides into town, when he rides into the boardrooms and back rooms of our country, when he rides into our hearts. There is an upheaval in the center of reality.

We may turn away from him. We may spurn him and deny him. And we do – we do it every day, in every malicious thought, in every word of cruelty or contempt, in every act of selfishness. When we get to the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, you and I are every person in that tale – the family members and friends that, according to some Gospel accounts, stayed with Jesus until the end, but also the collaborators and the cowards, the crowds that turn on him and even the torturers themselves, since our government has no qualms about “enhanced” interrogation techniques.

Every one of us can run away from love, but God’s love pursues us, all the same, meeting our violence with kindness, our sinfulness with forgiveness, our hatred and fear with the One who is “gentle and humble in heart” [Matthew 11:28].

As we enter Holy Week, we invite Jesus to ride into our lives and into our world – to shake things up, and turn things around, and open us to the love that makes all things new.

Ride on! Ride on in majesty!