Between noon and three

…spare us in the youngest day when all are shaken awake, facts are facts, (and I shall know exactly what happened today between noon and three); that we too may come to the picnic with nothing to hide, join the dance as it moves in perichoresis, turns about the abiding tree. — W.H. Auden, "Compline"

Month: January, 2018

January 29, 2018

The Reliability of God

This was my first sermon at St. Mark’s, Berkeley, CA, preached on the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, January 28, 2018. This was three weeks after my last sermon at St. Michael & St. George, and in the meantime I was able both to take my annual retreat at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico, and to move to the Bay. Thanks to all for your patience these last few weeks especially, as I’ve been slow to respond to emails and even slower to update this site. Life is getting settled more and more now with every passing day, and I’ll be back in the swing of things before long.

Collect: Almighty and everlasting God, you govern all things both in heaven and on earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of your people, and in our time grant us your peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Deuteronomy 18:15-20, 1 Corinthians 8:1-13, Mark 1:21-28

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

Good morning everyone! It is a pleasure long-awaited to be here with you this morning. I’m looking forward very much to getting to know you better, and to serving as your priest.

I promise it’s not usually my habit to begin a sermon by commenting on the lectionary itself, so it’s probably bad form to do so this morning, but at this point you’re stuck — so there it is.

Here we are on the fourth Sunday after the Epiphany. Jesus has been baptized in the Jordan, he has called his disciples, and now he begins his ministry officially with a sermon and a healing in Capernaum. By pairing this Gospel with the passage from Deuteronomy we heard read, the lectionary framers are pointing out that Jesus is the fulfillment of this prophecy: Jesus is the “second Moses,” the “prophet like Moses” which Moses prophesied to the people of Israel that God would send to fulfill the promises and usher in the messianic age.

It’s a connection rife with theological riches. But for myself, I’m stuck wondering, why on earth did it take so long? By most reckonings, that prophecy would have been made to Moses at the very least many, many centuries before Jesus came on the scene; and at the very most, potentially almost two full millennia before Jesus came on the scene. Why such a long wait?

It begs a lot of questions about what God was doing in the meantime, and Israel, and should make us stop to think — with such a long time between promise and fulfillment, how were people supposed to carry on? There were the prophets, and kings, and psalmists, and all the rest. But none of them were the final word.

So much waiting in their lives of faith, across so many generations. So much waiting in our own lives of faith, or our lives, period, for that matter. Isn’t there more to it than just so much waiting? As Christians we hold very dearly that God is faithful, and more than that, that God is reliable. How do we experience this reliability, how do we know it for ourselves, when so much of our lives are spent waiting for God to act, or for some other goal or occasion? Or worse, how can we trust the reliability of God when disappointment looms, and things don’t go as planned or hoped?

For the Israelites, in exile as in Egypt, they had to become people of prayer if they were going to keep going without the familiar places or rituals of land or temple. And in their prayer, they recalled the former days of God’s faithfulness: his faithfulness to Abraham and to Moses; to Ruth, David, Bathsheba, Esther, Daniel, and all the rest. There was something so central about remembering the past that it came to characterize prayer in the present: when Jesus first appears in the synagogue at Capernaum, Israelite religion had flourished in the long centuries of exile and subjugation, flourished with prayerful remembering of all those long centuries. When he gets up to preach he first reads from the scroll of the Torah, recalling to mind those events of ages past.

But more than remembering, their prayer included the offering of the present too. Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Psalmists, constantly offer all the anxieties and concerns — and joys and celebrations — of the present moment to God in prayer. Today in Capernaum Jesus, with the whole rabbinic tradition of which he was a member, directed his teaching at the present moment, helping the people to offer their daily lives to God, all their experiences and all their moments. Beyond the synagogues, in Jesus’ day whole schools of prayer flourished in which the faithful were trained to live the present moment as an offering to God; and all the vast system of rules and regulations, so often lampooned as merely “Pharisaical,” existed to help people mark all the moments and tasks of their daily lives with a prayerful attitude.

Furthermore, by Jesus’ day Israelite religion had grown oriented towards the future too, and their prayer followed suit. Not just remembering the past, not just marking the present; but standing on tiptoes as it were, looking forward both to the coming of the Messiah and finally to the end, when all the promises would be fulfilled. The Jewish mystical tradition comes out of this orientation towards the future, and many of their great hymns and sacred music as well, which Jesus and his disciples would have known and the early church would have sung. (Music which, incidentally, continues to shape the life of the Church in its later development as Gregorian chant.)

In the centuries and millennia between promise and fulfillment, then, the people of God carried on by becoming people of prayer: people whose prayer was characterized by a concern for remembering the past, marking the present, and orienting themselves towards the future.

