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: March, 2018

March 30, 2018

Maundy Thursday 2018

Collect: Almighty Father, whose dear Son, on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood: Mercifully grant that we may receive it thankfully in remembrance of Jesus Christ our Lord, who in these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life; and who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Exodus 12:1-14, 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, John 13:10-17, 31-35

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

Maundy Thursday. Today we continue the same dramatic reenactment we began on Sunday with palms and the triumphal entry. We continue our reenactment, but we also increase its intensity: in a few moments we will wash one another’s feet, in imitation of Jesus at the Last Supper the night before he died. Later we will take the Sacrament from the Chancel to the Altar of Repose, echoing Jesus’ own departure from the Upper Room to the Garden of Gethsemane. We will keep vigil there after the service in partial response to his request to Peter, James, and John, “Remain here and pray with me,” while he goes to his own Agonizing prayer. We will strip the church of adornment, and wash the altars clean at Jesus’ betrayal and arrest.

In our liturgy tonight, as on Palm Sunday, there is a difficult emotional transition: we begin with celebration, giving thanks for Jesus’ triple gift on this night: first his example of humility, leading his disciples by washing their feet. Second his new command that they love one another as he has loved them. And third by another new command, “Do this in remembrance of me,” introducing them to the gift of the Eucharist by which he remains with his church from age to age, nourishing us continually with his own body and blood. But then a spirit of trouble and even desolation descends on the liturgy, and we leave in silence to face the starkness of tomorrow’s death in a bare, evacuated church.

On Palm Sunday in my sermon I observed that all this drama is a way not of adding or creating what is missing, but of revealing what is already present. Today I want to reflect a little on how this liturgical remembering also accomplishes a reversal of our vision. If this kind of revealing adds clarity about the events at the core of our faith, it also increases the murkiness about how we view the world and the rest of our lives.

If you remember the story I told about King Nebuchadnezzar, the fiery furnace, and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, Nebuchadnezzar could see clearly that God was present with the three young men in the midst of the king’s attempt at execution; the episode certainly added clarity on that point. But if you’re Nebuchadnezzar, now what? What kind of world is it, where flames in a fiery furnace refuse to do their jobs, where angelic visitors side with prisoners against royalty? Without trying to elicit undue pity for the king of Babylon, it must have been a disorienting experience to say the least. Simply put, the world is not what he thought it was, and its mysterious powers not all under his thumb.

How many times has something similar happened to you? A surprise cancer diagnosis, or a compliment you weren’t looking for; a friend or cousin cuts you off, or a piece of particularly bad news brings you to your breaking point. Maybe it’s a pleasant surprise, or maybe it’s an unpleasant accumulation of small but lethal slights, or maybe it’s a death. Whatever the case, it disorients us. The world is not what we thought it was, and the news we’re given makes us rethink our assumptions and forces us into a new posture, a new manner of approach, a new way of seeing and thinking and imagining. When we’re in the middle of it, all we want to do is to come out on the other side intact. But on the other side, we see we’re anything but intact. We may have the same spirit, we may be made of the same physical stuff, but we can never go back; something is fundamentally different now.

Okay, so far so good. The question is, what reversal does Maundy Thursday accomplish? What disorientation does it initiate in us as we remember it liturgically, publicly, and inwardly? We call it Maundy Thursday from the Latin “Mandatum” for “Commandment” and we remember that tonight Jesus gave his disciples a new commandment, that they love one another. But that’s not the only commandment he gives. Jesus gives at least three commandments tonight. The first is the famous “Love one another” which concluded our Gospel passage tonight, symbolized by Jesus’ example of humbly washing their feet. The reversal here might be obvious, but it’s worth stating directly: whatever kind of authority we might associate with God, whatever kind of majesty or dominion, God exercises it not by edict, fiat, or imposition, but by washing feet, by serving the basic needs of creatures, granting them the dignity of God’s own attention and care. Any earthly authority that would claim God’s blessing or approval must do likewise, or be revealed a fraud. That goes for parents as much as it does for presidents, for priests as much as for police. If we wish to claim God’s approval on whatever leadership we exercise, we must do it wearing the servant’s towel. The further irony is that only one who serves in this way is free; any who would coerce or impose is a slave to violence and fear. This is a strange world that Maundy Thursday begins to reveal.

The other two commands come in the other Gospel accounts of tonight’s events, but no doubt they’re familiar ones. The second command Jesus issues tonight is, “Do this in remembrance of me.” And so we do, every week, nearly every day, and tonight especially. Scholar Dom Gregory Dix once wrote poetically, “Was ever any other command so obeyed?” The Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, the Holy Communion, the Mass, has come to define the contours of corporate Christian worship, and has done since the earliest days. But obedience to this command is more than a memorial. There is a reversal here too. We generally think of the bread and wine as symbols which convey a deeper meaning, a deeper presence. But the meaning, the Presence of Christ himself changes the nature of the symbols as well. So for those who partake of the Eucharist, all bread in every setting now points us to Jesus, the Eucharistic Lord, not only the bread consecrated here; all wine points us to his passion, not only this chalice. All eating, all drinking, all human fellowship is a sign of his once and future presence among us and the unity of all creation in him. In short, the symbols themselves become signposts of the kingdom of God, and the world we live in becomes suddenly planted thick with the seeds and occasions of forgiveness, faithfulness, and light, despite the darkness brooding everywhere.

Finally, the third command Jesus gives tonight is perhaps the most disorienting of all. He turns to Judas and says, “Go, do what you do quickly.” Judas gets up from the table and goes to betray Jesus to his death. Recently I heard someone observe, that throughout most of history, people were scandalized not by the resurrection — what else would you expect from the Son of God? — but by the crucifixion, by Jesus’ death in the first place. Death is not something we expect of a savior or a god, let alone betrayal by one who was so close. In our world today, the reverse is true: we expect Good Friday, we’re not surprised by injustice, it’s not shocking for trust to be broken or honor discarded for profit. It’s the resurrection that surprises us, the resurrection that we find difficult to defend or explain. However we react to it, Jesus’ command to Judas, “Go, do what you do quickly,” introduces another reversal: here is someone not afraid to face death head-on, who knows he goes to suffering and worse, who will agonize in the Garden over whether or not to go through with it; who yet, at almost the critical moment, encourages his betrayer to go, and get it over with already. It really is an intimate moment, quietly spoken; it’s unclear whether the rest of the disciples even hear what Jesus says to Judas. His tenderness towards his betrayer reveals the last great reversal of the evening: here is the same Jesus who will say to the thief on the cross tomorrow, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” The stupendous gentleness of Jesus before all the forces of rack and ruin, destruction and dissolution: this gentleness of his person, a trait so often considered in this world as weak and easily taken advantage of, proves stronger and more enduring than death itself.

What does it mean for us? Find the gentlest person you know, and discover the invincible vanguard of heaven. Put aside the brash, the caustic, the pompous, and the self-promoting: they are nothing, a desert of ambition and vanity. Embrace the gentleness of Jesus and find an oasis of life.

In a few moments we will wash one another’s feet, share in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, and before the end strip the altars and keep watch before we all depart in silence, while the shadow of death grows over the church and over our hearts. But as the drama continues, let the reversals which Jesus’ commands initiate, refocus our imaginations and recalibrate our expectations. The world we will discover is a strange one, bearing little resemblance to the powers that hold sway over the news, shareholder meetings, and geopolitics. But these days of remembering will help us put our feet on firmer ground and lift our heads above the fray, to see lasting joy springing from the mouth of despair, life emerging from the tomb, and love greeting betrayal with a kiss.

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

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March 25, 2018

Palm Sunday, 2018

This sermon was preached at St. Mark’s, Berkeley, on Palm Sunday, March 25, 2018. (The Annunciation normally falls on March 25, but because of the weight of Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Easter Week, it will get pushed to Monday April 9. At St. Mark’s we will observe the Annunciation at Evensong on April 8, the second Sunday of Easter, though I know this bends the rules a little!) I have not announced a “theme” for my Holy Week sermons this year, but they are a continuation of the same ones begun earlier at St. Mark’s on worship and life with God. In hindsight, I might have titled these, “The moment that does not pass away,” borrowing an observation on the crucifixion by Br. Jeremy Driscoll, OSB, in his book “A Monk’s Alphabet.” — the point is, the events of Holy Week and in particular the Triduum are the heart of Christian life and identity, the focal point around which everything else, including the cosmos, revolves. These sermons explore that conviction, and try to offer a few different points of entry.

Collect: Almighty and everliving God, who, of thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the sample of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may both follow the example of his patience, and also be made partakers of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Isaiah 50:4-9a, Philippians 2:5-11, Mark 14:1-15:47

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

After the Passion Gospel a sermon needs hardly to be preached; you’ve already heard most of what there is to say! But all the same I’d like to spend a few moments sketching out the territory for the week ahead.

We began this morning with one of the most ancient collects in our prayer book: “Assist us mercifully with thy help, O Lord God of our salvation, that we may enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts, whereby thou hast given us life and immortality.” The contemplation of those mighty acts. How do we accomplish this contemplation? In large part by dramatic reenactment.