I’d be hard pressed to come up with a better summary of what prayer is all about: what is prayer but sharing memories with God, painful, joyful, and otherwise? What is prayer but sharing the present moment with God, with its struggles and celebrations? What is prayer but sharing hopes with God, both for healing of griefs and for fulfillment of cherished dreams?

If you and I ever find ourselves in a position where the gap between promise and fulfillment seems too long to bear, or where the tension between what is right and what is actually happening is impossible to bridge; or simply where grief looms with no way out, offer it to God in prayer. Start with the present moment; recall the past with all its twists and turns, highs and lows; direct yourself towards the future in anticipation that God will finally prove faithful yet, that peace will finally come in all its splendor — and you will have covered the bases.

But more than covering the bases, you will find something mysterious going on. As you share all these moments and concerns with God, the present, the past, and the future all commingle together in the presence of the Holy Spirit; and as they commingle, by God’s grace a new thing is made. Our memories, our present, our futures, are transfigured and transformed, recast into a new thing beyond any of them. More than a backward glance, more than a glimpse far off, in prayer we find our lives the occasion of heaven itself breaking into the here and now, especially into hurt and grief, anguish and anxiety. A new thing happens, God himself appears, and we encounter him most personally right where we need it most.

This is certainly one of the points that St. Mark is making in this passage from his gospel this morning. It’s no wonder that Jesus’ first miracle, and his first official public appearance, occur together, in the context of the people of God at prayer, in the synagogue.

So here’s the kicker. When we take all our waiting, all our griefs, all our frustrations, hopes, and concerns to God in prayer, in public or in private, God’s answer is not necessarily to do what we ask, but to show up himself, just as Jesus showed up in that synagogue in Capernaum. When we are most sick of waiting, most frustrated by the promise of peace still lingering so far off, God shows up to teach and to heal; Jesus shows up, commending himself to our touch, our taste, our nourishment, and most of all, to our love.

Yes when God shows up, it is not to answer our questions to resolve our dilemmas or give us directions on what to do next; it is to commend himself to our love. When we are filled with perplexity, God is not in the business of giving satisfactory explanations for us to understand, but of revealing his face for us to love. And in that love our griefs are held and healed.

So what are we to do in the long gap between promises and fulfillment? Jesus came as Moses prophesied, but more than a thousand years later. Jesus has made promises to us too, about the peace that passeth understanding, and the fullness of his kingdom coming soon. In times and moments when that seems especially far off and grief and disappointment are still to near, let’s you and I turn to prayer. There may we find painful memory and uncertain hope, both of them, recast before the face of God, recast into the wide open embrace of his presence, his healing, and his peace. There may we find the courage to love even as Jesus loved, and find heaven itself breaking into our midst.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.

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January 7, 2018

The Baptism of the Lord

This was my last sermon at St. Michael & St. George in St. Louis, before moving to Berkeley, California, to take up the post of Priest-in-Charge at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. It was the first Sunday after the Epiphany, always the Baptism of the Lord, and despite my best intentions I couldn’t help trying to collect a large number of themes into one sermon. Whether or not it was successful the congregation is better equipped than I to say, but here it is regardless.

Collect: Father in heaven, who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan didst proclaim him thy beloved Son and anoint him with the Holy Spirit: Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior; who with thee and the same Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Readings: Genesis 1:1-5, Acts 19:1-7, Mark 1:4-11

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

Well here we are, it’s January 7. The drummers drumming have packed up their kit. The lords a leaping, ladies dancing, and maids a milking have all had their fun; and the Three Wise Men have come and gone. Christmastide is over, and we begin this new season of the Church’s year with the same sudden shift as we begin it every year: Jesus no longer a baby but suddenly thirty years old, presenting himself to John the Baptist to be baptized and begin his ministry. Why is this the way it begins? Why does Jesus, without sin, get baptized?

It’s the question I find myself asking, though I think it reveals a weakness in me, and probably in western Christianity — “If he’s without sin, why does Jesus need to get baptized? Jesus is without sin; no, he doesn’t need to get baptized. Why do we place the burden of proof on God? Better to ask ourselves, “Why do we assume things happen only because they need to?” Why do we assume religion is about meeting needs in the first place — or for that matter that God is in the business of creating needs, only for him miraculously to fulfill?

No, need has nothing to do with it for Jesus, and it has nothing to do with it for us either. Religion is not about fixing our problems, spiritual or otherwise. Jesus goes to John to get baptized in order to begin his ministry on earth; and by stepping into the water, he is saying something very important about what his ministry is going to be, and what it will entail. It’s not about getting “the sin problem” fixed, it is about making a statement: why God created life in the first place, and what it is intended to be.