We began this service out in the courtyard and sang the same Hosannas, waving the same palm branches as the crowds in the Gospel. We’ve just heard a dramatic retelling of the same episode. In my last parish we began out on the front lawn, even invited a local petting zoo to be a part of the day. The star visitor was a venerable donkey named Donatello, a fifteen year veteran of the festivities, who always proudly led the procession into church.

Over the course of this coming week we’ll undertake to wash one another’s feet, carry the Sacrament to the altar of repose, strip the altars, venerate the cross, and carry out a vigil as after a loved one’s death — all dramatic retellings of this series of events which is right at the heart of the church’s identity.

So, with God’s help, we enter the contemplation of these mighty acts. A big part of this is remembering what happened, and who were the players, and what were their motivations. We tell the story dramatically over the course of these days In part to jog our memories, and to give us the time we need to consider the scope of the drama and to offer us various points of entry into the unfolding narrative.

Remembering in this way, just like revisiting the story of the Pilgrims on Thanksgiving or Thomas Jefferson on July 4, helps to create a common set of reference points for who we are as a people, as a family of faith. It creates a baseline of shared memory: none of us were there ourselves all those years ago, and yet we are the common heirs of the memories all the same. Sharing them with one another creates and sustains the succession of generations for whom this holy week is their own inheritance, their own treasure.

It’s a remembrance, but it’s more than a remembrance. This past Wednesday, at the regular 12:10 service, the appointed first reading was from Daniel — that episode where Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego get thrown into the fire for not worshiping the king’s golden image. You know the story: instead of burning up, they walk around in the flames together, saying prayers and singing hymns. Meanwhile, as they walk around, King Nebuchadnezzar is watching to make sure they burn up like they’re supposed to — but he notices it’s taking longer than usual, and also he notices a fourth person in the flames with them, who wasn’t there when they got thrown in: he looks like a son of God. The king is so confused he lets them all out, and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are all unscathed — but no trace of the fourth person. The implication is, that, as the three of them said their prayers and sang their hymns, God himself appeared beside them.

We tell ourselves the same thing as a way of encouraging us to pray, and to come to church: especially this week! — when we remember together as a group the events of Jesus’ passion and death. As we pray together and sing, God appears among us, affirming our faith and leading us to the other side of whatever challenge we might be facing. Jesus promises that wherever two or three are gathered together in his name, there he is in the midst of them.

But it’s important to remember, praying is not a way of coercing God to show up. In the fiery furnace, the angelic visitor did not show up because he was impressed by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego’s faith, or by their discipline, or their conviction. And for that matter on the cross: God does not decide to forgive our sins just because Jesus says, “Forgive them, father, for they know not what they do.” No, the thing about prayer, and the thing about remembering in the context of prayer, is that it does not coerce God into doing something that wouldn’t otherwise happen; rather, prayer reveals what is already true, shows what is already present, and enables us to recognize what was there all along but we couldn’t see or notice.

In the fiery furnace, Nebuchadnezzar could finally see for himself that God was with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego no matter how badly the king might try to isolate and shift their loyalties to himself alone. When a priest anoints the sick and prays for healing, it’s not magic for manipulating germs or enchanting the body’s powers of recovery. It’s merely to reveal that God the source of life is present even in the midst of illness, suffering, and death; and that the sight, the glimpse, the touch of God which anointing reveals allows for a more profound healing than any miraculous cure or magical incantation. On the cross when Jesus prays, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do,” he reveals to everyone present and to all of us that God’s mercy runs far deeper than any sin, violence, mockery, or injustice, and we can only be silent in awe before the mystery.

So it is with Holy Week, and with all our liturgical remembering — and for that matter with all our prayer in whatever context we offer it. We do not create what was not present already; we do not coerce the nearer presence of some reluctant or faraway deity. We merely open a window on what was there all along, and which will continue through endless ages, closer than the closest friend or brother, or even thought or feeling.

The events of Holy Week, its characters, and chief of all its God do not pass away. In remembering them together, we open a window onto a deeper reality than we can see most of the time.

In Holy Week, we see again as if for the first time a God whose chief characteristic is generosity, free and open and continuous to the world he has made, full of mercy and loving-kindness. We see a world gathered together around a death, uneasy with the wickedness that has been done, implicated in more ways than one, but powerless to stop it from carrying on. We see a Savior betrayed, but who in betrayal forges a way through death: that what was once an ending, the only ending, ending every story ever told, is now the continuation of my story and of every story in the further reaches of divine Love.

In Holy Week we see everything orchestrated together into a music which all creation sings. As we reenact, and remember, and pray, and sing together, we take up our parts and join the harmony of the whole. This year may God grant us a special glimpse of this music in which the whole world is caught up, along with life and death and all time. As we retrace the final steps of Jesus’ earthly life, may we see all the more clearly that pattern, that rhythm, to which the whole world moves. Seeing more clearly, may we love more truly; and loving more truly, may our joy overflow.

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

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March 24, 2018

Good Friday 2018

Collect: Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Isaiah 52:13-53:12, Hebrews 10:16-25, John 18:1-19:42In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

As many of you know, or may have discovered thanks to the suddenly eased traffic, this week is spring break at Cal. It’s the first time since I’ve come to St. Mark’s that class has not been in session, and I’m struck by the very noticeable quiet of it all. This isn’t the first time I’ve been in a university community during spring break, but for some reason I’m particularly struck by it this year. It’s certainly not silent: buses continue their routes, HVAC units continue their hum, the construction project up the street carries on, and planes fly overhead like they always do. But the human bustle is much reduced: I notice far fewer random bits of conversation and general hilarity rising above the fray, while the groups of pedestrians walking past my office are gone, leaving only solitary, somewhat harried graduate students. The coffee shops are empty, and for the first time, I don’t have to wait in line when it comes time for lunch. It’s not an easy kind of silence, like summer break, but the gathering of a breath, a waiting kind of silence, for the press and stress of the last weeks of the year suddenly to descend.

For whatever reason, this silence has impressed itself on me this week, and has put me in mind of Good Friday all week long. There on the cross as Jesus hangs from noon until three, a darkness covers the whole land. The sun goes out, I imagine the birds have stopped singing, and the onlookers, frightened out of their mocking, have gone home. They leave only a dry hill with three dying men. The wind blows in the grass, and all creation waits for the last breath.

I post the texts of my sermons to a WordPress blog, which I’ve named, “Between Noon and Three.” The title is a phrase I’ve borrowed from W.H. Auden, who uses it repeatedly in a number of the poems in his series on the Divine Hours, the traditional offices of prayer throughout the day. Today here we are, literally “between noon and three” as we meditate on the last hours of Jesus’ earthly life, the period of time he hung upon the cross.

One of the things I like about Auden’s poem cycle is that every one of them seems to take place on Good Friday: it is a day that does not pass away, that remains forever. But despite the way the crucifixion pervades the poems as well as the poet’s consciousness, the narrator never quite manages to figure out what to make of it. To Auden, Jesus’ death is the sort of thing that seems inevitable and long-planned, as if the whole arc of human history has been leading up to the murder of God; and at the same time it seems the sort of thing that comes upon us from who knows where. Suddenly the deed is done and we’re left struggling to figure out just what it is that’s happened, let alone what it means.

Auden describes, near the end of the cycle, his dream that one day he might finally discover “Just what happened today between noon and three.” The Church locates the salvation of the world in these three hours, although it has never explicitly defined how, or satisfactorily explained why. Why this solution, of all solutions? To answer, we have to take stock of the silence which prevails from noon until three, silence that defies easy explanation or understanding, silence that seems eternal and yet stings as a sudden wound.

Like the silence here in Berkeley these last few days, but in a much more profound way, this silence at the cross is not an absence or a void, but a watchfulness, a waiting, a regard even, where God and creation are intensely aware of one another. Our collect for today reflects the same stillness, the same awareness: “Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross.” We pray God simply to behold us; for God only to just look at us. It’s as much as we can muster on Good Friday. And the silence of the Cross is the surest sign we can point to that God is answering our prayer. “Just look at us,” we pray. And on the cross God does.

There is a dialogue here in the silence, a kind of speech that’s exchanged within this mutual regard, this mutual beholding. Dare we say that there is love here, somewhere, in the sight of God and in our own sight, as we behold one another? That, at any rate, is the conviction of the Church: that somehow, mysteriously, as Jesus is exposed to all the world and death itself; as we stand exposed to God for all our beauty, all our shabbiness, and all our sin, we are reconciled to one another. The silence enables us to know one another more profoundly than before: God is known to humanity in infinite compassion; and humanity is lifted up into the nearer presence of God.

It’s not really so hard to believe. Years ago, in one of my adult confirmation classes, there was a mother who had a son in college. His school was in the same town, and he would come home frequently, for laundry and all the rest. But she was missing him, and lamenting the fact that they didn’t talk much anymore. What would become of their relationship? She felt he was slipping away and that she was, too; that they were fast becoming strangers to one another. This caused her a lot of grief and worry.

One day she appeared in tears, having just received a diagnosis of breast cancer. But it wasn’t the cancer that had caused her tears. She had managed to corner her son because she wanted to share the news; she was afraid how he’d react, but instead he just looked at her: really looked, and she felt as if he’d actually seen her for the first time in a long time. He didn’t say much except “I love you, Mom.” But that look was all she needed. Her tears were from bittersweet happiness, from learning afresh that she really was seen and known and cared for, despite a terrifying diagnosis. She didn’t worry after that: about her health certainly, but not about her son.