Jesus enters the water, and when he comes up the heavens break open, but first he enters the water. When God shows up in our lives, it’s usually when we’re in over our heads and we don’t quite know it. When I was a grad student living in London many years ago, that winter was bleak and dark, and I was feeling the weather in more ways than one. That Easter, unlooked for and inexplicably, somehow Jesus’ resurrection felt like it was mine too, and not just his; I had come out of the tomb and the world was fresh.

Water means a lot in the Bible and in the ancient world, it’s never just background information. Remember Genesis 1, which we just heard read: “In the beginning the earth was formless and void, and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the deep.” Water, the primeval element of chaos and disorder, over which the Voice first speaks, the first light of creation shines; water the source of Noah’s flood; the Red Sea through which Israel escapes Pharaoh; the Jordan which they cross to enter the promised land; water the moment of trial and the occasion of faith.

Jesus enters the water for his baptism, and enters all these moments simultaneously. Jesus enters the water for his baptism, and makes the domain of chaos and disorder the dwelling place of God. Jesus enters the water for his baptism, and defeats all the old powers, overthrows all the old fears, binds up all the old demons, sheds light on all the old darkness. And he does so as a human person like you and me. Wherever you and I find those darknesses in our hearts or our world, Jesus’ baptism puts him right there too, right there beside us.

This changes everything about the way we regard Jesus’ baptism, and our own, and for that matter the whole project of religion in our life and our world. It’s not about fixing anything, but about pointing to the single stupendous miracle that God is here with us making all things new: not in quiet and in peace, though they are his fruits; but in the work halls and the prisons and the sex trade, in depression and disability and disappointment; in disease and death, robbing them of their power and endowing their victims with his own eternal life and light.

I’m sure I’ve told you one of my favorite stories, about St. Seraphim of Sarov, a hermit who lived deep in the forest. One day a fierce bear set upon him, to eat him for lunch. But Seraphim spoke kindly to the bear, and invited him to his home instead. They became friends and were often seen walking and talking together in the woods. The story isn’t meant as a ridiculous break from reality, but as a lesson — that with God, dark and dangerous places are the first beachheads of grace, signposts of restored communion in the kingdom of God.

Yes, Jesus’ baptism offers a new vision for us and for the world. He comes up from the water and the heavens are opened. A voice proclaims, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased,” and a dove rests upon him. The vision is of a kind of world where this kind of thing happens, where our eyes are changed and we can see truly. Jesus will go to the cross to make the message complete, and rise from the grave to make the victory sure. Those who dare to follow, must dare to continue the work.

Because the work certainly goes on. Our part is to bear witness to the new life we have begun to see, to the possibility of new life in places we had thought dead or at least impossibly mundane. As Jesus entered the water, as he went to the cross and entered the tomb, so we go about our daily business: brushing teeth, driving cars, visiting mom, throwing a party, going to work — all the while aware that these are the moments God is breaking in creating new possibilities, new life beyond the immutable laws of Mondays, taxes, and parking tickets.

Why do you need any of this in your life? You don’t! It’s completely gratuitous. There is no reason that you or me or anyone needs this stuff in order to survive. But the vision Jesus offers is about so much more than what’s merely necessary. The vision is about putting us in touch with what’s truest and most lasting about the world and about God. The vision Jesus offers is of people healed by his touch, sins forgiven by his word, human life made holy just by his presence, and all creation brought to its completion by his sacrifice.

I remember a widow in Denver, whose husband of 70 years I buried. She didn’t come to church for a long time after the funeral, understandably so: it was something they’d done together for the better part of a century. Then, on Christmas Eve, I saw her at the rail and gave her communion for the first time in months. Afterwards she said to me, “You know, I didn’t come to church for so long because I thought I’d miss him here the most. But it’s strange, now I feel closer to him than I have in a long time.”

So what have I been driving at? At his baptism, Jesus enters the water of the Jordan, enters all the griefs and dark places of the world and of our hearts, and by his presence blesses it — water now the sign of forgiveness of sins and eternal life in him forever. By his presence Jesus turns the floods of death into the river of the heavenly city of God. You and I are charged to do likewise: wherever there is darkness to bless, not to curse, to enter and befriend it, because there we will find Jesus gone on ahead.

There’s a wonderful old story, maybe you’ve heard it: when Noah sends out the dove after the floods have destroyed the earth, it returns with an olive branch and then it doesn’t return at all. Where does it go, where is the solid perch it found to live? The story goes, it reappears today, here, at the Jordan River, making its home as it rests on Jesus. Whatever floods we’ve faced, whatever woes we may know, let you and I, with Noah’s dove, rest on Jesus in the midst of the water, and bear witness always to his eternal life.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.

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