This kind of love is what the silence of Good Friday enables. This is what we assemble together here today to remember, to encounter, and to venerate: to see, and hear, and say, and touch, what we cannot understand or communicate by words alone. We are here today to pray God “To just look at us,” and in the looking, to be known and reconciled and loved.

This is why Good Friday and the moment of Christ’s death is a moment that does not pass away but remains forever. The silence of mutual beholding, between God and creation, is the still point in a turning world, the seed of hope and an everlasting comfort. It is the moment where love reigns supreme despite all the forces of death arrayed against it.

Whenever we are tempted to think all is lost, or to throw up our hands in the face of chaos, or to despair at so much wickedness in the world and in our hearts: the cross is there, its silence is there, speaking loudly and clearly of God’s gracious beholding, calling us to new life in a Love that does not pass away.

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March 18, 2018

What good does it do me?

This sermon was preached at St. Mark’s, Berkeley, on the Fifth Sunday of Lent, March 18, 2018.

Collect: O Almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men: Grant unto thy people that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings: Jeremiah 31:31-34, Hebrews 5:5-10, John 12:20-33

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

Recently l was talking with a parishioner, and the subject of prayer came up. “I learn the words,” he said, “But part of me also wonders, what good is this really supposed to do me?” I confess I sputtered a bit, because I normally operate from the presumption that prayer is an objective good in itself, valuable despite whatever benefit we might or might not derive from it. It doesn’t usually occur to me to ask “What good does it do me?”

I’m sure I answered with something unsatisfactory, and the conversation moved on. But I’ve been thinking ever since. Even if it is an objective good, apart from any personal benefit, there should be something to say about the good it does. One good place to start is the passage from Jeremiah this morning. “I will write my law on their hearts and on their mouths; and they shall not need to teach one another, saying, ‘Know the Lord, for they will all know me.’”

There is something about the repetition of words and phrases, which begins to sink into the mind and heart. It’s easier to feel loved when a loved one says “I love you,” on a regular, repeated basis. And when the going gets tough, those repeated affirmations become an internal backstop, a confidence which underlies whatever surface struggles or tensions we might face.

So it is with prayer. Words repeated over time enter the mind and heart and begin to undergird our daily reality with the promise and presence of God. When the going gets tough, and often when we least expect it, whatever prayers have sunk into our hearts resurface and work as guiding lights in the midst of chaos and uncertainty.

It reminds me of a story a father once told me about the first night his infant son was in the hospital. It was a sudden and unexpected emergency, and that first night, helpless, the father turned to prayer after a long time away from praying. He said he felt utterly stranded, he couldn’t think of a single word to say, or any way to start praying — just that he wanted to, and was devastated he couldn’t. But in that moment as he knelt in agony, without even words to offer, a childhood prayer came back to him which he remembered somehow from Sunday School. It was all he could offer, and yet in that moment it was enough; and as he said the words, a calm came over him that he never thought possible. From that moment on, he was convinced he had met God, and in a very powerful way he had.

We pray so that the words of our prayer might sink into our hearts and minds, and become second nature, a second language. But it doesn’t stop there. So often in life the things we adopt as second nature — the activities and hobbies where we spend our leisure — all become more than second nature. They come to shape our imaginations and define who we are. That’s clearest in a sacramental framework where a person ordained a priest really becomes a priest; or where married persons become something more together than the sum of their parts. But it’s also true in a smaller way in everyday habits and patterns. We introduce ourselves by our professions, our hobbies, our loyalties, our relationships. “I’m a teacher,” one person says, or think of all the cartoons and memes featuring some variation on, “Work at the firm pays the bills, but my life is fishing.” — or golf, or music, or whatever. We define ourselves by the second natures we adopt; and in doing so the second nature shapes and directs our primary nature.

Our whole lives long we are still becoming what we will grow up to be. For prayer to come as second nature to us is for it to shape our imagination, our powers of perception, until our primary nature is marked by openness to the presence and power of God. A life of prayer is a life of becoming more and more aware of the movement and mystery of God’s grace within and beyond whatever happiness or anxiety we face in any given moment. In this way, the words of our prayer and the choice to offer it become less like going to a river to sip water — it does nourish us and it does strengthen us — but more than that, it’s like getting in a boat and sailing downstream and out to sea. We move through the landscape from a completely different perspective, carried by the river at least as much as we navigate it ourselves, until it finally opens up onto a limitless horizon, and we look back at the land, our home, from the sea and see just how good and precious it is.

“In that day no one needs to teach one another saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” As God’s words enter our hearts, our hearts enter God’s. Far from a small enclosure, there is room there for the whole creation and all worlds that ever were or might ever be.

Which brings me to the last piece of good that prayer does for us: and that is, that it puts us in touch with God himself at work within us, just as he is at work in all life. Prayer is something that happens in us, something that God accomplishes within us, at least as much as it is something we say or offer ourselves. When we pray, “Our Father,” as Jesus taught us, we offer the same words Jesus himself offered to God, we step into his own prayer, into his Spirit, who prays his prayer within us. When we pray, we open ourselves to the movement of the Holy Spirit who gives us life, who is the ground of who we are and who we are meant to be. In short we are put in touch with the core of our inmost nature: made in the image of God, yet still unfolding in every moment of our lives.

In this way we can understand a little better then what Jesus means in today’s Gospel when he reiterates the same thing he said to Nicodemus last week: “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He makes from the cross his own final prayer, “Father into thy hands I commend my spirit.” — His final prayer, which is the heart of all prayer: the Son of God offering himself to God the Father, opening himself continually to the movement of the Holy Spirit, even in the face of death itself. There is a magnetism here which the whole creation is bound up in, everything that is created by God and depends on God for life; and when death itself is drawn into prayer in this way, whatever power it had to sever and break is ended. When we pray we are brought back to this moment, this eternal offering of the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit, this unity of all creation in love.

What good does it do us? It may not be measurable by clinical or financial standards. But it does put us in touch with the whole reason and mystery and majesty of life. And the more we open ourselves to this mystery, the more wonder-filled and delighted we will be as persons; the more capable of weathering the storms and difficulties that inevitably come; the more bound up in one another our lives will become, and the more we will recognize ourselves as creatures of love whose lives are hid with Christ in God.

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

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March 11, 2018

Seen and unseen, said and unsaid

The following is more of a meditation than a sermon — occasioned in part by Jesus’ connection of the cross with Moses’ serpent of bronze in today’s Gospel, and in part by some of the responses to last week’s sermon — variously jubilant or concerned that I had downplayed the doctrine of the Atonement. My intention was not to downplay the doctrine, only to shift focus from the mechanisms of forgiveness to the God who forgives. The meditation below is an elaboration on that shift in focus, as well as a continuation of previous themes on worship in general. It was preached on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, Refreshment Sunday, 11 March 2018 at St. Mark’s, Berkeley. The choir sang a setting of the mass by Arvo Pärt. The photo is of the rood screen and chancel at Christ Church, New Haven, CT, by Lauren Larsen Photographs.

Collect: Gracious Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven to be the true bread which giveth life to the world: Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings: Numbers 21:4-9, Ephesians 2:1-10, John 3:14-21

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

One of my favorite churches is in New Haven, Connecticut, the parish where I served as a seminarian years ago. They have an old-fashioned rood screen like ours, an open, carved wood lattice placed at the juncture between the nave and the chancel. A great, almost life-sized cross stands at the summit, and all the carved work makes the screen feel like a sheer, breezy curtain into some Moorish walled garden in some desert palace long ago. It marks a transition from one place to another, one attitude to another, one world to another, as communicants pass beneath the cross on their way to the altar to make their communions with the One who hangs there.

As you walk under the cross, your eyes shift to the altar, and to the communion rail ahead. But behind you, up on the beam that supports the cross, there are words carved into the wood — facing backwards, facing back towards the altar. It’s a quote from John’s Gospel, a later repetition of one of the verses we heard just now: carved in the old King James,’ “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.”

It’s an architectural way of making a very complicated and very beautiful theological point, plain for all to see on any given Sunday at the administration of communion. It’s also a reminder to the clergy, who is really the MC, the conductor of the Liturgy: Christ himself, more than any one or group of his ministers. It is his action, his love that orchestrates the whole celebration, his grace that calls us to the altar and that binds us to one another in these holy mysteries.

But as Jesus makes clear with Nicodemus in the Gospel today, the cross is also a direct reference back towards the episode in Numbers which we also heard today: the people of Israel have made their Exodus from Egypt, and they have wandered in the wilderness for years now. They’ve had a bit of bad diplomacy with the people of Edom, who did not permit them to cross their country on the way to the Promised Land, and so now they’re taking the long way around. They grumble, against Moses and against God, and they complain about the manna, the food from heaven which they’ve receiving miraculously every morning for nearly forty years now. God seems to be a bit bad tempered as well, because he responds to their grumbling by sending fiery serpents to bite and afflict the whole ungrateful bunch. God tells Moses to craft a bronze serpent and raise it on a pole — so that anyone suffering from snakebite can come to it and look at it and be healed.

It’s a weird story, no question about it, especially since the Ten Commandments are fairly explicit about making no images. The brazen serpent appears again in the book of Kings. Apparently the people had kept it and treasured it long after they had entered the Promised Land. It held a special place in the temple, and they would burn incense before it. King Hezekiah, one of the last great kings before the exile, undertook various religious reforms and finally destroyed the brazen serpent, fearing it had led the people to idolatry at last.

In Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus it’s fairly clear that he’s referring to the healing properties of the snake: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” There’s something refreshing about the connection, at least to my mind. All that the people of Israel had to do was look at the serpent and they would be healed. No elaborate public displays of penitence, no sacrifice required; not even an apology or an admission of guilt. Just look at the serpent and be healed. Somehow the action itself was enough, the action itself contained all that might have been said and more.

There is certainly dramatic irony in play, and a painful one at that — having to look at the image of the thing that caused injury in order to be healed. But such a task also reminds them that the snakes were not the primary cause of their unhappiness, rather their own all consuming regard for themselves and their appetites, much as in the Garden of Eden, the serpent was only the vehicle of temptation and not the agent of the fall. Looking up at the bronze snake to be healed, away from the ground and away from their navels, in a sense points out their narcissism and restores a proper sense of perspective. Likewise for us to behold Jesus on the cross is to be reminded that his lordship is as victim, not as tyrant, and if there is anything wrong with this picture it is with ourselves who are so slow to recognize the victimizing power of our own misdeeds. But all this and all the inexhaustible more that might be said about the cross and about what happens there and about what good it does us, is contained and communicated in the simple act of looking up at it. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” Just as the people of Israel were healed by looking at the serpent, so are you and I, by beholding the cross.

It’s an architectural way of making a very complicated and very beautiful theological point, which mingles the sign with the signified and liberates final religious meaning from priests and scholars and poets and restores it to anyone with a beating heart, who with humility and love yearns to be forgiven, to be healed, to be free.

Just look up, behold the cross, from whatever vantage point you possess, whatever you are feeling and wherever you find yourself. And in that action, behold the axis mundi, the central hinge of the whole world, both healing and mystifying us, in relation to which our lives make sense as being drawn to the very brink of heaven — but which loses all meaning the minute we make it serve our own ends; and more, in that moment it stands in judgment against us, for it was just such a self-seeking appropriation that led Jesus to be condemned in the first place.

The difficult thing about architectural points is that they are made silently, without words to interpret. Buildings are their own interpretation, speaking themselves to us as whatever life they are built to enable is lived out within them. So it is with the Church, the Sacraments, the Bible, Prayer, Doctrine, and the Cross. They exist not to be explained or defended or appropriated, but to enable a life in touch with God. Let them touch you, let them populate the landscape of your imagination. Look up from wherever you are to behold these mysteries on the horizon, and find God close at hand to help and to save.

This morning as we come to the foot of the cross above our own rood screen, and at the altar make our communions, may we find ourselves refreshed by the simplicity of our task, beholding the source of our healing and transported across time and space to the antechambers of Paradise: to that walled but un-gated garden where the serpent finally is crushed and death is no more, and the dead wood of the cross bears fruit for the healing of the nations.

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

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March 4, 2018

Faith and Folly

This sermon was preached on the Third Sunday of Lent, 4 March 2018, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley. In some ways it’s a reprise of themes from before Ash Wednesday, on worship as the exercise of love, but with a Lenten twist focusing on the love of God revealed in the cross.

Collect: Almighty God, who sees that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended form all adversities which may happen to the body, and all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Exodus 20:1-17,1 Corinthians 1:18-25, John 2:13-22

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

Do you ever wonder how Jesus himself would have processed some of the things he did? Like did he ever regret being so short with Simon Peter, when he said, “Get thee behind me Satan”? Later on did he think, “Huh, maybe I shouldn’t have been quite so hard on him”? Or in our Gospel reading today, clearly he’s very angry with the money changers in the temple, and I wouldn’t dare suggest that he wasn’t right to do what he did, driving them out. But I wonder how Jesus himself thought about it in the next few days. Did he think, “Hmm, maybe that was over the top, I’ll be a little less intense next time.” Or was he happy for it to have been such a public moment?

I confess I’m not much given to those kind of public losses of control very much, but sometimes it happens, and almost always regret it later. I don’t want to project myself too much on Jesus, but I have to think he at least wondered how his words and actions were affecting other people.

The thing is, we don’t actually know. All we know is how the disciples remembered what they saw and heard. And they saw and heard some pretty amazing things, including some pretty crazy and off-putting things, things which I at least, and probably a lot of you too, would regret having done pretty immediately afterwards.

Does it limit or otherwise sabotage shat we think of Jesus if all we have is the record of how he was received by others? — if it’s most colorful points are moments when he let his emotions or even his own foolishness get the better of him?

Maybe, but then perhaps it reveals something important too. As an introvert, for me the alarm bells start to go off internally if I notice I’m getting chatty or too talkative, because it’s not my natural inclination; my friends though seem to enjoy it, and say they’re glad to see this different side of my personality. It’s scary for me because talking too much makes me feel like I’ve lost control. But my friends don’t see a loss of control, they just see facets that were there all along. What feels like foolishness and even embarrassment to me can actually be received as warmth and openness to others, helping them to see and know more than they might otherwise.

St. Paul seems to think something similar is going on with Jesus: that in whatever folly he might have felt at his outbursts, the rest of us see something of God that we might not have seen otherwise; and chief of all, in the embarrassment and humiliation of the cross, we know something profound of the lengths to which love and grace can bring even God himself.

I once heard a wise priest use an illustration about eggs. If you put an egg into a pot of water and turn up the heat, and someone asks you, “What are you doing?” there are three ways to respond. First you can say, “Oh I’m boiling an egg.” Second you can say, “Oh I’m raising the temperature of the water, causing molecules to move faster and faster until a chemical change comes over the egg and it transitions from a liquid to a semi-solid state.” And third you can say, “Oh I’m making breakfast.” This priest went on to say, in the current state of the world, we are especially obsessed with the second way of answering, and sometimes with the first; but for the most part we’ve totally forgotten how to just make breakfast.

I don’t know about all that, but at least as far as Jesus and the Cross goes, he’s got a very good point. Too many people want to explain the Cross as merely the way God manages to bring himself to forgive us our sins. Or they take another tack and explain how such a sacrifice functions to expiate the indignation and wrath of a righteous judge. But Paul’s letter to the Corinthians seems to suggest that neither of these explanations quite hits the mark, and something both more simple and more difficult to explain might really be going on: simply that, as Jesus goes to the cross, he faces his final folly. He refuses to tell the truth about his mission and identity to Pilate. He refuses to correct the record for the high priest or perform tricks for the crowd to remind them they’d only just hailed him as the Messiah. And the result of his failure to correct the record is that he goes to the cross and dies.

What is he doing? Why doesn’t he try harder to save his own life? Why doesn’t he use the proper process of religious reform to clear the temple of the money changers? Why doesn’t he help Simon Peter see what’s really at stake, and instead just yell at him? Because he’s human first of all in addition to being the Son of God, and therefore given to limitations in judgement. But also and maybe more importantly, he’s heartbroken. He’s not “boiling an egg,” he’s not “increasing the speed of molecules” (although those are involved). What he is, is heartbroken. And heartbreak makes us do foolish things.

Why’s he heartbroken? Just turn on the news. He’s heartbroken that a world created for goodness has turned on itself such that it finds solace in murder rather than life, in manipulation rather than nurture, in networks rather than friends. And in the heartbreak of God, Jesus becomes human and goes to his own death.

Folly, plain and simple. It doesn’t fix anything, any more than a tub of ice cream or a long walk eliminates or resolves our own sadness or the works of our own foolishness. But what it does do, for Jesus’ disciples at least, is to reveal on Easter Day that love is stronger than death. The foolishness of God leads Jesus to a preventable and humiliating death. But the foolishness of God reveals also that death is not the end for those whose life is located in the love of God; that there is no last word sin or wickedness can claim over those who put their trust in God’s mercy.

Which brings up a very important question: how do we figure out what God is up to in the first place, and how do we measure our own success at following the mission we’ve been given? We’ve got to keep boiling eggs, and we’ve got to keep raising the temperature of the water in order to do that. But let’s not forget to make breakfast while we’re at it, and even more importantly, to eat it with relish.

By which I only mean, the foolishness we commit either from happiness or from heartbreak might be closer to the truth of things no matter how painfully it burns or how impossible it is to explain. It reveals something about the very deep love of God, and it sanctifies fools and victims of folly alike.

Whatever our favorite metric for personal or financial success, as far as God is concerned, the degree to which we are willing to let ourselves look foolish in the love of God, for better or for worse, is the degree to which we are aligned with God’s purposes. Do we have a particularly cherished image of ourselves? Are we pleased to be regarded as smart, or kind, or successful, or responsible, or popular, or dignified? Let the image go. Look a fool in your own eyes, and find yourself a friend in God’s.

As Lent carries on, then, let us have the courage to play the fool in love, so that we might grow all the closer to the heart of God.

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

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